SUMBA, 5 - 9 June
I set off for Sumba with excitement and a little concern. The plan seemed easy enough - catch a plane to Waikelo, take a bus to Waikabubak and get a National Park permit, then another bus to Lewa where I look for birds - but I didn't know how it would go in practice given that my fluency in Indonesian didn't extend much beyond "punya pacar?" (do you have a boyfriend?) and "umur anda berapa?" (how old are you?). I got lots of small bills changed at a bank in Kuta because the ATMs give the cash out in 100,000s which are of absolutely no use in the eastern islands (or pretty much anywhere else for that matter). Getting the money from the ATMs was a mission in itself actually, with the first three machines that I tried all rejecting me. The first said "cannot comply" or words to that effect; the second said to contact my bank (eep!); the third just spat the card back out at me, which is at least better than swallowing it completely I guess. Pretty worried by now - and after checking my online banking to make sure all my money was in fact still in there - I finally found a machine that didn't want to test me any further. Anyway, the upshot of all that was that I was now walking around with three million rupiah in small unmarked bills. Anyone want to paint a bulls-eye on my back?
The flight to Sumba was delayed by over an hour, and seeing as I'd just been talking to a Hawaiian family who's Merpati flight had been cancelled three days running I was a little apprehensive as to whether I'd even reach Sumba. Once off the plane at Tambulaka Airport some guy hurriedly rounded up the six or seven foreigners disembarking and herded us off to a side building -- but when he found out I wasn't bound for whatever resort he was pimping, instead being some rare independant traveller, he lost all interest and abandoned me without a second word. And rare I appeared to be! On the bus trip to Waikabubak every single person along the road stared almost open-mouthed, and in the town itself kids followed me around yelling "hello mister!" and giggling when I said hello back. The downside of being a rarity is of course that precious few people speak more than two words of English. I had been going to stay at the Hotel Arta which is apparently quite nice but its also more on the outskirts of town so I went instead to the Hotel Pelita, chosen for its relative closeness to the bus station, but also because its basically right opposite the police station and post office, both places which I figured would be likely points of enquiry as to the whereabouts of the parks office, which I had to find to get a permit for the Langgaliru National Park near Lewa where most of the endemic birds are found. It was easier said than done to find this office. I had "PHKA - Perlindungan Hutan dan Konservasi Alam" written on a piece of paper because everything I'd read called all the parks offices around Indonesia "PHKA offices". Turns out that (apparently) the PHKA office is in Jakarta and all the other regional offices are just called Departemen Kehutenan ("Forest Department"), so my little note got me absolutely nowhere. But here's where blind chance came into play, because at the Hotel Pelita there was staying a chap from Ruteng in Flores who spoke perfect English, who went out of his way to help me out of pure kindness, driving me all round town on his motorbike and translating everything as we tracked down the elusive office. Of course I had to ask him about the Flores giant rat in case he knew of any localities but he'd never heard of it which was a bit unsettling. My initial plan for tracking down the giant rat when I get to Flores was to begin by asking the locals if they know where they are found. I figured that if there were rats the size of house-cats living in your area you'd probably know about it. I'll just have to hope for a better reaction once there. Later it transpired that I hadn't even needed to waste all that time looking for the office in Waikabubak because I could have arranged the permit with much less hassle once at Lewa. It would have been cheaper too, because at the Waikabubak office I had to pay 25,000 rupiah for each of my cameras, 10,000 for the permit itself, and another 10,000 for something additional that I didn’t understand.
The cats round Waikububak are all docked and invariably only have one eye. Docking the cats' tails is supposed to bring good luck. I'm not sure about the eye. The drug of choice round here, coming in second after cigarettes, is betel-nut. Apart from being addictive and carcinogenic, long-term use rots away the teeth and gums and stains the mouth bright red from the juice. Not only do betel-nut chewers look like they've just been smacked in the mouth with a baseball bat, but because it increases saliva production they are also constantly spitting streams of blood-red saliva into the street. The bus station-slash-marketplace, which is the main meeting point, as a consequence looks like a set from a zombie movie.
