Ring of Fire: an Indonesian Odyssey
dedication
This book is fondly dedicated to those special people who are least likely to see it, the tribal peoples of the islands, who took us in hand, treated us as equals, and opened their lives to us.
Ring of Fire: an Indonesian Odyssey
Lawrence Blair
with Lorne Blair
Editions Didier Millet
Acknowledgements
Of the numerous people who have, over the years, helped make Ring of Fire possible, and who are not already mentioned in the book or credited in the films, we would particularly like to thank the following:
Monie Adams; The Keraing, Andi Banawa and his wife, Ibu Desa; Julian and Julis Boileau; Jan Butchofsky; Soedarmadji Damais; The Tans Hans family; Raden Temenggung Jarjonagoro; Virginia Holshuh; Indonesian Directorate-General of Tourism; Michael and Robert Kennedy; Perry Kessler; Claire Leimbach; Donaldine Lourensz; James and Aune Nelson; Sydney Perret; Dorothy Pittman; Putrayala; Robert Seiffert; James Seligman; Gusti Made Simung; Alyson Steffen; Hal Stone; Harifin Sugeanto; Charles Twing; Jack Weru.
All photos © Lorne and Lawrence Blair, unless otherwise stated. All photos reproduced by kind permission of the copyright owners.
Foreword
When I was preparing for my first visit to Indonesia, in the early 1990s, I was holed up in a seedy hotel in one of Bangkok’s more disreputable neighbourhoods. The hotel offered few services and no charm, but seedy as it was, it did have a shelf of books that guests could borrow. One of them was a well-thumbed, nearly disbound copy of Ring of Fire, recounting a grand tour of the archipelago by ship by the brothers Blair. I snagged the book and brought it up to my room to read. My first trip to Indonesia was also to be a grand tour, beginning in North Sumatra, with a trip to Nias, and ending in the Bandas. I consulted the book’s index and was disappointed to see that the authors hadn’t called at Nias, but Banda was there. So I turned to page 130 and read: “On the dawn of the second day we discerned the smoke-wreathed cone of the Banda volcano perched on the horizon like a veiled Egyptian pyramid.”
I was hooked – on the book, I mean. I had been hooked on Indonesia years before I came here; Joseph Conrad had taken care of that. No footloose wanderer in Southeast Asia worth his flip-flops can long resist the siren allure of the great tropical archipelago. I had previously read about Banda, its strategic importance in history, how the Dutch had swapped Manhattan for the tiny islands’ nutmeg groves. But the Blairs’ faintly lavender-tinged prose appealed directly to the dreamy boy who grew up in Texas reading Lord Jim and Treasure Island, and the whole romantic boy’s literature of sailing ships and deserted tropical isles. I immediately turned back to the beginning and read the book from start to finish.
So while it would not be accurate to say that Ring of Fire inspired me to undertake my first voyage to Indonesia, it did remind me why. “A veiled Egyptian volcano”: Yes! A few weeks later when I cruised into the narrow strait between the fairytale port town of Bandanaira and the smoking volcano, the experience was just as magical as the Blairs had described it. That lavender tinge in the prose was simply reporting: if anything, it was austere compared with the spine-tingling reality of discovering an isolated group of islands like the Bandas. To capture that sense of remoteness, of mystery, is an essential aspect of writing about the archipelago, and no one in modern times has done it better.
I have recommended Ring of Fire over the years, blissfully unaware that it had fallen out of print: how could that be? It’s one of the essential modern texts about Indonesia’s far-flung islands. Now it is back, and all lovers of Indonesia, its people and its critters, rejoice. As Lawrence Blair notes in his introduction for this new edition, there have been many changes in the archipelago since the voyage described in this book, and few for the better, but the air of enchantment, the brute charm of these islands is indestructible.
JAMIE JAMES
KEROBOKAN, BALI 2009
Outriggers slipping out to fish. (LORNE & LAWRENCE BLAIR)
Introduction
This book was hurriedly written during an icy winter in Boston, Massachusetts, while also writing the dialogue for our Ring of Fire film series, which my brother Lorne was simultaneously editing. Our bluff had been called, and after 10 years of independently filming nine separate expeditions in Indonesia, followed by 15 years of being unable to sell them, Public Broadcasting in the United States, in conjunction with the BBC, had finally picked up our work and required that we condense our adventures into four one-hour episodes – by yesterday.
