Wild Indonesia Book

I love this book so much. I also love the documentary which the Blair brothers made before this book was published. It's a book I should've read a long time ago, because it's a book that was written for me! The Blair brothers started to explore Indonesia in the late sixties, and the remaining surviving brother is still living in Indonesia. This book takes you to the far eastern corners of Indonesia; Papua, Aru Islands, the original Spice islands, Sumba, Sulawesi, Komodo Island, but also visits Bali and Krakatau. The brothers were inspired by Alfred Wallace's "Malay Archipelago" adventure and wanted to replicate it. They did it during a time before mass-tourism and the Internet. How I envy them. I also love how respectful the Blair brothers were to the local people. It was refreshing to see them get along with most people in their journey and try to understand the other side. They speak fluent Bahasa Indonesia and mingled well with the locals. They went to visit the Asmat tribe in Papua and despite the fact that they hadn't reached the Stone Age yet, the Blair brothers recognized that their lives consisted of a lot of leisure time equivalent to the West's 'affluent society'. They only took from nature the little they needed and the rest of the time was dedicated to games, storytelling and war. I was also amazed how they were faced with the supernatural. Many modern people would dismiss it with a shrug, but they were open to magic and superstitions (how the black cat warned him before his Hollywood A-frame burned down; how a dream propelled Lawrence to turn the prahu replica of their boat in other direction and tada! the wind emerged for their sail; how Lorne's wide-angle lens fell into the water when they were filming during gusty winds and the prahu's captain nodded in approval of their "offering").

I learned so much from this book. About the diversity of the archipelago (mimic octopus who can transform himself into 16 different sea creatures (wow!); the Greater Bird of Paradise, which is a symbol of the soul and of eternal life; tarsiers, who in Borneo are believed to be our ancestral spirits; the psycho-navigators in the jungles of Borneo; "bisu", transvestite priests living in harmony in the southern Muslim villages of Sulawesi, which just tells me that people back then were way more tolerant and religion wasn't so black and white like what we believe it to be in the past, "These people, our people, don't know who we are any more. They treat us worse than their women. Our job has always been to stand just between heaven and earth - to be neither pain nor joy, man nor woman, but to stand beyond the dualities which rule this world. We can remain sensitive to the voices of spirits, and can dream of events to come, though few people listen to us now."). Lawrence Blair presents us with some fascinating facts. For instance, how we humans are actually descended from reptiles (there are three layers to our brain; the top layer is the neocortex which is responsible for our rational thinking, beneath it we find the limbic system responsible for emotions and intuitive responses, and beneath that is the Reptilian (R-) complex, governing our deepest autonomic functions! That's probably why many ancient societies all came up with dragons in their stories! In Indonesian, we use an expression "tanah air" (literally meaning 'land water') to refer to our nation. Blair highlighted that many societies in Indonesia seek a balance between the two which is essential to our lives. The book is filled with a generous amount of humor, which was very enjoyable. When Blair described how the Bugis pirates quickly adapted and learned how to drive cars, yet maintained the habit to keep the lights off to not be detected by enemies. How the Bugis pirates were feared and entered the English language as the 'boogeyman'. How the Asmat cannibals describe the Malay flesh to be too sweet, the white flesh too salty, but Chinese flesh perfectly delicious. Finally, I highlighted several quotes in this book. What impressed me a lot was his observation on the continental vs. the island mind.

"The Wallace Line also appears to mark the division between two very different kinds of mind - the 'continental' and the 'oceanic'. There is increasing evidence that the original island peoples did not migrate eastwards from continental Asia, but evolved independently for millennia amongst the isolated atolls of the south Pacific - resulting in a different turn of mind. [...] Severed from the rest of the world by sea and sky, an atoll-dweller, unlike a continental people, cannot easily resolve his differences with neighbours by simply fighting or moving on if he loses. He must adapt, turn inwards, integrate with his community. Food and possessions become shared, rather than bought and sold. Decisions, too, tend to be collective, rather than autocratic. So limited are the staples, materials and real estate of an atoll-dweller that every food, object and square yard of his diminutive space becomes invested with mana, an invisible, inter-connecting kind of holy force, making everything individually 'alive'. Rein is given to the intuitive, or 'right brain', faculties which perceive wholes, rather than their parts. Whereas the 'continental' mind is logical, monotheistic and autocratic, the 'oceanic' mind tends to be holistic, polytheistic and democratic."

"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 through 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 (2009)

"Only now, when the tribal peoples have almost gone, has the West awakened to the fact that, rather than their lands and possessions, ti is their subtle abilities and specialized environmental wisdom, forged since the beginning of time, which are of paramount importance to us all."

"We had come to Sumba for a glimpse of our earliest beginnings, of megaliths and the origins of war, where a warrior still looked his opponent in the eyes, but we had found something more. It seemed there was no animosity here but, rather, a recognition that we are all participants in the interplay of light and darkness, order and chaos, reflected in the life-giving seasons of the planet itself, if we but knew how to interpret them like the Ratu."

"Remember, from now on, wherever you go amongst the tribes of man, you will bear the mark of Aping, as a reminder that all life forms are part of a single tree." - Nanyet (Penan Dayak)

"The Bird of Paradise, it seemed, had beckoned us on and led us in, to stand here in this place high in the land of volcanoes. It was here in Bali, after returning from the Toraja Star Children, that I first recognized what they meant by us all being born half of heaven and half of earth. And after the mounted warsports of Sumba it was in Balinese ritual that I saw with new eyes the battle for balance between light and darkness. And after Borneo, returning to the sacred Banyan tree and its simian custodians, I had felt that all great trees, what's left of them, do indeed link heaven and earth in a single forest of life."