The next morning I went to the zombie bus station. All I had to do was catch a bus to Lewa and once there find what had been described on an internet bird-trip report as a "basic losmen owned by Cornelius and Katy Hary" (
sic) who were used to the strange ways of birders. I figured that Lewa would have to be just a small town so it shouldn't be hard to track the place down. The guy in the Forestry Department had also said that lots of foreigners stay at a place called Mamariwu House, which I thought would likely be the same place. So, I go to the bus station and they tell me the bus is full (even though its empty) and I end up paying 50,000 rupiah to some guy with a car that he uses as a bus. I was pretty sure I was getting ripped-off judging by the way they were all laughing about it, but it was the same price as all the other passengers (locals) were paying and apparently it is a fair price, so I guess they were just laughing because I was a wierd tourist -- I was the only one in the whole town after all. We leave at eight, I'm told, but because its Indonesian time I sit around till ten then we drive round town a couple of times picking up and dropping off various other people, then sit at the station for a while longer. Eventually the guy comes up again and yells "go, go, go, now we go!"...in another half an hour apparently. There's all sorts of interesting sights along the roadside in Sumba, from the semi-skeletal colts tethered to trees to the millions of dogs roaming everywhere (except for the ones trussed up in the marketplace next to the goats and chickens of course). At one point two half-naked men charged past the car wielding seven-foot metal spears, obviously hunting something for the dinner pot, possibly a small foreign child. Once in Lewa the driver asked a few people for directions then dropped me right at the door of Mamariwu House which was indeed the guesthose owned by Cornelis and Kati Hary (and which is alternatively known as Hary Homestay). In days gone past, any birders coming to Sumba had to stay in the main eastern town of Waingapu and hire a taxi and driver for the day to visit the forests around Lewa, but not any longer fortunately. I'm not sure what sort of luxury accommodation the writer of the aforementioned trip report was used to, but Mamariwu isn't what I would call "a basic losmen"; I found it to be very pleasant and comfortable, and the Harys were perfect hosts. They speak some English reasonably well (better than they think they do), and they also have a close friend called Budiyanto Karwelo who lives nearby and speaks both English and German fluently. Most people who stay there simply turn up on the doorstep unannounced like I did, but you can also email Budi at
[email protected] to let them know you’re coming and he can arrange the stay.
Once settled into the most excellent surroundings of Mamariwu House - where there were
pale-headed munias nesting in the tree by the house - I headed out to the forest via a short motorbike ride. Really all the forest birds of Sumba are doomed. The forest is being destroyed left right and centre, its over-run with introduced macaques, and poaching is rampant. Even protected areas like the Langgaliru National Park at Lewa are in reality composed of little more than isolated degraded patches of trees dotted about like islands in a sea of man-made grasslands. Even the biggest remaining stretches are just thick wedges either side of the main Waikabubak-Waingapu highway. The localities that birders visit are generally referenced by the kilometre posts of that highway. The one I went to on that first afternoon was km 51 (although I kept inadvertantly calling it Area 51!). Here I spotted
blood-breasted flowerpecker, rainbow bee-eater, dollarbird, collared kingfisher, helmeted friarbird, brown quail, brown goshawk, Wallacean drongo, yellow-spectacled white-eye, Asian paradise flycatcher and
large-billed crow. I stayed inside the forest till after dark hoping to spot the small Sumba hawk-owl which was only discovered in 1991. I heard some owls calling -- along with the calls of great multitudes of the introduced tokay geckoes -- but none of them appeared within my torch beam.
