Edward Pollard

South Sumatra, Sept 2007. 

Trip, stumble, fall.  I crashed though the last of the Barringtonia, and landed on my back in the sand.  I looked around quickly, but there is no sign of Luca.  My dignity was intact.  For the last hour we had been bashing through rattan thickets and wading in a swamp that might contain some of the last crocs in Sumatra that have not become high fashion.  I had managed this with the pomp of a seasoned pro, but at the last gasp, with the boom of the Indian Ocean drawing me on, I had come a-cropper.  We had been able to hear the sound of the surf for at least the last two kilometres.  Its siren song had taken me by Siamang and Leaf-monkeys with barely a glance, and now I stood on the deserted strand, dumbstruck.  The beach stretched north and south into the salty haze.  The maelstrom of breakers roared offshore.  The water that reached my boots bubbled down into the sand like the head of a good pint settling. 

We had just walked about six kilometres from the research station at Way Canguk, in the far south of Sumatra. From camp to shore the walk had been through uninterrupted, and largely undisturbed forest.  As I walked along I had been spotting signs of animal life everywhere; pig and sambar tracks, Great Argus dancing grounds and piles of decaying elephant dung.  After a short while I began to worry about the extent to which I have been brainwashed by WCS.  I was no long simply thinking ‘ooh pig’, it was more like ‘hmm Tiger prey, I wonder what sort of density this area could support’, and elephant dung merely became “S3, S3, S4, S2, oh, hang on, hope they are not too close”.  Thankfully all such thoughts evaporated when I reached the beach.  I was amazed, there must now be very few places in western Indonesia where one can walk through undisturbed forest all the way from the hills to the sea, it was a special, and possibly soon to be unique experience.  I sat on a log to take my boots off and contemplated braving the surf.  A latter day man-Friday appeared driving a motorbike along the beach.  He drove by, waved and called out “hello mister”.  And with that my Paradise was lost, and I was back in Indonesia.

 

Apo Kayan, September 2005

The boat pauses, so does my heart.  I can see it happening.  The prow is caught by the current and swings around to the left.  It snags on a rock and we are stuck across the full force of the stream.  Then we are over.  I am in the water, in the spin cycle as bags and tarpaulin sheets swirl around with me.  But no, it doesn’t happen.  Just in time we get an extra burst of power.  In the form of a dyak with a paddle.  We are clear of the rapid, and carry on up the Boh.  It was a long ride.  By the time we pulled in for the night we’d been on the river for over 5 hours and travelled more than 50 Km.  We had got a lot further than I was expecting.  I had been thinking about doing this trip for years.  I visited this area of forest for work in 2002, and when looking at the maps realised that one could travel over land between the head waters of two of the great rivers of Borneo, the Mahakam and the Kayan.  Now, almost 3 years to the day I was finally doing it.  I had travelled up the Mahakam river from Samarinda, and was now on the river Boh (rhymes with ‘so’).  It is the stuff of clichés.  Travelling through the ‘heart of Borneo’ in a dug out canoe with 4 dyak head-hunters clad in small strips of bark.  Except that the canoe is powered by a rather noise Chinese outboard, they haven’t been head-hunters for 50 years, and Petrus was sporting a rather blue Juventus shirt.

I shifted slightly to see if I could find a new gap in the rocks.  I opened my eyes to see in the half light of dawn that one of my companions was up and lighting the fire.  It was an eerily quiet morning.  It is never really quiet in the forest.  Days are filled with the chattering of babblers and variations on a theme of ‘coo’ of 4 different barbet species all desperate to make sure that you know they are there, but one is never exactly sure where.  The penetrating ‘saw’ of cicadas is all too frequently joined by the cutting ‘saw’ of a chainsaw.  At night the birds calm down but are replaced by frogs.  Frogs that go ‘ping’, frogs that go ‘warg’ and sometimes the slightly discomforting call of a frog that goes ‘redrum’.  The crickets and cicadas redouble their efforts after dark, and it’s really not exactly peaceful.  But this morning was different.  There were few birds, the forest sounded empty.  In the far distance I could hear a single lonely gibbon ‘whooping’, trying to find some friends.  I suspect it was because we had camped at an old village site.  It turns out that the upper Boh is really just an extension of the Apo Kayan.  The cultural core of Borneo, and my ultimate destination.  People have been living up here for centuries, building a long house on the banks of a river, and farming along its banks and back into the forest.  On occasion the whole village will pack up and move on.  This maybe because there was an outbreak of disease and the area is considered unsafe, or perhaps to move further away from one’s enemies.  As a consequence of this pretty much all of the riversides have been cleared and used for growing rice at some time in the last 200 years.  Demu, where we spent the night, was abandoned about 20 years ago.  By first light it was clear.  The forest was small, and young, there were no big towering dipterocarps, and clearly the birds were not keen on here either.     

To rather over extend the cardio-vascular metaphor, rivers are the arteries of Borneo.  I had already travelled over 400km by boat, and was now on foot following a small creek deeper into the woods.  We had finally left the old village lands behind and were back into ancient tall forest.  We disturbed a family of otters gambolling in the shallows and then finally turned away from the river to climb over the watershed.  A red muntjak was watching us warily, barked and bolted.  Then a little further up the slope a yellow muntjak was standing in the middle of the path.  At this rate we’d have the full rainbow of muntjaks by the time we reached the Kayan river.

 

I am sitting on the veranda watching the world go by.  It is amazing how quickly one can fit back into rural Indonesian life.  I had only been in the village of Long Ampung for 24 hours, and I had already found my spot to sit and see, and exchange small talk with the locals.  A young man was passing and stopped to chat.  He didn’t look dyak, and maybe was looking for a kindred spirit.  I asked and it turns out he was from Surabaya, in Java.  I must have looked surprised, so in explanation he rather forlornly said “my plane broke”.  The next day I am out at the landing strip waiting for my plane back to Samarinda.  A couple of days ago when we had emerged from the woods to suddenly find this wide open strip of tarmac it was quite unnerving.  After days in the forest to be suddenly out in the open, with a big blue sky, was quite agoraphobic.  Now however it is just hot and exposed and I am following a small patch of shade while I watch Ali inspect his broken plane.  A siren sounds and another small plane bumps down.  An engineer gets out with an expanded version of the standard Indonesia tool kit.  Not only does he have a hammer, but he also has a wrench, a screw-driver and some string.  There’s now small crowd and we gather around to watch.  I ask what is wrong and apparently the magneto is broken.  Considering I think this is the character in X-Men played by Ian McKellen I decide it’s time to stop asking questions.  I go to the booth and pay for my ticket.  I don’t actually get a ticket, but they say I have a seat.  After an hour the engineer puts away his hammer and confidently says that it’s fixed.  There is no fuel at Long Ampung and our plane does not have enough to get back to Samarinda.  No problem, we just siphon some off the other plane, into a jerry can and pour it into the wing of our plane.  There is some discussion as to how many can’s worth are needed.  I think they just guessed.  I am slightly concerned when the person selected to do the siphoning lights up a cigarette.  Soon it is all sorted out and I find my seat.  It looks rather like it was taken from a fried rice stall.  Magneto is fine, does whatever he needs to do and we are soon skimming the canopy heading back to Samarinda.  Or at least I hope we are.  The pilot’s GPS is broken.

Central Kalimantan, March 2005

One couldn’t help but crush them with every step.  Most were relatively small with green wings, but scattered amongst them were larger ones with long, curved, brown wings.  The majority had three wings, but not all, some had two.  Seeds.  The ground in this forest, not far from the geographic centre of Borneo, was littered with them.  There was a mast on, and a big one.

The mast in the forests of Borneo is something from ecological fable.  One of the great biological wonders, up there with the migration of the wildebeest in the Serengeti, and the mass spawning of the Great Barrier Reef.   But unlike those annual events, the dipterocarp mast only happens once every 5 years or so, and one of this magnitude has not happened since 1987.  These forests are dominated by trees of the family diperterocarpaceae, (but we tend to just call them dips, it’s a little easier to say).  These are the big ones, the towering canopy trees that everybody wants to cut down.  Every few years, prompted by cues that are not fully understood, they all flower in the same season.  10’s of species flowering over a month or so, usually at the end of the year.  But the more amazing thing is that no matter when they flowered, they all fruit and set seed at more or less the same time.  Everything goes at once, and not just in a small localised area, this is taking place although western Borneo (and possibly across the whole island).  Over 2 weeks 100’s of millions of trees set seed simultaneously, after many years of just sitting there quietly photosynthesising.  And it’s not just the dips.  This year everything else went off too, but over a longer period.  I caught the end of the forest durian season, but apparently a month or so earlier the forest was full of the sweet smells of rotting durian, mangoes, rambutans and myriads of other fruits. 

And why this apparent co-operation? surely it would lead to more competition.  But that’s not the problem.  This strategy is likely to saturate and satiate the seed predators.  When everything goes off at the same time there is more than enough food to keep the insects, birds and pigs happy as, well, pigs in....

I was climbing up a short steep hill to visit an animist shrine in a forestry concession in Indonesian Borneo.  Unlike other areas I had visited, the local people in this part of Borneo still practiced the old, pre-missionary, animist religion.  On the top of the hill was a small shine and cleared area for ceremonies.  The shrine had some offerings to the spirits; flowers and a 1,000 Rp note.  The other curious thing is that the logging company staff all call the religion Hindu.  In reality it bares no resemblance to Hinduism practiced in Bali, or anywhere else.  That’s because it’s not Hindu at all.  This is just a way to include it as one of the National religions (Islam, Christianity and Hinduism) that are recognised in the Indonesian principles of pancasila.  The only similarity it has with Hinduism is that it’s polytheistic, and as far as the lawyers are concerned, that's close enough.  I had never seen it before and was keen to visit the place.  I was not expecting the mast.

I know several people who monitor these things, a mast of this size is rare, and important.  But somehow this one had snuck under the radar.  I was almost giddy with excitement about it.  In my years in Borneo I’d heard all the stories, but still could not quite believe it, the forest floor was carpeted with seeds.  In just a few meters I could see 5 or 6 different types of seed of varied design.  Like kids with a new toy myself and my companions would pick them up, climb onto a rock or log and cast them out.  They helicopter down like giant sycamore seeds.

