going (kinda) primitive on siberut island

siberut island is the northern island of the mentawai islands and the most important home for the mentawai tribe. a ferry leaves from bungus harbour in padang and arrives at bat obay, the harbour on siberut about 10 hours later. that is if the weather doesn't suck like it did for us...the ferry left around 9pm, so we all had bunk beds in the cabins upstairs. the passengers downstairs just sleep on the floor (see left). we floated at the harbour in padang for 2 hours before finally taking off and it was already raining, so the journey was gonna be a rocky one (understatement). i was staying with 7 locals (my fellow travelers were staying in another cabin) in my cabin (on three beds) and it was way to warm to sleep, so i spent most of the night on the floor outside on the deck, while the boat was rocking back and forth, making my stomach and brains totally confused, so that all i could do was lay down and try to fall asleep. but when it started to rain even harder, waking me up up half wet, i went to my cabin and still managed to sleep for a couple of hours. in the morning we had a stopover at muara sikabaluan, a tiny harbour on the north side of siberut, to unload all the stuff that was stacked in the ferry (see right, this isn't even 1/5 of everything). it took about 2 hours, so just imagine how much stuff it was! i was having a cigarette on the deck and when i looked down at the side of the boat there was puke everywhere! very gross, but all the locals where just eating during the ferry ride, so i guess that’s what happens. we got of the ferry for some breakfast and i felt like i was still rocking back and forth (land sickness?).

guy who works on ferry, colourful market at harbour , harbour

when everything was unloaded and our tummies where filled we left again. the ocean was a lot calmer and i tried to learn some mentawai words indra had given us, now that reading wouldn't make me throw up. i was sitting on the deck and saw dolphins swimming around!! four hours later we arrived at bat obay and went to the home stay, which was right near the beach. we played shithead and uno all night (which would be our pass time almost every night). the five of us had to sleep in this tiny room, and i do mean tiny. on the floor. but it was all good, i’m not that high maintenance anyway. i had to pee in the middle of the night and the toilet was about 20 meters away. and it was so dark. really dark. i had my crappy cheap flashlight with me and the shadows around me were scaring the shit out of me haha. toilets don’t flush in indonesia, well at least not in any budget places, so i had to get a bucket, walk to the sea, fill it, walk back and then well, empty it. the moon was up high and the sea looked absolutely amazing in the moonlight. there was no one around, just night creatures and the water and i felt really lucky to be able to experience that. i did’t take a picture though, since some views just cannot be captured by anything else but the heart and knowing it will only be at that moment in time and never the same anytime else, just makes me remember it better, because i know i will never see it again.
after a night filled with not much sleep, we left with a speedboat (which is just a wooden canoe with an engine) for bat djaudjau (it’s not spelled that way though) where a chief lives with his family (see right). the weather was really bad during the whole trip btw, so when we had to get of the boat, our guide indra told us to just take of our shoes, since it was really muddy and barefoot was better. nice nice nice, feet covered in warm mud! we spent the first two days there. the things you do on a trip like this depend a lot on the weather. we were supposed to go fishing and hunting, but because it was raining everyday, the river was to high so it was to dangerous. i really wanted to get a tattoo which was possible, so i was happy with that, but the guys were a little bit disappointed. so if you are planning on doing a trip like this, make sure you don’t go during the rain season.

below some pictures in and around the house:

kitchen, laundry space, cooking

storage space, drying space, chiefs daughters making bracelets with beads

they pound on these to send messages to other mentawais, skulls as decoration

chicken breeding basket, backpack, some other materials

drying cocoa beans, the backyard (aka pig town), the front yard

the stairs at the entrance, tree trunk to river, cage for pig (if there's a ceremony)

the chief showed us how to make poison and how to shoot a bow and arrow (i really sucked at that):

he goes to the jungle and picks the leaves and the branch used for the poison, adds a red chili, mashes it all so that it turns into a paste and squeezes it above a small bowl;

he puts the poison on the end of the arrows, without touching the point (because it will eventually become dull and won't go through the flesh) and then dries it above the fire. he puts some more poison on it, dries it again, and repeats this about 4 times. the arrows have to be covered in new poison once a month.

that evening indra told us some traditions in the mentawai tribe. first of all, sex is taboo and men and women sleep in different areas of the house. if a guy likes a girl they make an appointment to sneak of in the middle of the night and go to the chicken house to uhm, you know.... if a girl gets pregnant before she’s married, her father will make her tell him who she slept with and this guy will have to marry her and pay the father dowry. if she has been with more than one guy, they all pay and one of them will be the father, but the kid will grow up without the mother. i guess they see it as a disgrace or something. the dowry consists of seven things: sagu trees (sagu is food, i’ll get to that later), coconut trees, pigs, chickens, durian trees, woks, other materials. which amount of these things must be paid, depends on how valuable the girl is according to her father. they don’t use money, so the more of these trees, animals and materials they have the better. if a father only has sons, he will need a lot of stuff, otherwise they’ll never get married! and having daughters is obviously a good thing.
there were these two old mentawais, the father (left) and uncle (right) of the chief, who showed us how they make their uhm, clothing. they cut down a tree (i don’t remember the name of the tree though), take of the outside of the trunk, slice a long rectangle in the tree (about 10 cm wide), peel it of and then bang on it. what you end up getting is a red coloured, long sort of fabric which has to be dried before using it. they wrap it around their waste and wear it like a sumo wrestlers outfit. the women only wear skirts. but the mentawais we met were not that traditional anymore. the chief was walking around in traditional clothing, but he also had rubber boots on...(left). they also have plastic cups and use more 'western'stuff like that. the mentawais used to hunt for monkeys for food, but all the monkeys on siberut are gone already (they still walk around with a bow and arrow, but they're absolutely terrified of snakes, so maybe it's just for protection or something). they eat sagu three times a day, which can be compared to bread. they do eat pigs, but only during certain ceremonies, since a pig for them is like money for us. what they do during the day is mostly just sit around, smoke and cut down the occasional sagu tree to make their food:

the chiefs girls carrying parts of a sagu tree, the mother rasps it with some coconut and then sifts it. the rasp is made from a type of palmtree which has spikes on the trunk, they cut the spikes down a bit and then they use it as a rasp

after sifting it, the sagu flour is put into a leave, rolled up and burned (as you can see in the middle picture) to eat it you take the white sagu stick out (that's me holding a piece) it doesn't taste too bad actually, but i really could not eat it three times a day everyday...

oh, i almost forgot: i had another weird food experience!! grab! i'd never heard of it either, but it looks like this:

they have been fried, don't worry, so it tasted a little bit like uhm, oil i guess, fried oily with a tofu like texture, except for the head (which you're not supposed to eat but of course i didn't know that) which is very crunchy. it reminded me a little bit of a cockroach and once that thought popped in my head (the noise of me biting on the head sounded like when you step on a cockroach) my stomach turned and i just had to spit it out...failed weird food attempt yet again, but at least i tried damnit!

we walked around in the jungle when it stopped raining and swam in the very sandy and cold river. i was a little bit sick the next day, but i did get my tattoo woohoo! so here is how they do it:

first the ink: they burn a piece of coconut skin on the inside, scrape the charcoal and add some sugercain juice to make it liquid; then the tattoo gets painted on (i choose a bow and arrow)

the needle is a wooden stick with a safety pin (put in fire to kill bacterias), but tattooing was traditionally done with a sharpen fleck of wood from the karai tree, since the mentawais only used utencils made from nature (and it seriously did not hurt at all)

afterwards, the chief gave me some green leaves to rub on the tattoo, so it would heal better and not get infected.

there are three reasons why the mentawai tattoo their bodies: a tattoo shows a person's area and their ethnicity, so it's basically a sort of identity card; it secondly shows someone's social status and profession and finally, it has a decorative function. tattooing must be done as a ritual process as it is a part of the local animist belief.

after that adrenaline rush i just slept most of the day, while the rest was making bracelets and necklaces from beads (the mentawais also wear those)(see left). we headed to the government village the next morning, known as madoba. it took us five hours through the jungle to get there, on the paths made with tree trunks. it was wet, slippery and muddy and i again almost fell on my ass a couple of times. i still felt a bit sick, so in the end i was so done with it all, i got really cranky haha. we had to hide from a massive rainstorm in a chicken house halfway, but i was already wet, i think all my clothes were wet at that point (can’t bring too much luggage). the village was very different from the first place we stayed at. the chief just has a house surrounded by jungle and this was really a village. people were wearing clothes and it wasn’t all that tribal and primitive as i had anticipated. i guess that after 20 years of tourists going on these trips, the mentawais have earned more money (they do use money here) and have become more western. there are probably still very primitive mentawais on siberut, but i think they live deeper in the jungle and maybe not allow tourists in their villages (which i can imagine). the house where we stayed that day even has a tv! there were a lot of kids in the village and they were all exited, waving, walking around with us, saying hello, staring, the usual actually. at night most kids gathered at the house and watched tv, since it’s the only tv there.

a random street, the backside of our homestay (that well in the middle is the shower) kids going to school with their unicef backpacks

a girl carrying around her babysister, mini mentawais, michael and kris playing volleyball with some kids

we headed back to the chiefs house the next day for lunch. it was either another trip through the jungle or a boat ride and we all choose for the last one. the trip back to the harbour was really nice. we were heading towards some incredibly dark clouds and I was wearing my last dry clothes and didn’t bring any rainjacket or poncho...luckily for me it didn’t rain, at least not on us. the driver stopped right in front of the rain and it was moving away from us, so we were behind this curtain of raindrops, which was really cool to see.

we went back to the homestay we stayed at the first night, put our stuff down and walked around the village. there were some kids playing with boats they made themselves. we almost missed the ferry that night, but we made it back to padang safely and i think everyone slept the whole trip. saar, kris, indra and me got on a minibus back to bukittinggi and julia and michael stayed in padang to catch the flight to their next destination.
after i got the rest of my stuff from merdeka home stay, i decided to go to a better place where they actually have warm showers, so i checked into orchid hotel. i had already met the guy who works there the morning before i left to siberut. i took a shower, which was really nice, especially after 7 days of cold ‘showers’, power napped and dropped my stuff at a laundry place. when i walked from merdeka to orchid i ran into lala who asked me if i wanted to go to lake maninjau the next day. i kinda already told eric i would go with him, but i saw lala first, so i said yes.