The book was intended to match the film series and describe what isn’t seen on camera, which of course is virtually everything. The films and the book are thus corollaries, and have oddly circled and sustained each other, like twin-orbiting stars, in various packaging incarnations, down to the present day.
Re-reading the book for the first time since correcting the proofs in l988, I find my nose is rubbed in the enormity of change over these merely 20 some years. There is the death of my brother Lorne, in 1995, the reduction of Indonesia’s forests by nearly a third – the equivalent to the entire land surface of Japan or California – the doubling of the nation’s population from 120 million to more than 240 million souls, and the birth thrashings of a newborn democracy, with its accompanying rising tide of plastic. If I was just sitting in Bali, watching the rising tide, I might even feel depressed, but as I still produce adventure films and spend several months a year exploring the out-islands on private charter cruises, its heartening to know that vast tracts of the nation still remain wonderfully wild and mysterious, and mirror the unexplored recesses hidden within all of us, everywhere.
Just a few of the discoveries from Indonesia over these last two decades include the world’s largest cockroach, the world’s smallest fish, a blood-sucking ‘vampire moth’, and the first known poisonous bird, the Hooded Pitohui (Pitohui dichrous), with toxic oil in its black and orange feathers. Also discovered is an Asian population of the Coelacanth, the four-limbed, 350-million-year-old pre-fish, over six feet long, which hasn’t changed since long before the time of the first creature to crawl on land and struggle for breath.
And there’s the Mimic Octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus), who was hard to find because he’s seldom himself. He transmogrifies, at the drop of a hat, into as many as 16 (so far counted) other marine species – including sea snakes, lionfish, stingrays and jelly-fish. He mimics with sufficient accuracy to have utterly fooled marine biologists who for 50 years have had the benefit of scuba gear to look him in the face. To me, all these creatures reveal more about ourselves, our protean diversity and our evolving capacity to see what’s actually going on with this thing called Life on earth.
Also from Indonesia, in only 2003, was the startling discovery of the remains of the ‘hobbit’, Homo floresiensis, not sapiens, like us, but a different species of human, who was three feet tall and lived until as recently as only 10,000 years ago. We had thought that our species of Homo, sapiens, had been alone for the past some 35,000 years, ever since the demise of Neanderthal man in Europe – then up pops this little elf, our first cousin, alive at the same time as ourselves, sapiens, hunting pygmy elephants and giant rats. The tiny people and cow-sized elephants are gone, but the Giant Rat of Flores lives on! And somehow, so do you and I.
It will become apparent, as you read (as it has to me), that my brother and I started out as profoundly naïve romantics, who were amazingly fortunate to come back alive, not once, but on numerous occasions. But life, and the universe, as has been remarked, are not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we can suppose, and it was a sharp irony that after surviving 800 miles together, largely on foot, through the jungles of Borneo �
�� where a broken leg is disaster – my dear brother Lorne fell into an open gutter in the streets of Legian, Bali, broke his leg and died a few days later in the local hospital of a stroke caused by marrow entering his blood stream. I was left with the feeling that it is as difficult to postpone one’s time of death as it is to bring it forward.
It was inconsiderate timing. I had to go ahead without him to lead an adventure cruise, long-planned between us, back to our old haunts, with 35 motley shipmates. A fifth film was added to the series: Beyond the Ring of Fire, which both chronicles this return to the land of cannibals and birds of paradise with our own ‘global tribe’, and observes, rather too closely, Lorne’s Balinese death rites – of the kind which he’d so eagerly catalogued, throughout Indonesia, all his life.
Because the historical record of a vanished world cannot easily be altered, I have likewise left the book largely unchanged, such as the number of islands thought to comprise the archipelago: and place names such as Irian Jaya, now West Papua, and Ujung Pandang, which has since happily reverted to Makassar, with its long historical resonance.
