Uncharted Waters

When I first came to Gili Meno I used to look at the view across the ocean to Mt Rinjani on the island of Lombok, and think to myself, ‘ah yea, that’s the same as Byron, it’s just like looking at my beloved Mt Warning’.

Mt Warning is sacred and majestic and quietly looks over the entire landscape of where I used to live. I woke up each morning to see it through my kitchen window, every week I drove near it for work. I climbed it three times. But, on one of my first trips back to Australia, as I drove into the Kingscliff area and looked over to its mighty silhouette, I realised instantly that I was way off.

Mt Rinjani is 3,726 metres high, more than three times higher than Mt Warning. It is sacred and majestic too, and formidable. Maybe one day I’ll climb it. (Or, maybe I won’t!)

Made’s mum lives in the foothills of Mt Rinjani, in thick jungle territory that’s also farmed for banana, coffee and cacao trees. It is cooler up there and rains a lot (like Mt Warning, the old volcano is a cloud-gatherer). Made’s mum lives in a tiny concrete and chicken-wire hut with no landline phone, no mobile coverage and no internet. It’s quite a trek up to her place, and I have never seen tourists in the region. All our visits are unannounced… to date she’s always been home as she rarely ventures far, worried the poor people in the neighbourhood will steal her few precious things.

One day, when we were sitting outside on her berugak chatting with family, we heard about a new waterfall nearby.

New? How can a waterfall be new, my western logic asked. Was it newly formed? Or newly discovered?

“How far is it from here?” Made asked his brother-in-law, a leader in that village who’d been instrumental in opening up the road to the new waterfall.

I’ve found that getting answers to that particular question anywhere in Bali or Lombok is a significant challenge.

The family discussed it animatedly and expressed different opinions ranging between ten and thirty minutes away. In the end, ten minutes was the considered consensus.

This exciting new waterfall, called Tiu Tiding, played on our minds, and as it was quiet season just after the rains had ended, we planned to check it out before we recommended it to any of our guests.

Hmmm. Sarah and Chrissy were staying with us for about a week at the time and they had other ideas. Halfway through their 18-month-long world travels, they were keen for adventure.

“We wanna come!” they squealed.

I responded cautiously, with a wet blanket approach.

“But we don’t know what it’s like,” I said. “Maybe it’s only a metre high! We can’t guarantee it’ll be worth your trip to Lombok.”

But they just squealed louder and insisted they were up for a fun Lombok adventure. Made’s big smile stretched across his face.

“You no worry,” he said to me. “Everything will be fine.”

We rented a scooter for the day from a guy hanging around the harbour in Lombok. Chrissy was quite a gun rider, with loads of experience in Vietnam and South America. I rode pillion behind Made, and as we all left the harbour, Sarah gave us a positive thumbs up.

Our plan was to buy some supplies at the local market and from a village fisherman, take them to Made’s mum, duck off to visit the waterfall, get back to her place where Made would grill the fish over coconut husks and make a fresh urap-urap salad for lunch, and then we’d ride the hour back down to the harbour in time for the last afternoon boat back to Meno at five. Easy.

We got to Made’s mum as planned, and everyone had a quick fortifying home-grown and home-brewed coffee while I enjoyed my home-grown ginger tea. Then we headed off in such a rush we left our sarongs and water bottles behind.

The journey started ok, along the usual rutted-out dirt tracks that head off into the jungle territory up there.

We even saw some fairly new and fancy signs saying “Tiu Tiding / Air Terjun ➡️” with a picture of a nice waterfall, so all was good.

After about ten minutes we came through a little village. There were some builders working on a small mosque. We slowed down.

“Waterfall ya?” Made called out in Sasak, the Lombok language, as he nodded and pointed in the direction ahead.

We received some strange looks and a few men called out something. I tried to get Made to stop; a distant alarm bell was ringing in my head. But Made was excited and on a mission so he kept going, and I shook the pessimism from my head.

Another ten minutes further, the track got quite narrow with more potholes. We’d started to wonder how far away this waterfall actually was when a man on a motorbike came up behind us and said to the girls, in very broken English, that our motorbikes wouldn’t make it there. The road was too rough, our Scoopy too low.

He’d followed us from the mosque to warn us of this. When we asked how much further ahead the waterfall was, we received only a nod towards the direction ahead.

Well we knew that Made’s sister and brother-in-law had been to the waterfall, and the signs we’d seen were new and fancy. Plus we were travelling on local, insider knowledge – surely this man was wrong.

We ploughed on. Several times Sarah and I had to get off and walk while Made and Chrissy nursed the bikes through slippery terrain. We were all working hard. The sun was high, the humidity was through the roof and we had no water, no hats or emergency supplies. Coming from Australia, I realised we were probably being pretty damn stupid.

The vegetation we were in was thick by anyone’s standards. Occasionally we glimpsed a view across the mountain ridges and valleys. We could feel we were gradually climbing up and up. We hadn’t seen a westerner since leaving the harbour that morning, let alone in the jungle territory, and the occasional farmer or local we saw was intrigued by our white faces. My dying old iPhone had already run out of battery. I was starting to stress a bit, and Made had gone quiet (a sign that he wasn’t 100% happy either).

Then a trail bike came up behind us with two young guys.

