Scarecrow in Syndication
My friend Xander Bennett, who updates his blog more often than I do mine, recently began writing for a burst fiction website called Elephant Words. It’s pretty cool. As I understand it, the idea behind the project is that every week six different writers each contribute short story interpretations of a different photograph, inventing characters and a world around the image, then post them online for the world to see.
This week it was Xander’s turn to choose a photo and he used a shot of a t-shirt scarecrow I took in Indonesia.
I remember taking the photo very clearly. We’d pulled to the side of the road on our motorbikes because Will wanted a video of some primary school girls congratulating his older cousin on an upcoming marriage (!). While he was arranging the kids and rehearsing their lines I went wandering and came upon a colourful field with black kittens slinking around the perimeter and a ratty t-shirt keeping guard. I took the shot above, filed it with the others, then didn’t think of it again until last week.
The first story birthed by the photograph, entitled “Hairshirt in Reverse”, can be read here. It’s a fun read, and it mentions Bounty bars, which always scores a few extra points in my book.
UPDATE: The second story, which interprets the scarecrow as bait on a fishing line in verse form, has been uploaded here.
This Week in Photos
Lake Toba at twilight, the view from our waterfront cottage.
The flies here grow to the size of small rodents.
Flowers?
Scarecrow.
It’s difficult to tell by looking at the photo – and my trigger finger was a moment too late to catch it – but this woman is holding her mobile phone upside-down.
Scenes from the Saturday market.
Tip jar.
A row of souvenir shops — most of them vacant — dubbed by us “the lane of death” for the pressure sales tactics employed by its desperate shopkeepers. No fewer than twenty shops still hold out, competing for an ever-shrinking pool of browsers. We were told that it’s not unusual for entire weeks to pass without a foreigner stopping to shop.
Shopkeepers’ brood.
We’ve been converted to the cult of the biker. $6/day hires you a Honda Supra and one tank of petrol to use as you wish…
…we explored. More photos another day, maybe.
Will in Professor Challenger mode.
The view from atop Samosir, our village of Tuk-Tuk receding into the background haze.
Jump!
Splash!
Will with Poppy, the owner of our favourite restaurant in Tuk Tuk. His curry fish and banana pancakes are highlights.
Lake fish barbecueing in banana leaves. “For medicine,” Poppy says. We don’t challenge him.
Pastries.
Slippers.
Will’s First Tim Tam
As anyone who knows me will attest to, one of my favourite social pastimes is introducing people to tastes, sights and sounds I enjoy myself, particularly those things that the person wouldn’t otherwise have exposure to. So when a dusty package of Tim Tams — by no means a favourite snack but one that’s unmistakably, unapologetically Australian — was sighted on a corner shop shelf here in provincial Sumatra it was as natural to me to snatch the package and thrust one in Will’s hand as asking the price or initiating small talk with the shopkeeper would have been to any normal person.
We had the camera on hand to document all the gory details.
“Well, Austin likes it so it must taste foul.”
“It’s alright but could do with more spices…”
“…ohhh, there’s that chocolatey hit I was promised!”
“I’ll get back to you with a better quip later.”
* oh, and excuse the evaporating trickle of blog postings lately: one hour of dialup internet access costs as much here as last night’s rental of our waterfront cottage. We’re moving up the island tomorrow and are hoping for broadband. You can do your bit by crossing your fingers for us at precisely 11pm MDT.
This Week in Photos
A skyscraper rising in Nagoya, the Japanese-settled port city on Batam Island, Indonesia.
Some spider, remarkable only because it was the largest I’d ever seen. We spotted it in between two branches in a tree from across the fairway we were cutting through.
A lizard posing in an abandoned, fire-gutted discotheque.
Our host Angeline van Leeuwen, granny in sunglasses.
Two Indonesians fish for squid on the northwest tip of Batam Island. The lights of first world Singapore pockmark the horizon, a 20km swim away for those foolish enough to risk deportation.
The Singapore skyline nearly disappears under the late-afternoon haze.
Muslims disembarking in the city of Medan on Sumatra. Infighting and violence between the Muslim and Christian sects ranks as one of the biggest problems facing Indonesia and has contributed to a recent drop-off in tourism.
The fairytale fishing village of Parapat, gateway to Lake Toba.
Two passengers prepare to hop off as a Lake Toba ferry approaches its jetty.
