TRAVEL|TAKING OFF
A Solar Eclipse, a Rave Party, and a Bunch of Terrorists on Sulawesi — My Wildest Travel Story
Fear and tripping in Indonesia
It was winter in the Northern Hemisphere. But as always, it was summer near the Equator. I was overwintering in the tropical latitudes of Southeast Asia. A good German friend had told me that he was about to head that way, too. He said a good party would take place on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
A total solar eclipse was to occur that winter over that exotic island. The team organizing the Eclipse Festivals wasn’t daunted by this place’s geographic and cultural peculiarities and had normally planned this year’s event. First rave party ever in Indonesia? And possibly in any Muslim country? It sounded intriguing. It’d been a while since I last was at one of those wacky fests… I always wanted to visit Sulawesi… an opportunity to catch up with my friend… I was immediately game.
So, a nice morning, I made for Kuala Lumpur’s airport and boarded a plane. After a few hours’ wait in Jakarta, I transferred to the second aircraft destined for Sulawesi. It was full of motley-dressed Australian, Japanese, and European ravers. The sun had long dived behind the western horizon of the spice sea before we landed in Palu, on the island’s remote northern coast.
The airport must have operated on its own electric generator. Besides sparse vehicles driving along the scant streets, it was the sole source of light over the murky city. Passing through the immigration control much faster than I’d hoped, I witnessed absolute darkness outside of the arrivals hall. The entire city was in a blackout.
I shared a taxi with two party-animal Korean girls and an Italian dude. The three of them got off at the city’s only hostel, where they had reserved dorm beds since a long time ago. I continued towards one of the many houses whose owners had expediently transformed into homestays for the occasion. That’s where my German friend had settled for a few days already and had supposedly asked the lessors to save a room for me.
The driver brought the vehicle to a halt, and before he extended his open palm, he pointed at a yard door, barely visible behind the darkness at the roadside. I meandered through the blackness, moving towards a dim flame burning slowly on the opposite side of the yard. I perceived low voices interrupting the stillness, shortly before I discerned the German sat at the table that hosted the candle together with three white chicks. He welcomed me, passing me a warm beer he grabbed from a crate under the table.
We forthwith engaged in mirthful chatter, keeping the tone down to not arouse the family. Like a beagle, however, the landlady quickly twigged the new arrival and came out to inspect.
For an initially strange reason, she seemed startled by my presence. It took a good deal of pantomime until we figured out that a room my arse she had kept for me. Although the German believed he had informed her successfully, she apparently had consented to something else she thought she’d understood. In the end, she granted me the comfy couch in the living room for a paltry, symbolic, practically voluntary pay.
All good. We took torches and went out in search of dinner. Even though it was almost midnight, we managed to find an open eatery. The two girls who ran the place talked on the phone nonstop while preparing our dishes at the same time. I understood they were calling friends and relatives to come over and check us out, since a whole lot of them were assembled around us before we were even served.
I felt a little embarrassed by their chuckling as they watched me tearing and blushing after I tucked into my meal. Then I regretted being the only one who replied “ok” to the cook’s “spicy?” question. We all finished eating, I downed a full carboy of water to quench my burning digestive system, we took countless selfies with the entire neighborhood, and headed back home.
The next day, I found out for good that we were considered stars. The festival had attracted an unprecedented gathering of foreigners to this place, where most locals must have never seen a white person before. No-one went past us without at least a nod or a smile. Avenues were blocked when drivers abandoned their cars to take pictures with us. Entire schools ran after us, shouting in unison “miste, miste, selpi, selpi!”.
Days elapsed and the one of the party’s opening dawned. The company from the guesthouse, we hired a car to drive us to the event site. We all shared a hunch that this was not going to be a typical psychedelic festival.
