When Travel Becomes Time Travel

Tomorrow we embark for Pulau Halmahera, one of Indonesia’s Spice Islands, where we will travel back in time.

Our aim? To experience the nomadic hunter-gatherer life as it is still lived today, among unassimilated Togutil people.

And this is a journey almost as close to time travel as it is possible to get. A step right back into human history.

Because, despite logging and mining of their ancestral lands and the efforts of missionaries and government to civilise them, the forest nomads we are going to meet still live as their ancestors have for millennia and ours did millennia ago.

They wear loincloths, hunt deer and bushmeat with spears, forage for sago, cassava, eggs, leaves and fruit. They build shelters of leaves and branches, and move their camps as the forest provides.

They live without money, electricity, running water, healthcare, in clan units of four to fifteen people, scattered among the rivers which thread the forests and mountains of this wilderness island.

Now, Z and I have seen a lot of different ways of living and experienced a lot of different beliefs since we started this journey in January.

But this journey — the two of us, a lead guide and three local guides-cum-porters-cum-guards will, I hope, teach both him and me a lot.

We’ll be building our own shelters. Hunting and foraging some of our own food. And, hopefully, spending time among people who live as they have done for millennia.

It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. I thought about it in the Calamian archipelago of the Philippines, not so far from here, where tribal peoples still live as true nomads in the forested mountainous interior of these islands.

I thought about it in southern Palawan, in the Philippines, even nearer to here, where the Ta’ut Batu lead a lifestyle not too dissimilar to the earliest cave dwellers not far from the sea. But Z wasn’t ready.

And I’d intended to do something similar in Indonesian Papua, but unassimilated tribes live deep in the interior, and on an island where every drop of fuel has to be flown into the interior, a simple boat charter runs at $700 or so a day.

So here we are…

Heading off into the wilds, in search of a people under an ancient curse, from a city which is, in part, straight out of Evelyn Waugh.

The curse? Well, Pulau Ternate, the island we are on now, and the spiritual and cultural capital of the northern Moluccas, has been ruled by the same family since the twelfth century CE, which means that some of their rituals are pretty damn old.

Certainly pre-Islamic. Possibly pre-Hindu, though early Hinduism involves a lot of magic.

And, as we found in northern Laos and the Tana Toraja, a lot of what folk initially describe as “old beliefs” turn out to be pretty damn current once they trust you enough to open up.

This old belief? Many centuries ago, the sultan of Ternate, ruler of an empire which vastly outstripped the size of this tiny island, had a captain, who refused to obey his orders.

The captain ran and hid in the mountainous forests of the neighbouring island, Halmahera — still a place which few can penetrate.

So the sultan put a curse on him: that he and his family and all his descendants would live in the forests, like beasts.

Many folk here put enough credence in the old belief that they consider the Togutil not orang asli (aboriginals) but degenerate Moluccans.

Which is also damn convenient when it comes to taking over their ancestral lands for logging and mining.

Things I’ve heard today about the Togutil?

“One day, on the survey land, we catch four of them,” explained an educated, thoughtful, Jakarta-based landowner. The choice of verb is unfortunate, but revealing. “They are from a family. The grandparents are brother and sister. They marry. They have two children. A son and a daughter. Then the son gets his mother pregnant and they have four more children. They live so far apart and are so afraid of each other they have no other way.”

“When the government resettles them, they run away. When someone dies, they bury them in the garden, abandon the house and run back to the jungle. They are afraid of the ghosts,” explained a local teacher of computing, a Sufi so abstract and spiritual he’s close to agnosticism.

He adds and, gentle reader, if you’ve ever heard the tinpan alley battering a tropical rainstorm plays on a corrugated iron roof, you might understand the sentiment a little, “When they first put them into houses and the rain falls on the roof, they are terrified and run back into the jungle.”

“There are some Togutil who are very, very tall and white,” one of Pulau Ternate’s many, many enthusiastic students of English (and mobile phone photography) explains.

“One day I was hunting deer in Halmahera and I saw the footprint. It was like so [he mimes the length of a forearm]. We think they are from Portuguese people. They are whiter than you. They have white hair…”

He continues, “A friend of mine, he bring some to his home. All they do is watch TV. They never saw TV, so they watch it from 6am to midnight and through into the next day. He tries to teach them badminton, but they cannot play.”

I must confess that I am not entirely sure about the ethics of this trek. It won’t be first contact, though folk believe there are clans further in the interior who have yet to meet people from outside their own tribal minority.

But we are, in effect, yet another incursion from the modern world on people who seem to run from much of it in terror. And, I wonder, if the Togutil eventually meet the fate of Borneo’s Penan, whether we will be a part of the problem.

Selfishly, though, I’m doing it. I think we’ll learn an immense amount. About human history, human nature, linguistics and, maybe, just maybe, what it means to be human and to be happy.

At the least, we should get an insight into a way of life which will, I think, be gone for good by the time Z has children of his own. What do you think?

We’ll be back to the land of connectivity in a week or so. In the meantime I’ll be posting some other amazing things we’ve done over the last few weeks. If you haven’t already, you might want to click here and follow our feed.