At one point we came to a patch of particularly large, spectacular seeds.  The kernel was the size of a plum and the 3 wings at least 10cm long.  This was one of several types of tengkawang, or illipe nut.  Throughout the region these are being collected in vast numbers.  It’s a boom for the local substance farmers, for whom tengkawang has been an important source of income for generations.  Earlier in the day we had stopped at a roadside hut where a local Dyak man was drying his illipe.  Under the hut he’d already stacked 5 large sacks full of nuts, and he was drying enough for a another couple of sack loads.  These he could sell to traders for 3,000 Rp (about 30 US cents) per Kg, which for people who’s monthly income could be as little as $25 per month is quite a windfall (as it were).  The nuts are pressed for their oil.  And you know I am not entirely sure what the oil is used for.  But illipe is an old, and important part of the traditional trade and barter economy of Borneo.  For centuries, along with gaharu, birds nests, gold, wild rubber and bezoar stones, it has been one of the lynchpins of local livelihoods.

As such I think tengkawang is a wonderful tree.  In conservation jargon it could be called a flagship and a keystone of the forest (so by my reckoning that makes it a flagship, a keystone and a lynchpin, quite some device that, something even Da Vinci would have trouble conceiving).  The tree is a dip (several species in the genus Shorea if you want to know) and is a lofty canopy tree, it masts along with the other dips and provides a key food resource of pigs and other animals.  The seeds are collected by the local people forming a vital economic resource, and the pigs multiply on the bounty, increasing further the glut (Dyaks like pork).  It is also representative of what is happening to Borneo’s forest.  This is the first big harvest of illipe in nearly 20 years.  Although the trees are officially protected from felling, the forests are still being cleared, or are burning.  One of the main threats these days is from large scale oil palm plantations, providing cheap oil that goes into everything from Head & Shoulders to Hobnobs.  Some people suggest that this loss of forest, and increasing fragmentation of the remaining patches is leading to a failure of the mast.  Much the same thing appears to have happened in the great broadleaf forest of eastern North America in the 19th Century, something that most likely led to the extinction of the passenger pigeon (for more on this you can read a series of fab papers by Lisa Curran).

If things continue apace this may well be one of the last great Bornean masts.  As I stood on a rock looking out over the rolling verdant forest canopy below me I was a mixed bag of feelings.  Excitement that I had finally seen the mast, a certain smugness that I was actually getting paid for this, but also a little guilt at the relief I felt that I’d seen it before it all goes.

 My trip to PT ERNA was while working with Smartwood 

Berau, East Kalimantan, April 2003

We came around a bend in the river and saw another abandoned camp, and a few boats pulled up at the bank.  The boatman said we were here.  Rather sooner than I was expecting and I was still a little confused.  This wasn’t exactly what I was expecting.  All I could see was a run down, grotty camp, with a single family.  Who were rather wary about who I was.  And why I was demanding that they take me to the Kelai.  There was some confused talk of some other people where were coming back, and we could talk then.  But then all of a sudden the boat driver said he was leaving and I should get my things ready.  Apparently I had to walk to some other camp.  I was still pretty confused but got ready.  The punan family packed up too and off we went.  Waded across the river, me remembering some advice that I’d once heard about trekking in New Zealand – get your boots wet as soon as possible and don’t even think that you’ll ever get them dry.  And we headed off up a side river away from the grotty camp, away from the boats and into undisturbed lowland forest.

I was stumbling along in my jungle boots and pants, fancy wicking shirt and a very heavy, pack.  Canned goods and 5kg of rice rather restricting my movement.  Quite a contrast to the Punan family I followed.  A short while later they stopped at another camp and loaded up their stuff and I realised that I was going to follow them to some other camp.  They were carrying all their stuff.  Traditionally the Punan were hunter-gatherers.  While other dyak groups lived in Long houses and farmed rice the Punan were the true forest people.  They lived in small groups of several families, in temporary forest camps.  They sheltered in wood, palm-leaf and bark cloth huts and would spend months at a time in one spot.  They subsisted on hunting, fishing and wild sago and would collect forest products such as the aromatic wood resin gaharu, rattan and gold.  These would be traded periodically with more sedentary dyaks for metal items, salt etc.  After several months, when the resources were beginning to be exhausted they would pack up and move on.  They became something of a cause celebre in the 1980’s when a Swiss man called Bruno Manser highlighted the destruction of their rainforest home in Malaysian Borneo (where they are called Penan) and the book Stranger in the Forest came out about an amazing trek an American did in the early 80’s with a couple of Penan.  Both of these portrayed them as noble savages who’s way of life was being destroyed by the logging firms and the admittedly pretty crude policies of villagisation carried out by the Sarawak government.  What I didn’t really realise before I got to Berau was that the Punan are not just in Malaysia, and there are many more in Indonesia, and they too have gone through much the same process cultural erosion and homogenisation with the rest of the Indonesia.  But with out any of the publicity.  Since the 1980’s missionaries and logging companies have been ‘encouraging’ the Punan to settle in villages and take up rice farming.  It’s almost certain that there are no Punan in Berau who do not spend at least some of the time in settled villages.  Every so often one here’s stories of people who still wear bark cloth and live in caves etc.  But I think this is more the superiority of people in Tanjung Redeb who like to ridicule the ‘primitive’ people up stream (who do after all eat pig).  TNC’s work has been in many of these small punan villages strung along the Kelai river, I’d visited most of these villages and heard people say that they often spend extended periods in the forest.  But most of the time they are fairly shy and not all that open when talking to me.  And so with this in mind it was something of a surprise when I was stumbling up the river to realise that I was looking at a what is pretty much the real Punan thing.  Or as much as it exists now.

The family I was with had a house in a village, and did farm rice.  But as soon as the harvest was over, 2 months ago, they’d moved into the forest.  They came to collect gold and would be there for another month.  They’d then go back to the village, sell the gold and plant the next crop.  While that was growing they’d come back to the forest.  In total I think they spend about 6 months a year living a more or less traditional life in the forest.  In front of me was the father, Bapak, carrying a large rattan pack on his bag, traditional ‘mandau’ knife strung on his waist and 7ft ironwood blowpipe at the ready.  All he was wearing was a battered old pair of shorts, and no shoes.  At tricky parts of the river he’d hold the hand of his 6 year old daughter and help her along.  Otherwise her and her 8 year old bother trotted alongside with them.  In front was mother, Ibu, spear in hand in, rattan basket on her back with the one year old daughter perched on top.  They made slow progress because of the weight of bags and so that children and lanky westerner could keep up and were remarkably patient with both.  Similarly the children didn’t once complain that they had to walk 3 km up a river barefoot.  This is just part of normal life.  As we went along Bapak and Ibu were constantly calling out to their 5 hunting dogs that were scouring the forest for pigs, or just about anything else.  We stopped for a break at one point and Bapak pointed out that although they were small they were good hunting dogs ‘well except that one, he’s afraid of water’ and sure enough a dog was stuck on the other bank whimpering.  This did strike me as a pretty big limitation in a rainforest that’s a maze of small rivers.  But he wasn’t going to complain too much.  Dogs are incredibly important to the Punan.  Mainly because without dogs you can’t catch pigs.  And if you don’t get pigs then you are not really eating.  A little later on we met a group of three men coming down stream.  They stopped to swap gossip.  Which I guessed was something along the lines of “can you believe this guy is going to pay us to walk with him to the Kelai, and he’s not even going to hunt pig !  what a weirdo”.  But all I noticed was that 2 of these solid, strong Punan guys were gently cradling tiny little puppies.  Presumably too young to travel, far they carefully carry them along as if they were pathetic Jack Russell terriers and not soon to be pig killers.

After a couple of hours of walking along ankle to knee deep the in the river, or along the beaches on the banks we came to another camp.  A much smaller one, 4 small huts on an alluvial bank on a small meander.  There was only one old guy when we got there, the others were out collecting gold.  We quickly set up our hut and waited for the others to get back.  With a few changes in technology – plastic sheeting roofs, some pits of plastic twine, cigarette lighters, this camp has to be pretty much like they have always been.  I looked over at the hut next to me.  It was small, much smaller than the huts we used to make at Gunung Palung.  Maybe only 2m x 4m,  the dogs and chickens slept underneath it, the family on a floor of pole sized trees and then what I guess you’d call an attic where the rattan baskets, wooden gold pans and other nicks and nacks were stored.  The fires was kept at one end under the roof with the smoke blowing through to keep the bugs away.  An hour or so before sunset the rest of the group came back.  In addition to the family of 5 I was with there were another 8 people in 3 families.  One of whom came in carrying a large dead monkey.  They were disappointed that there hadn’t been any pigs in a couple of days, but the monkey provided some fresh meat, and there was still plenty of smoked venison from the deer the old man had killed the day before.  The successful hunter’s wife made short work butchering the white-fronted leaf-monkey (Presbitis frontata, endemic to Borneo) and it was clear that real care was take to divide it fairly.  The hunter's family got the best cuts – the hind legs, the guts, the meat along the back.  The rest was divided into 3 neat, equal piles.  Two families got a hand (don’t know what the other got that was equivalent), a piece of liver and a bit of the sternum.  I’m not too sure what happened to things like the skull and the skin, but I suspect it was just thrown away, or fed to the dogs.  My family got one of these plates, which I supplemented with can of pilchards.  As the sun set I was offered the first choice of the boiled monkey.  Never one to turn down food I took a small piece.  Tough, not much meat on it, and not especially tasty.  I stuck to the only marginally more appetising pilchards for the rest of the meal.  Later that night, to the light of a kerosene lamp fashioned from the empty pilchard tin we finally got to talking about my hair-brain plan.  I was hoping that Bapak would come with me, probably with one other person.  After his initial stand-offishness he proved to be a really nice man.  Like all punan he was very quiet and modest with me.  Constantly calling me the formal Bapak, or when asking direct questions would use the polite form of we used to include the person you’re talking to - kita.  Initially this confused me slightly when he asked me “are we married?”, but I soon realised that it was his way of avoiding the awkward “tu or vous” issue, as it were.  He was called Mateus and had a round face with friendly eyes.  He had a shaggy mop of hair and the typical skimpy moustache.  I never did ask him how old he was, I suspect he doesn’t know.  But I estimated he must have been in his early 30’s.  Old enough to have been born in a bark cloth hut somewhere, but now can watch the war live from Iraq on satellite TV.  My other guide was younger and spoke better Indonesian.  They always spoke Punan amongst themselves, a slightly abrupt, but not ugly language.  He was called Darwin, which of course I loved, had some more sharp clothes, no moustache, but the classic dyak bowl haircut.  We chatted briefly about the route, all of which meant nothing to me, and quietly and clearly embarrassed, asked how much I’d pay them.  I replied and it was never mentioned again.

