Waterway To the World
If Tan Puay Hin ruled the world?if, like Kublai Khan, he possessed fabulous wealth and an army that scattered enemies with the mere rumor of its advance?he would still probably prefer to do most of his ruling from a skyscraper in downtown Singapore.
Tan is the chief operating officer of PSA, the company that runs Singapore's port. We meet at his company headquarters, in a well-appointed 40th-floor office offering a godlike view of the port. Ships the length of three football fields sidle up to gargantuan dockside cranes; tens of thousands of containers are stacked up behind in multicolored canyons of steel. It looks like a Bond-movie set waiting for an explosive finale. Tan, 52, himself appears to be a mild-mannered salaryman?pencil moustache, plain suit, chosen-by-my-wife tie?but he commands an operation of global reach and brain-scrambling complexity. Every year, Singapore handles some 20 million shipping containers riding on 200 shipping lines serving 600 ports in 123 countries. At PSA, Tan Puay Hin's nickname is "The General."
At that moment, I stand up, march onto the balcony, and scream into the wind: "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Okay, so I don't. I made that up. I just sit there and listen to Tan talk about capacity enhancement and resources planning, stuff like that. Once you get over its epic scale, Singapore port is mainly remarkable for its remorseless efficiency, and General Tan?a modest, affable chap?is justly proud of it. "Most containers don't stay here for more than a week," he tells me. "Two-thirds leave within a few days. About 16% don't even stay here overnight."
Yeah, yeah. Did you also know that if you lay 20 million containers end to end, they stretch more than three times around the globe? Or that refrigerated containers last year transported 57 million tons of merchandise? "That's almost the weight of two million whales!" notes a PSA brochure. And guess how many containers PSA loses, misplaces or damages every year? Fewer than 10. It makes you wonder how airports got so good at losing our luggage.
Make no mistake: running the world's busiest port is a serious business. Singapore sits at the mouth of arguably the most important sea lane on earth, the Malacca Strait. Some 50,000 ships pass through it every year, carrying a third of the world's trade and half its oil supplies. Linking the Indian Ocean with the Pacific, the Strait is a choke point where global trade, geopolitics and lawless seas all intersect. The Strait's security is vital not just to the three countries that flank it?Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia?but to emerging giants India and China, and to the countries who buy their goods. In other words, to all of us.
For centuries, great maritime cultures have met and mingled in the Malacca Strait. Dependable monsoon winds drove pioneering merchants between India and China, and were a closely guarded secret in Marco Polo's age. He sailed home through the Strait in 1292 after 17 years in Kublai Khan's court, and spent five months in a fortified stockade on the Indonesian landmass of Sumatra, waiting for the winds to change. Polo, his father and his uncle eventually headed home in a convoy of ships carrying 600 people. It was ravaged by pirate attacks, and after 18 months at sea only 18 survived. The Polos arrived in Venice "clad in tattered Tartar clothes," writes the scholar Frances Wood, "ragged and unrecognizable, bereft of all possessions save rubies and emeralds sewn into the seams of their tattered garments."
That's the story, anyway. Fact or fable, Marco Polo's travels gave the West a new way of imagining the East, and helped ignite trade with peoples who had seemed impossibly strange and distant. Seven hundred years and one jet age later, we depend upon the sea even more than in Marco Polo's time?we just don't know it. Modern maritime trade is hidden. Ports have retreated to ultra-efficient spaces behind barbed-wire fences and security checks. The ships, computer-driven monsters with skeleton crews, load and unload their cargo quickly and vanish on the open oceans. The biggest vessels can carry 9,000 containers, offering economies of scale that seem to bend logic. Take Australian ice cream, which Japanese love. Due to the frequency of sailings, the quickest way to get it from Fremantle to Tokyo is via Singapore?a detour of several thousand miles.
