At Amanwana jungle resort on Moyo island.

When it comes to Amanwana, it really is almost about the journey as much as the destination. Situated on Moyo island in Sumbawa Besar, the jungle resort is just an hour’s flight from Bali in a C-208 Amphibian Cessna Caravan float plane that flies impossibly close to stunning volcanoes and dives into marshmallow clouds of brilliant white, emerging again to reveal dazzling views of rugged green slopes and picture-perfect coastlines before it lands at a backward tilt with a gentle series of splashes on the most perfectly sapphire waters. A multitude of varieties of fish are already visible as the plane pulls up to the jetty and the door opens.

“Selamat pagi. Welcome to the jungle.”

Sunset with sea view.

The beautiful island of Moyo is located just kilometres off the northern coast of Sumbawa. Since 1976 it has been a protected zone for an abundance of animal and bird life, from deer and banteng bull to wild boar, macaque monkeys, sea eagles, and osprey. The island has a population of just 3,500, residing in eight villages around the coast and subsisting through fishing, farming, and trading. Amanwana, styled as a luxury camp, has been here since 1993. Of the is-land’s 36,000 hectares, Amanwana actively manages 12,000, officially set aside as a nature reserve.

Some of the abundant marine life found in the waters around Amanwana.

Moyo is truly a nature lover’s dream, offering a fascinating natural environment for exploration, with vegetation that ranges from dry savannah to dense jungle and hikes that take in a series of spring-fed waterfalls and cool freshwater pools. Its shores are lapped by the Flores Sea, in which a wealth of coral is found, from stag horn to gorgonian fans, while throughout the waters can be seen a profusion of colourful tropical fish and sometimes also dolphins, manta rays, and whales. Amanwana has its own dive centre and offers PADI certified dive courses, so divers at all levels can experience the magnificent worlds under these waters.

“I’d rather be in a tent than in a house,” Mary Leakey famously said, and in tents like these, few would argue. With either ocean or jungle views and linked by sand pathways under a canopy of tropical forest through which families of monkeys scramble, the resort accommodation consists of 20 luxury air-conditioned tents that are bright, spacious, and airy, each enclosed by a solid wall underneath a canvas ceiling, with teak-framed windows along the sides offering panoramic views of the surroundings. The tents are not walled off from the rest of the island, which is also a sanctuary for the indigenous Rusa deer, beneficiaries of Amanwana’s breeding programme, which has ensured a steady increase in numbers of their population.

In May 2008, Amanwana created the Moyo Conservation Fund, which enables guests to contribute to the conservation efforts and community work on the island. From restoring the coral reef to building a school in the nearby village of Labuan Aji, the resort works towards protecting, nurturing and enriching the environment for future generations of islanders and visitors. These efforts also include a turtle protection project, waste recycling scheme, and education and support for stewardship of the land. At another level of community involvement, one-third of the staff is from local villages, opening up opportunities to them abroad while strengthening ties between the resort and the villages back home.

A sense of this harmony with both the environment and the surrounding communities is deeply felt during a stay here. Add to this the usual impeccable Aman service and understated elegance, and you have the ingredients of an incomparable resort and a truly memorable experience.

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Vikas Swarup, author of Q&A (a.k.a. Slumdog Millionaire) and Six Suspects, is set to appear at the 2009 Ubud Writers and Readers Festival.

Q. Your appearance at the festival next week is much anticipated, we’re looking forward to seeing you here. Will this be your first visit to Bali?
A. Absolutely. I am very much looking forward to the visit, having heard so much about the fabled beauty of Bali.

Q. You were inspired to start writing your debut novel, Q&A, while living in London. What was it that prompted you? Had you always felt that you had a novel or several lurking inside you?
A. I am an ‘accidental’ writer. I used to write in my school days and even won some creative writing contests. But I never thought I would be a novelist and did not write a word of fiction for almost fifteen years. It was only when I was posted in London that I got inspired to try my hand at fiction, motivated by some of my contemporaries in the Foreign Service who had written novels, and by the city of London itself, which is such a vibrant cultural hub.