A surprisingly slow start the next day.  Maybe because the rain during the night meant the rivers had risen and judging from the day before they’d be our main routes.  So we packed up.  Me with my huge amount of stuff, them with very little.  But inexplicably including 3 coconuts.  I didn’t ask.  The walk was wet and hard work.  I haven’t yet had a chance to look at the route on a map or satellite image so I’m not too sure where we actually went, but I don’t think it was too far.  One slight disappointment was that we more or less followed rivers all the way.  Which made great sense if you want to move around easily, and I didn’t mind getting wet.  But it did mean that I didn’t get too see a great deal of classic lowland rainforest.  On occasion we’d cut across from one small stream to another and rising up from the stream bed would pass through the big forest.  But that’s only a minor quibble.  All around me, and I think for 100’s of Km in most directions was untouched Bornean forest.  From that perspective it was hard to believe the predictions of its demise in 7 years, and some of it was stunning.  Classic lowland rainforest with an open understory, some mid sized trees and dominated by monster dipterocarp trees, 50m tall and 1 ½ m across at the base.  The best of this was when we finally started climbing up away from the Segah watershed to cross into the Kelai.  After a stiff 200m climb we paused for a break at the top.  I collapsed in a heap of sweat, blood and rucksack, and Mateus and Darwin pause for a smoke.  Not a sign of sweat, no leaches and not a scratch on them – buggers.  I set the GPS going to work out where I was and looked down the slope and the beautiful forest spreading away from us.  It was one of the holy shit, I can’t believe I’m doing this, moments.  In about 15 seconds Mateus had made himself a little chair and Darwin was squatting at the base of a big tree.  There he was, shoeless, wearing only a ragged pair of shorts, mandau in it’s sheath, rattan basket at his feet and blowpipe leaning against his shoulder.  While they chatted he opened up the bamboo tube that carried the darts and fiddled with them, whittling them a little with another small knife.  Hanging next to the dart tube was a small gourd with the poison in and another bottle with the sago pith end that plugs it in the pipe and I guess stabilise it in flight.  The next morning he showed it in action.  Firstly a 7 ft ironwood pole is not light, but they not only manage to hold it to their mouths but keep it steady with astonishing accuracy with both their hands at the mouth end of the pipe.  No supporting it half way along.  Strong wrists.  The fire hardened end of the dart is dipped in poison (extracted from a tree sap, not frogs like in the Amazon), the stopper placed on the other end, stuffed in the pipe, a barely audible ‘fut’ and the dart vanishes.  I couldn’t see where it went but they claim good accuracy up to 20 or 30 m.  And I believe them.  No wonder I saw so little wildlife.  This was another thing that occurred to me up on the ridge.  I’d heard no gibbons, or even squirrels in the last 3 days.  This area was pretty heavily populated by Punan, and they’d lived there for 100’s years.  They are very efficient hunters and so it’s no wonder that there was so little around.  I do think that it was partially because we were making a lot of noise and walking along the river beds with a restricted view, but I saw remarkably little wildlife.  Orang utans haven’t been seen in this area for at least a decade, and rhinos not in a generation.  On the contrary unlike in some logging concessions birds were abundant.  Sitting up on the ridge 2 of the best calls in Borneo rang out around us, the maniacal laughter of Helmeted Hornbill and the echoing double whistle of the Great Argus pheasant.  The latter is a spectacular bird with 1m long peacock like tail, that is absurdly difficult to see.  These exotic Indiana Jones backing sounds were then joined by the Short Billed crow, which rather ruins the image with it’s typical corvid caw.  Over the top of the ridge we then dropped down into the other watershed.  I paused for another failed attempt to get GPS reading at a gap, only to be joined by 2 Rajah Brooke’s Birdwing butterflies.  10cm across and dancing around in the sun around me.

And then it was back down into the rivers.  Scrabbling over and under innumerable tree falls, down cascades and through waste deep pools.  I was beginning to notice the lack of fish too.  A short while later I realised why.  We came across a gaharu collectors' camp.  Gaharu is an aromatic resin that’s produced by a few tree species when they are infected by a certain fungus.  It’s used as incense in Arabia and has in the last 10 years become especially valuable.  When I was up river in December I was told that the best quality stuff could be sold to traders at 1,300 dollars per Kg.  Apparently with the war the price is down to 300 dollars, but that’s still pretty good money.  Almost all the gaharu close the villages was collected years ago and so now people travel huge distances, far into the forest looking for it.  They stay for months at a time and scour every inch.  Almost all of this is now done by people from East Java and Lombok.  They hear stories of riches “Hussien’s brother’s neighbour’s son found a single tree with 100 million Rp of Gaharu in it” and come to find their fortune.  Unfortunately they are not quite to forest savvy as the Punan and as well as carrying 30 kg of rice into the forest with them, they rely on fishing.  Frequently with poison.  So now even in seemingly remote streams the fish are virtually absent.  This time we stopped for a break with 2 Javanese guys to have coffee and sit out a rain shower.  They were clearly astonished to see me.  “So you are doing this walk and you’re not even going to look for Gaharu”.  The contrast with the Punan camp was startling.  They had a 8m long hut, with stretcher like cloth beds, many more pots and pans, and instant noodle wrappers, dead batteries and coffee sachets littering the ground.  And certainly no dogs.  The rain eased and all three of us were clearly glad to get away from there.  Another couple of hours river walking and we reached our next camp.  An old abandoned Punan camp, and leech central.  We hadn’t really carried much in the way of shelter, and so as we lay under our skimpy tarp (10 years on from being a ground sheet on a desert island in Tanzania) we hoped it wouldn’t rain.  They then asked about the war.  Why it was happening, how big is Iraq, why is England wanting to fight Iraq.  All the questions I couldn’t answer, and all rather surreal to be talking about it in the middle of nowhere with a couple of Punan.

In the end we lucked out and it didn’t rain.  This was the point where my guides were to turn back.  They wanted to get back to looking for gold and said that it was only a short walk to the main river, where I could get lift to one of the villages.  So we settled up, I handed over all the rice and tins that I didn’t want to carry.  And went our own ways.  They were good people, and I was lucky to find them.  If nothing else I’ve given them something to talk about with their mates.  We parted ways, them heading back me on to the Kelai.  They said it’d be an easy hour to the river.  Easy  - no.  There were no doubt short cuts and things, but I couldn’t find them and so scrambled along the banks, over rocks and around tree falls.  I never fell and hurt myself, but it was kind of risky.  And 1 hour, my arse.  I swore and cursed the bastards for lying.  They clearly didn’t want to do what was a bitch of a walk.  When the banks were shallow or sandy it was OK.  It was the rocky sections with the tough vegetation that was the bitch.  The only entertaining bit was after about 3 hours meeting some Gaharu collectors coming up stream.  They simply could not comprehend that somebody would be out in the forest alone.  Let alone a westerner.  But at least they told me that it was only another 1 ½ hours.  And it was, and was easier too.  I got a chance to look at the forest and animal tracks.  Finally the river became still and deep.  I waded along the bank thinking of Humph in African Queen, only I didn’t have the love of Katherine Hepburn to keep me going.  I had to scramble along the bank, made greasy by the recent mud dropped by the flood, clambered under yet another tree fall and there in front of me was the Kelai.  After all the time on the small rivers, this was suddenly a very large river.  I’d only been in the woods for 3 days but I had that real sense of agoraphobia.  But also elation.  Maybe it wasn’t the toughest trek in the world, but it felt great to be there, to have actually done the trek between the two rivers, something I’d been talking about doing since the moment I got to East Kal.  So I waded down into the river.  Rinsed my smelly t-shirt, laid it out in the sun and waited for a boat to pass to take me back to the real world.

Sangalaki, April 2003.

The sun rose in a clear sky, the island was at its best.  I had arrived the night before with another diver called, appropriately enough, Konrad.  It had been a hot day on the way out, too hot, and we didn’t really appreciate it.  We had managed to get a short warm up dive in that night, lighthouse reef.  There is interesting growth on the pylons of the lighthouse and we dropped right onto a cool big fat nudibranch.  But it also started the trend of minor problems that seemed to go in a rotation.  Konrad’s fin strap snapped and we had to go back for some more.  Next Andreas’ gauge blew, back we went, then I went in without my computer.  And so forth.  Each time until the end, when Ramsay joined us the problems became gradually more benign and it just got to be something of a joke.

It’s almost a cliché how stunning the island is.  An oval of white sand near 1 km in radius.  One can walk around the island in about 20 minutes counting the tractor tracks of the green turtles that came up to nest the previous night.  It is not covered in desert island palm trees but a Lord of the Flies jungle.  It’s too small to hold much wildlife, but the dive lodge has done a good job at minimising their impact and one can see a few things.  Large monitor lizards patrol the rubbish for rats and Tabon Scrub-fowl charge around like road-runner.  These are a species of megapodes, a predominately Australasian family of birds.  Sangalaki is one of the Westernmost outposts for this family, one of the few places west of Wallace’s line where they are found.  The family is famous for their nesting habits.  They don’t make nest, but lay the eggs in mound in the ground where they burry them.  Rotting vegetation is piled on top and the heat generated by its decomposition incubates the eggs.  The island is ringed by coral about 600m offshore, and on still mornings the view is stunning.  The shallow waters are pale aquamarine contrasting with the dark blue of the deeper water at the reef edge.  There is only one dive lodge on the island, and this time Konrad and I were the only guests.  With the triple impact of the Bali bomb, then fear of anti-western reaction to the War and now SARS has really hurt them.  Amazing really considering how much it has to offer : the best coral in Borneo, the largest green turtle nest site in South-east Asia, resident Manta rays AND the freaky jelly-fish lake on Kakaban.

