Leo Maxam
Red Island
The Grajagan gold rush
We’re going to a funeral. Yesterday we were blissfully pulling into perfect 6ft Money Trees. Today we are walking through a steamy Javanese village wearing somber faces. We were invited here by our new friend, Adi, our favorite staff member at the G-Land camp we’ve been staying in. Gregarious and talkative, Adi has been our guide for the past week, schooling us on the ping-pong table and showing us how to keep our rooms monkey-proof. Over late-night beers he’s regaled us with tales of jungle cats, Kelly Slater arriving at G-Land in a helicopter and the tsunami that hit this coast and his nearby village back in 1994.
Today Adi is unusually quiet. He’s come home from G-Land for his uncle’s funeral, and he’s brought us – five surfers on a pleasure trip from Bali – with him. We’re embarrassed, strangers showing up to such an intimate family gathering. But Adi’s family greets us warmly. Men shake our hands and women bring us food. They seat us at the front of the ceremony. Adi’s uncle died in a mining accident not far from this village. He was working in a tunnel below the earth when something went wrong and there was a cave-in. That’s all Adi tells us. We don’t ask for more.
The next day Adi takes us to the beach. “I want to show you where I started surfing,” he says. “We’re going to Pulau Merah.” Adi told us about Pulau Merah countless times back in G-Land. It’s just an hour’s drive from his village, he said, insisting that we bring our boards with the promise of a fun rivermouth A-frame and no other surfers around for miles. “We call this place the Magic Wave,” Adi says as we walk through a shady grove of jungle trees fronting the brilliant crashing surf. “There is always something to ride here, 365 days a year.”
Unlike its neighbor at G-Land, the wave at Pulau Merah isn’t world-class, but it’s still damn fun. We go to town on the peaky sandbars, flying and flaring without an audience. It’s a welcome break from the crowds and surf schools back in Bali. In fact, we only encounter one other surfer all afternoon, an amiable twenty-something local named Yogi. He’s riding a tattered yellow twin fin and having a blast. He says he’s been surfing every day since he was fired from his job with the mining company.
“That mountain there is one of the largest gold finds in the world today,” says Yogi, motioning to the massive rock we’ve been surfing in front of all afternoon. He points to the next peak west. “They reckon that mountain over there has even more.”
We’re standing on the beach with our boards, watching the sun sink behind the misty islands that guard the bay at Pulau Merah. Yogi is telling us how he used to work as a drilling operator for an international mining exploration company here in Pulau Merah, until he was fired last month along with some 200 other employees. He explains that Pulau Merah, which means “Red Island” in English, is named after the towering rock in front of us. It looks like it dropped from the sky and landed in front of this picturesque white-sand beach. The island is covered in thick vegetation, but we can see gaps revealing the deep crimson rock below, the telltale sign of oxidized copper and gold. Yogi begins telling us about the Indonesian gold rush happening right here in Pulau Merah, a few bays west of G-Land.
“We may be in the middle of nowhere,” he says, “but there are mountains of gold here.”
Adi has to leave Pulau Merah early to take care of some business. Our plan is to meet him back in G-Land for the impending swell in one week. We say goodbye next to the beach road, as hard-hatted mining company employees zip by on shiny new motorbikes on their way to work.
“Nice bike,” says Adi, then he buzzes off on his aging Yamaha.
We’re staying at a simple surfer homestay recently built by an Aussie expat and his local partner in front of the beach at Pulau Merah. Every morning at 0700 the mining company’s helicopter roars to life next door. We eat breakfast and watch the chopper run supplies and equipment to the base camp up on the mountain where the drilling takes place. The Australian company doing exploratory drilling into the mountain is investing millions of dollars a year to explore and map out the earth below Pulau Merah. Their research shows gold and copper deposits worth hundreds of millions. So far the company’s operations have been limited to exploratory drilling, says Yogi, but if they get a permit to start a full-scale production mine, this quiet corner of paradise could see some drastic changes.
The company’s drilling operations are located between two of the largest national parks in Java – Meru Betiri National Park, home to one of the most important sea turtle breeding sites in Indonesia, and Alas Purwo National Park, where G-Land is located. Many locals we talk to, including our hosts at Red Island Surf Camp, say that the foreign company has no business mining in a national park.
