Tin has been the main produce of the island for more than 200 years and has made the local population relatively wealthy. I've certainly never seen a beggar in Bangka.
As the airplane was making its decent into Pangkal Pinang I could see large muddy holes in the ground the frightening results of failed explorations.
Thanks to high wages of up to IDR400,000 per day, at some time or another most of the population of Bangka has worked in the tin mines. School teachers knew that if a student went missing for a day or two there was a good chance he was in the mines, helping his family pay the bills. For ob vious reasons, some parents preferred their children to work rather than go to school.
If they were not down the mines, they were probably in a smelter. The owner of a smelter could often expect to see profits of IDR150 billion a month (over US$13 million at today's rate) and it was no coincidence that the wealthiest person in Bangka owned three of them. I am not sure how I would get through that kind of money every month!
To learn more about it I paid a visit to the Tin Museum (Museum Timah) on Jalan Jenderal Ahmad Yani in Pangkal Pinang. The building was originally the mess house of Bangka Tin Winnig and also served as the meeting place for Indonesian leaders and the Dutch government before the Roem Royen Conference. In this free museum you could learn about tin mining through dioramas depicting its history, right through from the days the mines were exploited by hand to today's use of hightech machinery.
Tin is mined by digging through the top layer of soil down to a depth of at least five metres to the sand underneath which contains the tin; a process that can leave huge holes in the ground. The sand is then pumped up to the surface through a pipe and screened. The main differentiator here is the size of the pump. Larger companies use a bigger machine and leave deeper holes, while the smaller operators, many of whom are mining illegally, use a much smaller pump. I am not sure how well it was managed back then because there seemed to be people mining everywhere you went on the island and apparently they didn't care too much about the holes they left behind.
These old mining pits filled with water that could be black, brown, green, blue, or turquoise. The darker the colour, the more recently the mining had begun. The green and blue holes actually made for an impressive scenery, espe¬cially those either side of the road between Pangkal Pinang and Sungailiat. They looked like blue lagoons surrounded by white hills and green trees!
Tin exploration could also take place offshore. When I went by boat down the river and out to Semujur Island, there were a lot of vessels dredging sand from the seabed, some Thai and Chinese owned. No wonder the beaches there were no use for swimming the underwater holes created by the mining industry had destroyed the coral reefs. Fortunately, after a two hour ride, I finally arrived at the Semujur and Pan¬jang Islands both still had white sandy beaches and plenty of fish.
The potential to attract tourists to Bangka was there, es¬pecially for culinary tourism. The food here is already famous, and now I have visited I know why! Their noodles, pempek, otakotak, and kerupuk are all incredible. I hope the government does something more comprehensive about the mining pits left behind in Bangka. Maybe they should look to Phuket as an example. This world famous holiday destination was once a centre for tin mining too.
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