Thursday morning’s dive was an awesome one too.  Andreas the diminutive dive master from Flores was on fire, finding things everywhere we looked.  The dive site is called Manta Avenue and I’ve not really thought much of it before, but this time it was packed with cool stuff.  We dropped in and within seconds were watching an unusually tame blue-spot stingray cruise around over the sandy bottom.  I was thinking that now would be a good time for its large cousin to swim by.  30 seconds later I look up as a smallish (ie 6 ft diameter) manta swims by.  The celaphic lobes that curve out from the head to guide plankton into its mouth when feeding were curled up and shone silver in the sunlight.  It was clearly not concerned by us and not feeding, it just carried on in it’s own way, swam by and disappeared into the gloom.  And the dive just got better from there.  Konrad and I were spotting sea slugs and all the crazy coloured reef fish while Andreas was finding everything else.  A superbly camouflaged scorpion fish sitting on a coral head.  A small barnacle encrusted hawksbill turtle drifted by.  A yellow leaf-scorpionfish sitting quietly in a crevice swaying gently like an autumnal leaf in the wind.  A large, dare I say inquisitive, cuttlefish hung in the water next to us constantly changing colour from white to brown, spotted to striped, the colours moving and fluxing all over its body.  Towards the end Andreas pulled out the stops finding all manner of funky crustaceans : Goby–shrimp digging their burrows under the watchful eye of their companion shrimp–goby, a spindly legged red furry thing that did its best to avoid being seen, that was later identified as an ‘orangutan crab’, a mantis shrimp trundling along the sand brightly coloured and packing a mean punch, and a beautiful pink and white porcelain crab hiding under a large purple anemone (who’s resident anemone fish were also a little non-plussed about having us poke around).  We surfaced on such a high, and it was a dive that was a little hard to beat in the next 3 days.  But we still had some good dives, and in the end I saw pretty much everything.  Other highlights included a big bad-ass 1 m great barracuda hanging in the water eying us warily as we swam passed eying it warily, a black ghost pipefish – like a feathery straightened out seahorse swimming upside-down trying to disguise itself as a piece of seaweed, and a mandarin fish.  I’d seen some photo’s of one of these about 8 months ago and since then had become slightly obsessed with seeing one.  They are tiny, rarely come out in the open and are coloured the whole rainbow in swirls and blotches, like Paisley on acid.  Finally on an otherwise mediocre night dive we got to see one hiding in a little hole in the stag-horn coral.

One of Sangalaki's specialities is the large population of resident Manta rays.  And the great thing about them is that the best way to see them is by snorkelling.   You don't waste a dive, and instead of sitting around between dives filling in your dive log, or exchanging dive stories, you can swim around on the surface with some damn big fish.  When the current runs right a slick of plankton forms along the surface.  The Mantas, some times up to 40 of them line up, swimming against the current with their mouths wide open filtering the plankton out of the water with special features on their gills.  All one needs to do is lie in the water in the middle of this line and watch them come right at you.  Initially it's a little spooky.  Some of them are huge, 3 or 4 metres across and having them swim right at you is quite a shock.  But you soon realise that they are not in the slightest aggressive and at the last moment they sense you and swim down and under you.  Every so often a large all black one swims by looking just like one of those menacing US stealth bombers.  These however are far more graceful. For such a big fish they are amazingly mobile.  They glide through the water swooping and flipping to avoid snorkelers.

Ramsay had arrived on Friday and so that night we went to look for the turtles.  It was either that or watch more of CNN’s coverage of the fall of Baghdad.  Every night of the year up to 20 female green turtles haul themselves up the beach to nest just above the high water line.  It is though that up to 5,500 females nest in the Derawan islands each year, the vast majority on Sangalaki.  They are quite flighty when they huff and puff up the beach and so we wait until they are already laying their 100 or so eggs.  It seems like hard work.  These females are about 1 m or so long and must weigh a hell of a lot.  they are designed for swimming and not for climbing up a beach, digging a 70 cm hole and then filling it in again.  They wheeze and huff all the time, to the point that I've sometimes wondered if they're going to make it.  You are guaranteed to see them each night, I even had one digging it’s nest right in front of my cabin one night.  Similarly most evenings one can watch the tiny hatchlings struggle out of the sand, and make their way down to the sea looking all the world like clockwork toys.

Ramsay was there for the weekend.  He hadn’t dived for a year or so, so we decided to break him in gently.  We forked out the extra bucks and made a trip out to Maratua.  This is the only island in the area that I hadn’t previously dived.  It lies on the very edge of the continental shelf, next stop Sulawesi but with a 2,500 m deep trench in between.  The island is like a large horse-shoe.  We came around the south west point and then followed the arm up.  Avoiding the shallow sandy lagoon.  Passed a couple of small, pretty grim looking villages, and some holding pens for live groupers.  The locals catch these and hold them.  Every so often large boats come along and buy them to take to Hong Kong.  Here they are sold for 100’s of dollars to people who want really fresh fish.  I have to admit they are damn tasty but now have stopped eating them as they have been seriously over fished.  It was a long sunny boat ride out to the site, a channel at the end of the eastern arm.  When the conditions are right a strong current flows up this channel from deep water, drawing in big fish from all around.  There are tales of incredible dives when people saw 100’s of barracuda, sharks and rays.  Unfortunately we were there on a neap tide and the currents were not predicted to be strong.  The plan was to drop off the boat and sink straight down the coral wall to about 30m.  Drift along at this depth until the entrance to the channel where we move up a little shallower and hang out and wait for the show to begin.  Ramsay looked cool and calm as I kept an eye on him on the way down.  We’d joked that it was his turn for something to happen.  At about 20m I turned around to see if things were OK and noticed him fiddling with his mask.  He pointed out that the strap had come loose and was struggling to feed it back through.  I stopped, turned and caught hold of him.  Thought about aborting the dive, and certainly thought that we should move up to shallower waters to deal with this, but then thought sod it.  I indicated that I was going to take off his mask and hoped that he realised what I was doing.  Konrad came in behind him and grabbed him to stop him from accidentally shooting off to the surface and I set about fiddling with the mask strap.  All I could think was “Ramsay, don’t panic.  Edward, do not drop this sodding mask”.  Thankfully the strap was easy to reconnect and in a matter of minutes it was all sorted out.  Ramsay cleared his mask of water and remained amazingly cool.  In over 100 dives that was the first time that anything had gone remotely wrong.  It was never dangerous, only it might have led to us abandoning the dive.  Afterwards thinking about it I was pleased at how Ramsay had remained calm, and at how smoothly we’d dealt with the situation.  The sort of thing that reminds you why the first rule of diving is never dive alone, and that you simply can’t beat experience.  I’m sure that a couple of years ago I’d have freaked slightly too, but I felt totally calm and comfortable down there and so it was relatively easy to deal with.

And after that the dive was pretty good too.  The current wasn’t really running, but it was still an interesting dive.  I know I would have regretted leaving Berau having not dived Maratua, so I also don’t mind the expense.  It was very different to the Sangalaki dives.  The mouth of the channel forms a sort of bowl.  We waited on the south side and watched the fish swim by.  A few chevron barracuda circled overhead, 4 or 5 white-tip reef-sharks cruised around on the lip of the channel and every so often a school of tuna or trevellies would zoom passed in the deep blue water, followed at one point by a white-spotted eagle ray.  A large open water ray (thought smaller than the mantas) with a large head and protruding nose that makes it look somewhat like a bat.  After 15 mins of this we turned and headed up the channel.  The strong currents had scoured this of most coral, and after the rich coral gardens of Sangalaki it looked like a desert.  But on closer inspection the rock was covered in little molluscs, sea squirts and other things with a firm grip on life.

We did two dives here and then returned to Sangalaki for a more relaxing drift across the coral.  Nice contrast and brought the number of shark species seen that day to 3.  Firstly a big fat lazy leopard shark sitting on the bottom doing not much of anything, and then a few moments later sturdy, more sinister looking black-tip reef-shark motored by before turning back for a second look.

The last day we went out to Kakaban.  That failed to disappoint again.  This atoll lies in much deeper water and one almost always has reasonable dives out here.  As was normal the first dive of the day is a deep one on Barracuda point.  Drop off the boat, sink quickly to 35 – 40 m and drift along.  The key is to work your way up as you drift along.  On occasion the current has whipped divers out passed the point and into a wicked down current.  There is even as rope attached to the slope for people to climb back up should this happen.  Thankfully I’ve never been there in those conditions.  It’s always been one of my preferred sites.  The water is clear, and there are regular huge schools of Bluetooth triggerfish and bannerfish surging up and down the slope.  As one comes to the point there’s a good chance of a large school of barracuda tornado-ing in the current.  Great wall dives are only the teaser for Kakaban, which has been described as ‘one of the most unique places in Indonesia’.  The real treat comes in the dive interval.  Normally one has to sit around for a few hours between dives waiting for excess nitrogen to leave the blood.  On Kakaban however one leaves the boat and land on the island.  At one end of a long golden crescent beach on the south side of the island is a board walk.  This climbs steeply up the sharp coralline rock under a canopy of trees that appear to grow directly out of the boulders.  This ridge of raised coral is about 10 m above sea-level, about 100m wide and runs unbroken for maybe 8 Km around the entire island.  It encloses a large brackish lake, about 400Ha in area and up to 11m deep, which one glimpses through gaps in the trees as you reach the far end of the boardwalk.  This lake, commonly known as ‘jellyfish lake’ is apparently anchialine.  Not that I know what that means either.  Let me know if you can find out.  There are a few in Palau in the pacific, but none anywhere near as large or diverse as this one.  There is no known direct link to the sea, but sea water seeps through fissures in the rock.  This is diluted by rainwater and consequently the water in the lake is slightly less salty than the surrounding sea.  It is also reputedly slightly tidal, though I have never noticed any evidence for this.  The lake may have no direct connection to the sea, but it is full of sea life.  Much of which is thought to be endemic to that one lake.  The most famous residents are 4 species of jellyfish.  In the absence of significant predators maybe, they have all lost their stings so it is perfectly safe to swim in the lake.  This dive interval is spent swimming in a world unlike anything I’ve seen anywhere.  It’s more like an artist’s impression of life 300 million years ago.  One of the jellies sits upside down on the plants growing on the muddy bottom near the edge of the lakes, another is tiny and it took me several visits before I noticed them, a third is large (the size of a dinner plate) and transparent making it almost invisible.  The fourth jelly is the most obvious,  It swims in the open water, often in huge numbers.  The experience of swimming in a dense swarm of jellies is quite extraordinary.  They bounce off your mask and you can’t help destroy them with each kick of the fins.  Amazing as the experience of swimming in jellyfish soup is my favourite thing is exploring the mangroves that fringe the lake.  One doesn’t often dive amongst mangrove roots so that alone would be fun.  Here it is just bizarre.  As there is so little tide the stilt roots that normally are exposed at low tides, are completely carpeted in life.  Almost every inch is coated in mussels, brightly colour sponges and tunicates, an endemic white anemone that eats the smaller jellies, and other weird and wonderful life that left me racking my brains trying to remember long lost zoology lectures to work out what order these things are in.  There are unique crabs and shrimp crawling on the roots and an endemic goby one of only a few vertebrates found in the lake darting in and out of the roots.  I happily spend the hour or so dive interval poking around in the mangroves.  So there’s this lake like nothing else on earth, great wall dives, a large population of coconut crabs, and rare birds, and yet the island still has no official protected status.