Q. On a practical note, how did you find the time and keep the motivation to finish Q&A in two months, given that you didn’t share what you were doing with family and friends, while also keeping your career as a diplomat on track?
A. The plot of the novel was fully formed in my head. I just had to write it down (or, type it on my computer). Since I was in a busy day job, I used the evenings of the weekdays to do my research, and on weekends and holidays I wrote, even managing 20,000 words on one occasion.

Q. You were born into a family of lawyers in Allahabad. Can you remember when you first saw a slum, or became aware of the extremes of poverty and wealth that exist in India? Did you ever encounter kids like Ram Mohammad Thomas and his brother?
A. No one in India leads a hermetically sealed life. The rich and poor live constantly intersecting lives. The gap of income and wealth is something you become aware of very early on. Not only did I visit slum areas, I had several friends from there with whom I played cricket. You can encounter boys like Ram Mohammad Thomas every day in India.

Q. When writing the novel, did you have any sense of the immense reaction it might receive? Did you already envision it as a movie? At one point, it seemed that it might be made into a Bollywood film, do you think this is still a possibility?
A. I knew that I was on to a good thing, that the plot was new and it was a unique way of telling a story. But never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that it would get translated into 42 languages and become an Oscar-winning film. If at all I visualised it as a film, I thought it would be a Bollywood film and that film would probably also have been set in Dharavi but you could bet your bottom dollar there would have been a couple of dream song sequences set in Switzerland!

Q. When the film ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ was released in India, some were upset and offended by it – why do you think this was? Did you experience any reactions like this with the release of the book?
A. I think people were upset by what they thought was an overemphasis on the poverty and slums of India. Fortunately the canvas of my book was much wider than simply Dharavi and I did not encounter any negative reactions with the book.

Q. The book is a story about the possibilities that are within all of us, and how lives can go through dramatic transformations – in a way this is mirrored by the story behind the book; you were an unknown author, as yet unpublished in India, and you wrote in two months a debut novel that has been picked up by publishers all over the world and made into a blockbuster Oscar-winning movie, you hang out with people like Oprah and already have a second novel set to be filmed… Do you believe in luck? Destiny? Hard work?
A. I believe there is no shortcut to success. You have to put in hard work, but then you also need that little bit of luck to carry you all the way. I don’t believe in destiny as something foreordained. Basically you create your own luck.

Q. Your follow-up novel, ‘Six Suspects’, is structured as a thrilling whodunnit. Your young son read the ending, and then threatened to give the game away on Facebook – did he follow through on this? Was there a big payoff?
A. Teenagers are very persistent. I had to give him an MP3 player to buy his silence!

Q. Do you foresee that writing may one day become a full time job, or are you still very much committed to your work with the Indian Foreign Service? Is there a gripping novel about Indian diplomats somewhere in the pipeline?
A. I love my job and take great pride in representing my country especially at a time when India is the flavour of the world. Having a day job means that I can write only in my spare time. But having the security of the day job makes it easier for me to write. I don’t think readers will be interested in a diplomat’s real life trivia. I’d much rather entertain them with fiction!

Vikas Swarup appears at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, October 7th-11th 2009. For complete programme details, visit www.ubudwritersfestival.com.

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Ubud Writers and Readers Festival founder, Janet De Neefe.

Kabar asked festival founder/director Janet De Neefe what she’s particularly looking forward to this year: here she recommends her top 5 things to see at the festival.

“1. Wole Soyinka – a senior statesman of global literature and the first Black African to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Be inspired.

2. the annual poetry slam – this year we have some of the world’s best performance poets, so hang on to your hats. Features the winner of 2008 Australian National Poetry Slam, Omar Musa. Be entertained.

