Letters From An Island Son, Far From Home

Stefan Verbano graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in Journalism in spring 2011. From February 2012 to May 2014, he served as a United States Peace Corps volunteer in the remote village of Mwanachama in Mansa District, Luapula Province, Zambia, Africa. For those two years he worked with local village leaders and farmer cooperatives, teaching about conservation agriculture and establishing poultry income-generating activities, all in order to create greater food security and rural livelihoods. Upon leaving Africa, Stefan has been heading east through Asia as a common traveler, working on Malaysian organic farms, climbing Himalayan mountains, contemplating eastern spirituality and exploring the culture, language, food, religion and landscape of a vast and beautiful continent. He is the son of Lawrence Verbano and Christine Damarjian. These are his letters home:


CHRISTMAS MORNING, MOUNT AGUNG, BALI -- SUNRISE

PART I

Mt. Agung

It began as little more than burgundy cracks in an otherwise black mirror. Needles of light poked through sections of the horizon where low-hanging clouds broke their ranks; came in through holes at the base of the starry tent where the Sandman himself couldn’t keep inky night from fading back through the color spectrum. Even as more and more light escaped from behind the veil, the land remained dark. It was still being gobbled up faster than it could break free; by the barren black earth, by the barren black sky, by the great light sink that is the sea. Out west, the line where land and water stops and sky starts remained dubious, but in the east, textures round and smooth and jagged and rough began to elucidate themselves. What was earth and what was water became clearer and clearer from how light played off  each; cast back ash-gray by igneous rock; absorbed, refracted and then reflected in Technicolor by ocean. Once half the horizon was filled with narrow, lateral slits of deep red, orange appeared in the center - a carpet being rolled out for the imminent arrival of our performance’s star character. With this new illumination, the sky above became textured, too, fading from black to deep-sea blue, with the outlines of cirrus clouds taking shape high up in the heavens. The clouds below us - the cirrus’ low-hanging, rain-carrying brethren - were still black as a pit from pole to pole, but where they were absent I could make out the fabric of greenery; tall, straight spindly trees on the mountain’s back, and then the broad-leafed amalgam filling up the valleys rolling away diagonally in all directions.

We had not even reached the summit before the sky began to lighten. The trek started six and a half hours and 2,000 meters below where we were at that moment, anxiously watching the sky, struggling to climb over the last few lava beds leading to the shorter and closer of the two peaks. Beyond the last rivulet of long-since cooled molten rock, the path became even again - paved with round, sooty volcanic gravel that loved to rearrange itself under your feet - and wound down along a ridge as narrow as a city block, with 300-foot cliffs tapering off on either side. One wrong step and any of us could quickly find ourselves surfing down a hill of dried lava into a gaping volcanic crater wide enough to hide an aircraft carrier. Dawn was not waiting on us, so, gasping for breaths of the thin, cold early morning air, we gave our last full measure up the summit’s final incline. I was clambering across The Roof of Bali, 3,030 meters above sea level, the fifth highest volcano in Indonesia, the towering apex of Balinese Hinduism’s “Mother Mountain”, and the sun was rising on Christmas Day.

My hiking partners were two early-30s German men who spoke fluent English and our sure-footed 22-year-old guide from the temple named Keriani. I became mixed up in their company after materializing near the trailhead the day before with no contacts and no plans, hoping to latch onto an established, scheduled climb at the last minute. I was a party of one, and saw little point in organizing my own expedition, mainly because the guides waiting at the gate were ready to gouge me blind being that I was alone and so poorly organized. I would have made the trek without a guide - I would have preferred it, in fact, remembering the un-pleasantries of hiking the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal earlier in the year with Keshav, a Nepali guide with the personality of a wet noodle who, true to form, tried his own hand at bamboozling me out of a formidable number of rupees at the last minute. But, alas, guides are compulsory on Agung, and after about three or four hours in the pitch-black pulling myself up a washed-out hill by tree roots, I would thank my lucky stars that Keriani was leading the charge.