One has to drag yourself away from the lake and back to do another dive.  Usually along one of the walls on the southern side of the island.  This weekend while we were getting ready for the second dive Ramsay’s gauge hose blew.  Andreas decided to sit it out and hand the reigns over to me.  He thought I’d done it often enough to know what to expect.  Thank god it was an easy wall dive and the Kondrad and Ramsay are good divers.  Still a little stressful all the same.  Who’d want to be a dive guide!  Neither of them had computers and Konrad didn’t even have a watch.  Great wall though, the visibility was better and I just love wall dives.  For one they are easier on the lower back as you can drift along standing up, as it were.  I also just love looking up at the reef.  The silhouettes of the fish and coral outcrops against the sun.  Or looking along at the 6 ft diameter gorgonian (coral) fans with the bright indigo anthias darting in and out of the beams of light.

All in all a very mellow trip with great diving and a hard place to leave, the island is just so beautiful.  Just what I wanted.  And caught some serious rays too.  About bloody time I was beginning to look a little pasty.

East Kalimantan, January 2003.

The morning sun shines up the bay on the mangroves and blue, blue water.  We were near the end of the Sangkurilang peninsula, a large lump of limestone that sticks out of the east of Borneo.  A land of towering karst and few rivers.  Any rain that falls sinks into the rock and seeps along below the surface.  The water emerges near the coast, crystal clear and pure.  At a couple of places just below the our residence fresh water bubbles up out of the rock right into the sea.  We boarded a small fishing vessel and took a long boat ride out through the bay and around the coast.  Looking back into the bay as we left gave us a great view of the forest rising steeply behind the camp.  On the south side of the bay this slope comes right down to the water, a small area of coastal dipterocarp forest still survives fringed by mangrove.  We turned west along the coast, small turtles diving down in front of us.  Eventually we reached a small village with a broken bridge which we needed to get under.  Unfortunately the tide was just a little too high.  We managed to get half the cabin under and then get wedged in, on a rising tide.  At least we were providing plenty of entertainment for the whole village.  After much hum and ha’ing and moving of people to try and weigh the boat down they decided to sod it and break the roof off the cabin.  Took no time and to a big cheer we were though.  From this narrow neck the lagoon opened up.  Surrounded by forest it is probably a hundred meters wide plus at the widest and very shallow, and like all the other inlets, very clear.  We kept on going through into another hidden lagoon at the back.  Just as we were passing into here we disturbed a family of 5 or 6 otters.  They scampered up onto the bank and then turned around to watch us.  They were not spooked at all, we were probably more surprised than them.  Finally they moved on and we carried on into the back.

The word ‘blue’ does not do it justice.  The colour is just too vivid, it is un-natural, it is the colour of copper sulphate and school chemistry lessons. The lagoon was almost perfectly circular, maybe only 20m in diameter.  It was fringed by lush forest and palms but it is the colour of the water that was breathtaking.  I think the only thing I have seen that is similar was way out in the Pacific.  And presumably for similar reasons.  It’s totally clear, crystal clear, no sediment at all.  What added to this though was the reflection of the vegetation, that maybe made it all the more intense. The clarity of the water was almost disturbing. We were reluctant to swim.  It felt like we would be tainting something that looked so pristine.  Finally Ben dived in, and surprised us by reporting that it was fresh water.  It was extremely hard to judge the depth of it and when I swam to the bank it looked like I could stand, about 1m of water.  When I tried to stand I sank, it was 3m deep.  Incredible, as if the jelly-fish lake, and the mantas and the turtles and the orang utans weren’t enough Berau would go and have something else that one can’t help but call unique.  As Jim put it, “we discovered two new shades of blue”.  We didn’t want to leave this prelapsarian setting but had to head back to camp.  On the way back we were momentarily joined by a pod of dolphins and took a diversion into the mangrove.    The boat crept through jade corridors of mangrove.  Rain started falling, deadening the sounds and turning the surface of the water to brushed steel.  Below us in the shallows Green Turtles were grazing on the sea grass.  They were small ones, barely 30cm long, we speculated that this might be where all the turtles from Sangalaki go to school.

The rain settled in and got steadily heavier.  After 15 months in very dry Palu and last winter away I had forgot just how wet the wet season in Borneo can be.  It rained for 24 hours.  Late at night we all got woken by it.  Not by thunder, but by the noise of the rain on the roof, and later by the crashing of falling trees.

The rain finally eased off a little on, just in time for our departure.  On the way back to the town we passed a demonstration.  A large group of dyaks were protesting against the destruction of the forest by a company that was clearing it for a plantation.  They had blockaded a road and had painted signs complaining about the destruction of traditional grave sites and forest resources.  We got out and took some photos and chatted to them a little.  The next day the police came along and arrested nearly 50 of them.  They were loaded in a truck and taken off to Tanjung and put in jail.  Most were released after about 12 hours but they still held 16 for a couple of nights.  A deal had been struck, the village will get financial compensation, $ 11,500 dollars now (they supposedly had originally asked for $150,000 or something) and a fee per ton of wood taken.

As well as telling us about the demo they also asked if we wanted to see the grave of Raja Alam, this translates as King of Nature so we were curious.  We drove around to the back of the village expecting some dramatic dyak grave site only to be confronted by a brand new, very outlandish, tiled pavilion.  All shiny and painted concrete.  But there was a new plaque signed by the Governor of the province and little bit of info.  Turns out he was a national hero.  A local sultan in the 1830’s who took on the Dutch Navy.  There was a dramatic description of how he, armed only with a couple of sticks and some small boats, took on the might of 12 Dutch Corsairs (or something).  Despite the odds he lost and was thrown in prison in Sulawesi for 3 years.  Eventually the Sultan of Gunung Tabor (also in Berau) negotiated his release and he returned a hero.  I think the Dutch then made him Sultan of Sambuliang, just as long as he was a good boy, and he died a couple of years later.  It sounds like something from Joseph Conrad.  And it may well be.  Conrad came to Berau as a merchant sailor in the 1880s.  Parts of Lord Jim are supposed to be set here.  Almyer’s Folly and Outcast of the Islands certainly are and Conrad might have heard these stories of piracy and rebellion.  The area clearly left quite an impression on him.

"the lonely stretches of sparking brown water bordered by the dense and silent forest, whose big trees nodded their outspread boughs gently in the faint, warm breeze - as if in sign of tender but melancholy welcome.  He loved it all: the landscape of brown golds and brilliant emeralds under the dome of hot sapphire; the whispering big trees, the loquacious nipa-palms that rattled their leaves volubly in the night breeze, as is in haste to tell him all the secrets of the great forest behind him.  He loved the heavy scents of blossoms and black earth, that breath of life and death which lingered over his brig in the.. air.. of peaceful nights. "

November 2002

A couple of Sundays ago as I headed to the airport I noticed that is was one those rare days in Jakarta when the haze clears slightly and you can see the volcanoes that run down the spine of Java.  You suddenly realise that these not small mountains are actually damn close and that the haze and pollution in Jakarta really is awful.

I was going to visit a friend called Daz who lives over there, I used to work for him in Sulawesi and earlier this year he did a contract for TNC in East Kalimantan.  He’s now semi-retired in Java.  Over the last 6 years Daz has been putting together gradually a sort of holiday villas / restaurant type of thing.  And basically the place was amazing.  To call it holiday villas doesn’t really paint the right picture.  Daz and his wife (who is from Central Java) have bought 4 Joglos (traditional Javanese houses) and moved them to a plot of land about 30 minutes south of Semarang.

This is real Java and the first time I have seen it.  In all my many trips to the island I rarely got out of Jakarta, and then it was only to Bogor and the mountains behind it.  In 1994 after Krakatau I did get to Jogjakarta for a week or so, but this was as a tourist and I didn’t see much other than the standard sites.  Central Java is generally considered to be the centre for Javan culture,  and is classic Java.  Narrow roads wind their way through the volcanoes, past immaculate terraced rice fields.  Every few kilometres are small villages of brick houses with terracotta pan-tile roofs nestled under durian, mango, rambutan trees.  The fruiting season has was well underway, the trees were laden down and huge piles of fruit lined the road.  It is in this idyllic, clichéd landscape that Daz has built his Joglos.  Back in 97 / 98 when the rupiah was crashing and nobody else much cared for these old traditional houses Daz bought 4 of them in various states of disrepair, dismantled them and moved them to their 5 arces of paddi and orchards.  He has gradually been rebuilding and restoring them and it’s now more or less finished.  These houses are about 60 to 250 years old, and consist of a tall steeply raked pan-tile roof covering an area of about 20 x 20 m.  All 4 main walls are of intricately carved teak and the interior has a large open space with about ¼ partitioned off with another intricate carved teak screen.  Behind this are the bedrooms.  The roof is supported by 4 large teak posts with yet more carvings.  Daz has modernised them slightly by replacing a couple of the walls with windows to allow more light in,  raised them off the ground and given them marble floors (as opposed the traditional dirt), kitchens and bathrooms.  The roof extends over a veranda on 3 sides where you sit, relax and watch the world go by.  It’s up at about 400m above sea level at the foot of a volcano, this takes the edge of the heat and there was pretty much a constant breeze blowing down the valley.  Daz has landscaped them wonderfully so that they are sitting in the middle of their paddi.  The one that I was in was totally surrounded and the only access was along a little stone path that curved it’s way through the maturing crop – the 3rd of the year.  Daz and his family live in one of the Joglos, to which he’s added a modern kitchen and office and things, and the other three he rents out.  All of them are furnished with antique Javanese and Dutch colonial furniture and nik-naks but it is incredibly comfortable.  I would sit on the veranda and chat with Daz, but a lot of the time we would just relax, read and watch the dragonflies hawking over the paddi.  And the butterflies, lots of butterflies.  In one 2 hour period without me really paying attention I saw 10 different types.  A couple of times large flocks (?) of yellow ones would come sweeping down the valley, hundreds passing in an hour or so.  And I slept.  11 hours at night (once I got used to the deafening frogs) and then another 3 hours in the day time.  I was beginning to think that they were putting something in the water.  Or maybe I was exhausted and really needed to catch up.  I had all these plans to get up early and do some birding, but I just couldn’t manage to get my arse out of bed early enough.

