It was 2010 in Indonesia. I had been chasing down and acquiring old wood in Southeast Asia for a decade. I had learned to follow up on rumors and hunches in search of forgotten and unknown old wooden buildings, bridges, railroads and other tropical hardwood relics of a bygone era. Sometimes the effort paid off, such as when we turned half a million old railroad ties into elegant hardwood flooring. Other times, not so much.
I had been playing host to two executive types, Ken and Art, from the US, for almost two weeks. Touring a loose network of sawmills, demolitions sites and scrapyards that were mostly hot, muggy, muddy and, to me, fascinating. To my guests, well, lets just say that they were struggling with the conditions.
Because they were the punctual, highly expectant and hard negotiating types, I had painstakingly created a very tightly scheduled itinerary, booked the flights, reserved the rooms, arranged transportation and prepared meetings with the vendors and subcontractors down to the hour.
Things went pretty well for the first week or so. We hit sawmills and suppliers in two countries and had probably been on half a dozen flights, numerous interminable car rides and a bunch of extended lunches graciously hosted by our Asian associates. It all came apart in Semarang, a gritty industrial city on the north coast of Java, in Indonesia.
It was the rainy season. During the rainy season in the tropics, it can really rain. It rained hard all through the night. Lightning flashed and thunder shook the walls of the hotel. In the morning, we had breakfast at the hotel and grabbed a cab to the airport for our morning flight to the neighboring island of Sulawesi. There was a lot of water in the streets, but the locals went about their business as usual. After all, it was just the rainy season, happens every year about this time…….
We got to the airport, checked in and made our way to the incredibly crowded waiting area. Where we waited. And waited. And waited. Eventually, word came through the crowd that the runway was flooded and no planes were landing or taking off. But- they had pumps going so perhaps things would open up sometime soon. Maybe.
We spent pretty much the whole day in the waiting area of a very crowded, very small, very damp, airport waiting area. The officials assured us numerous times that they were making progress with the flooded runways, but by late afternoon it was clear that no planes were going to fly today. It was decided that we should go back to the hotel for another night and try again in the morning. I was tasked with re-arranging our itinerary to accommodate our change of plans. My guests were getting grumpy. They were challenged by the lack of order inherent in the Indonesian way of being in the world. They wanted to blame someone or something for the delays, they wanted someone to be accountable. I briefly considered that role, but decided it didn’t suit me and shrugged it off as the weather and the Indonesian outlook on life. Punctuality is not a cherished value there.
The next day we repeated the same exercise. It was still raining. The runway was still flooding. The waiting area at the airport was still full of Kretek (clove cigarette) smoking Indonesian travelers gracefully accepting their fate as being stranded in the Semarang airport until the waters receded. It was almost a festive atmosphere. But not for Ken and Art.… They were not happy. Meetings were not happening. Deadlines were not being met. Nobody was being held accountable. And everything was slightly damp, if not wet
By early afternoon we decided to give up and hire a car to drive us the 4-5 hours to the nearest airport at Jogjakarta. Apparently their runways were not flooding and we could get a flight out the next day. If you have never taken a road trip on Java, then it is difficult to convey the sensory overload that it entails in mere words. Suffice to say that the roads are bad and congested, the trucks are overloaded, the drivers are crazy, and there are cows, chickens and goats. And it’s raining. I was used to it so I managed to sleep a bit, but by the time we got to Jogja, my guests were pretty much frazzled. Thankfully, there was a decent hotel near the airport where we hunkered down for another night.
I spent a lot of time re-scheduling meetings that night, which was not my usual methodology. My contacts were puzzled by it and I had to, again, remind them that I had V.I.P. executives from the U.S in tow and that they liked thing to be scheduled and punctual. I had been in Asia for a long time by then and was used to letting meetings happen when they did and to rolling with the unpredictable tides of the land. There is an Indonesian expression for this: “jam karet”, which translates directly as, “rubber time”. As in, it’s flexible.
We finally managed to get on a flight to Makassar, Sulawesi the next morning. Unfortunately, the 2 days we had lost were not really in the plan for my guests. For me it was not a problem. I was used to such situations and was generally happy to let things unfold. We had to hustle to get to our meetings and ended up cutting them short because my guests were in such a hurry. They didn’t seem to understand that being in a hurry and not accepting another extended lunch or a detour to their cousins shrimp farm is simply not polite. If a foreigner wants to develop good business relationships in this part of the world, they have to get used to unexpected and lengthy detours and meals. It’s part of the deal.We had originally planned two or three days at the tail end of our junket to go investigate a potential source of Teak that I had been hearing rumors about for some time. As the story went, there was a small harbor in a small town called Raha on a medium sized island off the south coast of Sulawesi. Apparently, sometime in the past, a large barge loaded with Teak had sunk in the harbor and the Teak was lying on the bottom in 5-10 meters of water. Estimates of how much was there ranged from 50 – 100 cubic meters. This was potentially a small fortune worth of Teak sitting in shallow water available to salvage. In that part of the world, arranging for the salvage rights, as well as a barge and a crew to assist could easily be arranged through the harbormaster.
