Kuku Island, Indonesia »   Kuku, Indonesia

Hello Lulu,

I happened to come across your site and have skimmed through your trip back to Indonesia. You are so brave! I really admire your courage. Your cousin Dung's family could then finally feel at ease that his remaining was finally located and brought back.

It really brings back a lot of memories. I was in Kuku in 1982 at the age of 13 for likely 1 month or so. I can still recall there were a wooden church, a few buildings and even a hospital there. What I remember most during my stay there were perhaps the scenes of a couple of boats coming to the island with people barely with skins and bones. They were at seas more than 30 days without water and food.

Up to this day, situated in northern Europe, at times the thoughts and memories of those days in Kuku and Galang still strike my mind. It's a miracle that we were able to make it all the way to Indonesia on a tiny boat barely 2.5 meters wide.

Hi Lulu,

Sorry for my late reply and please bear with my bad English as it's not even my 2. language.
Reading your story makes me think of my sister who raised me and my younger brother for 3 years in the camp and serveral yrs later on in Northern Europe. It must have been a huge load on your shoulders being a 'mother' to your siblings in such desperate circumstances as in the camp. It took me yrs before I could comprehend why she was so overprotected towards me and my brother.

I for one, as a 13-14 yr old boy, did not 'suffer' much except for the longings for my parents at home back in vn. I can still recall those rainy afternoons sitting in the barrack, weeping and yearning for my parents. Gradually I grew it off and got used to the situation. It must have been worse for my younger brother, we have actually never talked about this. How those years have affected on our lives is hard to say - For me they have been a ballast getting me through hard times and stuffs. Could we make it through the camp, then we shall survive everything.

Back to Kuku, our boat number was probably DN1101CA where DN stands for Ddo^`ng Nai . It was loaded with 67 ppl, pretty much crowded, hardly space to move at all under the deck and we were forced to sit there 'til passing the vn territory. We had to pay a local fishing boat some gold so that they would guide us to Terampa island, and later on to Kuku. I can still recall that we slept on the floor in a kinda church the first night on Kuku. The following days I had to go to the wood to get cu?i, and I did see some graves there.

How is the trip back to Indo organised?

Hello again Lulu,

Yes, I read about your trip back to Kuku in 1998 on the Journey part on this website. It really is like an adventure. I hope you will get to publish your whole story one day.

What I meant when asking about the coming trip was if there was an 'organization' or some sort of travel agency behind? Please keep the website posted with info and stuffs from the trip, and please take tons of pictures and post them here.

Have a nice day

Hi lulu

I'm glad you create this forum. I was seeking for Kuku peoples for the longest time afraid that these great memories will fade away in time.

Reading your brief story, sound like you and I have a very similar past. I too came from an upscale family and became poor overnight, my dad disappeared to the re-education camp, struggled to help my mom raise the 6 kids, escape 3 times, got caught in the storm, 5 times met the Thai Pirates, boarded Malaysia and got push out to Indonesia border, got to Letung village, and dumped on Kuku island.

It was the greatest experience and adventure of my life. Such a valuable lesson don’t you think?

Best regard
Tuan

Wow! I am so excited to stumble on this website. Thank you Carina for starting this. I just went back to VN on a tour trip in January of 2009 and was ask by my tour group to share my experience of escaping VN and survival in Indonesia. This promp me to call my parents and older sister for detail infos. I want to know exactly where KuKu is located so I decide to google and stumble upon your website. I am hook! I enjoy reading your website and certainly have my own memory of KuKu and Galang. My boat number is VT1069 and we was in KuKu in June 1979. We was brought there by a German ship. I think our boat was the 3rd or 4th boat to arrive on Kuku. Our boat has about 450 peoples. Kuku was my home for the next 11 months! I have great memory there. I was only nine then, so I guess I was more carefree. I remember roaming the island and swiming at beach pretty much cover my daily activities. I remember hanging out with friends and I am sorry for not remembering all of their names but the two names I do remember are Xi Mui and Ai. They are Tieu Chieu chinese. We use to collect and trade candy wrappers. My most happy memory was in Galang. I used to make kite and fly it every afternoon and also try to still kite in the sky. I was quite good at it. Anyway, Thank you for your website and I am very impress at your courage to go back to Kuku island. I will continue to follow up with your website and hope to be able to join you on your future journey back to Kuku.

Hello again,

Same here, I am glad that I've found this forum.

As for attaching images as part of the comments, there are a few Vanilla extentions/add-ons that do support this type of functionality. Please ask the guy who implemented this site to take a look at http://lussumo.com/addons/index.php?PostBackAction=AddOn&AddOnID=154. I am not sure if I am able to help out - With a new born baby at home and overloaded with work at the office, I hardly have time for anything else.