Every ship?advanced or ancient?docking in Singapore is tracked by PSA's computers, along with the quantity and destination of its 20-foot-long shipping containers, the basic, unregarded unit of international trade. One vessel is a 38-tonne barge called Marco Polo 78, the name just visible on its rusting bow. Moving at three knots and crewed by barefoot sailors, it has chugged across the Strait from the Indonesian island of Batam with a cargo of coconuts and pineapples. To get an inkling of what Polo might have seen and experienced, I will make Batam my first stop on a voyage up the Sumatran side of the Strait, a lesser-traveled coastline of forgotten islands and mangrove-choked inlets, and the historical haunt of pirates who still torment passing vessels.
Last year Lloyd's of London, which insures most shipping, designated the Malacca Strait a "war-risk zone," and several Singapore companies now offer private armed escorts. Alex Duperouzel is managing director of Background Asia Risk Solutions (BARS), whose company motto?"You Are Not Alone"?was inspired by a ship's master. "I never sleep when I'm in the Malacca Strait," he told Duperouzel. "I feel so alone out there."
Apart from Duperouzel, who is an accountant ("I can't shoot," he confesses), BARS staff are all ex-military and include, says Duperouzel, "one or two Brits and Americans." But the Strait of Malacca is not the Strait of Hormuz, where the threat of suicide attacks means "you literally need to be able to blow boats out of the water," he says. "We've had to be visible many times but never had to fire a shot." Last year BARS escorted a 12,000-tonne cable-laying ship worth tens of millions of dollars. A fishing boat with 17 armed men approached, saw Duperouzel's men brandishing automatic weapons, and left in a hurry.
About 300 ships ply the 900-km Strait at any time, along with just a handful of patrol vessels from Singapore, Malaysia or Indonesia. There were no acts of piracy this year until early July, which saw three attacks in as many days. But is the Strait really a war zone? There is a crime problem, admits Duperouzel, "but active law enforcement brings that problem down periodically." Growing cooperation between the police and military of the three littoral states helps keep piracy down. And due mainly to the logistical challenge of launching seaborne attacks?a speedboat loaded with explosives has a comparatively short range?there has never been a terrorist incident in the Strait. Says Duperouzel: "It's easier to park a truck outside a nightclub than it is to hijack a supertanker."
Or a ferry packed with day-tripping families, like the one I took to Batam that Saturday. The boat hugged Singapore's coast, cruising past the thin yellow beaches of Sentosa Island, then picked up speed and darted across the Strait. We were dwarfed by container ships and supertankers, but their ranks dwindled as we crossed the invisible sea border into Indonesia and approached Batam, its waters plied by wooden boats from another century. As we docked, the Singapore skyline?far away and dreamlike beneath gathering storm clouds?disappeared behind the headland.
The Left Bank
A sign on the ferry read, "Gambling is strictly prohibited on board." Since last year it has also been prohibited on Batam, once a haven for punters from Singapore and Malaysia. Tourist numbers had since slumped by more than a third. "We have not lost hope," Batam's tourist chief Arifin Nasir told reporters; he promised to promote the island's "cultural riches" instead. I headed for the main town of Nagoya, a semideserted red-light district, and checked into a hotel as the call to prayer rose over the massage parlors and the girlie bars.
With its strategic location and status as a free-trade zone, Batam has attracted billions of dollars in investment from international firms. It is also a well-known destination for foreign sex tourists, and the town of Nagoya is both seedy and surreal. Its signature building is a half-finished hotel shaped like a love boat, which sits in the middle of a crowded parking lot, looming over the car roofs like a ghost ship trapped in pack ice. Billboards outside town advertise housing projects with names like Palm Beach and Shangri-la Gardens, while a colossal mall and apartment complex called Superblok Imperium is announced by statues of Arthurian knights and toga-clad Romans. Bizarrely, but like many Batam structures, this architectural goliath is painted in bright, kindergarten colors. Albert Speer meets Willy Wonka.
