One day I met some elementary school boys trying to catch a fish in a pond while walking. I asked them, “Do you know where any restaurant near here is?” with a gesture of eating food.
One boy understood my English and said, “Follow me” I followed him to his house which was a restaurant. The boy changed his clothes and came to me “What do you like to eat?” He suddenly acted like a professional waiter.
Anyway, when I investigated his school bag with his permission, I found his math test scored “Zero”. I teased him and he was laughing with embarrassment. While I was eating noodle soup, I saw a middle aged man getting off his motorbike and noticed he was the boy’s father, the owner of the restaurant.
Pa brought a live crab wrapped very exquisitely by banana leaves and straws. I saw him selling it to another customer for 5,000 rupees which was less than a dollar. They seemed to talk about something very seriously. I was wondering what was going on. He asked me if I was interested in following them to another village where a dead shark was lying on the beach.
Pa said he wanted to take some teeth from the dead shark. Once I heard it, I was already excited. I believed watching a huge dead shark wouldn’t happen often in my life. We 3 of us decided to go there.
Getting close to the village, it stank everywhere. A rotten huge shark on the beach was seen at a distance. I felt like vomiting due to the stinky smell, but Pa and another man, a Danish anthropologist, approached to the shark covering their noses with Kleenex tissues. Pa seemed to take some teeth from the shark.
When we came back home, Pa suggested taking a break at another village, where I bought a basket of live shrimp for 5,000 rupees. Pa wrapped them carefully with banana leaves not to get them get spoiled and carried them until we arrived home.
When I said to him I was thirsty, he climbed up to a coconut tree. He used his long machete to cut it to help me drink the juice. He was the only man who never asked for money on the island.
That night when I went back to my guest house, Risky and his wife were anxiously waiting for me.
Risky said, “I was worried about you! Please don’t go farther, it’s dangerous out there!”
I thought it was funny, because I was already far from my own hometown in Indonesia.
haha,Even if the teeth had been made of diamonds, I couldn’t have taken them. : ) The rotten shark, about size of 7 or 8 meters, was giving off untolerable smell.
I’ve heard those shark’s teeth are very expensive and worth a lot of money.
You should have jumped in to the water and grabbed a tooth!