How much further Made asked them?

No answer, just helpful nods and murmurs towards the direction ahead.

The guys offered to show us the way. Perhaps that was a good thing, as soon we came to a couple of Y intersections with no waterfall signs, and without the guys we could’ve got lost. (Or, more likely, we’d have turned back!)

But Made’s optimism that we were getting close was dwindling, and we were both starting to swear. Which says a lot for two people that don’t swear.

“Goddammit,” he muttered a dozen times.

“FFS,” was what came out of my mouth. “What is wrong with these people, why the hell can’t anybody just tell us how much further it is?”

Even though Chrissy was a competent rider, we were clearly making very slow progress. The young guys rode ahead and a couple of times they doubled back to check on us.

Then they stopped us and a little pow-wow was held. They offered for one guy to take Sarah on the back of their bike, and for the other guy to ride Chrissy’s bike with Chrissy as passenger. That way we’d get there faster. Our questions of ‘HOW MUCH FURTHER?!’ received the familiar vague response.

Off Sarah’s driver went, her young rider confident on a trail-bike in the jungle terrain.

We weren’t to see her again for another half an hour.

Thoughts of kidnappings in foreign lands and jungle bandits went through my mind as we crept deeper and deeper into the jungle. Deeper into the bowels of Lombok, closer to the heights of Mt Rinjani.

More rutted out bits of road meant Chrissy and I had to get off and walk again. Many whispers of goddamit, we are never coming here again, escaped Made’s mouth, while he and I continued to smile and pretend to stay happy and calm in front of Chrissy.

They were our guests, our responsibility and we didn’t want them to see that actually we weren’t enjoying it one bit! We’d had a gut-full but had no choice but to push on, we could hardly abandon Sarah!

After another few kilometres our poor Scoopy gave up. Smoke spewed out of the engine. By now Chrissy’s driver had gone ahead also. We pushed Scoopy off the track and under a bush and continued on foot into Mission territory.

Another few hundred metres of trudging and swearing and sweating and Chrissy and her driver came back to accompany us. Eventually we came upon an opening with a little wooden table and a big banner tied between trees, announcing a warning of some sort to ‘take care’. Sarah stood there safe and sound with a big grin on her face. She wasn’t fazed at all at having been taken off on her own into the wilderness by a young fellow who spoke no English at all.

The journey had taken us an hour and a half from Made’s mum’s place.

Perhaps the family had meant ten kilometres, rather than ten minutes?? It’s six months on and I still haven’t been able to figure out the huge differences in perspectives.

Another pow-wow was held. If we went in to the waterfall, about another ’20 minutes walk’ the boys told Made, we would run out of time, miss the last boat and have to spend the night in Lombok. Without our toothbrushes.

But we hadn’t traipsed all that way for nothing and the girls were still laughing and keen.

The adventure continued. The ‘walk’ in to Tiu Tiding, which I later found out means “steep waterfall”, was steep. We clambered down brand new ‘steps’ made from rough, hand-cut branches and roots buried into a muddy vertical drop. It was so steep that the only way to lower ourselves down, and later back up, was by clutching vines as thick as Made’s forearms.

The young guys had been joined by a couple of young boys (who’d overtaken us on our Scoopy some time ago!). None of them spoke any English, but they smiled shyly and gave us helping hands in some of the trickier parts.

By now I had switched my thinking from fears that the guys were drug smuggling kidnappers, to wondering how much of a handsome tip we’d give them later for all their amazing guidance!

Finally we got down to the pool and of course it was all worth it. An absolutely pristine, green, magical space.

All four of us enjoyed the cool spray from the waterfall which was probably 30 metres high, and had a long dip in the chilly pool. The young fellows sat shivering on a boulder nearby, watching us, bemused. The water was way too cold for them. We’d stripped down to our bikinis and didn’t have sarongs to help cover us. I felt a bit disrespectful to their Muslim culture, but nothing was going to deter us now!

 

The force of water falling from a rock face into a natural pool can be so powerful that it is transformative. One of the reasons they are often considered sacred I guess. I closed my eyes and held my arms out wide and got as close as the wind and spray would let me.

I used to love the waterfalls in the ranges of the Mt Warning caldera, and there’s some impressive waterfalls in Bali and Lombok too. They fill my spirit with an energy that’s both calming and invigorating.

Chrissy and Sarah loved it too. We all lapped up the peace, breathing in those positive ions, cooling our muscles and connecting deeply with nature.

Afterwards, shivering on the rocks, we chatted a little with the guys (with Made translating) and discovered that the ‘road’ in, and the ‘steps’ down, had been hand-built only a month prior by local men, including the guy that had kidnapped Sarah. They told us that Chrissy, Sarah and I were the very first westerners ever to visit the waterfall.

Ever.

Well that was something for our intrepid adventurers to write home about!

We probably wouldn’t have been able to find our way back to Made’s mum’s place, so we asked the guys to lead us back. There we said goodbye, and the four of us pitched in and gave them a bit of money, their first ever Tiu Tiding tour-guide fee. Methinks it might be a little while before they get any more westerners up their way!

No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit. Helen Keller

 

NB A big thanks to Chrissy and Sarah for being awesome adventure buddies, and for the few pics!