Akbar

A 32-year-old master's student from the province of Aceh, northern Sumatra. He would always sport a red Blackhawks hockey team cap, shades, and a locked fanny pack. He drove us around Western Java on our gibbon road trip. Fearlessly, he passed cars from the left, from the right, around blind turns, in traffic. He had once raced cars and felt the need to continue the recreation on the windy trafficked roads of Java. He later revealed his cousin drove even faster and could even drive on two wheels.

Akbar’s outdoor experience included spending a year near Palu studying and ebony forest, laborious forestation and tree growth studies on the Togian islands, and sampling oa and macaques all over Indonesia. He would tell us of his encounters with black poisonous snakes by the caves in the Togians, the sea snakes, and how he would just sleep outside in a hammock when he was doing data collections.

He was a player and wasn’t bashful about making that fact known. Several times he would tell me of his exploits... Dutch, Chinese, Indonesian — he had experienced it all. One night he was intent on bringing me out whoring with him. While I declined to participate myself, I accompanied him in the back alleys of one town we were staying at. There, as the women watched TV, had conversations, or played cards, men could pass by their homes and view and pick them out through their living room windows. Akbar brought one girl back to the hotel that night. I continued to roam around, and was actually offered interesting conversation and food by a pimp and two whores, ( a man, his wife and his wife’s friend). Needless to say, I expanded my vocabulary that night. Afterwards, Akbar noted his whore’s enthusiasm, skill, and cleanliness. Beyond women, he also liked fish. Fish heads for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.