Batam also has a grim cosmopolitanism borne of the desperate nationwide hunt for work. My airport taxi was driven by an Acehnese. The bellboy was Javanese, the waitress Balinese. I went to Batu Batam Vista, which sounds like a fancy apartment block but is actually a slum where more than a hundred squatters live. (Their vista is a busy highway.) Here I met Adrianos and Urbanus Estakius, brothers in their 50s lured here from Flores, more than a thousand miles away, by tales of well-paid work. So were the tales true? Adrianos gestures around his home, a wooden shack with a ragged lino floor, which the government could bulldoze at any moment. "All lies," he says. Both brothers work as security guards and are paid peanuts?around a million rupiah a month, or a hundred bucks. Urbanos is a night watchman at a new housing complex, while Adrianos guards a patch of government land from squatters?that is, he guards it from people just like himself.
Batam's cultural riches exhausted, I moved on. My goal was to travel up the Sumatran coast in small trading boats, but the only way off the island was a 30-foot fiberglass boat with five outboard motors. It shot out of Batam's port at a velocity unimagined in Marco Polo's time, then ploughed through muddy estuarine waters toward Sumatra. First stop, Tanjung Batu, a gritty trading post, a baby Batam. Local merchants ferry bananas and pineapples across to Malaysia, and bring back whisky, cigarettes and electronic goods to sell in Sumatra's cities. Tanjung Batu's other industry is sex. Outside town, hidden down an unpaved back road, is a purpose-built village of bars and brothels, populated by Javanese prostitutes.
The largest structures in Tanjung Batu are three- or four-story concrete birdhouses, featureless except for rows of small holes to admit swiftlets. Their nests are destined for soup bowls in Singapore restaurants and fetch a high price. Who owns the birdhouses? "The Chinese, of course," a local told me. "Birds mean money in this town."
Hendy, the ethnic-Chinese owner of my hotel, is one of Tanjung Batu's richest men. He owns five birdhouses and wears a Rolex that is very probably real. "You can build a house," he explained, "but you never know if the birds will come." So what's the secret? I asked. Hendy drew a Chinese character on his newspaper and circled it emphatically. "Luck," he smiled. This luck extends to even remote corners of Sumatra, where ethnic Chinese conspicuously run all the most profitable businesses and ugly concrete bird houses dominate the landscape, looming discordantly above the low-lying mangroves like something left behind by aliens.
The indigenous Malay-speaking folk of the Riau Islands, which include Batam, are known as orang asli or "original people"; they lie at the bottom of the economic heap. With their intimate knowledge of the forest, the orang asli have worked in the timber trade since precolonial times. More recently, they had provided cheap labor for Riau's illegal-logging operations until a police crackdown closed many sawmills. These were tough times for the orang asli, as I discovered at our next port.
Teluk Dalam is the only real town on Mendol Island, home to about 3,000 people. Our boat's arrival shook it from its morning torpor. As we docked, smaller boats materialized to load on fish, sugar and areca nuts, and offload ketchup and instant noodles, in a Lilliputian imitation of Singapore port. Teluk Dalam has a feeble cell-phone signal, a small army outpost and, pinned up by the shipping office, a poster of Malaysian militant Nurdin Mohammed Top, suspected of masterminding a string of terrorist attacks including the 2002 Bali bombings. But otherwise its connection to the rest of Indonesia seems tenuous.
Our boat's arrival was a major event, especially since it brought the first European most islanders had seen in the flesh. Almost immediately, a journalist turned up to interview me for the local newspaper. His name was Suarten, and afterwards we set off on his motorbike to visit some orang asli villages. The narrow concrete path snaked through swampy plantations of coconut and areca-nut palms, past tumbledown wooden houses with Islamic inscriptions over the doors. The orang asli are largely animist, but a battle for their souls was under way.
At a village called Telukkelapa I met Inri Kiroyam, a young Protestant pastor from Jakarta who had been assigned here two years ago. She referred to the orang asli, in English, as "the ancients." They made up most of her 100-strong congregation. Inri was only 29. "But for the ancients, that's old," she smiled. "Their girls get married when they're 15. They have no identity cards, no education. They believe in myths, not reality." Despite Inri's ministry, most orang asli still preferred to make offerings of rice, sugar and eggs at the coconut-leaf spirit house that hangs from the rafters inside each home.