And luck certainly had something to do with it. I had been haggling with the guides at the entrance for over an hour, aimlessly walking up and down the hill leading to the parking lot asking around if any treks were already scheduled for the night. The first guide I spoke with told me that, being the single climber at the last minute like I was, it would cost around 300 Euro to summit Agung. This price was echoed by a few different men. I couldn’t believe it. I had made the half-day overland trip to the mountain on my own volition, brought my own food, water and gear, and these guys were charging more than what it cost to opt in to an “all inclusive” trekking package with roundtrip transport from 100 kilometers away and the bullshit brown-bag egg-and-cheese breakfast buffet carried up in the guide’s backpack and served to the exhausted white people upon reaching the summit. After awhile my haggling had succeeded in pacifying the price to around 100 USD, but this was still both much more than I was willing to pay, and much more than I had in my pockets.

The sun was setting in the sky, and my heart hung heavier and heavier as the prospect of being able to climb that night fell with it. I thought of giving up. The skin on my face and forearms was tight and hot, sunburned from spending the heat of the day on a motorcycle in high, clear elevations. I had a first-degree burn on my right calf the size of a silver dollar where I had brushed my leg against the bike’s exhaust pipe after many hours of riding, and it made my entire leg feel numb and sluggish. I had about 50 pounds of luggage with me and no idea where I was going to safely stow the majority of it for the night so that I could carry up only the absolute essentials: food, water, warm clothes, headlamp. Hungry, tired and approaching despondency, I again started climbing the hill to the parking lot with my mind made up to ask around at the trailhead one more time.

Keriani came barreling down the hill on a scooter in his uniform - the name of his eponymous trekking company slapped on the front and back of a blue polo: “Keriani Trekking and Adventures”. He must have seen my head hung low because, though he was traveling down the hill on the opposite side of the road, he suddenly swerved across the center line and braked to a halt right at my feet.

“Hey, do you need a ride?” he asked with a blooming smile.

“Um, yeah, I guess so. I want to climb Agung tonight…” I responded, trailing off a bit, lost in thought, probably sounding hopeless.

“Do you have a guide now?” he asked.

“No,” I grumbled. “The guides at the gate want more than I can afford because I’m alone.”

“I’m a guide,” he said with a sort of encouraging air. “I run my own trekking company on Agung mountain.”

“Oh yeah?” I prodded. I didn’t want to get my hopes up, but in that instant - just by the look on his face - I could feel the seeds of hope being sown.

“Yeah. I’m leading a group of two up tonight if you can go with us,” he said. “I think they are Belgians”. (They turned out to be Germans.)

“Really?! REALLY?!” I blurted out with a nasally squeak before I could conjure up anything more intelligent to say.

And then I hugged him. He was a complete stranger, two years my junior, and I hugged him and thanked him and slapped him on the back and couldn’t stop exclaiming how he had “saved the day!” He beckoned me on the back of his scooter and we took off to buy AAA batteries for the headlamps.

“Do you have good shoes and clothes, a ‘torch’ and enough food and water?” he asked, shouting to be heard above the crackling engine and whooshing wind, straining his neck backwards but keeping his eyes on the road.

“Yes, yes! I have everything!” I said rapturously.

We agreed upon 600,000 rupiah (about 50 USD) to let me tag along, and I promised not to slow the party down too much.

The trailhead for Mt. Agung’s 10-kilometer summit climb starts at the “Mother Temple” of Besakih on the mountain’s southern slopes. This is where Keriani left me, right outside the temple entrance at the local police station. He told me that - with permission from the officers on duty - I could stash my luggage there for the night, and that he would meet me out at the road that evening with the “Belgians”.

The temple complex at Besakih is made up of twenty or so separate temples and shrines, each one designated for use by people who belong to a particular caste or live in a specific region of Bali. Like everywhere else on the island, Hindu architecture abounds in Besakih: in its buildings with concentric, terraced roofs like square Tesla Coils, in its maze of symmetrical staircases and split gateways, and in its bounty of giant stone-carved dragons and bug-eyed, teeth-gnashing monsters. It is through this pageantry that we started our winding, arduous journey up the mountain at 11 p.m., hiking through darkness by headlamp and flashlight to reach the summit just as the sky was being set alight.