Below one of the Joglos they have built a restaurant and extended it around 3 sides of a courtyard with a gallery.  Daz’s other great passion is collecting Javanese painting and Asian ceramics.  Last year whenever he used to come to Palu, you couldn’t meet with him at night without being interrupted by a stream of people coming to sell him things.  He now finally has an amazing collection of Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai and Indonesian pottery some of which is absurdly old.  Back at a time when celts and picts were throwing mud at each other Asia was creating some beautiful ceramics, something I for one was never taught in history. 

 

I rather reluctantly dragged myself back to Jakarta in time for Lebaran, or Id ul Fitri.  This is the Muslim festival that celebrates the end of the fasting month of Rahmadan.  It’s the biggest festival of the year, equivalent in importance to Christmas.  In Indonesia the tradition is for everybody to go home.  People will travel for days, the full length of the archipelago to be home for Lebaran.  In the days leading up to it the television news is dominated with updates on traffic jams, ferries and trains.  This occupies most of the broadcast, pushing news about the arrest of a key suspect in the Bali bombing case, or the peace deal in Aceh into the ‘and finally’ sections.  The holiday officially lasts a couple of days and is very social.  People dress up in their finest to visit their neighbours and friends to ask forgiveness for sins they may have committed in the last year.  Each household spends days preparing tons of traditional cakes (Kwe) that are brought out when visitors call around.  These sweet, sticky, gooie, brightly coloured cakes are washed down with equally sweet, brightly coloured drinks or tooth rottingly sweet coffee, and pleasantries and gossip are exchanged.

In the last 4 ½ years I have managed to miss most of this.  In 98 I arrived just after it.  There were 2 in 1999 (they are about 11 months apart), I was skiing during the first one and in Pontianak for the second (on both occasions Marc had the gut busting task of visiting all our friends in the villages near Gunung Palung).  2000 was just after Christmas and I spent it diving off Sulawesi,  2001 I was home again, and this year I was to spend it in Jakarta.  Because surprisingly few of the 10 million of so people who live there, actually come from Jakarta it was a weird, but rather nice time to be there.  Everybody leaves town.  The streets empty, the air clears and the place is dead.  The only problem is that most places to eat close for the holiday period, so you either have to cook, which I’ve forgotten how to do, or eat at expensive hotels.  The first day of Lebaran, last Friday, was slow.  I sunbathed, read and caught up on e-mails.  Marc had decided to get in the spirit of things and organised an open house / Id ul Fitri party for the Saturday.  He had bought most of the kwe but decided he wanted to try his hand at making our favourite.  Sticky rice cooked in coconut milk inside little woven palm leaf packets.  This was always our favourite in West Kalimantan, and he assumed it was a standard Indonesian kwe.  Well it turns out not to be.  None of Marc’s friends in Jakarta knew what he was talking about.  In the end he persuaded a couple of them to come over and help make it anyway – a half Chinese, half Betawai Budhist and a Christian Minahasan, maybe not the best people to make traditional Malay kwe.  By Friday lunch time they had the pre-made palm packets (there was no way we could have made them) and 3 Kg of sticky rice.  All they were lacking was the coconut milk, a large pan to boil them in, the 12 hours to cook them and let them cool and any clue what they were doing.  To try and solve this problem I telephoned Lisa in Samarinda to ask for instructions.  Got these but a while later Marc reminded me that much as we love Lisa, we have also eaten food that she’s cooked.  Marc called Lisa’s mum.  He also went to round up the remaining ingredients.  They finally started preparing the food at about 5 pm.  Initially I helped out, fiddling with the packets and lamely attempting to fill them with rice.  I quickly realised that I was a spare wheel and had planned to see Paul anyway so I made my excuses.  It was dumping it down with rain and after 30 min’s of calling I couldn’t get a cab.  So I grabbed my waterproof and decided to walk out and try and find a cab on the streets.  It was weird.  It was only 6:30 and the place was deserted.  Normally at that time the 500 m from Marc’ s place to the main road is completely grid-locked, that day I think I was passed by maybe only 3 cars.  It was as if it was 3 am.  Somebody else commented that it would be like this in England on Christmas day, true, but the difference was that there was nobody around.  It wasn’t just that there were no cars, there were no people.  Nobody walking around, and most of the houses were closed up and dark.  Eventually I gave up trying to get a cab and took a Bajai – a motorised rickshaw.  Ricketty, deafening modes of transport that must poison their drivers with the clouds of lead, carbon monoxide and lord knows what other emissions.  Normally I wouldn’t take one of these as far as Paul’s but the roads were empty and it was fun.  Bizarre to see JKT so quiet, and I always like the heavy rain.  It was hammering down on the road, swamping the drains and the crap canals flooding back over the roads and floor of the bajai.  Got to Paul’s, went to eat Lamb chops at a local hotel and gossiped.  We then continued the conversation over a couple of woefully bad games of pool and I headed back at midnight.  Just as Marc was finishing up the kwe.  7 hours on.

Marc and I were up early on Saturday to clean the house and prepare things.  A colleague of Marc’s came down from Bogor with bags full of more Kwe and we sat and waited for people to arrive.  And waited.  And waited.  By about mid day I was beginning to feel a little embarrassed.  It looked like nobody would turn up.  Then the rush started.  Scott came in from Samarinda, Paul turned up, Marc’s boss arrived and Salim came down from Bogor.  So at least there were now some guests, even if all 7 of us were from TNC and Smartwood.  Then things started to pick up.  And it got quite interesting to watch.  After having to spent (endured ?) 2 Lebarans in the villages around Gunung Palung Marc decided that this was the model he wanted to use.  Or was this a chance at revenge.  So he bought the crappest coffee he could find, and the sweetest, reddest chemical drink.  The only difference was that most of the kwe that he’d bought was of a marginally more palatable standard than the typical village kwe.  With the possible exception of the home made stuff, which didn’t quite turn out as planned.  And so what proved interesting for the rest of the day was watching how people reacted to this.  Most of the people who turned up were friends of Marc’s from the weekly games of Ultimate Frisbee.  This was a mix of long-term expats and some relatively well-to-do Indonesians.  A well-educated, worldly, interesting group of people.  But it was also clear which of them rarely left Jakarta.  Those who had travelled to the remoter parts of Indonesia embraced it all and tucked in, trying all the Kwe and sieving off the coffee grinds with their teeth.  Others, and most of the Indonesians, politely nibbled at the Kwe before sneaking it onto the table, balked at the coffee and said that the red stuff was too sweet.  There was almost universal confusion over Marc’s homemade Kwe.  It turns out that most people didn’t know what to do with it.  They thought it was some savoury dish, badly cooked lonton or something and one of the most universal questions was ‘where’s the curry to go with it?’.  Admittedly it wasn’t quite as coconutty and sweet as it should be, but people had trouble believing us when we said that it’s supposed to be eaten alone.  It was a fun afternoon.  I think that in a way Lebaran can be quite lonely for ex-pats.  No matter how long you’ve been in Indonesia, even those married to Indonesians and have children etc. I think that it’s a time that reminds you that you are alien to this culture.  Marc’s bash was a great chance to get involved with the Lebaran traditions, but at the same time have fun with people from a similar cultural back ground.  By about 7 we were all just about kwe’d out and in need of real food.  The only place open that we could find was the local Mex-Tex restaurant.  Complete with wooden cacti and sombreros on the wall, and packed to the rafters with all varieties of the Kemang ex-pat community : miners in jeans leering at the waitresses, mixed couples with screaming kids, surly western 16 year olds from the International school drinking beer and smoking the local cigarettes and a large party of cool, sophisticated, beautiful people who work for a variety of terribly worthy conservation and social development NGOs.

After a rather tasty but surprisingly un-spicy burrito we headed back to Marc’s for the final stage of the party, Miss World.  Prime time, evening entertainment Live from London broadcast to all of Asia thanks to Rupert.  And what a truly terrible event it was.  And  something of a let down.  The hosts were a couple of nobodies who thought they were hilarious, and inadvertently were, two interludes for some bands that nobody had heard, and the event itself.  There we were all ready with our sweepstake on the winner, and bets on which would be the most common phrase used.  And none of it happened.  No swim suit section, no nifty skill, no section where they tell us what they want.  In the end not even the person who had drawn ‘world peace’ got to win, let alone HIV, land mines, something to do with helping children or wanting to invade Iraq (odds on favourite for what the contestant from USA would say).  They were barely allowed to say anything, they walked and smiled a lot.  It started off with 92 people, include representatives from such widely recognised countries Gibraltar and Curacao, none of us were too sure where that is, which was kind of the same for Wales.  Then without any explanation but through a tortuously lengthy process 20 semi-finalists were selected.  For these we got to see little film clips of them doing interesting things in Nigeria, which presumably they got to film while 200 people were being killed.  From these we learnt absolutely nothing except that they had clearly not been advised on what sort of clothing was culturally sensitive.  After this another 10 people were dispatched and we got the ten finalists.  They had about 20 seconds of camera time to say something, none of which was especially memorable except from the contestant from Norway who proudly produced a cuddly toy pig and told us that it was her mascot and it was called Bacon Piggy.  She pulled it ’s tail and it squealed and wobbled.  Another glorious lack of cultural sensitivity.  After these film clips they were asked inane questions to which they gave bland answers.  Here the Spanish speaking contestants suffered from the incompetence of the translators.  Now maybe I’m wrong but I thought it would be quite easy to find Spanish translators in London.  Well they managed to find two people,  one totally failed to do any translation, and the other got it all wrong.  Personally I think it was this stage that robbed it from Miss Peru, but it we also suspect that just possibly it was a done deal.  Because when they finally rushed to the end and announced the winner it was….. Miss Turkey.  Whose only high point was rather a nifty bit of belly dancing, but was a cunning, politically correct choice.  So she received the horrific blue crystal crown and we all waited with baited breath to see what she was going to say, whether the host would ask her if W could use the bases yet, whether she thought the Kurds should be allowed an autonomous homeland, why exactly was she wearing such stupid boots.  But alas the credits rolled and it was all over, people left and I did the washing up.

