This week a poor Indonesian fisherman will become rich. The two brothers say it happens to someone every year, so they've left a bowl of sticky rice on the ground, hoping that their offering to the gods will make them the lucky ones. The dingkis fish are running now, and if these swim into their trap, the siblings may catch hundreds of kilograms of the fish, worth a fortune in nearby Singapore.
I hear the fishermen's story through my interpreter Idaman, as we sit on the floor of their rough wooden stilt house over the sea, drinking sweet tea. The setting is unfamiliar, but the people are like any other fishermen, dreaming about the big catch.
Ethno-tours organised by Island Connections International (ICI) bring visitors to stay with families in fishing villages in the Riau islands, an hour by ferry south of Singapore. Batam is one of more than 3,000 Riau islands, and is a booming business centre and popular weekend destination for people from the city state.
With its teeming motor scooter traffic, highways that abruptly turn to potholed tracks and hotchpotch architecture, it already feels a world away from modern Singapore, but we're only half way. At Sekupang wharf, we're met by ICI staff in an open pancung boat with powerful outboard motors throbbing at the back and are soon skimming across the South China Sea, past dozens of islands, many uninhabited, some with stilt villages clinging to their edges. When the boat pulls in at the jetty at Pecong Island, the real ethno-experience begins.
Pecong normally has no tourists, being just a few hundred metres long, with no accommodation, no restaurants and no souvenir shops. It's desolately beautiful, with kites soaring above coconut palms and mango trees, and the shallow sea lapping gently at its shores.
We divide into small groups to live in village houses for the next couple of nights. Men stay with one host family and women with others; even married couples are split up. My host is Pak Udin, son of the village leader and assistant to the government administrator.
He has hosted six ICI groups over three years; although Pecong people are used to visitors, they're not overrun. "We were nervous about foreigners here," says Udin. "But now we know they're interested in us, so we're excited and proud when they come."
Interpreters fluent in English and Bahasa Indonesia stay with us, teaching basic greetings and polite phrases, as well as cultural etiquette, such as pointing with the thumb rather than the finger and eating with the right hand.
We sleep on rubber mats, wrapped in sheets or sarongs, and eat with our hands, sitting on the floor. The men eat alone, served by Udin's wife Ibu Melati, while their children watch from the doorway. They'll eat after we're finished.
The food is simple but good - rice with spicy prawns or coconut fish curry, green beans and hot sambal, and slices of green mango.
Wearing shorts or sarongs, visitors take open-air showers with buckets at the communal well. The toilet is just a hole in the floor over the sea - tricky for all of us, and it proves especially so for an American businessman, who somehow drops his passport down there. He has to dive into the water to retrieve it and comes ashore with a soggy passport and an excellent story.
The warm sense of community is apparent. No doors are locked and the village does not have a police force. Pecong is a relatively prosperous village and is changing, says Udin.
A new concrete road, paid for by the government, runs around the island and already seven motorcycles use it, which is surprising since the road is barely one kilometre long. A teacher proudly rides his motorcycle 200 metres to school each day, "to save time", he says.
At night a band perform with the volume turned to levels endangering eardrums and sanity. A keyboard player and singer belt out joget music, while eight bored girls brought from Sumatra sit waiting for a village boy to pay 40 US cents for a dance. The bands know fishermen will have money when the dingkis run and it's considered unseemly for the local girls to dance in public.
The next morning we're woken at 4.30 by the roosters and the amplified call to prayer from the village mosque. After a breakfast of chilli noodles, we pile into a boat to join fishermen working out at sea.
Pecong fishermen build a kelong, a funnel of poles and nets, which corrals fish towards the narrow end. We help to haul up the traps and find that no one is rich yet, although most have caught enough dingkis to keep them smiling, which they do easily on Pecong.
We finish up with a couple of nights at ICI's resort at Telunas beach on sparsely populated Sugi Island. Facilities may be rustic compared to some resorts, but the perfect white sand is backed by hillsides of dense jungle, the staff have the relaxed but attentive friendliness we experienced in the village and the thatched huts have comfortable beds, flushing toilets - and chairs.
Chatting about our time in the village, a man from Kentucky sums up the experience: "Our lives are about what we're doing and where we're headed; village life is about who you're with."
Getting there: take Singapore Airlines to Singapore and then take the ferry to Batam Island. Ethno-tours cost US$130 per person, per day for 10 days or more, including transfers from Batam, meals, guides and accommodation. More information at telunasbeach.com
Getting there: take Singapore Airlines to Singapore and then take the ferry to Batam Island. Ethnotours cost US$130 per person, per day for 10 days or more, including transfers from Batam, meals, guides and accommodation. More information at telunasbeach.com