Inri introduced me to Suro, 33, one of her converts. Now rechristened Ruben, he wore a Minnie Mouse T shirt and shin-length surfer shorts, and trembled with nerves when he spoke. I asked him how Christianity had changed his life, and Inri translated his mumbled reply as: "He's full of joy now." Full of joy and out of work. Until the recent crackdown Ruben worked at a nearby sawmill, now abandoned.
I wanted to explore the area further, but suddenly the journalist Suarten said, "It's too dangerous." At first he refused to elaborate. Then, reluctantly, he told me that two headless corpses had been discovered the previous week in Tanjung Batu, my last port of call. The heads would probably be used as sacrificial offerings to protect new buildings, he explained. The killer or killers had not been caught, but there was a growing hysteria that they had arrived on Mendol Island. "We should go," said Suarten.
Inri was unfazed. "It's just a story," she shrugged. But Suarten?a journalist, an educated man?not only believed it but seemed genuinely scared. "Many people have education, but they still believe in myth and superstition," explained Inri. "That's Indonesia."
A Shady Past
Headless corpses and black magic. News of such events rarely reached the outside world. Nor, I was realizing, did reports of pirate attacks on the Sumatran side of the Strait. I left Teluk Dalam on a sturdy wooden boat with peeling blue paint, entering waters that had been notorious pirate lairs for hundreds of years. "A thousand rivers gave them hiding-places whence the swift warboats could dash out to seize a peaceful merchantman," explained The Pirate Wind, a book about 19th century piracy that I'd brought along to scare myself with. A British captain refused to say where he kept his money, I read, so pirates cut off his fingers and left him "a bleeding but breathing mass upon his quarterdeck." The captain of a Dutch schooner was captured by a pirate king who "with one blow cleft his body from the shoulder to the side, while his companions fell upon the mate and cut him to pieces."
Our captain, Agim, was a Bugis, celebrated seafaring nomads from Sulawesi. He had sailed the length of the archipelago but didn't want to talk about bajak laut?pirates. "None around here," he said airily, steering his boat across lagoon-smooth water by the light of a crescent moon. But later I sat on the prow with a soft-spoken crew member called Ando. A month ago, he told me, armed men on a speedboat had boarded a vessel like ours at nearby Guntung and stolen millions of rupiah in wages bound for a coconut factory. And a year ago, the corpses of seven sailors had been found on the shore near Guntung. They had been lashed to driftwood and mutilated. "Crucified," whispered Ando. "Like Jesus." High-seas piracy of international ships had declined, but the low-seas variety still thrived along Sumatra's lawless coast.
A couple of days later I found myself on another 30-meter workhorse. The mangrove forests closed in on both sides as we entered the Siak River, Indonesia's deepest. The darkness was interrupted only by the diabolic flares of onshore oil derricks, or by the cooking braziers on passing fishing boats. I sat near the prow, legs over the side, the dark water fizzing like cola beneath my feet, until my fellow passengers motioned me to pull my legs back inside the boat. When I asked one man why, he replied?in English, his eyes bulging?"Vampires! Vampires!" Another man formed his hands into a pair of jaws, then slammed them shut. When I dutifully moved my legs, the other passengers all burst out laughing. That's the thing about being a stranger in remote places, I reflected. Local people are always trying to give you the willies.
After several days touring the vice islands of Riau, I braced for another shabby town of brothels and bird buildings. But Siak, a former sultanate and trading post, turned out to be a gem. There was no litter and few cars, just neat bungalows slumbering beneath mango and coconut trees along a picturesque stretch of river. At the heart of the town stood the palace, built in the Moorish style in 1889 by Syarif Hasyim Abduljalil Syarifuddin, Siak's penultimate sultan.