 

Sunday, as Marc went looking for Dim Sum and frisbee I met up with Linda and we headed back to Berau.  A long trip. Firstly the plane was late, then we had to call in to a Balikpapan hotel to drop some things off and where we hoped to get a taxi up to Samarinda.  Amazingly enough there were none to be found.  This was a major hotel and we had to wait 30 mins for a taxi.  Even then the ride took for ever.  The car had to get fuel, find a friend to accompany the driver back to Balikpapan and then the Hell Drive itself just dragged on and on.  Most of the time the driver was fairly cautious.  But every so often he’d have some sort of aberration and decide to over-take a truck while going up hill, around a blind corner with his lights turned off.  At each of these moments all conversation between Linda and I would halt, we’d suck a breath and stifle a scream until we were safely around the corner again.  I hate that drive.  But eventually at 9 pm, 10 hours after leaving JKT we were back in Samarinda.  Back to the smelly market and running the gauntlet of the gaggle of school girls when I walk home from the office.  Back to the annoying trend of the moment, a couple of balls on strings that people young and old rattle.  They just clack the balls together in order to create an incredibly annoying noise that just makes me want to grab their balls and shove them down their throat.  But as we were pulling into Samarinda we also saw a curious sight, a blind man guiding 3 other blind people.  Not something you see everyday and for some reason it reminded me TNC’s work in East Kalimantan.

Go to Daz's Joglos

Samarinda, October 2002

I take micro-busses to the office in the morning and, as I need the exercise, walk back. It’s always an entertaining trip through Samarinda.  “Hello misters” everywhere of course and inevitably one has to run the gauntlet of girls just out of school.  Best way to deal with it is to keep your head down and try and get through that one without too many cat calls.  Then one has to pass what Paul accurately called the stinky market.  I must actually explore inside there one day but the outside is daunting enough.  Daytime there are women on the street selling huge bunches of bananas.  Oddly after dark these change into a long row of tables with chicken carcases on them.  No ice, just a table and some very stiff looking plucked chickens.  They smell too and I can’t quite work out why there aren’t more flies.  I don’t think I really want to know either.  Also saw an odd thing today.  A typically petite Indonesian girl in a green hijab brandishing a particularly large drill.  Just didn’t quiet look right.

And my other point of the day is WHY do people have to have the reverb function on on any PA in Indonesia.  So I can slightly understand why loud is good, and who did that ever do any harm to.  But reverb, it just sounds so stupid.

A couple of weeks ago we had a huge storm.  Actually it was the last real rain that we’ve had, the dry season has run really late, raising fears of 1998 type fires.  I was at the Hotel Mesra and was woken by it in the middle of the night.  A huge lightning storm right on top of the city.  The bang of thunder when it is right on top is amazingly loud and kept on waking me up with a hell of shock.  The cool thing about it was that the shock wave from the thunder kept on setting off car alarms in the hotel car park.

The city is nearly finished on its beatification program.  This has meant spending 40 Billion Rp on building a giant stump just next door to our office.  It has taken months to build and I was joking when I predicted it would be a stump in honour of Kaltim’s vast forests.  Now it’s done and we have a 6m high, 8m diameter concrete stump with 2 rather odd looking dyaks dancing on top of it.  Their legs are too long and they have tiny heads.  They also look like they are both either about to fall over backwards or are squatting to take a dump.  This wonderful monument is next to the big hole.  Another mystery project which is simply a large pond type of thing.  It’s nothing sensible like a reservoir but it’s just lake that fills and empties with the flow of the Mahakam and appears to do nothing to stop the floods every time it rains.  We had a little competition to work out what it’s there for.  The current front runners are that it’s a mosquito breeding program or a carbon sequestration project  (all the algae that grows in the stagnant water must be sucking up tons of carbon).  But now the beatification has reached here too.  They’ve built a delightful fountain in the middle, complete with 2 Mahakam river dolphins spitting water.  As with the stump we suspect that in a few years these will be the only river dolphins anywhere near the river.

Berau, May 2002.

The road to the Kelei river was supposed to be the ‘trans-Kalimantan highway’ which theoretically would take us all the way to Banjarmasin on the south coast of Borneo and had been planned to go all the way through to Ponti.  In this part of the world it was a dusty (or muddy) single track logging road, very grand.  But I was pleasantly surprised to see how much forest there was.  After 2 ½ years in West Kalimantan I’d become accustomed to never seeing any forest, but here there is plenty.  It’s in various levels of disturbance from open burnt patches to areas that still haven’t been logged, legally or illegally.  And it was pretty spectacular, this really is the Borneo of lore, a rolling landscape of lowland dipterocarp forest, a couple of times there were breaks and you could see forest stretching off to the horizon in all directions.  The Regency is still 95% forested.  Now this is not to say that this is all pristine forest, almost all of it has been distributed to logging concessions, most of whom are doing a pretty good job of trashing the place.

The road ran up and over several ridges before dropping down to the Kelei river.  Spanned, as ever, by a girder bridge made by some Australian company.  Everywhere I’ve been in Indonesia I’ve seen these bridges, be it across the Kapuas in Ponti or at Teluk Malano, or across the Lariang in Sulawesi.  How much must have that company paid to Soeharto et al to have the contract to supply every damn bridge in the country…  A little further up stream we came to the village of Long Gi.  Almost all the Dyak villages are called ‘Long somethingorother’, not as I assumed because they used to have Long houses there, but because in some Dyak language (I would guess Iban or Kenyah or something) ‘Long’ is a river confluence, and most villages are at confluences.  We chartered a couple of ketintings to take us from Long Gi to Long Duhung, the nest village upstream.  Ketintings are basically your standard sampan (dug out canoe) like we used to go up river to Gunung Palung, but with what looks like a garden strimmer/brush basher fixed on the back.  And from the speed of some of them you’d have thought they still had the nylon cord on the end and not something sensible like a propeller.

The three hour trip upstream was great.  Again this was he sort of thing I’d expected in Borneo, and have never seen.  A broad shallow fast flowing river with rainforest towering on either side.  The last hour was particularly good as the river ran through some protection forest that remained un logged.  This was real into the heart of Borneo stuff, sitting in the prow of a motored canoe driven by a Dyak through untouched forest.  Huge trees on either side and the obligatory hornbills flying overhead.  As the area is inhabited entirely by Dyaks I was expecting it to be all hunted out.  Back in Gunung Palung there were plenty of animals to be seen as the area predominately Muslim Malayu who don’t hunt.  Around here hunting and fishing is the primary source of protein and I was expecting to see nothing, not even a squirrel.  But again I was pleasantly proved wrong, not by anything spectacular like an orang utan or a rhino as those have been hunted out.  But by a group of proboscis monkeys.  This was something of a surprise as these have always thought to be an almost exclusively coastal species, but recent work has shown that they can be found way inland up rivers and that the fact that they are only found on the coast now is that the coast has been inhabited by malayu who haven’t hunted them out.  I’d just 2 days beforehand read a paper about this, and there infront of me, a couple of hundred Km up river was a family group happily living in riparian and lowland forest.

Long Duhung is a small village, only 23 families in about 20 little wooden houses on the bank of the river.  They do have electricity and a communal TV with satellite dish that was provided by a local logging company.  When we were there the sound had failed on the TV, but lots of people still happily gathered around the TV every night watching whatever was on in total silence.  The community is almost exclusively Punan (or Puna), who were once the only truly nomadic hunter-gathering group on Borneo.  Their plight has been quite controversial in Malaysia where they have been forcibly resettled off logging concessions and into villages.  What is less well known is that there are many more Punan in Indonesian Borneo most of whom were resettled in villages back in the 60’s and 70’s as part of the central governments attempts to stamp it’s own Java-centric culture on the whole archipelago.  I didn’t really get a chance to talk to them about this much, some of the older people had been born into the nomadic life and must have seen quite some changes, from nomadic hunter-gatherer to satellite TV and pornographic VCDs.  The are still some obvious hangings on from their culture however, things that became very clear when we ran through the exercise.

TNC has this system called Site Conservation Planning (SCP) that it likes to be used at all its sites.  Basically it’s a planning tool whereby anybody who knows anything about the area sits down in a room, works out what going wrong and how to fix it.  A kind of threat analysis really but all dressed up with whistles and bells, a new name an a fancy computer program.  This works fine in the US where is was developed, but we found in Sulawesi that it doesn’t work so well when you are talking to local villagers in the area and don’t always see the world in the same was a bunch of bearded sandal wearing conservation biologists.  So we adapted the system.  Took the computer away and did it all with big bits of coloured paper and in this case a lot of it was in the Punan language.  For those who know what I’m talking about, we basically combined it with fairly standard PRA techniques.  As I say we did this around Lore Lindu, but I never really got a chance to see it in action, and never really understood how it worked.  Also unfortunately we did far to late in the game for it to make much difference to TNC in Sulawesi.  But they are trying it again here, and I have to say I was impressed.  It worked really well, didn’t seem too forced and the information we got should be very useful in helping to design what TNC does here.  An added bonus that I’d never realised before was that it also works as an tool to raise awareness.  Getting the whole village to sit around and talk about what it happening in their local environment made them sit up and realise that it was getting screwed up.  I got the impression that this was the first time that they’d ever really come to think about it and where it all might be going.  But what stuck me most when we went through things was how much theses were forest people.  Massively in contrast to the Malayu we worked with at GP.  There we struggled to try and get them to value the forest as something more than just a source of timber that they can sell.  Here we asked what was the most important thing to them and they almost universally answered ‘the forest’.  It’s where they get building materials, fruit, medicine and meat.  They saw the biggest threats to that was from the logging companies and wanted them to be controlled.  But what was also encouraging was that that they also admitted that they too had an impact, they saw they there were fewer animals now because they’d hunted them and there was less forest now. Additionally they thought it was a problem that they had to clear the forest for agriculture.  This was an area that showed their culture.  The Punan were never farmers, it’s only since they have been settled that they’ve started farming, and they are not very good at it.  They only really grow rice and have never had any assistance in that.  One curious thing was that unlike other dyak groups they also didn’t keep domestic pigs.  They were hunters and if you needed meat you’d go and hunt it, it seemed like it had never occurred to them that you might be able to keep pigs in the village.  When we were talking about the problems of farming I asked them if they had any adat, (traditional, ‘tribal law’) concerning agriculture they said that they didn’t.  All their adat was to do with hunting and collecting things from the forest.  They’d never had need for rules about amount of land that could be cleared and how long it should be left before using again.  Other Dyak groups are famous for their big harvest festivals.  The Punan don’t have these, they’ve only been farming rice for 30 years.

The consultations we carried out went on for two days and the whole village turned up, from 3 month old babies to an old woman with heavy traditional ear rings that had stretched her ear lobes.  Atun who ran it was very good.  She put up with screaming children and rain so heavy that the noise on the tin roof was so loud that you couldn’t talk to the person next to you.  She and the other TNC person Agus had amazing rapport with the communities and it was really great to watch them work.  I just hope that all the work they did gets used.  I get the impression that Scott sees SCP as something that has been forced on him by TNC and is not really any use.  I used to think this too, until I actually paid attention to what it is and saw that it has the potential to be a really useful tool.