It was the single greatest 12-hour period of physical exertion I have ever experienced. It made every day of my Nepalese Annapurna trek seem like an ice-cream social for some freshman backpacking course (except perhaps the last day - hiking 600 meters up to crest Thorung Pass at nearly 17,000 feet above sea level, and then skidding 1,000 meters down again to the town of Muktinath). The “trail” up Agung was hardly even that; it was more like a drainage ditch cut into the side of the mountain by monsoon rains, and then filled up with volcanic gravel and - at lower elevations - a mess of tree roots. It would have been impossible to make it up that mountain without using upper-body strength; without heaving up four-foot-tall steps one handful of grass at a time, without scrambling over fallen tree trunks, without clawing fingers into patches of loose dirt for better traction. Where Annapurna was well-worn, Agung was wild and precarious and unstable. There were no stone staircases or guardrails or distance markers or signs of trail improvements at all. Above the tree line, the established path disappeared completely, and even the most bona fide climber would have spent two solid hours stumbling over a hill of crisscrossing lava beds textured like a gigantic rock-hard, porous black brain.

Half an hour after we set off from the entrance to Besakih, Keriani led us to a temple nestled away in the jungle, instructing us to leave our packs and shoes at the door and come sit around the altar. He burned incense and sprinkled flower-infused holy water over us; a blessing of luck for the perilous trials to come. The night was silent except for the chanting and banging of drums coming from down the hill. Our last stop before setting foot onto the mountain proper was at a small shop beside the trail, where our guide bought cookies and biscuits wrapped up in newspaper, to be broken out at rest stops over the course of the next ten hours when morale seemed to be running threateningly low. The first leg of the trail was a jovial one, with the Germans bantering back and forth in their own language, from time to time quizzing Keriani in English about some particularly exotic-sounding aspect of Balinese Hinduism; reincarnation, polygamy, karma, the names, colors and avatars of so many countless gods. We howled at the moon at midnight, shaking hands all around, cracking jokes about who had the bottle of champagne in their backpack, and bidding our fellow strangers a merry Christmas in such a strange place. As the trail got steeper, though, the joking and revelry died down, and we locked our jaws and fixed our gazes upon our own respective halos of yellow light illuminating the uneven trail ahead. When we were about halfway up, Keriani suggested we should rest for half an hour at a flat protruding rock platform, and ambled off into the bush to look for dry tinder to start a fire. He pulled cups of instant noodles and a large plastic thermos out of his pack, and we sat in silence slurping mono-sodium glutamate broth and peering out at the island below painted with twinkling lights, like lanterns bobbing along the surface of a vast and murky black sea.

At about 3 a.m., high above the warm blanket of clouds, the air dropped below freezing, and, despite our protests and desire to find a comfortable shelf of rock to curl up and sleep on, Keriani coaxed us to our feet again and again, telling us we would catch hypothermia if we stopped moving. We were still soaked in sweat from the lower half of the ascent, which now betrayed its purpose and sucked the heat from our bodies. I was shivering uncontrollably until, during one of our 3-minute rest breaks, I stole away from the group to change into the long underwear and waterproof rain pants I had not given a second thought since Annapurna. But more than the warm clothes themselves, I was most grateful for the hiking shoes leftover from my Nepalese excursions; the Germans, wearing tennis shoes, seemed to be fighting Satan himself to keep their footing over loose patches of earth.