3. Literary Lunches – the most divine venues Ubud has to offer with a glittering cast of international and Indonesian speakers. ‘Dangerous Women’ will feature some of the strongest female literary stars of 2009 and Wole Soyinka with Hari Kunzru at the Four Seasons is guaranteed to knock your socks off! Be enthralled.

4. Tribute to WS Rendra – join us in celebrating the life, works and legacy of the ‘peacock’ of Indonesian literature. Be moved.

5. Out of the eighteen workshops available, I’d love to do the ‘Introduction to Screenwriting’ with UK screenwriter Asitha Ameresekere. He’s planning to show some scenes from films and distribute scripted scenes to show what happens in the transfer from page to screen.”

Each year throws up interesting authors that many attendees either haven’t heard of before or haven’t got around to reading yet. This year, Kabar asked the UWRF team which books you should read before the festival. Here are their top 10 suggestions:

1. Wole Soyinka’s ‘Poems from Prison’
2. Lloyd Jones’ ‘Mr Pip‘
3. Julia Leigh’s ‘Disquiet‘
4. Tom Cho‘s ‘Look Who’s Morphing’
5. Hari Kunzru’s ‘My Revolutions‘
6 Neel Murkherjee‘s ‘Past Continuous’
7. Vikas Swarup’s ‘Six Suspects‘, ‘Q&A‘
8. Seno Gumira Ajidarma‘s ‘Eyewitness’
9. Bejan Matur’s ‘In the Temple of a Patient God‘
10. Mohammad Hanif’s ‘A Case of Exploding Mangoes‘

For the full program and schedule of the 2009 Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, visit www.ubudwritersfestival.com

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Producer Steven Starr speaking at the screening of FLOW at the ARMA Resort, Ubud.

Bali’s Green School (www.greenschool.org) organised a screening of the award-winning documentary FLOW (For Love Of Water). Intense and provoking, the film explores aspects of the global water crisis, from polluted tap water and contaminated bottled water in the US to the privatisation of water services in developing countries, which often excludes the poorest from access to clean water.

Producer Steven Starr has been working with students of the Green School over the past week, and described how impressed he was by the “enthusiasm for life” he found on the campus. In March, a group of Green School students travelled to the Global Issues Conference for EARCOS (East Asia Regional Council of Schools) to present their research on water issues in Bali. This ongoing work is set to become the basis for a documentary film on the subject later this year.

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Elizabeth Pisani.

As a fundraiser to sponsor emerging Indonesian writers to attend the 2009 Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, the Indonesian Heritage Society is organising a lunch with Elizabeth Pisani on April 7th in Jakarta. Pisani’s life as an HIV prevention researcher has taken her from the brothels of southwest China to the gay bars of Bangkok, and in Indonesia she has worked with the health ministry to map HIV risk. She will speak about her experiences and her book The Wisdom of Whores at the IHS lunch, in a talk entitled ‘Landscapes of Desire: sex, politics and AIDS in Indonesia.’
Funds raised at the event will be used to send two or more Indonesian writers to participate in the October festival, and also to fund 5 Indonesian readers, students and aspiring writers to attend.
For more information and to buy tickets (Rp.300,000), contact IHS at +62 21 5725870.

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Bullied and teased on board the Jermal, Jaya longs to escape.

In the midst of the homogeneous stream of today’s Indonesian cinema, Jermal challenges the flow. A thoughtful portrayal of the relationship between a father and a son, it explores a classic theme given a unique twist by its setting: an isolated fishing platform, or jermal, in the middle of the Malacca Straits off North Sumatra.

The central character is Jaya, a 12-year-old schoolboy whose orderly life is dramatically disrupted when, after his mother’s death, he is sent to the jermal to be with his father Johar. Johar, a taciturn and solitary figure, is an escapee from the mainland with a past he is determined to reject. Snubbed by his father, Jaya is left to fend for himself in a tough new environment that transforms him from a naïve schoolboy into a hardened survivor.

