cheerful paraphernalia of the sea. So far the fishermen remained in possession of the most desirable site for many miles, but it was impossible that this should long continue to be the case, and slowly the town was moving its frontier of white cubes and high, glass-topped walls towards this maritime Arcadia.
In the meanwhile the fishermen’s village remained solidly rooted in the past, and I was interested by the survival here of a prehistoric pre-culinary process which I had previously believed to be confined to Burma, and in particular Mergui, famous for its ‘Bombay Duck’, which is considered the best in the East. In Mergui the whole of the town’s extensive seafront is closely covered, in season, with small fish which are split, salted and laid out to dry. Their exposure is not only to the sun, but to numerous dogs which pass up and down their rows, marking their territory in the usual way. In Tapaktuan the limestone shelves replaced the Mergui seafront, but the process was identical. In The Select they did not call it Bombay Duck, but it was much in demand, and there were cries of enak (delicious) from diners who had ordered it. No one within earshot remarked that the cook had been busy.
The next morning, conveniently alerted by the mosque, we were up at dawn, then down to the road-block, where after a glance at our passports the policeman waved us through. ‘Road bad,’ he said. ‘You go, OK, but if trouble no one come for you.’
We expected it to be bad, but not that it would be the worst any of us could remember ever travelling over. Someone had told us that they were repairing and widening it at the rate of thirty kilometres a year, but every year the problems got worse. People who popped down to their holiday villas once in a while could never be sure how long their weekends might last.
The first few miles out of Tapaktuan inspired us with false confidence. It wasn’t so bad after all. We were skirting the foothills where the cataclysmic rain to come would drain quickly down to a wide marshy plain, with the sea in the distance, so there were no dubious bridges to negotiate and no wide holes in the road surface to be filled in. The mountain slopes above the road had been logged, and with the loss of the sponge effect of the root-system there could be sudden floods where the road dropped to marsh level. We should be well away by then. At least the road surface was better than it had been before Tapaktuan. We suspected that the trouble had been no more than a few girders gone out of control, and felt hopeful that this had been cleared up.
Although still in Aceh we were coming to the end of it, and the feeling was of the slackening of tension and an end of a war-time atmosphere. Fifty miles back much of the countryside was deserted, and we drove all day hardly passing a car. Here, so far as we could see, things were back to normal. There was some traffic and many more people about, some of whom actually waved.
The traditional villages we were passing through were exceptionally picturesque in a slatternly fashion. They seemed in microcosm to illustrate an Asian pattern where fertile soil stimulates uncontrollable population growth. They were built in and along the small, swift-flowing mountain streams, which were chocolate in colour from the silt in suspension, and which over the years and centuries had enriched the peasants’ fields. Possibly from custom, no paint was used on any of these places. Buildings were of raw wood under layered roofs of palm thatch or, where the owner could afford it, corrugated iron. People packed the road and streamed like ants in and out of their doors. Domestic gear of all kinds was piled up outside houses into which nothing more could be crammed and there was a sensational amount of litter. Here was the problem at its source, for which a solution had been sought in transmigration, but when the authorities decided to move out surplus humanity from such villages as this it
In the meanwhile the fishermen’s village remained solidly rooted in the past, and I was interested by the survival here of a prehistoric pre-culinary process which I had previously believed to be confined to Burma, and in particular Mergui, famous for its ‘Bombay Duck’, which is considered the best in the East. In Mergui the whole of the town’s extensive seafront is closely covered, in season, with small fish which are split, salted and laid out to dry. Their exposure is not only to the sun, but to numerous dogs which pass up and down their rows, marking their territory in the usual way. In Tapaktuan the limestone shelves replaced the Mergui seafront, but the process was identical. In The Select they did not call it Bombay Duck, but it was much in demand, and there were cries of enak (delicious) from diners who had ordered it. No one within earshot remarked that the cook had been busy.
The next morning, conveniently alerted by the mosque, we were up at dawn, then down to the road-block, where after a glance at our passports the policeman waved us through. ‘Road bad,’ he said. ‘You go, OK, but if trouble no one come for you.’
We expected it to be bad, but not that it would be the worst any of us could remember ever travelling over. Someone had told us that they were repairing and widening it at the rate of thirty kilometres a year, but every year the problems got worse. People who popped down to their holiday villas once in a while could never be sure how long their weekends might last.
The first few miles out of Tapaktuan inspired us with false confidence. It wasn’t so bad after all. We were skirting the foothills where the cataclysmic rain to come would drain quickly down to a wide marshy plain, with the sea in the distance, so there were no dubious bridges to negotiate and no wide holes in the road surface to be filled in. The mountain slopes above the road had been logged, and with the loss of the sponge effect of the root-system there could be sudden floods where the road dropped to marsh level. We should be well away by then. At least the road surface was better than it had been before Tapaktuan. We suspected that the trouble had been no more than a few girders gone out of control, and felt hopeful that this had been cleared up.
Although still in Aceh we were coming to the end of it, and the feeling was of the slackening of tension and an end of a war-time atmosphere. Fifty miles back much of the countryside was deserted, and we drove all day hardly passing a car. Here, so far as we could see, things were back to normal. There was some traffic and many more people about, some of whom actually waved.
The traditional villages we were passing through were exceptionally picturesque in a slatternly fashion. They seemed in microcosm to illustrate an Asian pattern where fertile soil stimulates uncontrollable population growth. They were built in and along the small, swift-flowing mountain streams, which were chocolate in colour from the silt in suspension, and which over the years and centuries had enriched the peasants’ fields. Possibly from custom, no paint was used on any of these places. Buildings were of raw wood under layered roofs of palm thatch or, where the owner could afford it, corrugated iron. People packed the road and streamed like ants in and out of their doors. Domestic gear of all kinds was piled up outside houses into which nothing more could be crammed and there was a sensational amount of litter. Here was the problem at its source, for which a solution had been sought in transmigration, but when the authorities decided to move out surplus humanity from such villages as this it
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