TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Into the wild: The curious case of a Dutchman who disappeared in a S. Sumatra forest
The legend of a Dutchman who decided to live with the Batin Sembilan tribe has grown especially popular among the locals who live around the Bentayan Conservation Forest, which spans 19,300 hectares.
Change Size
Batin Sembilan tribe member Mat Attam (second left) and his children who live by the Meranti River in Musi Banyuasin regency, South Sumatra. He claimed to be related to Mat Liar. (JP/Jon Afrizal)
F
or many people who have been mired in the scheduled routine of contemporary life, the sheer wilderness of nature has long promised an appealing liberation from the mundane. An entire tourism segment even thrives as it caters to the public’s need for a temporary retreat away from the bustling civilization.
Some view the way of nature as a fascinating mirror of present-day society. There are, however, few others who see it as a legitimate alternative to modernity.
Peter van Kan, a Dutch national who had become a legal Indonesian citizen, was an adventurous soul who is believed to have left modern civilization to join the indigenous Batin Sembilan tribe deep in the Bantayan Conservation Forest in Musi Banyuasin regency, South Sumatra in 1964.
After decades of fruitless search, Ferina Istiani – Van Kan’s former neighbor in Palembang, South Sumatra – desperately took to Facebook to post a missing persons announcement in November 2009, 45 years after van Kan went missing.
Ferina said that Van Kan, who was born in 1940, had gone hunting for wild animals with his friends in the Bantayan Forest on the day he went missing. However, she said Van Kan was not among his friends when they returned from their jaunt in the forest.
In fact, he has never returned since then, she said.
