Burning Bright

Four of us were driving on Sunday from Banda Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra, to the town of Calang on Aceh’s western coast. It was a seven hour drive; we were five hours in. The road ran along the coast past wide empty beaches of pale sand, and then over high cliffs where gibbons dangled from the trees. It had been almost three years since I was last in Aceh, in the weeks immediately after the tsunami. At that time the destruction of the towns and villages here was complete; even now, there were stretches of the coast which looked as if a disaster had just struck them, with the tall skinny stumps of palm trees jutting up out of inundated marshy swamp.

One hundred and seventy thousand people – the number is no exaggeration – died along this coast in the space of a few minutes on Boxing Day morning. It was the largest single tragedy any human being alive has ever seen. Emotionally, it’s an experience that I hardly began to digest.

But three years later, what had been destroyed was being restored. Houses had been rebuilt, and rice fields had been cleansed and replanted. It was stirring and touching to see it all around. I met a woman whom I had last seen in a refugee camp, stunned with grief after the loss of her three children; now she had a new home and new 16 month old daughter. I saw the mosque which had been the only thing left standing in her village. The community had left a corner of it broken and unrestored, in case people should ever forget about the tsunami.

It had been a long, exhausting journey and the four of us in the jeep were quiet as the sun set and darkness came down. But I was filled with thoughts of how lucky I was to be here, how thrilling it was to be driving along this bumpy road through the bush – here, now, alive, with friends, surrounded by the timeless sea and trees. The road turned away from the coast and up through the forest, with a steep cliff above to the right and a thicketed plunge below to the left. The lamps of the jeep cast a wide oval on the road ahead. I was daydreaming (I really was) about travellers of long ago, who spent days and weeks rather than mere hours making journeys like this, and of the dangers and monsters which threatened their imaginations.

To the right of the road, a dim shape became suddenly visible. At first I took it to be a dog – but it was much too big to be a dog. Quickly it moved across the road and its shape and colour flared up in the illumination of the headlamps. At the same moment, everyone in the car exclaimed.

It was a tiger, and it was walking, quickly, but without any sign of anxiety, in front of the jeep. Its shoulders rolled and pumped like pistons, and the orange of its coat flashed. For one brief moment it turned towards us, a cunning slant-eyed tiger face. I was seized by two equally powerful thoughts. The first: get out of the car, now, and take a photograph; the second: whatever you do, do not get out of the car. But already the tiger was ducking down into the steep jungle on the far side of the road, its back legs were disappearing into the vegetation, and then, like an apparition, it was gone.

It was a wild Sumatran tiger, one of four or five hundred left in the world – driven even closer to extinction than the victims of the tsunami. You could live along this road all your life and never so much as hear one in the forest. What were the chances against our encountering one like that? It felt like an omen of the best kind of luck, almost a symbol of the human struggle going on all around, of life winning out slowly in its battle against death.

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[JFK Miller]

"It was the largest single tragedy any human being alive has ever seen."

Not entirely true. No doubt there are still people alive who remember the 1976 Tangshan earthquake in China which killed over 240,000 people.