The tools of the Indonesian marketplace.
A lone fisherman waits out a storm on Lake Toba.
A view out the empty ferry en route to Tuk Tuk, a one-time tourist on Samosir Island in Lake Toba, Sumatra. “Low season, I give you good price” is the motto of every restauranter and shop-owner on the island. The last high season was six years ago; the tourists have packed up and moved on but the locals remain, ever optimistic that business will some day pick up again. In Tuk Tuk alone we’ve determined that there are at least two restaurants for every one tourist on the island.
Will shows a group of schoolgirls the photo he’d just taken of them along the road to Ambarita.
Kids walk the main strip of Ambarita, a small village 5km from Tuk Tuk. Every corrugated tin hovel houses a souvenir shop, each one manned by another family waiting out front for one of the handful of tourists on the island to ride past. ”I need money to buy rice”, one woman pleaded with us, her desperation clear as she dropped the price on a treasured 1850’s Dutch East Indies coin from 220,000 rupiah to 30,000 (about 4 CAD$) as we rode off on our bikes.
Storm clouds brew over Tuk Tuk.
Note the sign.
Photo credit Will van Engen.
Birds make short work of a discarded pineapple.
Waterfront City (Flight)
A sign points to the Batam Flying Club at Waterfront City, a failed megaproject on Batam Island, Indonesia. Anticipating an influx of Singaporeans travelling to the island for weekend getaways, the Indonesian government built a resort complex comprising – among other things – a marina, a terminal with ferries to Singapore, shops and restaurants, go-karting, cable-waterskiing, indoor skiing and bungee jumping. When the crowds never materialised the proprietors packed up and left, leaving the shells of their businesses behind.
A glider peers out from its hanger across a runway, overgrown with grass. “I’ve driven this road a dozen times and have never seen it out,” Ted Alleman tells us.
Arced skyward with a flat.
Watching grass grow…
Part III (Commerce) coming soon.
Waterfront City (Snow)
A jet soars above the hulking steel carcass of Snow World.
Construction on this indoor skiing resort began in the late-90’s and was suspended after two years. In 2006 fires broke out and gutted the complex, burning down walls and charring the sheet metal ceilings. The source of the fire remains unknown but locals have their suspicions.
Jungles now encroach on its towering sides.
It’s eerily quiet inside…
The main engines sit rusting and exposed.
A sledway links the maintenance shed to the skiing hanger.
Felled pillars litter the way to the Holiday Inn, the only major tenant remaining at Waterfront City. The hotel operates express shuttles to and from Nagoya, the entertainment district on Batam Island, quashing the chances of success for what few local businesses and restaurants remain.
Part II (Flight) and III (Commerce) coming soon.
This Week in Photos
Rickshaw drivers watch taxis pass by. With so many green-and-yellow cabs on the roads of Chengdu, the slower, pricier rickshaws seem to be dying a slow death.
Hens going to market.
Pigeons at market.
An advertisement for a popular Chinese ice cream bar. The face on the specimen I bought was frowning at me.
A woman sculpts glass figures along the market strip in the village of Luo Dai.
In China, all public toilets — or “Water Closets” — are given a star rating, from **** – which ranks up there with the worst of the first world – to * — which is so frightening that even cockroaches wouldn’t dare enter. Although you wouldn’t think so from its exterior facade, this particular water closet scores **.
My fluke flight to Singapore was the only plane departing from the international terminal of the Chengdu airport. It was eerie, seeing schedule boards with only one entry, corridors and concourses vacant and unlit. I wish I’d had more time to explore.
Silhouettes dancing around the one open departure gate…
…and the only plane on the apron.
In all likelihood the last photo I will ever take of Chengdu.
Laundry hanging out of apartment windows in Singapore. I had only twelve hours to enjoy the pleasures of the first world before we left by ferry for Indonesia. Arriving at 1:30am, I spent those hours wandering the airport, catching up with Will, and watching the long-awaited 300 in cinemas (our first film since Moscow).
Cable cars leave Singapore for nearby Sentosa Island.
Freighters in the waters near Singapore. ’Scuse the dirty skies, my camera body needs a good cleaning…
The view out our front window in Batam, Indonesia.
Will reading “Everyday Indonesian” en route to Nagoya, the business centre of Batam.
Workers at an Indonesian water bottling facility.
Builders at the construction site of our hosts’ new home.