Thanks for your willingness to send me the photos from your last trip. Please send them to intrasys@gmail.com.

I've read somewhere that some people spent 11 monthes on Kuku. Is this true? Was it possible to survive that long on that island?

Have a nice day :-)

My God! were we living like Robinson Crusoe for that long? I thought it was about 2 weeks.....
Man, did I remember that night when the World Vision boat came. The entire island awoke by a shout of someone, all rushed to shore, overjoyed by the sight of the boat (A NON-REFUGEE BOAT). The wait for it to come ashore felt like an eternity.
We were given tuna (ca ngu) and cabbage. In the dark, I washed the fish and cabbage and cooked them with sea water, and MADE my sister and brother stay awake to eat them. The food tasted awful and full of sand, but we were thankful, for that was real source of vitamin we had in so long. I borrowed someones 'wood chopper' to cut the fish, not only it was bulky and heavy, it had a hook on the top end, which made it even more difficult to manage. If I had a bigger pot, I wouldn't have bothered cutting it.

I sure am glad that I don't get emotional like you Tuan, imagine if every time I see a large ship, and it brings back the taste of sardine cooked with cabbage in sea water mixed with sand.... no thanks. hihihi

Hey, you deserve a lot more then you give yourself credits for. Without peoples with soft heart like you and me, there wouldn’t be any music to hear, poem to read or story to ponder and this place wouldn’t materialize for people to share their hearts… I thought Mimi became a better cook after the first try? :)

I think he did, I will ask him to share more accounts with us.
BTY, I hope to get more info from the commander of Letung island during my next trip then will share with all of you when I return.

I was in Kuku from June 25,1989 to July 20, 1989. Those were the days I would never forget.

A week after our arrival, the was UNHCR stopped by at Kuku, not to pick up any refugees in Kuku, but to bury a women who passed away during the trip . We witnessed the sad burial ceremony. Some healthy men went up to the burial ground on top of the hill to help digging, then, other carried the coffin, made of some wooden planks. There were no flowers, incest, just our vietnamese surrounding the grave saying the last goodbye .

Before leaving on the next day, UN representative promised to come back within a week to pick us up - admitting our desperate situation: shortage of food, medicine, and the threat of abusive treatments from the camp commander and his troops .

That was the promise he failed to keep. When UN ship came back a month later, we had already buried four more people in that hill.

http://www.geocities.com/dangdthanh/html/galang/kuku.html

The navy comander of Terampa island did tell me that they burned down and close the camp to stop local villagers from looting and causing problem problem. My first instinct was 'what's there to loot rob?'

When I went there, we had permission from the chief of Letung and he sent 2 navy personnels to take us there by their canoe.

Hmm...It goes back to what Tuan said...could it be "fate and Reality" or just pure coincidence ? Spooky.

jeanluc, you are funny.

Kuku dance is fun too.

JeanLuc,

You're crazy indeed, but I like it.
You can get the low-five from the Ku Brothers. High fives are hard to come by when you bring the 3Ks to the party.

how about the babies that were conceived on the island but born elsewhere? i know that refugee camps are notoriously dark afterdark..., and hardly anything to do, you know?

Lulu,

That was an amazing story with the baby boy. Also, I did not know
there were closed to 200 left behind on kuku.

Are you checking in from Singapore? What's the target date for Kuku?

Say hi to David Lee for me. Hope he finds his mom's remains.

Hi Lulu,
I did a search on Google about Kuku Island after listening to Viet Dzung's special interview of a group of Vietnamese taking trip to Kuku Island on April/13/2009. It brought back so much memories and emotions.

My brother (15 year old) and I (14) left and arrived at Kuku in 1984 on a boat from Phu Khanh (PK5918). We spent several weeks at Kuku and met "Tram Tu Thien". I can still remember few lyrics from the song that Tram Tu Thien had written when he was there. It goes like this:

"Hoi em co nghe Kuku tinh ho.
Den voi Di khong ai doi cho.
Ngay que em mu\a mua mu\a nang
......."

I would appreciate if someone in this forum knows the whole song and post it.

As for the living at Kuku, life was peaceful for me. We went fishing, swimming and trade with the locals who would sail their boat to Kuku and trade canned food for their fresh caught fishes.

There was a translator on the island whose' blooded is half Vietnams and Indo. I never like this guy. Once, I saw him beat Tram Tu Thien for fishing on the dock. He later transferred to Galang and hang around with Vietnamese ladies on the "wrong side" of the business.