My hamstrings were on fire, so much so that the reaction time between my brain and legs was becoming more and more delayed. Everything from the waist down felt numb, and I was finding it hard to keep my balance. I started to lag behind the group, their beams of light charging farther and farther up the trail without me, and I would only catch up with them again when they would stop to rest. By the time I huffed and puffed up to where they were cooling their heels and crumpled to the ground filling up the missing segment of the circle, their three minutes would be up, and with my legs howling for respite and my heartbeat blasting in my temples, I would struggle to stand up again on shaky legs and continue the trudge. Only once I thought about throwing in the towel; only once considered telling the other three to leave me in some somber clearing and continue on unburdened; that I would see them in the morning when the sunlight returned and they made their way down again. It was only a fleeting thought, precipitated by fear, catalyzed by pain, and hours later when I took that last fatigued step to reach the summit as the sky began to burn an iridescent dawn, I whispered a quiet prayer to Mighty Agung - and to whatever other gods may have been lurking up there - for their faith in my unconquerable soul.




Stef on the summit.

PART II

Mt. Batur

I arrived at the temple around 4 p.m. - seven hours before the trek started - on the back of a motorbike, guitar case in-hand and giant royal blue hiking bag hanging off my shoulders. My “driver” for the day was named Jimmy - well, that was his nickname, probably adopted because white people could pronounce it more easily than his given name. His real name was Ketut Sariada, and he was a mid-40s Balinese spiritualist with a round head and black, greasy, slicked-back hair. We had started off from Lovina Beach on Bali’s north coast at 9 a.m. and chugged his little Honda up and down the small mountain range running from the center of the island eastward dividing it north by south. Halfway into the ride we stopped for lunch overlooking Mt. Batur - a shorter, more active volcano to the north of Agung - and I took his photograph. At the time, I assumed Batur simply rose up out of a great valley - just a pure geological coincidence - and it wasn’t until I was 3,000 meters above sea level early the next morning when I could clearly see the mountain’s massive crater. It was Batur’s testament to its former monumental glory, a height it will slowly, steadily build back up to over the centuries and millennia, but for now the contemporary volcano’s size appears puny in comparison to the footprint of its past.

Ketut Sariada (Jimmy)

Jimmy and I only agreed on a restaurant the second time around. We came into a larger town along the two-lane highway which ran right through the middle, and there was a string of western-style diners buffered on either side by “warungs” (basically Indonesian eateries; local amenities, local selection, but also local prices). First he stopped at the “orang putih” (“white person”) cafe; floor to ceiling windows, plush furniture, ornate Balinese decorations, a stainless steel self-service buffet piled high with meaty bite-sized, deep-fried, golden-brown goodies with “sayur” (“vegetables”) and all the rice you could ever care to eat for just 80,000 rupiah (about 6.60 USD). There were shiny SUVs in the parking lot with smartly-dressed white families licking ice-cream cones and taking group photos with the mountain in the background, while dirty barefoot local children moved from one group of tourists to another hawking brightly colored sarongs, bushels of bananas and bags of peanuts for “cheap price, cheap price”. The only Indonesians inside the building itself were the waiters.

I was ready to take all of this - the palpable economic and thus racial divide - on the chin because I was ravenous, not having eaten breakfast that morning, and knew it would probably be another twenty-four hours (half of that spent climbing a mountain into the upper troposphere) until I could eat a good meal like this again, and I had at least arrived with Jimmy, a local, who beckoned me through the door despite my protests. Really, I just wanted us to be able to sit across from one another as equals and share a meal. It would have meant a lot to me to break the paradigm in a place so obviously segregated by skin color and fabricated solely for utility by tourists.

Jimmy took a seat next to me, and when the waitress came over to tell us the buffet’s price, he stood up to leave.

“Steve, you can eat here. It’s okay,” he said with a tinge of humiliation on his face, “but I want to save my money. I will wait outside by the motorbike until you are finished.”

“No!” I jumped to my feet with acid in my throat. “I can’t do that, Jimmy. I just can’t. Let’s get out of here.”

With that I cast aside the laminated menu, slung my hiking bag across my back once more, took up my guitar and made for the door. The waitresses tried to block our way, asking us what the problem was, and I just clenched my teeth and took one resolute step after another, shaking my head at every fake smile and compromise they threw at us. Out on the street again, I dropped my luggage down next to the bike.

