The Simple Life

The Jakarta Post - WEEKENDER   |  Tue, 05/19/2009 6:58 PM  |  On a Jet Plane

Peace and quiet are the order of the day in a small fishing village on the banks of Lake Toba. Chriswan Sungkono visits a simple corner of North Sumatra.

A veil of mountain mist hangs low just above the lake, which shimmers in the remaining light of dusk. In a sustained blue afterglow, the lake’s placid surface seems to extend far into the receding horizon, and the promontories bordering it, immense though they are, appear distant, as if drifting into another world of their own.

On one of the sampan, a man wearing a straw sombrero instructs his two young boys to load a net bloated with fish onto his wooden boat. He fires the engine and cautiously directs it toward the far shore, and they eventually vanish from sight. Other boats slowly head ashore as people, both on land and on water, start packing up. Grabbing their bags and fishing gear, one by one they leave the lake in a quiet procession. The day is done; it’s almost dinner time. Tonight, like any other night, they will have fish for dinner.

Here in the traditional fishing village of Tongging, where things happen in an exceedingly habitual fashion, it’s a bit difficult to distinguish one passing day from the next.

Home to about 500 families today, since its earliest settlement Tongging has flourished thanks to the munificent grace of Lake Toba, the world’s largest volcanic lake, which resulted from a massive eruption on Sumatra 75,000 years ago. Living close to the border between Tanah Karo and Simalungun regencies around the inlet at Toba’s northernmost point, generations upon generations of Tongging’s inhabitants – a mélange of several Batak ethnic subgroups, the most predominant being the Karo – have enjoyed the bounty of the lake and the fertile mountain soil.

Every new day, beginning at daybreak, the lake is no longer quiet. Men and women – and dogs, too – congregate on the lakeside as the morning bustle gets under way.

People tread the numerous crisscrossing planks of wood attached to floating barrels that form the rectangular shapes of the fish farms, each housing hundreds of fish, large and small. The fish need to be fed. Amid the swarming green of the water hyacinth, some crouch on makeshift bamboo platforms even until the sun is high, holding, jerking, flinging their fishing rods about. These men need to catch some fish to feed their families. Others simply wait on the lakefront, rows of empty buckets by their sides.

Every activity in the village revolves around fishing. Thus, an awareness of and familiarity with fish and everything about fish is imparted to locals from childhood. Children from the many similar villages on Lake Toba are raised to achieve a range of things later in life, but fishing is the one thing they must learn as early as possible.

There’s nothing strange, therefore, about a three-year old girl playing around on the street with a real fishing rod. Neither it is extraordinary to see a small boy of five paddling laboriously – and skillfully – from the far end of the boat to keep it steady and straight so his older brother can unload their catch of fish. Now that is learning by doing.

When the shipments of fish arrive – some delivered by traditional fishing boats from neighboring villages – those who wait on the lakefront tarry no longer. As the men begin to unload the fish, bucket by heavy bucket, the women divide the rest of the chores among them. Some focus on weighing and scraping the scales from the larger fish, others on packing the fish into their own buckets and filling them with blocks of ice, still others on cleaning the nets of the remains of smaller fish – a large portion of which they ultimately toss to the prowling dogs – and the rest (often this falls to the daughters) on washing the buckets to be returned to the boatmen.

Besides tilapia and carp, which are generally farmed, the main commodity of Lake Toba is the local favorite ikan pora-pora, a particularly slender and tiny fish that is caught wild, rather than farmed. Tons of this pora-pora fish are gathered daily by traditional fishermen on this particular spot in Tongging and transported into wet markets in nearby towns, even as far as Medan.

A Mitsubishi L-300 waits only meters from where the buckets of pora-pora have been arranged and counted. Each, containing about 16 kilograms of fish (around 400 fish), excluding water and ice, is then hauled to the roof of the car. After about half of the roof’s area is covered with a certain number of buckets, the man on top signals his friends below to stop. With a thick rope he ties the buckets together, securing it many times to the iron bars welded to the roof.

The remaining buckets are placed inside the car as the driver turns on the engine. Then a few women and youngsters, some dressed nicely and wearing makeup, hop into the car, adjusting their sitting positions beside the buckets. Within minutes, the car’s engine revs and off it goes along the road uphill. For most villagers, and obviously all the fish here, the only way to get out of Tongging is by this kind of public transport.

It is such a tantalizing sight, the morning lakescape in Tongging, like watching a concerto of maestros, where every instrument is played fluently and everyone remembers their own part by heart.

***

There are places on earth whose very ordinariness is so seductive it is worth staying there for more than just a day or two. Tongging is such a place. It boasts a full-circle panorama whose qualities can only be measured in superlatives. It’s hard not to be lured by Tongging’s natural glamour. Stop by the winding road on your way down to the village or at any point along its Toba shore, and look in any direction. You’ll find a picturesque scene right there.

Only a few small inns operate in Tongging, while the handful of lakeside eateries here offer more or less the same menus: grilled freshwater fish, taken from one of their own ponds. What makes the fish special, according to Kaban, a resort caretaker who lives in the tourist-savvy town of Berastagi, “is how it is grilled. The fish is wrapped in banana leaves first before it’s grilled, and upon grilling, it exudes an aroma so appetizing you can’t wait to put your fingers into its soft white flesh, and finally to dip it into the chili mixture.” One thing, though: You have to ask the cook to prepare it this way.

But that’s about it. The rest is just what it is: a village. Forget about finding Internet cafes or other modern tourist facilities. Although the nearby Sipisopiso Waterfall – Indonesia’s highest waterfall – gets crowded by day trippers most weekends, commercial tourism has not really crept in here, leaving Tongging pretty much in peace.

This may be a blessing in disguise for travelers hunting for “unspoiled” destinations, where tourism has not entirely reshaped the features that make people want to visit in the first place. For the locals, however, that’s not always the case.

To get a view of what it’s like being a local, follow the path along the lakeside up to the inner village, where wooden houses, stilted shelters, brick buildings, farmland and stately tombs mingle. Iridescent butterflies glide somewhat nonchalantly from one flower to another, sometimes even alighting on your shoulder for the briefest of moments. Tongging’s lakeside, indeed, is one of the few places where boats and butterflies can blend so beautifully.

At about the center of the village you’ll start to pick up the voices of kids, and perhaps you’ll even bump into one of them along the way. A moment later you’ll arrive at the gate of the oddly named SD Negeri No. 044854, one of the only two schools – both elementary level – right here in the village.

The teachers and students at the school all crave for more learning resources. What they have now is far from adequate. As one English teacher remarks, “When we need to copy materials, we often have to take a ride by motorbike or public minibus to Kabanjahe, the regency’s capital, where the photocopying machines are. It takes two hours alone to do that. Books and newspapers have to be bought from there as well, limiting our access to information.”

Thus, as in many remote villages throughout Indonesia, the favorite source of information, and even more of entertainment, is the satellite dish.

And of course, the television set. When afternoon comes, when the women have returned from their day jobs, they recline on their seats or on the floor in front of this ubiquitous box, eating lunch. An ordinary lunch consists of rice and fish and some vegetables the villagers grow themselves, but often they eat rice with only instant noodles, just to give it some flavor. Other kinds of meat, such as chicken and pork, are occasionally found on the table, on the special days called “market days”, usually Fridays. These are perhaps the only days they need to be able to distinguish from the rest – the truly ordinary ones.

It really is a matter of subjectivity: who should envy whom, and why. For some people – call them the “seduced outsiders” – Tongging possesses an unearthly charm, precisely because of its genuine mundaneness. Some even proclaim it an ideal setting where they can spend their lives in retirement, “in such an idyllic atmosphere”.

But “idyllic” is not an adjective these villagers are hesitant to leave behind, if to them it proves synonymous with “arrested development”.

Nurita Silalahi, a restaurant owner who tasted city life when she went to college in Bandung many years ago, plans to send her two daughters to big cities to study when they’re old enough.

“We have to improve ourselves,” she says of a dream shared by many mothers in the village. “And our lives, our daughters’ lives. Not every child here is willing to be a fisherman when they grow up.”

As she speaks, her daughters – one tall, one small – play blithely under a nearby tree.

The villagers of Tongging may have been living in a village in the world beyond for so long, but now they are geared up and hungry for some improvements in life. Now, they’re willing to struggle to achieve what they want. And, perhaps, what they deserve.

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