A letter from Sumatra: 1993-part V

Anise and Herman would cook and evening meal consisting of rice and noodles, mixed with vegetables. The locals would let us have a taste of their grub. They don’t like rice, but grow sago, which is a tall tree about 18 inches thick. When the tree is ripe they chop it down, and then into 4ft sections. We helped them do this with a machette.

The sago tree sounds almost hollow, as the pulp is of an almost powdery consistency. You can cut a sago tree in half in 5 minutes, providing you don’t slice your toe off. The Mentawai use a kind of scraper /sieve, to get the pulp, which is then soaked in a large wooden box above the stream, to get the sago powder. The locals mix sago with coconut, and wrap in banana leaves, approximately 12 inches long and 3/4 inch in diameter. They cook these and the result is a kind of bread, which tastes as if its got cheese on. We actually thought they had put cheese in it just for us. We gulped these down and told them that this was the Memtawai answer to pizza.

Later at night the locals would do their traditional dances, all based on animal / man situations. They were very funny and insisted on dragging up each of us to do a native animal dance with them. You don’t really understand how clumsy westerners are until you see them hiknig through mud and dancing native style. Last of all we would put up our mosquito nets and lay down to sleep. The nets fit 2 people, and work as long as you secure all the edges. The mosquitoes are very good at finding a loose corner or waiting till you go to the bathroom, and fly in with you. Steve and Jorg and a hole in their net so they got a lot of bites. David form Switzerland had a nightmare one night, and stood up screaming. Anise and Herman thought a snake or a wild animal had got into his mosquito net, so they charged in and ripped the shit out of it to rescue him. Then he woke up, silly boy.

One funny thing was that the Mentawai don’t really keep animals, but they feed wild pigs and chickens twice a day. The houses are all on stilts, so under every house is basically a pig sty. All the Indonesians get up about 5.30am, and so the pigs would arrive even earlier in anticipation of their feed. I swear I thought a whole herd of wild beasts were about to enter the house. They are so loud, and together with the roosters, wake everyone up.

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