The Impossibility of Either Loving or Leaving Labuan

I was once laid up in Labuan Bajo with severe fevers, several large and infected skin abrasions, and profound stomach pains. Now, I grant you, the situation could have been worse; I could, for example, have been sick in rural Benin with the twin phantoms of typhoid and cerebral malaria (as a Serbian ethnobotanist of my acquaintance once was), or I could have been a Victorian-era adventurer condemned to a diet of raw rat flesh in a Central Asian dungeon (as Alexander Stoddart so suffered at the hands of the Emir of Bokkara), but in retropsect I can announce that the situation was sufficiently taxing that do not envy either the experience.

Labuan Bajo is well-known worldwide as the jumping-off point for travels in the Komodo National Park, in the Indonesian province on Nusa Tenggara Timur. For a dozen months I worked and lived in the mountains about 35 kilometers south-east of Labuan, with the Tado people in the Kempo ethnic region of West Manggarai. But that is not the topic of this brief essay, and I will not burden you with its intricacies.

By some accounts, Labuan Bajo can be considered a city, a town, or a hybrid mixture of the both. It hugs a marvelous sweep of coastline and its inhabitants are a polyglot rabble of Manggarai, Bugis, Bajo, Bima, Bajawa, the odd Javanese, a lone Balinese police officer, and various other ethnicities and sub-ethnicities particular to that area of the world. It is home to mosques and churches, to seaside fishing villages and hillside farming villages, quite poor food and some very impressionable nightlife that I would describe as charming and memorable, if a touch basic.

The doctor who administered my varying afflictions was a very commanding, if not incapable, Timorese woman from the provincial capital of Kupang. My fevers were tempered with aspirin, my skin infections with generous tips of foul-smelling liquids, my stomach pains with mashed bananas, and as a final flourish and for good measure my backside was the recipient of a fairly intimidating injection, which, if the skin infections gracing my legs are considered in tandem, made the simple act of walking rather challenging.

Over the course of several days I had made a sufficiently miraculous recovery so that my faith in the Timorese doctor was confirmed in side with my longing to again board a bus bound for the mountains and make the trek home to my village of Pusut. And a few dinners of grilled fish, made even more palatable by the addition of several large bottles of Bintang beer (antibiotics be damned) had reconstituted my strength and added the reassuring protein - and equally necessary alcohol - that my diet of pappaya leaves, cassava, and white rice in the villages had left lacking.

So I bounced upon rusted axles while inhaling a delicious perfume of cloved cigarrette smoke and exhaust fumes, happy that in this one regard (my health), I was again fit to fight a struggle that the rural poor in developing countries worldwide know so well.

Several months later I marked my birthday in a series of airports traveling from West Sumatera to Denpasar. In transit at Jakarta's Soekarno-Hatta International Airport I sat down and for several hours stared out a window and thought of Manggarai and the sunsets over that magnificent sweep of coastline, over those parched hills, over Labuan Bajo. And I longed to return with a conviction and force as strong as my desire to leave and never return once was.