The idea for the film was seeded by a Kompas article read by director Ravi Bharwani a few years ago. “I felt at the time that a jermal would be a great place to make a film, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do with it. I just knew it was a great location. Not just aesthetically, but the possibilities of it being in the middle of the seas, this context of isolation.” Ravi developed the story together with Rayya Makarim in a 2003 scriptwriting workshop with Jakarta-based veteran cineaste Orlow Seunke, finally completing production in 2008.

Here are some outtakes from the experience…

BANDI (played by Yayu A.W. Unru)

Rayya: “When we picked the main actor (Didi Petet), we needed a partner and alter ego who would be able to challenge the main character, because the character of Johar is this big, formidable, strong, intimidating character. Because they’ve worked together for 26 years in pantomime theatre (in the group Sena and Didi Mime), they know each other very well, and Didi recommended him. I think in some scenes Yayu even steals the show! He was a very strong actor.”

Ravi: “I like to see and I like to make films that have minimum dialogue. So we had at first short lines for him, then they became shorter and shorter until finally we had the idea, why not make him mute as well?”

Rayya: “That was a challenge as well, as opposed to other Indonesian films, where everything is so verbal and every single thing is explained. We, especially Ravi, wanted to make a very visual film, so instead of putting things in, we took them out. Also, what I like about Bandi’s character – the irony in the relationship between Bandi and Johar – is that Johar is this person who can talk, he can express himself but he doesn’t say a word, he’s quiet, everything is closed up. Whereas Bandi, who cannot talk, is so expressive – that idea that someone who cannot talk is actually expressing more than somebody who can. Bandi is there as a supporter, but also as somebody who provokes his friend.”

JAYA (played by Iqbal S. Manurung)

Ravi and the casting agency scouted the whole city of Medan and the small towns nearby before discovering Iqbal through a screen test at his school. “He was a natural…the moment that we gave him something to do, he reacted quite fast, without having a script or without even telling him to prepare anything.”

Rayya: “This boy was hyperactive [on set] – you’d think he had no concentration span whatsoever, he’d be goofing around all the time. But the moment we’d say ‘Action’ – we’d have the clapper in front of his face and he’d still be making faces – click – and suddenly he’s there! And sometimes as well it’d be really late and we’d still have to do a few scenes, he’d be completely fast asleep on a chair. I’d have to pull him, ‘come on Jaya’, he’d be grumbling…but he’d do it. The moment we say ‘action’, he acts, and that was quite amazing.”

The Jermal Boys.

Some of the kids cast for the film were actually themselves from the jermal. All had different backgrounds, a couple were from the area, one has his own bakso stall – but they soon forged a close bond.

Rayya: “We stuck them together in a house for about a week or 2 weeks before shooting and when we met them again they were all best friends! They really gelled well together. They were all friends, so bullying got hard, especially the stripping scene [a bullying incident where the jermal boys take Jaya’s clothes and force him to climb up one of the jermal poles]. Jaya cried for an hour, I had to babysit him. He said I’m not ready. I said you’ll never be ready. But if you don’t do it now, you’ll still have to think about it tomorrow… But the kids also felt bad about that scene. They were like ‘how can we do this?’. And when they did it, they did it so well, so naturally – one kid smacked his bottom! They were quite ruthless in their acting, but it worked well.

“Dealing with 9 kids was hard at times, the concentration, they had no experience in acting, no idea what it entailed. They had no idea they were going to stay on a Jermal for 30 days. They didn’t know that a big part of filmmaking is waiting, they were bored.”

Ravi: “For 2 weeks we kept them in the house, then we had a basic reading and doing all the stuff we were going to do in the film, rehearsing. I also made them stay over on the jermal for 2 days, to get the feeling of what it’s like to wake up on the jermal every morning.”

Rayya: “One night suddenly one of the boys, Ahab (the boy who thinks he’s a whale), had a fever. Then he suddenly was making all these different moves on the deck and he became this tiger, growling. He was possessed. For me this was something very exotic, but for the others, this was just something that happened all the time probably. But for me this was fascinating! When they asked him who he was, he answered ‘Mayong’. The workers on the jermal said that this word has two meanings: ‘keeper of the sea’ and ‘young tiger’.

