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Published: June 30th 2009
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For the fourth morning running I headed up Potawangka Road in search of the Wallace’s hanging parrot. Its interesting going through villages early in the dawn because it gets quite cool overnight, so you pass the villagers all squatting in blankets along the roadside, like snakes basking in the stored heat of the tar-seal. This time I had some information from a person in town that the place to go was all the way up to the village of Tebedo, twice as far as I’d been up before, and there I could see the parrots in the trees about 300 metres past the village. But again no luck. It didn’t help that unbeknownst to me at the time, my motorbike driver took me right through Tebedo and onto the next village so I was in completely the wrong place anyway. As I was walking back along the road, having just passed through the real Tebedo, I passed a man walking from the other direction who stopped to talk. As it turned out, Frans as he was called, knew exactly where to find the hanging parrots because he often took people to see them (“all the time, tourists come from all over, always want to see nuri - nuri, nuri, nuri - why they all want to just see nuri?”). As it happened it was too late in the morning by the time I met Frans and the parrots would be all back deep in the forest, so we arranged for me to come back that afternoon at 5pm when apparently I would be assured of seeing them in the trees outside the village. As we sat in his house drinking coffee and discussing parrots and other birdy things, I threw my usual question out there, about whether he knew tikus (“mouse”), and yes he did; did he know tikus besar (“big mouse”)? "Yes, yes, this big", he says, holding his hands apart at exactly the right distance to show the size of a Flores giant rat. They live in the cave, he says, motioning to the forest behind the house, and they also come into the village to eat the coconuts. I asked just to be sure, they were found here in this area? Yes, yes, their name is bitu, or in Manggarai (the local language) beco. This seemed like a wild stroke of good luck, finding the locality for both of my most-wanted Floresian animals in one fell swoop. But you know what they say about getting your hopes up before your chickens are cooked… or something.
In the afternoon I returned to Tebedo with ample hopes. The motorbike driver I got this time must have had a few too many spills off his machine because he was the most singularly dim-witted person I have ever met. I explained to him where I wanted to go a couple of times, then we set off in the wrong direction. I explained again, and we set off in another direction. I got him to pull over and explained again, and again, and again, masterfully resisting the urge to just head-butt him in the back of the skull. I don’t think it was my Indonesian that was the problem because this was the fifth time I’d been to Potawangka Road and every other driver had understood my directions first time. We finally set off in the right direction, and every few minutes he would swivel round to repeat the instructions to be sure he understood; that was when he wasn’t trying to up the arranged price mid-trip that is.
At Tebedo there were no parrots in the trees. We looked at the fossilized tree trunk sections that litter the ground. Frans asked me what the name was in English of a particular tree growing there and I said I didn’t know, and he said in Indonesian it is called kapok which I found etymologically amusing. The kapok is a South American tree and the name comes from Tupi-Guarani (a local American Indian language); it got transferred intact to English and obviously from there to Indonesian, and now the Indonesians consider it to be their own native name! Because there were no parrots there at that moment Frans said he’d show me the “big mouse cave” so we hiked off into the forest for about ten minutes. The cave wasn’t really a cave as such anymore, more like a large overhang, but it had obviously once been a cave as there were big stalactite formations in there. Along the back wall were various small openings to burrow-like cave systems which looked like good hidey-holes for giant rats. Frans pointed to a large burrow in an earth bank. “Landak” he announced. “Oh”, I said. Landak is a porcupine and while I haven’t seen a Sunda porcupine before it wasn’t really what I was after. Were there bitu here as well? I asked. Frans shrugged and said “sometimes” in a very non-committal sort of way. On the way back to the road to see if the parrots had arrived he was saying “July, August, September, many many nuri, all the time”. “And now?” I asked, knowing what he was going to say. He shrugged and said “sometimes” in a very non-committal sort of way. “Sometimes,” I repeated to myself, perhaps a bit too sarcastically. Back at the road we wandered around all the trees in the area until dark but no hanging parrots came. Then we returned to the cave to see if any bitu would come out. It took a bit longer to get there than last time because we got lost in the dark, but eventually we found our way. No bitu came out and neither did the landak. I don’t blame him. With the amount of noise we made bashing through the undergrowth he probably thought we were coming to knock him on the head for dinner.
The ride back to Labuanbajo was pretty scary on a motorbike that had a slow leak in the front tyre, a wobbly back wheel, and was obviously running out of petrol, not the best of combinations when on a deserted mountain road in the middle of the night several hours walk from the nearest settlement. Every so often there would be little ‘chinks’ as bits fell off the bike, probably something un-necessary like wheel nuts. Once on the main road it was even worse because nobody dips their lights for approaching traffic and you can’t see a thing. I kept expecting to get swiped by the side of a lorry or to just run right off the edge of the road. When trucks went passed they kicked up clouds of dust that absorbed the beam from the headlight (when it was working that is!) so there was just a wall of lit dust ahead.
So as yet no hanging parrots and no giant rats. They may or may not eventuate. Something that definitely didn’t eventuate was the boat to Sulawesi. The guy who was going to sell me the ticket kept pressing me to give him the 300,000 rupiah for the ticket and I was adamant he needed to make a reservation for it first before I was handing over that amount. As it then transpired, the boat leaving on Thursday didn’t go to Sulawesi at all, it was going to Maumere (another town on Flores), the Sulawesi ferry wasn’t going till the 12th of July which is too long away for me. There may or may not be another ferry that goes weekly to Sulawesi but I can’t get a firm answer on that one from anyone. I thought I had a boat rounded up to Komodo tomorrow as well, but as that turned out the other guy who was “definitely” going had in fact only said he was thinking about going, so I don’t think that’s leading anywhere either. And all the flights out to Bali so I can then fly to Sulawesi are fully-booked for quite a way in advance (because there are so many tourists in this town) so I may be stuck in Labuanbajo for even longer. I’ve already been here a week, and the longer I’m here the less time I will have in Sulawesi. Everything’s getting more and more frustrating as the days go by.
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Peter
non-member comment
Just relax, lay back and let the wind blow in your face! Don't be too ambitious!