It took quite a long, bumpy drive along the rutty, serpentine road that scaled that sparsely-vegetated slope off the city verge until we arrived at noontime. The tropical sun scorched mercilessly the bare plateau, and there was not a speck of shade, natural or artificial, to pitch our tents. The equatorial mosquitoes, however, weren’t in the least deterred by the heat, indefatigably swooping down on us, feet to forehead.
Platforms, stalls, and all rudimentary facilities were made exclusively of bamboo; a commendable feat how they managed to erect these even in such an inaccessible location. The official beginning of the event was in the evening, and we were among the first to show up — by first, meaning among the attendees… A full regiment of heavily-armed soldiers, specially dispatched from Java, was already deployed around the site.
The rumors had circulated in the city. But now they weren’t mere rumors anymore. The party was under a terrorist threat!
There were some mujahedin jihadists from Central Asia who had blown up a couple of hundred people in a market in Jakarta before fleeing to Sulawesi’s jungles to carry out guerrilla. They had heard about the Satanic binge of orgies and were keen to volunteer for imposing divine justice.
Personally, I hadn’t taken these threats with unease; because, if they were capable of realizing them, they wouldn’t warn… Imagine Bin Laden calling the CNN before skyjacking the airplanes.
Serious or not, though, the threats resonated. Out of six-seven thousand tickets they had sold, hardly a thousand people turned up. Out of several tens of DJs they had booked for the line-up, almost nobody came. The same three-four sleepless outliers played the psytrance throughout the entire week.
It had crossed my mind that the whole story about the terrorists might have been malarkey; fabricated to bring in the army and make arrests for illicit substances. This idea probably was a bit overly paranoid, but it was a paranoia we all shared.
This was by far the cleanest rave I have ever attended. Not a whiff of burning marijuana ever penetrated my nostrils in public. We were, after all, in Indonesia; a country where the first announcement that came out as soon as we sat on the plane was: “We would like to remind you that possession of narcotics in Indonesia is illegal and is punishable by death.”
Not that nothing was available, but when you are surrounded by an army—even if, in theory, they are there to protect you and not to detain you—the awareness of the potentially fateful consequences rendered any usage a strictly private act. Like on the big night before the eclipse…
There was that one Canadian chap, a NASA engineer, totally obsessed with the universe, who had camped near us. He had taken the risk to fly out from the USA carrying a dropper vial full of LSD.
The music had taken a brief break before the great nighttime pandemonium. Deep silence dominated the pitch-dark field where we were hiding in between the bushes, away from prying, martial eyes.
“It’s not dripping, it’s not dripping the fucker!” complained the Canadian as he strove to squeeze out a drop into each of two water-filled water-bottle lids amid the plain darkness of the new-moon night.
“Here, it dripped!” he exclaimed at last and handed me one. I imbibed it in a single swig. He did the same and started probing the dropper.
“Oh, it must’ve been dripping all along,” he uttered after a few moments. “There must’ve been five or six drops in each one…” We exchanged puzzled looks, shrugged, and shook our heads half-indifferently.
We remained there for a few hours—discussing the cosmos under a star-flooded firmament—until we got enchanted by the untz-untz-untz—which had meanwhile begun to vibrate the earth and animate the damp tropical atmosphere—and scurried down to the stage. Lots of mystical, Dionysian things happened that night, about which I will not go into details here.
A new world materialized in the morning; a more beautiful one for anyone who observed it. And before it even got warmer, the night returned temporarily.
The loudspeakers fell suddenly quiet, and the echo of a collective whoop got also absorbed by the silence in two moments. Invisibly, the Moon’s inertial mass slipped in front of our rising star. Only the daylight’s gradual waning attested to its presence. And for two ecstatic minutes, upon culmination, like a haloed black hole it appeared in the twilit sky, a mental tunnel between limits and infinity. And…
“This is gotta be when the bomb explodes!” a dump Aussie lad breaks into the quietude and spoils the magic.