BTW, do you have info how to enroll in future trip to Kuku and Tanjung Penang?

Thanks much for the replies.

The interview was done live on AM radio (broadcast to north and southern california). I do not have the link.

I can't wait to have Lulu back and hear from her as to how I can get myself there on the next trip.

Best regards,
-Don

Hg,
Phu Khanh included Nhatrang then. Now Nhatrang is excluded from PK because of the tourism revenues, Hanoi wants it to belong to Central. Nhatrang was my hometown.
I have a story from Kuku, if any body remember that time, in 81. Especially anh Thanh, I hope the person was not you, if it was then I'm sorry. That time, people found out there were durian tree up on top of the hill, if you walk pass the heli court yard. They went to pick them, which was illegal. Then one morning I woke up in the noise of a crowd laughing. I got out to find a man walking pass out hut carrying lots of durian, hanging from his neck, front and back, with a big note saying "toi an cap sau rieng". The Indonesians made him walked up and down the camp for half a day. I felt very sorry, not for the man but because of the rude crowd. You are lucky anh Thanh, not getting any durian falling on your head, as durians mostly fall at night, or ending up with diarrhoea. We were not allowed to go picking durians because the HCR wanted to protect us from any casualty. It was for our own sake. Think of if a 2 Kg durian had fallen on top of your head, you would be now lying somewhere in Kuku waiting for Lulu to come and dig you up. Before I came to Kuku, there was an European volunteer doctor working at the hospital; he died of indigestion, eating lots of saurieng and drinking spirit at a time. Another few of our fellow refugees died from diarrhoea for eating too much of them.

Anh Thanh,

Welcome back. I enjoy your Galang website especially the mix in the contents, from the sketch and schametics to the dramma in the stories. Being detail oriented yet see the big picture is a rare trait in engineering. Hope it serves you well.

Picking durian is hard, it must've been equally difficult to hide/eat it because of its aroma. I heard most hotels in Asia prohibit eating durian in their premises. There is this 'Zimmer' guy on the Travel channel, he's a world traveller and eats just about anything, however, he just could not take durian. Go figure.

The sea shore of Nhatrang "was" beautiful. No more now. Even though I spent all my early years there, most days at the beach, Nhatrang does not carry as many good memories as Kuku, then Galang do for me.

When we were in Kuku, we stayed at the last hut at the very end of the camp, opposite to the HCR office. When I was there the Baptist church was already built; someone in this forum must have been there very early to see the corals, I've heard.

We really enjoyed the scene, the sunsets were beautiful.. Especially my hubby, he found one page flying off from the Bible near the church, and that was his very first English lesson in the camp, and the site of the church was where he hid himself to do reading lessons to himself. He knew the page by heart.

I already had a family then and had to look after my one a half yo son plus the duty to cook while my whole troup was helping at the hospital. I didn't have a chance to venture around the island, let alone go looking into the jungle. I really missed that part. I didn't have to look for wood as my troup was all men, they did it every day on the way to "feed the fishes". As I said Kuku was then pretty established, we had enough food ,ration already packed in a plastic bag (P3V printed on the bag was later my daughter's initial in memory of Kuku) We got fed up with the mung bean (all the sugar went to the men's coffee), so somebody found a way to make beansprouts out of mungbean, using the beach sand. There were two kind of vege we had, beansprout and rau sam we picked from the head land around us, fertilised with "urea".
Hey, and we saw no flies or mosqitoes at all, hygiene was pretty good, life was good after you guys left, around the '80 to '85, then it went down I've heard.
After all we all survive and had helped Indonesian ppl got pretty good job for more than a decade.

Dear All,

I am back (safe and sound, nhung ma den nhu cot nha chay), thanks for all the caring and praying. We needed it!

There are so much to tell, but I just want to 'check in' with all of you, then will give you full report later.

For me, this journey to Kuku is as unforgettable as the first one 30 years ago.
* We found 2 out of 3 graves that we wanted to look for, one of them is David's Mom, the one that we did not think we would find..... I took photos of other tombstones (that are legible), I will post them on the net, hopefully, they will be helpful to their families.
* Birth Certificate, I spoke to THE man who was the first and last officer at the UNHCR in Indonesia, he said that they were unable to issue BC at the time because of the unbelievable number of boat people came in to the islands during that time (thousands per day) those issues took lower priority. One suggestion, contact UNHCR in Jarkata, they might have some records or suggestions.

I gotta to take my daughter to lunch, haven't seen her in 10 days. Will get back to you soon.

Lulu

your good karma is boundless. welcome back.