The palace is now a museum, its cool interior stuffed with royal memorabilia: crystal goblets imported from Europe, a copy of the bejeweled Siak crown (the original sits in Jakarta), photo albums perforated by burrowing insects. A portrait shows the sultan in full regal dress, shaded by an umbrella held aloft by a startled-looking retainer; in another, he stands with his young son and heir, who is dressed in a sailor outfit. One cabinet held a piece of moldering beige cloth covered with Arabic letters. This was a baju kebal, a magical vest that supposedly rendered Syarif Kasim II, the last sultan of Siak, invulnerable to swords, bullets and other perils. "The Japanese bombed the area in 1942 but the palace was never hit," explained Pardianto, 33, the museum's caretaker. "The sultan had a mystical power we can't explain."
That power evaporated after Indonesia's hard-won independence in 1949. Syarif Kasim II declared his loyalty to the new republic, but was distrusted for cooperating with both the Dutch and the Japanese, who had occupied the country during World War II. His impotence was not only political. None of his four wives bore the sultan children, and the Siak bloodline died with him in 1968. He is buried in the grounds of a nearby mosque, in a tomb draped in golden cloth.
Siak was known for the quality and abundance of its timber, but its famous forests are dwindling, now cleared by heavy machinery and ferried away on rusting barges?several of them called Marco Polo, I noted, as another high-speed ferry carried me downriver to Dumai, an oil-rich town shuttered for Friday prayers. There I caught a boat back across the Strait to the Malaysian city that gave it the name: Malacca. Leaving Dumai, the jungly Sumatran coastline shrunk to a scribble on the horizon. Soon there was no land visible in any direction, and only one ship. The world's busiest seaway can seem a big, lonely place.
Back To the Future
After a week in remotest Sumatra, Malacca was a shock. It had things like metered taxis, foreign tourists, wireless broadband. I got a map from my hotel and, using its points of orientation?St. Francis Xavier's church, the Dutch graveyard, Pizza Hut?set out to explore the city. Unfortunately, I set out 500 years too late. Malacca was founded by a Malay sultan in 1396, and in its heyday the monsoon winds brought merchants from across the known world. They carried tea, silk and porcelain from China, embroidery and opium from India, jewelry and jade from Burma, cloves and nutmeg from the Spice Islands. Middle Eastern traders also brought Islam, accelerating the spread of the religion in Southeast Asia. Malacca was a truly global marketplace, a thrilling entrepôt of East and West where, it was said, 84 languages were spoken. And although Marco Polo died a century too soon to witness it, later Venetians well understood its importance to European trade. The Portuguese writer Duarte Barbosa declared: "Whoever is Lord in Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice."
The golden age didn't last. Malacca was seized by the Portuguese general and explorer Alfonso de Albuquerque in 1511. Then came centuries of karaoke colonialism: the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Brits?everyone got a turn. Singapore's meteoric rise sealed Malacca's demise, and a city that once traded with the world was forced instead to trade on its past. This is why modern Malacca has so many museums?including one shaped like a Portuguese sailing ship?and so many junk shops. Tourists can also take boat rides past the Dutch-era trading quarter, pointlessly rechristened Little Venice. My guidebook warned against swimming at nearby beaches because "passing tankers have a habit of swilling out their tanks."
Malacca's glories are long gone, but the Asian trade boom it once commanded has resurged. Returning by car to Singapore, I had come full circle?and so has history. We are witnessing what imperial scholar Niall Ferguson calls "a revival of China and India after a long period of their near-eclipse by the West." Again, the Malacca Strait drives this revival, but it also marks the boundary between the haves and have-nots of globalization. On one shore lies bustling, high-tech Singapore, a nation of cheerful workaholics with a world-conquering mantra of efficiency and competition; on the other, impoverished Indonesia, a vast and vibrant nation still hobbled by superstition and corruption, its people forced for now to content themselves with the crumbs of global prosperity.
"General" Tan Puay Hin says you can see Indonesia from the 40th-floor balcony of PSA's Singapore headquarters. But not today. Sweeping across the port far below is a tropical storm from the relatively lawless Sumatran side?actually, the tail-end of the northeast monsoon, which in Marco Polo's day propelled sailing ships through the Strait toward India. Fat raindrops begin to fall on the balcony. "We better go inside," says Tan. "The weather is one thing we can't control." Well, not yet, anyway.
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