Τhe party ended. Tired, sunburned, itchy, unwashed (the makeshift showers never worked), but mentally refreshed… together with some thirty people, we jumped onto the open back of a lorry—which was probably leased by the festival—to be brought back to the city. No hint of terrorists. I had forgotten about them. I did not yet know that I was going to bump into them soon…
Dips in the sea, trips to waterfalls, walks around town, good food, and the like… pleasant days and nights passed in Palu. My German friend had cycled some 700 up-and-downhill kilometers to come to the festival from the southern city of Makassar. He now fancied a hotel, rest, and his pizza delivered at his door.
On my part, I was itching for adventure. With an offbeat Australian girl and a demented German woman from the party, we planned to go to some faraway jungly mountains in the hinterland, where we could see some prehistoric tombs and such.
So, early morning, we went over to the station in search of transportation means. With a bit of Indonesian and plenty of pantomime, we agreed with a dude to drive us in his jeep. We hardly noted a trace of civilization along the long route; only endless, dense greenery. Shortly before sunset, we reached a broad valley, covered with rice fields and encompassed by soaring, lush, wild mountain ranges. A village called Wuasa lay in its midst.
We got off at the settlement’s sole guesthouse. There we met an Italian botanist. The four of us were the only foreigners in the village, which numbered about a thousand inhabitants and was a full day’s journey away from the nearest noteworthy hub of civilization.
By daybreak, we were up and merrily preparing for our expedition. It was a splendid, mild day. Nothing felt unusual. We found a car and made for the trailhead, whence we’d hike through the jungle to some tombs. But no sooner than we left the village, our advance got obstructed by the army.
The soldiers kindly let us know that a terrorist group had been spotted in the mountains, they were about to launch operations against them, and we couldn’t be allowed to proceed any further. Very understandable that. We greeted and turned around.
We returned to the guesthouse to consider alternative destinations. But we there found out that they had shut down the Internet and the mobile signal, all communications. Soon, we also realized that all roads leading in and out from the village had been blocked. We were effectively marooned. Then, helicopters and distant explosions began reverberating across the valley. Lastly, a small unit cropped up and got stationed at the guesthouse to protect us round-the-clock.
As it was, we decided to go on a stroll around the village. It didn’t take long before a genial local woman invited us home. She was the village teacher, and probably its only resident who knew some basic English. She showed us around her house and then joined us to resume our walk.
It took five minutes and two turns until the next invitation. This came from the village policemen when we passed in front of their station by chance. It turned out the single time in my life I’ve been called to a police department for my benefit. They offered us coffee, and we remained guests the whole afternoon, playing ping-pong with the cops, football with the kids of the neighborhood, and stick-throwing with the police dog.
In the evening, it was our turn to receive uniformed guests. The Javanese army officers heard that the guesthouse had visitors, and they came over to drink tea and dick around. Utilizing our poor Indonesian, and their even poorer English, we tried to have a chat. More so than the words, spoke the images.
One of the guys got to show us pictures from the operations on his mobile phone; basically, disemboweled corpses, intestines and other innards littering the mud around. Upon a photograph in which the deceased’s face was sufficiently preserved to distinguish an imamic beard, he paused and drew my attention. Proudly, his index swang from the screen to himself—as if to say “him, I…”—before concluding with a “boom boom”.
So went by a few days in Wuasa until they said they’d be letting a pickup truck cross the mountains for the town of Poso. We all but literally had to lug the German psy-gal to hurry up and leave early, lest we travel in the night. They told her we had 60 kilometers and she expected on an autobahn.
For the whole day, we suffered the relentless sun-hammering, at times pushing the stranded vehicle out of the mud, until we reached the town late in the afternoon. The hippie girls pushed on to some other place right away. I decided to stay there for a while and regroup my thoughts.
I came to learn about this writing challenge and Taking Off via the Globetrotters publication. Adrienne Beaumont and Anne Bonfert are two of their writers I’ve very much enjoyed reading. Here are their latest:
And here is my other Wildest Travel Stroy submission on Globetrotters:
