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.

Oblivion the Whale and His Precious Oil

Rudyard Kipling's 'The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows', first published in the fall of 1884 and later collected in the 1888 Plain Tales from the Hills collection, is the recollections of a half-caste opium addict six weeks before his death. Gabral Misquitta's entire life revolves around the lashes of his addiction. The opium den in Coppersmith's Gully, near the mosque of Wazir Khan, is both home and hearth, ruin and salvation. Isabelle Eberheardt's well-known story, 'The Oblivion Seekers', similarly recounts addiction to the same substance. While Kipling was a writer who requires no introduction, Eberheardt was somewhat more obscure. Her life reads as a tale that might have come from Kipling himself. (Please reference 'Miss Youghal's Sais', first published in the spring of 1887.) She fled from her native Geneva to North Africa in 1899. She spoke Arabic fluently, formally converted to Islam, and typically dressed as a man in order to enjoy greater freedom and mobility. In October of 1904 she died in a flash flood in Algeria when the walls of her clay house collapsed inward, trapping and drowning her.


In 1975 King Faisal of Saudi Arabia was killed (assassinated) in a gun battle in Riyadh. His nephew, Prince Faisal Ibu Musaed, allegedly fired three bullets at him with a pistol at point blank range during a royal audience. It has been observed that the word 'assassin' may be derived from 'Hashshashin', a militant Sunni sect, thought to be active in the Middle East in the 8th to 14th centuries. This mystic society killed members of the Abbasid elite for political or religious reasons.

In 1942 Iran reached an agreement to allow British and Soviet troops into the country in order to protect the petroleum-rich nation from German offense. The agreement stipulated that all foreign troops would leave Iran within six months of the end of the war. By 1944 however the Allies had begun to demand oil concessions from Iran. Thirst for petroleum had by no means been satiated when the war began to reach its end in 1945, and of course by that time Great Britain and the United States had changed their attitudes toward the Soviet Union. When Truman took over from Roosevelt in April 1945 the to-be Cold War policy on the Soviets began to become doctrine, and Iran became a test case for a new boldness in international affairs. The Soviets feared that they would be denied the oil they needed from Iran and supported a rebel group based in the north. The United States reacted by accusing the Soviets of interfering with the affairs of a sovereign state. The Soviet Union negotiated an oil deal with Iran and removed its troops; almost immediately Iran reneged on the deal and violently put down the rebellion in the north.

Interestingly, the oil companies know very well that in less than 30 years they will not only be charging very high prices, but that they will be uncompetitive with renewables. -Paul Hawken

It seems that one of the most fundamental aspects of the procurement of petroleum in the past century has been its symbiosis with the modern global economy, in which nation states though sovereign are submitted to economic, political and military pressure in total competition for limited resources. When we discuss renewable energy, corn fields for ethanol and bio diesel and dozens and hundreds of other strategies, do we consider that competition over such instruments of global economy almost always cause some form of direct or indirect exclusionary competition? Whether the commodity is tea, opium petroleum, or the slave trade - abolished in Britain 200 years ago - somebody always suffers.

He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers. -Henry B. Adams

Thinking Outside the Kitchen

DENPASAR - Ngurah Sutedja leans forward in his chair and stretches his arm out to point through the window of his office, tucked in a well-lit corner of his expansive kitchen at the John Hardy workshop in Mambal, a sleepy inland farming community in central Bali. Beyond the glass, encased in a bamboo window frame, is the almost completed construction of a second kitchen devoted to what he describes as ‘pignics.’

Several men busy about carrying freshly-cut lengths of bamboo, while behind us the noise and energy resonating from Mr. Sutedja’s kitchen sound like the surging of waves breaking against rocks, as his kitchen team of twelve chefs, six stewards, and four service men and women prepare the daily organic lunch for the workshop’s seven hundred and eighty-five employees.

The ‘pignic’ kitchen, explains Mr. Sutedja, stems both from one of John Hardy’s seemingly constant stream of ideas, and also from a challenge extended to him by Cynthia, John’s energetic, striking and seemingly omniscient wife. “John came up with the idea to do a special lunch, and a few days later Cynthia ate babi guling in Jimbaran and returned home saying that it was the best she had ever had, that the skin was just perfectly crispy,” states Mr. Sutedja while laughing. “Of course I thought that I could do better, so we had to try it here at the workshop.”

But his challenge was larger than merely preparing Bali’s best babi guling – which is in itself no small feat – he had also to overcome cultural differences in preparing and serving pork in a diverse and multi-cultural work environment where Hindus, Muslims, and Christians strive to design, create and produce some of the world’s most exciting and beautiful jewelry.

Mr. Sutedja thought the problem through, and as he has consistently done during the past eight years that he has been working with John Hardy, he arrived at an innovative solution. He and his team built a special ‘pignic’ kitchen, a totally separate and self-contained environment in which to butcher, prepare and serve what is arguably the island’s best babi guling.

Mr. Sutedja’s creativity and novel approach to problem solving are nurtured in the workshop’s positive and natural environment. The property, framed by traditionally built mud walls, and containing organic vegetable gardens, fishponds, fresh fruits, and innovative bamboo-based architecture, inspires a rigorous and highly conceptual form of thinking.

The John Hardy concept of sustainability is an idea that permeates all aspects of life and labor at the workshop, from the silver designers to the gardeners and the kitchen, where one of the most distinctive elements of sustainability is used everyday.

The story goes that a while back the kitchen cooked with gas burners. A sudden lack of gas supplies on the island coincided with a special guest visit to the workshop, and Mr. Sutedja was forced to find a new way to prepare lunch. He ordered that fires be lit and dry wood be collected, and in this manner the kitchen prepared the VIP lunch. Just before the food was to be served, John Hardy himself came into the kitchen and took note of the wood fires.

“He asked me why I was cooking with wood instead of the gas burners,” smiles Mr. Sutedja. “I just explained to him that this way was the traditional Balinese way of cooking, and that it tasted better.”

After this John Hardy and Mr. Sutedja met frequently to discuss the kitchen and how to improve it in an environmentally sound, more efficient, and traditional manner. They experimented with several ideas before hitting on the rice husk stoves that are on prominent display and in daily use in Mr. Sutedja’s kitchen.

The stoves are simply creations that burn on discarded rice husk. A sack of rice husk costs Rp. 1,000, and Mr. Sutedja’s kitchen uses ten sacks per day to serve lunches and dinners to more than eight hundred people. He calculates his weekly rice husk expenditures as between Rp. 50,000 and 60,000, whereas before he spent Rp. 1,000,000 per week in cooking with gas stoves. And the food, all locally produced and mostly organic, apparently tastes much better when cooked in this way.

The rice husk stoves and the ‘pignic’ kitchen are but two examples of Mr. Sutedja’s creative thinking, something that he describes as having evolved from the nurturing and pressured demands of life at the John Hardy workshop, where constant innovation and a quest for a better way are institutionalized concepts.

“He is very creative,” states PR Manager Agatha Belinda. “We frequently encounter many challenges here. For example, we had to get ready for an event with two hundred people and wanted to do something organic. Pak Ngurah came up with the idea to use hollowed bamboo stalks as glasses and rolled lemon grass as straws. He always finds solutions to whatever problems or issues we throw at him.”

For his part, Mr. Sutedja remains modest. He is quick to smile and even quicker to praise his kitchen team for their hard work and innovation. If sustainability is about creative problem solving and using resources in fundamentally new ways, it is safe to say that Ngurah Sutedja is at the absolute fore-front of innovation in Bali; and as a Balinese from Gianyar, he hopes that more and more people take note.

“These are my challenges,” he says softly, “but there are many more problems that we must also solve together through cooperation and hard work.”

(Originally published in The Bali Times.)