I was hot to go down there and check it out. I had packed my mask, snorkel and fins and mapped out the route to get there. Unfortunately, Ken had pressing executive type matters to attend to back in the states and he had to leave the night before our flight over to Kedari, our jumping off point for the ferry ride down to Raha. Art and I continued the journey, but he felt that if we hurried, then we could make it down to Raha, check the harbor out, and get back to Makassar the next evening so that he could get back to more important and urgent matters. I was skeptical about the tight schedule, but willing to let things unfold.
Well, unfold they did. We got to the airport on time the next morning only to discover that there would be at least a three-hour delay in our flight. Oh well. Art fumed for a bit and then grudgingly accepted the fact that there was no way he could adhere to his already unrealistic schedule and decided to book the first flight to Jakarta and back to the safe world across the Pacific where things are generally predictable and on time.
Relieved of my burden of playing host and tour guide, I relaxed in the lounge with a book, talked with friendly strangers and waited for the flight. Eventually, it arrived and I was in Kedari, a lovely port town with a huge bay and a bunch old wooden (Teak) colonial warehouses to drool over. I checked into a cheap hotel, rented a motorbike and explored the area a bit. I had dinner and beer or two on a floating restaurant in the harbor and generally enjoyed the warm tropical evening.
In the morning, I caught a ferry for the 4-5 hour ride down the west coast of Sulawesi to the town of Raha. It was a beautiful day and the scenery was stunning. Jungle covered cliffs descending to azure tropical waters. Small islands dotted the offshore waters and billowing clouds rose over the highlands. The locals on the boat were very friendly and curious about what a “bule” (white foreigner) was doing on a boat heading to a part of the archipelago that was far off the beaten path for foreigners. We chatted, shared stories and kreteks and I tried to explain my mission.
The boat finally arrived at the little harbor of Raha late in the afternoon. I disembarked with a few other folks, and assessed the situation. A pier extended out from the wharf with a couple of fishing boat moored to it. There was another fishing boat aground in the shallows off the shore at an odd angle and there were some guys scraping barnacles off the hull. There was hardly anybody around.
I wandered into town a ways and managed to locate a “kost”, a very basic room, usually used by Indonesian laborers, for the night. I stashed my bag and headed back out to see if I could find the harbormaster. After asking around for a bit I managed to find his office, really just a desk in a barebones room in a marine supply shop near the wharf. He wasn’t around and nobody seemed to know when he would be.
I managed to convey to a couple of the laborer working on the grounded boat that I wanted to hire them and their canoe to take me out in the harbor to dive and look for a sunken boat. They were very amused and skeptical, but willing to accommodate my request in exchange for some rupiah. There is another common Indonesian phrase that I heard in use that evening, “Bule gila”. It means “crazy foreigner”.
The next morning I showed up at the harbor with my mask, snorkel and fins. My friends were there, waiting for me, as much out of curiosity as anything. I am 100% certain that I was the first bule to ever show up in Raha to dive the harbor. They were quite sure that I was mad.
I spent several hours snorkeling in that harbor with the guys in the dugout shadowing me. I think they were afraid that I was truly crazy, perhaps even suicidal and they didn’t want a tragedy to occur on their watch. They stuck close to me. I got a pretty good look at everything on the seafloor in the harbor. I saw several sunken boats, quite a bit of debris. Some tires and quite a few fish. But I didn’t see anything that resembled a load of sunken Teak. No piles of lumber or logs looking like a pile of underwater Lincoln logs. I kept thinking that I could almost see it, just out of my range of vision, so I would swim in that direction until the seafloor dropped off into the depths.
Finally, I had to admit to myself that there was nothing there for me. I dragged myself back into the canoe and they took me over to the fishing boat that they were working on. We hung out for a while, smoked, and drank some of their instant coffee. They were relieved that I hadn’t drowned. I was disappointed, but somehow amused and satisfied. No, I hadn’t found the mother lode of reclaimed Teak. But I had a great boat ride, met some nice people and had a fine, self-guided snorkel tour of the Raha Harbor. I felt quite fortunate to be alive and doing what I was doing.