“One thing that caught us by surprise is how an Australian company got permission to mine in a national park, even if it’s just exploratory drilling,” says Mick McComas, part owner of our surfer homestay. “How did they get that exploratory permit in a protected forest? That’s my main question.”
One day Yogi takes us into an illegal mining camp adjacent to the company’s drilling operation on the mountain. The mines can’t be reached by car. A snaking motorbike trail into the protected forest is the only way to get there. We don’t realize how rough it is until we’re halfway there. It’s essentially a dirtbike track, filled with logs and patches of mud. When we finally arrive we are met by a bustling tent city in the middle of the forest, everyone here searching for gold in the national park.
About three years ago, local prospectors started showing up at Pulau Merah with hand-made tools and gold pans looking to strike it rich. Today there are over 2,000 people from all over Indonesia working in the illegal mine, Yogi tells us. They work in teams of 10 to 15 people digging tunnels into the ground, some as deep as 100 metres. The tunnels snake through the earth and their walls are held together precariously with sticks and scrap lumber. The miners often stay down there working overnight. It’s a risky living, but one with a higher payoff than working in the rice fields all day under a hot sun for a few bucks a day. It was a risk Adi’s uncle decided to take, and many of the illegal miners we meet say they knew him. One wiry man, chain-smoking cigarettes, says Adi’s uncle would often dig under the earth while at the same time pumping out groundwater from the tunnel with a foot-powered pump.
“He wasn’t scared of staying down there for days at a time,” he says.
Before gold was discovered in Pulau Merah, says Yogi, most of the locals worked as rice farmers or fishermen. Now, most of those workers have moved into mining, either in the illegal mine fields, or if they have a connection, for the mining company.
“Maybe mining isn’t the best thing for Pulau Merah in the long run,” says Yogi, “but people here have no option.”
Back at our surfer homestay, Ari Zainal, a Banyuwangi local and McComas’ partner at the surf camp, says that many people have died in the local mines from cave-ins and exposure to dangerous chemicals used to separate precious minerals from the rock. Ari believes that developing eco-tourism in Pulau Merah will serve the community better than mining in the long run.
“I’m trying to educate people in Pulau Merah about the benefits of tourism,” he tells us. “We have all the green gold we need right here: the oceans, the mountains. If we can protect our green gold, then we can survive in the long term – not only for us, but for our children and grandchildren. If they mine here, eventually all the gold will be removed and we will have destroyed the mountains and the sea. Then what will we do?”
As we take our last look at Pulau Merah’s flawless crescent bay and Super Mario World islands just offshore, it’s hard not to agree with Ari. But a bombing swell is scheduled to hit and it’s time to leave. We’ve decided to make the trek out to G-Land to catch the swell, and to see Adi one last time before we return to Bali. When we arrive, the staff at the G-Land camps seem more concerned about the latest swell forecast than the mining development at Pulau Merah.
Michael, a surf guide we meet at Bobby’s Camp, says that even if the talk of a large-scale open-pit mine and a shipping port at Pulau Merah becomes a reality, it probably wouldn’t have a noticeable impact this deep in the jungle.
“Straight line, it’s about 45 kilometers from Red Island to G-Land,” he says. “If you were to follow the coastline, you’d cover 250kms. If the proposed mine was on the other side of the bay at Grajagan, maybe it would be more of a concern, but it’s three bays over from here. It’s far enough away. If they’re dumping toxic mercury, the rivermouth at Pulau Merah where people surf and the fishing village in the corner of that bay are going to feel the immediate impact.”
Others, like Bobo, the manager at Joyo’s Surf Camp who’s been working there year-round since 1998, aren’t so confident.
“We don’t see anything from the mine here,” he tells us, “but I have heard some rumors about a port being built if they open a big mine. Maybe that will bring pollution in the water to G-Land from the currents. Maybe, maybe not. I hope not.”
Adi, meanwhile, is nowhere to be found at our camp. We want to tell him about our visit to the local mining camps, and the good things the people there had to say about his uncle. We want to thank him for letting us in on the beautiful secret of Pulau Merah. We look for Adi at his usual hangouts – cleaning the dining room, holding court at the ping-pong table – but we can’t find him anywhere. When we ask the manager, he tells us that Adi quit a few days ago. The last anyone heard he was heading to the mining fields near Pulau Merah hoping to strike it rich.