In these intervening decades I have been aboard numerous exploratory cruises throughout the islands: some first visited with Lorne and others entirely new to me – but many thousands remain, each with their own specific peoples and creatures, which would require several more lifetimes to reach. Some of the vessels carried only small groups of scientists, others were cruise liners with as many as a thousand passengers. All this has only reinforced my suspicion that adventure travel, whether armchair, or up close-and-personal, has less to do with what’s there to be seen as what we have in us to see. We can travel the globe and see nothing, or wander though our own gardens and be filled with awe by what we’d never previously imagined. For me, Indonesia remains one of the last wild bits at the bottom of the garden of our world.
LAWRENCE BLAIR
BALI, 2009
A Land of Waking Dreams
This is the story of 10 years of exploring and filming the steamy islands of the volcanic Indonesian archipelago. It begins, inappropriately enough, in the freezing winter of 1972… I was struggling to complete my doctoral thesis in an icy northern England when my brother Lorne called me from London with the news that Ringo Starr had agreed to put up £2,000 and the post-production costs of our first adventure film. I had spent three years researching contemporary mysticism, and it was through John Michel, a colleague of mine who was an authority on Druid mythology and the ancient sites of Britain, that I first met Ringo. Shortly after the formation of Apple Films (a subsidiary of the Beatles’ Apple Corps Ltd), Ringo and his associate Hillary Gerard had approached us to help them make a film about Arthurian legends and ‘Magical Britain’. Although this project failed to come to fruition – even with Apple behind it – it was to lead us indirectly into more than a decade of adventuring in some of the most remote regions of Indonesia.
Within three weeks I had handed in my dissertation, Lorne had assembled the rudimentary equipment, and with more bravado than common sense we found ourselves on the island of Celebes in the South China Sea. From there we set sail with 16 fierce Bugis tribesmen on a 2,500-mile voyage through the Spice Islands in search of the Greater Bird of Paradise.
For nine months amid storms and doldrums, we drifted amongst forgotten kingdoms of silk and gold, fire-walkers, grave-robbers, pearl-divers and pirates. Eventually we reached the Aru Islands, close to the shores of west New Guinea, where we managed to record the first ever colour footage of the golden-tailed bird in its natural habitat.
Of all the Birds of Paradise, the Greater is as rare and remarkable as it is difficult to reach. For centuries before the arrival of Westerners, it had been the symbol of the soul and of eternal life; and for the Chinese, who traded with the southern islands long before the time of Christ, the bird became associated with the phoenix myth, which crept across the continents into the mind of medieval Europe, even before it was known that the world was round.
On finally seeing these creatures, mating in the high forest canopy like cataracts of spun glass, we found them to be transparent with a deeper meaning, with something which lay beyond them, in the undiscovered wisdom of the islanders themselves. The birds proved to be merely the lure which was to draw us into 10 years of adventure through a land of waking dreams.
Just how we got involved in this way of life is still beyond me. I’m not sure how we got here at all. Lorne, three years my junior, didn’t even want to arrive. According to our mother, he was so late that she began to suspect she had the hysterical pregnancy of all time. He received his first report card when he was only four years old from a boarding school in the South of France which domestic insecurities had required our attending rather early in life. It consisted of just two words: ‘folle indépendance’ – which can fairly be translated as: ‘independence to the point of lunacy’.
Shortly afterwards we returned to English prep schools, where I quickly had my French beaten out of me in French grammar classes, and where Lorne responded by continuing to be unable to talk or, rather, to speak in any known language, for he would hold forth volubly in a tongue uniquely his own. I was frequently called out of my classes to interpret for him, and it began to be assumed that he would never talk at all. But when we emigrated to Mexico as teenagers with our mother and stepfather in the mid-fifties, he suddenly burst into articulate Spanish and English – and he later added French and Indonesian – all of which he used to protect and further his folle indépendance.