“Then the main actor exorcised him, took some water and threw it on him…it was like watching a bad B film! And you don’t know whether it was acting or if they really believed it…

“There’s a story behind the jermal: the crew member who was lowering Ahab into the boat that night, as he was lowering him, somebody pulled his hair back. And he looked, and it was a little boy, who ran to the other side of the jermal to his mother. There was a family of spirits there, a husband, wife, and child. According to the crew member, the husband was annoyed because the film crew were having a buffet dinner, and had not invited the family to join them. The husband had a bad temper – he entered Ahab, possessed him.

“Then the next day it happened to two of them – Ahab and Franky. They were facing each other on all fours, held back by 5 people each, ready to attack each other. Then it was like, ‘alright, yesterday was fascinating, today we need to finish this! We need to shoot a film!’”

JOHAR (played by Didi Petet)

Didi Petet was always the actor in mind to play the role of the father on the jermal; his name was already written on the script as it developed.

Ravi: “There are not a lot of Indonesian actors who could act well in this type of movie, so he was our first choice. We didn’t consider anyone else.”

Rayya: “Physically he fits the role, and we also thought that you need a formidable actor to be able to make the transition from being a very closed-up man, and slowly and slowly that wall gets scratched, slowly and slowly he opens up. And he also found it a challenge – it’s not just a normal character development, because the original character is a teacher and he had to keep in mind that he used to be this good man, open man, and then he closed himself up because of what happened and became an emotionally different, detached person. And then he had to go back to his original self again. And that for him he said was a challenge, he’d never done anything like that.

“Johar is isolated on so many levels – he wants to close out everything, be distant from everything, that’s why he wears earplugs at night, sleeps with a sarong covering his face, blocks out the light by covering his windows with newspaper. He has shut out the world.”

The jermal is indeed often a place of escape for people who have something to avoid on the mainland.

Ravi: “One whole jermal is occupied by convicts. Nobody even dares to approach their jermal – they have big muscles, long hair. Some of the others have kids that have run away from their homes, just to be away from their parents, work over there. You even see mentally retarded people on some jermals. When they are not accepted by their family, they send them over there. Because they can do manual labour, they don’t need too much experience, they don’t have to interact on a social level, so they are well off over there in comparison.”

Jermal is released in Indonesian cinemas on March 12, 2009.

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Dede Suryana

Mengejar Ombak, the documentary about Dede Suryana, a young surfer from a West Java village who became an international star, has just won two awards at X-Dance Film Festival in Salt Lake City, a sports documentary festival that runs in conjunction with Sundance Film Festival.

Big congratulations to Jakarta-based director Dave Arnold – this has been a labour of love many years in the making, and all the hard work has resulted in an excellent and thoughtful film that explores the journey of a very special kampung kid thrust into the international surfing spotlight.

Click here to view the trailer and read the article about the film that Dave wrote for Kabar back in 2007. Premieres are planned soon for several locations in Indonesia – we’ll keep you posted!

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Kabar Indonesia is dedicated to the country’s fascinating people and places, taking the reader on extraordinary journeys across the archipelago.

Expat Indonesia profiles the most interesting and inspirational individuals who choose to make this country their home, while also providing trusted information on how to make the most of what Indonesia has to offer, from exotic explorations and enriching encounters to the finest lifestyle privileges.

Published quarterly by Kabar Media, the magazines profile life in the Indonesian archipelago through striking photography and fine writing, with each page designed to hold the reader’s attention from
cover to cover.

In addition to the magazines, Kabar Media also creates custom-made communications for a variety of clients. Working closely with each organization, we develop the optimal communication vehicle for the client’s requirements, whether it’s a magazine article, brochure, or a coffee table book. Each project is followed through from concept to copywriting, photography, design & layout, to print or digital publication.

For further information on Kabar Media, write to us: info@kabarmag.com

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