“Steve, I don’t understand,” Jimmy said, bewildered. “You told me you wanted to go to a restaurant.”

“I did…I’m…I’m sorry,” I stammered. “But it’s not fair. That..,” - I pointed back through the windows toward all the smug, smiling, well-fed white faces - “just isn’t fair.”

“But I am your guide,” he said. “Guides don’t eat with the tourists.”

“Well, my friend,” I responded, “I am one tourist who does eat with his guide. Let’s go to a warung, okay? It will be cheaper and we can both eat together… as equals.”

My traveling companion eventually shook off his confusion at all of this, and we hopped on the bike once again. Jimmy drove a few more blocks up the highway where the local eateries started. He pointed out a warung with a finger of an outstretched arm, and turned his helmeted head around to look at me with an expression as if to say, “Is this one alright?” I nodded, and we pulled into the empty parking lot and dismounted.

The place was deserted except for an older woman, a little girl who was presumably her daughter, and about 17,000 flies. Each of us took up our respective plastic lawn chair and examined the menu printed in 64-point font on the wall. The prices were about a third of the “Orang Putih Cafe”. The woman greeted us with a grin and made some small talk with Jimmy in Balinese while she wiped down our table with a rag, taking with it dried-up bits of brown rice, slicks of yellow meat-scented cooking oil and an entire extended family or two of dead flies.

We ordered iced lemon tea and took turns getting through the formalities. He started in at me with the usual string of questions (in order): “Are you married?” “How many kids do you have?” “How long have you been in Bali?” “What do you do for work back in America?” That last question is always a difficult one for me to answer - mainly because I haven’t set foot in America in three years, and lesser so because I usually run out of breath before I can explain what Peace Corps is in any kind of comprehensible detail that will survive the language barrier - so I gave him the optimistic answer.

“I’m a writer,” I said. “A journalist, actually.”

Jimmy withdrew into his own thoughts suddenly, and then cracked a smile like he was hatching some scheme.

“You should write about me,” he said after a pause. “I am a healer, and I always need customers.”

And he was. He had studied under a Hindu guru in the past, and occasionally escorts physical and mental therapy-seeking westerners around Bali for spiritual healing. He said he had treated serious physiological medical conditions like cancer and HIV with practices like “mountain therapy” and “beach therapy”. Of course, alarm bells were ringing off their mounts in the rational reaches of my brain at this, but I figured it would be disrespectful to question him using my brain about something he believes so fervently in his heart. He told me I should promote him on my “website”, and at some point the conversation trailed off with my weak assurances that I would “do what I could”.

The shuffle of the old woman broke the resulting silence. Our lunch was ready. He ordered fried fish with rice and “sambal” (a spicy sauce made with shrimp paste and chilies), and I opted for “nasi campur”, which is in its essence aromatic rice cooked in coconut milk and served with stewed vegetables, spiced shredded coconut and some type of meat - a traditional Balinese staple. He dug into his mound of rice like a true local - three fingers and a thumb pressing the grains into a ball, dipping it into the oily fish platter and bringing the whole thing dripping gloriously up to his lips. I used a spoon.

We took turns swatting the flies away from our table between bites.

“Don’t you think this is better? Better than down there?” I asked him with a laugh, pointing in the direction of our cleaner, more expensive, more segregated first choice.

He stopped chewing for a moment and looked in the direction I had beckoned toward, but said nothing. His gaze fell toward the table. He wasn’t going to respond.

“Jimmy, don’t you think it’s unfair?” I prodded him further. “Don’t you think it’s unfair that all of the nice things on this island - the fancy hotels, the fancy restaurants - are only for tourists? I mean, you are from Bali, right? Don’t you think Bali should be for the Balinese? Why should we - why should the Orang Putih - be treated differently just because of the color of our skin?”

“I do think it’s fair,” he responded at last. “It’s fair because, Steve, you are a king...”

Happy New Year. 

-Stef


All The Letters From An Island Son, Far From Home