It was in Mexico, during those flowering years, that we climbed the snow-capped volcanoes, dived in the Mayan wells, collected creatures and orchids and, abetted by the enlightened curiosity of our parents, delved deep into ways of being and mind unimaginably different from our own. Caught by the currents of our time, the family also became involved in Subud, a meditational method which was based in Java. Shortly after our stepfather died, our mother, Lydia, made her first leap across the Pacific to live with a Javanese guru in Jakarta, and brought back tales which inspired our first visits to Indonesia, as delegates to a Subud conference.
I was to spend a month there during the toppling of President Sukarno, while bloody revolution raged beyond the ashram walls, hoardings displayed anti-Western hate propaganda, and the British embassy was fire-bombed.
Our mentors and brothers at the Subud enclave encouraged us to focus only on the inner world, and to avoid exploring the dangerous but tempting ‘illusory’ world of ‘Maya’ outside. Lydia had barely set foot beyond the ashram in three years when Lorne turned up to kidnap her for a reconnaissance mission with him to Celebes island, 800 miles away to the north-east. It was to prove a magical turning point for them both.
In Makassar harbour they saw the great black-sailed trading schooners of the piratical Bugis tribe, with whom, just 120 years previously, the remarkable naturalist-explorer Alfred Russel Wallace had sailed on his historic odyssey through the Spice Islands to become the first Westerner ever to see the Greater Bird of Paradise alive. They also visited the Toraja tribe of the Celebes highlands, who believe their ancestors once descended from the Pleiades in starships. Here they discovered that their last great king had died several years previously, and still lay rotting in his widowed queen’s home. He would lie here, no one knew for how long, until the tribe had painstakingly amassed the financial and ritual wherewithal necessary to launch a dead king’s soul back to the stars. By going beyond the scented ashram walls of Subud, Lorne and Lydia had touched on an unsuspected world on the brink of disappearing.
Even after our Mexican upbringing, it was a revelation to find such things still going on, unknown to the outside world – and there were still another 13,000 Indonesian islands to explore, if we could only reach and film them while there was still time. We were always a family uprooted. Lydia, herself an inveterate explorer, was now aware that her three years in Java had been quite enough of an inner workout, and she returned to Europe to comb the Mediterranean for a solitary place to
centre herself. She had just enough money left after selling up in Mexico to buy a small finca in Ibiza, where she settled in to survive on a war widow’s pension and the proceeds from her annual harvest of almonds.
By our mid-twenties, Lorne and I had returned to England penniless but hopeful, with our BA degrees from Mexico in Business and Philosophy. Well – Lorne had almost got his Business degree, for just a week before graduating he accepted instead the position of assistant to Bob Cundy, an independent ethnographer who virtually singlehandedly cranked out hair-raising adventure films, shot in all parts of the world, at a time when it was still feasible to make a living out of them. This hands-on experience helped Lorne talk his way into a production assistant’s job at the BBC in London, where he was exposed to the broader spectrum of skills required to get a film on the air. But he chafed for his independence, and his brief visits to Indonesia only increased his determination to make the big jump. His nights were filled with reading abstruse research material, hatching film-plots and writing investment proposals.
I, too, was living a double life. My exposure to the energy and subtle abilities of my Subud brothers in Java had so ignited my optimism and sense of wonder concerning our hidden natures that I had wangled my way into Lancaster University’s Department of Comparative Religion to write a doctorate on transformational consciousness, in a field which was later to be referred to as psycho-anthropology. My subsequent book was an early attempt to define the range and focus of this discipline.1 I was alternating between the academic asceticism of northern England and an enormous flat I shared with Lorne and two highly entertaining identical twin brothers in Bayswater, London. It was a vibrant time: the flowering of the sixties had lost some of its bloom, but the fruit was ripe and all around us in the protagonists of the new arts. We watched from our window as Mick Jagger gave his free concert in Hyde Park, stood on our seats at the Albert Hall for Janis Joplin’s last performance, and traipsed to Avebury and Stonehenge for equinoctial celebrations. Through our tangled London flat flooded musicians and philosophers, ravers and astrologers, actors and explorers. Periodically I went back to the northern wastes again, a sort of alchemical prep school where, like Lorne, I sustained myself through the dark times with dreams of the southern islands. It was during one of the darkest, that I received Lorne’s excited phone call.
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