The next morning I went on a longer motorbike ride, 45 minutes or so on what could only graciously be called a roughly-sealed road, to a place called Watumbelar in search of the citron-crested cockatoo, probably the most endangered bird on the island. Everyone I talked to about parrots said that maybe ten or fifteen years ago they were commonplace, in gardens and even coming into kitchens to steal food, but now they are rarely seen by anyone because they have all been hunted out for the international and domestic pet trade, a situation that goes not just for the cockatoo but for all five species of parrots on Sumba. The requisite National Park and local guides led me from isolated forest patch to isolated forest patch trying to find the cockatoos which remained unseen as did the Sumba hornbills, but I was still perfectly happy to see a whole lot of other birds, including
savannah nightjar, short-tailed starling, apricot-breasted sunbird, red-naped fruit dove, pale-shouldered cicadabird, thick-billed flowerpecker and
pied chat (I saw 20 species of bird in all at Watumbelar)
In the afternoon it was off to another highway site, km 69. The National Park guide took me into the forest -- and got us lost! I was not impressed. I mean, I can quite adequately get lost all by myself for free! What was even funnier was that after an hour he finally admitted he had no idea where he was, and I had to lead us back to where we started from. Once back at the road he wanted to go straight back to town, but if I was having to pay to have him there then he was jolly well going to stay there till after dark so I could look for owls! At about km 69.5 there’s a small now-overgrown clearing next to a sharp right turn with a crash barrier. The recently-described
Mees’ nightjar comes out here a few minutes past 6pm and does several fly-bys so I saw that well. Apparently its also good for both of the endemic boobooks but I didn’t even hear them here.
The next day was more of the same, along the road at km 69 to 71 (where the forest ended) looking unsuccessfully for the hoped-for Sumba hornbill - although
ashy-bellied white-eye, brown-throated sunbird, Arafura fantail, green imperial pigeon and
black-naped fruit dove were new for the trip list, then back to km 51 in the late afternoon where I again saw no owls but did see a
ricefield rat (and got my fingers filled with thorns struggling back through the scrub in the dark). In the morning I gave the hornbills one last try, once again without success, then had to give up on them and head off to Waingapu to make my way to West Timor (but I did find
Horsfield's bronze-cuckoo, rusty-breasted cuckoo and
Sumba flycatcher). I only had very average success with birds on Sumba, missing out on almost all the main species I was hoping for (the hornbill, cockatoo, green pigeon, both owls, jungle-flycatcher....) although some other endemics sort of made up for that (especially the absolutely fantastic red-naped fruit dove). The fault was partly my own, trying to keep to something resembling a schedule, and partly simple bad luck. The hornbills will probably be extinct before I ever make it back to Sumba again, but being at Lewa was really the first time I've properly enjoyed myself on this trip, simply because I was out there looking for birds, doing what I came here to do, instead of just struggling to actually get anywhere. I've said it before but I hate the travelling part of travelling -- I like the bits in between the travelling.
Between the Merpati and Transnusa airline companies, planes leave Waingapu (Sumba) for Kupang (West Timor) every day of the week. But as I found out, they're all fully-booked days in advance which was a bit of a surprise. I went on the waiting list for the next day but there wasn't much hope of getting to Kupang before the end of the week. I had inadvertently found myself staying at the Hotel Elvin which was 275,000 rupiah per night (the cheaper fan rooms all being already occupied) so I was going to have to move to a much much cheaper place if I was in Waingapu for more than one night. However there was a surprise cancellation about quarter of an hour after going on the Transnusa waiting list and by a fluke I got on it, possibly at the expense of the locals who'd already been on the list before me. I had no time to go in search of the endemic Sumba buttonquail, so I really do need to come back to Sumba one day to see the birds I missed -- before they all become extinct -- but I doubt I'll ever be able to do so.
Because the Hotel Elvin is an expensive upmarket-type place -- marble floors, chandeliers, toilets -- they give you a free breakfast consisting of coffee, two pieces of toast and a boiled egg. And here's where I came across the most bizarre thing yet. When you travel in a foreign country you are constantly seeing things strange and new every day, but truly the wierdest thing so far was the green toast. Not green with mould, just entirely lime green, like white bread with food colouring added. Never before have I seen such a thing.
After breakfast I headed to the airport to go to my next port of call, West Timor.