Karl Herbert Dundee

He told our driver just where we could stock up on groceries for our two day outing. He motioned him to stop so we could get fresh fruit, introduced the young woman behind the roadside stand as his girlfriend and gave her a big hug. Had I been ready, I would have taken a picture of her huge smile. We stopped at a small store to get six-liter jugs of water; he knew the woman there too, and again at a small restaurant, where everyone was so glad to see him, he chatted for ten minutes before he remembered we were with him. "Ibu here is 120 years old. I've seen her Dutch papers." Karl told us. "Still cooks on the same wood stove she grew up with." Well, she certainly did cook on a wood stove, but whether she was 120 was hard to say.

Just before entering the road into the park, Karl yelled "Stop, stop, stop," and hopped out of the truck to shake hands with Simon. "Simon's from Britain," he later told us. "He lives in the jungle counting animals. He's lived there five years. Can you imagine? Bah! Jungle makes him crazy."

Inside the park, Karl knew the locals too He introduced us to the park rangers and the host at the beach cabins. "That's Om. How do I know how to spell it? 'Om', who cares. Ya, that's his first wife. When his second wife ran away 20 years later, he married the first again. Go figure."

Karl of course knew the trails too. "You take that one there, you wind up with panthers and snakes." He pointed to the right trail. "We go this way to the beach. I know, I've been here four times."

The trail he chose wound and curved and quickly fade away.. We stepped past waist high mint leaves, over lava rocks, across twisted vines that grabbed at our pants and shirts and over coral ridden beaches. At one point we came to the burnt remains of a fishing village. Twine still hung where fish had been dried and fishing baskets littered the sand. Karl had known the fisherman that had lived here. "I slept right here," he said pointing to a charred mat. "Last time I was here, we ate fish together. Now the government kicks them all out because this is a National Park now and burns their homes. Bah."

Further into the jungle Karl motioned us to keep quiet, then pointed up into the trees. Black monkeys were swinging from branch to branch. I wasn't surprised when he told us he knew them too. "Five years ago," he began, "I was bit by a grey monkey. He wanted to get the peanuts in my hand but I held them tight. Oh it was awful. The monkeys can still smell the poison in my hand now. If I sit still like this," he pulled his arms tight to his chest, "they will come and climb all over me. I sat right here last time and monkeys were everywhere."

As we walked, Karl told us more and more. "You know, a lot of people don't believe my stories," he said. But they haven't lived in Indonesia for ten years or gone where I have gone." He pointed to the skulls of two wild pigs and a deer lying in the dirt. "Do you know why you never see monkey bones? "I tell you," he said. And he did. "It's because other monkeys burry the dead. I saw it with my own eyes. But it's no use telling anyone here. No one believes me."

"One day, the jeep I was in hit a monkey. I tell the driver, "Stop, stop." I wanted to see what would happen. Slowly lots of other monkeys came out of the jungle and dragged the dead monkey away." He acted out the motion of dragging a monkey then continued. "The monkeys took him to a clearing. I know this because I followed them. They dug a hole in the ground, a monkey grave. Then all the monkey's, maybe 12 of them, put the dead monkey in the hole and sat on the edge with their hands up," again he demonstrated, "Maybe for ten seconds, total silence. Then they all started throwing dirt on the grave. Then again they all sat with their hands like this and then they go away. Later I went to tell the officials what I have seen but they didn't believe me. So I took them there. But as soon as we walked into the clearing, hundreds of monkeys came from everywhere and started hissing and screaming at us. So we ran away, and still no one believes me. But I have a picture. Stupid film lab lost the negative. But I still have the picture and I've made about a hundred copies."

Each of Karl's stories was more unbelievable than the next. He told us how he had been responsible for taking supplies to the German girl who 20 years ago was sentenced to life in the Thailand prison (Bangkok Hilton) for drug trafficking. How he had flown every U.S. president since Eisenhower in his helicopter. How he has twice gone to the cockpit of passenger flights to help, once to help fly because the pilot wasn't trained to land in a storm, once to alert the crew that if they took off, they wouldn't make it off the runway.

Karl talked to us about owning guest houses in cities all over the world. "The one in Bali costs US$1200 per night. It's booked solid," he said. "If I want to stay there, I have to reserve ten months in advance."

By the end of this story we had picked our way through the jungle vines to the beach. The sand was riddled with what looked like wide tire tracks. "Those are python tracks," Karl said pointing to them. I have a story about them too." Whether his stories were true or not was hard to tell, but they were certainly fascinating to hear. "Go on," we coaxed him.

He began. "Once two teenage boys were camping here in the jungle One was attacked by a python and the other ran away for help. When the second boy returned with the villagers they found the python all wound up sleeping with an enormous belly. I know all of this because I was there. They held the snakes head with a forked stick and sliced its belly open. A whole boy fell right out. Later the villagers skinned the snake and ate it. Yuck, Bah."

With the end of this story, we were again clawing through jungle branches. I could see the next beach through a small clearing, and beyond that a misty clump of hilly land - Bali.

"Come, come, come," Karl suddenly said. He bent low and motioned us to be very quiet. We walked out along coral fragments and into a dense patch of bushes. Through them I could see the faint outlines of a fisherman working on a net. "The government must have missed him," Karl whispered.

Karl was first to cross the log spanning the murky river that separated us from the lone survivor."There are snakes in there," he whispered. "Be careful." But I wasn't; halfway across I lost my balance and within seconds I was up to my thighs in black saltwater sludge. I wasn't quiet either. My yell for help could be heard far across the beach. The fisherman was instantly at the river with outstretched arms; but he wasn't coming to help me. He was coming to greet us. Yes, Karl knew him too.

I spent the next fifteen minutes wringing out my filthy socks while John snapped a few pictures and Karl and his buddies talked. When we left Karl said "You don't tell anyone about this fisherman. If the government finds out he is still here, they will kick him out too." Karl had nothing to worry about, we didn't speak enough Indonesian to get the breakfast we wanted in the morning let alone tell a government official who we had seen and where.

It was getting too late at that point to continue onto the next beach, so we turned and headed back. After we past the burned fishing village, we took another path along the water's edge back to our beach cabins. Naturally there were more stories on the way. Karl told us how twice he had eaten human meat with tribes in Irian Jaya. "No, I didn't know until after when they told me. My body sweated for two days straight both times."

When we stopped to put our socks and shoes back on after wading two streams, Karl told us his last story for the evening. Out on the horizon a thick black band of clouds had formed. "It's raining out there," Karl said. "One time I was on a beach and I saw a cloud that stretched the whole way across the horizon. It was like a black wall. I knew something was wrong so I ran away on my motorbike. I told the fisherman on the beach to leave too, but no one listened. I drove maybe 150 meters up the hill and then watched as that black wall came closer and closer. It kept getting bigger and bigger and then it hit. It was a tsunami maybe twelve meters high by six kilometers long. There was nothing left of the beach or the villages."

We crossed the last few lava rocks back to our beach in silence. Karl went to his cabin, John and I stayed behind to watch the flying fish and the sun set and then walked to the host's quarters to start dinner. "Do you think if I write all of this down, anyone will believe me?" I asked John.