The writer looked disappointed, too.
‘If we hadn’t been expressly told, would we even know this was a volcano?’ Yona asked. ‘It’s not obvious at all.’
‘And doesn’t this geyser just seem like a neighbourhood well?’ the teacher added, describing a source of water bubbling in front of them.
The group stood by the so-called geyser and flipped coins into it. The gurgling fountain taking their money wasn’t even hot; its water had long cooled. Local children helped the tourists on their trek to the volcano’s peak. The youngsters skilfully set the travellers on horses, some by themselves and others with a partner. They guided Yona and the others to the summit, after slipping a flower into each of their hands. The horse’s hooves tick-tocked rhythmically, like a metronome. The college student accidentally dropped his flower. It hit the ground, and a flower-sized cloud of dust spouted into the air. Soon the gift was buried beneath a horse’s footprint.
Standing in front of the volcano’s crater, the group took pictures, made wishes and threw their flowers like they were bouquets. The bouquets drew an arc as they fell into the crater. To Yona, the whole action felt like neatly placing rubbish into its specific waste receptacle. Watching the flowers fall was less than thrilling. She just wanted white-grey volcanic ash to flutter down the mountain, like a cannon salute from some unknown army.
The teacher had brought two sketchbooks. She’d hoped her daughter’s passion for art would help transfer events from the trip on to the books’ pages, like ink-covered print blocks pressed on to blank sheets of paper. But her daughter didn’t make an effort to draw, and only after her mother smacked her bottom a few times did she open up one of the sketchbooks. Her drawings didn’t live up to her mother’s expectations. The first of the five or so images she quickly scribbled down was of the Brazilian barbecue she’d eaten at the resort, and the last depicted heads, scattered about a crater. The meat didn’t at all fit with the purpose of this trip, and the heads were just unpleasant. The bodiless faces in the girl’s drawing were all laughing. And they looked familiar, too. Not to mention that there were precisely six of them.
‘It’s us, Mum!’ the girl explained, unnecessarily.
The teacher looked embarrassed, worried that the drawing would cause the group distress. While she was drawing, her daughter hadn’t been asking pointless questions like she usually did, which was nice, but if the pictures were going to turn out like this, it seemed preferable for her to be asking questions. Whether they were riding in the car or walking along a Mui road, the girl’s infantile questions were ceaseless. At first, her inquisitiveness lightened the mood, but it was gradually starting to arouse irritation among the travellers. The girl asked about almost everything, like she was always trying to get in the last word, and at some point, not just her mum, but also the guide, started answering half-heartedly.
Nowadays, disaster trips didn’t stop at the disaster zone; most of them boasted other features as well. There were packages that combined tourism with volunteering, packages that mixed tourism and survival challenges, and packages that offered both tourism and education, with classes in history or science. The teacher kept complaining that she should have picked one of the educational trips.
‘Kids nowadays—they grab a snow crab, pull off the legs, and expect there to be cooked meat inside,’ she complained. ‘If you cut a fish in half, they think that the inside will already be roasted. Making kids learn from nature is the best way to give them real experiences, but the theme here is too vague to actually learn anything.’
‘Mum, what’s that over there?’
Her daughter cut into the conversation, unable to wait for her to finish talking.
‘Mum, look at that yellow truck—where’s it going?’
The child’s mother didn’t know where it was going. Even if she did, her answer wouldn’t have been any different.
‘I don’t see it,’ she said.
‘Mum, look there—the truck stopped for a moment and now it’s going again. It’s really fast.’
‘I don’t see it.’
‘Look there, Mum. Now there’s a second car.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
The vehicle accelerated hurriedly and disappeared, relieving the teacher of having to deal with the situation. The others had closed their eyes. They were sleeping, or pretending to sleep. The girl kept repeating, ‘Why, why, why?’
On a disaster trip, travellers’ reactions to their surroundings usually went through the following stages: shock → sympathy and compassion, and maybe discomfort → gratefulness for their own lives → a sense of responsibility and the feeling that they’d learned a lesson, and maybe an inkling of superiority for having survived. The stage someone reached depended on the person, but ultimately, adventures like these reinforced a fear of disasters and confirmed the fact that the tourist was, in fact, alive. Even though I came close to disaster, I escaped unscathed: those were the selfish words of solace you told yourself after returning home.
But with this desert sinkhole package, Yona wasn’t experiencing any of the typical responses to a disaster trip. All she had to look forward to now was the one-night homestay. It was an experience meant to mimic the two days of the 1963 head-hunting tragedy. Here, travellers had to choose between two options.
‘You can do the homestay from the Unda perspective, or you can do it from the Kanu perspective,’ the guide told them. ‘The locations are a little bit different. You just pick which one you want.’
The teacher and her daughter chose Unda, and the writer and college student chose Kanu—just to get away from the girl. The writer urged Yona to come with them, but his pleas made Yona pick the Unda group. They divided up and got into two cars that would take them to their respective homestays. The Unda home was on the course of a river that flowed right by the white sand desert.
When the Unda group arrived at their destination, the guide presented their temporary home. ‘This is an Unda residence—from the tribe whose heads were discovered in the sinkhole we saw yesterday. The house is propped up on stilts over the water. It was built to earn tourism revenue that helps provide education and healthcare for Unda children. Don’t venture away from the building, to ensure that we don’t have any problems and that no one from the village gets hurt. Our little princess shouldn’t go too far from Mum, either, got it?’
The girl pouted her lips and hid behind her mother. She then shouted something utterly nonsensical.
‘Mum, the guide said she was going to cut off my head!’
They’d been excited about spending the night in a local house, but the accommodation wasn’t much. No longer did the travellers have access to Belle Époque’s air conditioning, nor its ample bedding. The biggest shock was the bathroom, which was a lot closer to nature than they would have preferred. But considering that it was constructed especially for tourists, they couldn’t complain.
An Unda woman introduced the three to their new surroundings. ‘The TV runs on a battery. It doesn’t use electricity. Oh, and see that house sitting on a boat over there? During the rainy season, people put their houses on boats like that and move. Rainy season just started.’