When it was over for the day you’d go down to the river to bathe and the generator would start up and everybody would disappear to watch their silent TV.  And by ten everybody would be in bed.  Bed meaning a woven mat on the floor.  When I was packing I thought, do I need my therma-rest – nah they’re bound to have mattresses.  Ah did I regret that, I got used to it by the third night but initially I didn’t get a whole load of sleep basically lying right on the wooden floor.  And then 5:30 somebody would start banging on a hollow log to wake everybody up to get on with things.  I reality the first things up were the dogs,  10’s of them that run around the village all day.  These aren’t your usual mangy Indonesian dogs, but healthy lean hunting dogs that look rather like small dingoes, which may well be what they are.  Anyway at 5:30 they all let go for a big old howl.  It’s quite amazing, if it wasn’t 5:30, they all get going and then after about 10 seconds all stop in unison and wander off.  For that brief moment they look like one pack, for the rest of the day they are constantly snapping and growling at each other.

Food was kind of limited.  The usual diet of rice, instant noodles and fish, and maybe some veg (usually ferns collected from the forest).  One night we got meat though.  Very exciting. “Hmmm what meat is this?”  “Sun bear, the kepala adat shot it, he’s very brave”  too right.  And it was fairly tasty, less chewy than I’d have expected and very lean.  As we were finishing that off somebody came around and asked us if we wanted to see some dances.  They were apologetic that the person who looked after the traditional costumes was away but they still would show us some if we wanted.  Sounded good.  So went off to the village hall, turned off the silent TV and waited.  The person introducing it said that normally when they do these dances it’s for special occasions and it goes on for about 24 hours.  But they had things to do tomorrow so they’d only do a little and it’ll only take a couple of hours.  I have to admit I was kind of dreading even that, having sat though Gamalan, and shadow puppets and Balinese dancing I know that I don’t have much patience for this sort of thing.  I was wrong though.  It was a lot of fun.  Again the whole village turned up to watch and join in, and it was clear that this was something that is still very much alive and that they enjoy doing.  It’s not one of those things kept alive for tourists, because there aren’t any tourists.  It was all done to a scratchy tape recording of some Punan music and men and women too turns in doing short dances.  It was interesting to notice that there were still some similarities to dances elsewhere in Indonesia, lots of twirling of hands and fingers, slow, very stylised.  The men wore a parang and one even drew it and waved it around, much to the excitement of the little children.  Eventually of course the inevitable happened and the announcer said “ and now it’s time for the tall white man”.  I paused for a while and then thought what  the hell.  Stood up and made a complete arse of myself.  Which is of course what happens most times I hit the dance floor.  I made my attempt to copy their dance, to much hilarity and people saying I looked like an orang utan.  But I gave it a go and I hope they didn’t think that I was taking the piss.  And certainly I will not be forgotten in that village.  Everybody was still having a good old laugh about it the next morning.    It was only during this evening that I realised that nobody had been smoking or drinking.  I was expecting it to be like the dyak villages in stories where they are all permanently pissed up.  They weren’t and I don’t know why.  As for not smoking, I think it’s simply that they have so little money and that the nearest place to buy cigarettes in 3 hours away by boat.  After another sore night on the floor and another pre-dawn chorus of dogs we had to head back down stream.  It was a great introduction to what an extraordinary place Berau is.  As we roared downstream I kept an eye out for red leaf-monkeys and wondered how I could persuade Scott to send me back up there soon.

Ketapang to Kuching, May 1998.

I was staying in a hut on a River in West Kalimantan so that I could monitor some illegal loggers.  We had got them kicked out of the forest once but then they paid off the police and came back with permission to take all the wood they had already felled, 90 trees, with a value of about 10 million Rp (the basic days wage is about 10,000 Rp, which was about 75 US cents that week, but changing all the time).  Ronnie decided to take me off the inventory to stand around and watch them to make sure they didn't cut down any new trees. Not exactly an exciting prospect.

Over the previous few weeks I had of course been listening to the radio in an even more obsessive nature than normal.  About 9 months prior to this the Asian Tiger economies caught the Asian flu.  Starting in Thailand and spreading to Philippines, Malaysia and even Taiwan and Japan, what were once surging economies came crashing down as the frailty of their foundations was revealed.  Indonesia fared the worst.  The miracle of it’s growth in the mid nineties was a sham.  President Suharto, his family and cronies, had all done very well for themselves, but finally people realized that something was rotten.  Banks had been making huge loans for people to build a tower blocks, for example.  This was built and then used as collateral for another loan.  A loan on loan basically.  In 6 months in ‘97 and ‘98 the rupiah crashed.  Its value against the dollar fell from 2,500 Rp to about 10,000.  And kept on falling (it finally bottomed out at about 18,000).  Banks collapsed, money flowed out of the country in huge amounts.  In early 1998 the World Bank and IMF stepped in and forced reforms.  Subsidies must be removed they said.  Suharto listened and in March the price of petrol, cooking kerosene, transport quadrupled over night.  By this stage I was in the forest listening to it all unravel on the BBC World Service.  Jonathon Head, our man in Jakarta, was my sage. (and Suharto the onion?).  Petrol riots broke out in all the major cities. The unheard of was happening and Suharto appeared to not know what to do.  Students poured onto the streets demanding for him to stand down.  After 35 years of autocratic rule, his days appeared numbered.  At about this time the Foreign Office stated issuing warnings telling all Brits to get out of Indonesia ASAP.  Did this include me?  I was thinking will we or won't we go, tended to think that Ronnie would want to stay. You wouldn't have though anything was happening at all where we were, life goes on as normal. There's rice to plant and wood to steal. I had heard that there had been some demonstrations in Pontianak but no looting or violence.

It was a Tuesday afternoon, a stupid logger with a gold tooth nearly got me lost in the forest before Udin (a local guy working for us) and I showed him the way back to the river.  Back at the camp was a man in canoe who said they were to take me down river.  Not exactly sure why, but they said I must go to Ketapang.  OK, this is it, time to go but first I had to collect my things from the pondok.  Then I had a very pleasant trip down river.  It was about 4 p.m., the nicest part of the day, and the sun was shining.  I didn't need to paddle so just lay back and watched the forest go by.  Birds singing, huge Stork Billed Kingfishers about the size of a jackdaw shooting down steam like some crazed low flying plane.  A brief glimpse of a young orang utan spread-eagled between two small trees, as intent on watching us drift by as I was on trying to determine its age and sex.  As we left the forest and entered the open burnt area a huge rhinoceros hornbill flew over, landed on a tree, kronked at us and flew on.  A little later, in the failing light a sambar deer hauled himself out of the water to our left, more than a little pissed of that a dug out had interrupted his dinner.  As the sun set and the fruit bats and stars came out I thought this is pretty damn idyllic and I really don't want to go.

At about 8 we got to the village where I found out a little more but nothing that really cleared up the picture.  Ronnie had had a meeting in Ketapang and the locals thought that I was going to join it.  I knew that had already happened so guessed we must be on our way, but why to Ketapang and not straight to Pontianak?

Up a 5 am the next day to catch the bus.  Another lovely morning watching the sun rise and burn the mist off the bright green rice paddies.  The bus journey was fairly dull, a typical tropical bus journey with no leg room, loud, bad music and sacks full of rice (though no chickens or screaming babies this time).  Dropped at the hotel in Ketapang to find Ronnie and learn that we are going to Kuching that day (Wednesday).  We were to catch a plane to Pontianak and transfer to a cesna we'd chartered to take us on to Kuching.

Ronnie was more than a little stressed.  Apparently he'd being trying to get in touch since Sunday to tell me to get to Ketapang.  In the end I arrived 3/4 hr before we were due to leave.  Fine, good that I have got here now but what about my passport.  Still in the office apparently, tops.  OK we just go from the airport to the office and collect it along with my money.  Oh no, roads closed due to a demonstration at the local university.  Only hope is to find somebody to go and get it.  Trusty old Samuel at missionary’s office.  Just hope he can find it.  While waiting at the hotel I met a few of the officials that Ronnie had been meeting, which was a little embarrassing as I was wearing filthy forest clothes, hadn't shaved for 4 days and probably smelt dreadful.  One of the officials was proudly carrying his tennis bag and was overjoyed to show us that it contained 4 shiny new tennis racquets and a less nice shiny hand gun. Apparently THE fashion accessory of the season.  And he was catching our plane!

The plane was due to go at 10 so left a 11:15, good one too.  A 20 seater 2 prop rust bucket with seats that looked like they had come from the DTC school bus.  The flight was fun though. Up the coast, over Sukadana and past our forest.  Incidentally I have learnt that Sukadana was a big sultanate in the 15th and 16th centuries, trading with the Portuguese, then the Dutch and briefly the Brits.  At one point it was the most important supplier of diamonds to Antwerp.  Touch down in Pontianak and collect by own bags from the roof, sorry the hold of the plane and met Brad the missionary.  He informed us that the Malaysian Airlines plane that we had just seen take off had space on it that we could have taken for $40 each but they wouldn't wait 5 mins so Charlotte took it and we were kind of stuck.  I did have my passport though.  Ronnie said sod it the US government is paying so we'll take the little plane, a snip at $580 for a 1 hour flight.  I though it was damn cool though. Unfortunately there was only one head set so I wasn't able to do all my Battle of Britain, Top Gun, Star Wars or Douglas Bader quotes.  The others were probably glad though.

Interesting flight, we cruised at 7,000ft, flying around the clouds and coming out of the sun to intercept the bosch at 4 o’clock... No, no back to reality.  The view was kind of depressing however, I was expecting to see some good big tracts of forest, but no, all the way from Pontianak to Kuching was a mess, farms, big new oil palm and Rubber plantations, logging concessions with atrocious road building and felling techniques.  Only once or twice did we cross any remotely intact forest and that was on the hill tops and dramatic limestone crags, some high enough to make it feel like we we’re skimming the canopy.  Round the rain over a waterfall and we swooped down to strafe the airfield and discovered that we were actually landing, fun seeing that through the front window of a plane for a change. And we were there, Kuching again, the same day as leaving Samanjak, 24hrs after counting trees in our forest.  I was kind of freaked.

Charlotte was waiting at the airport, husky of voice, with another Brit evacuee from Pontianak whose husband been working for Cable and Wireless (odd how only in times of crisis do I get to meet the only other Brits in West Kal, later met another and ex-Oxford forester, all the world’s here).  Together well all took a cab to what I expected to be the Backpacker lodge.  Ha, no way the US says we stay in the Holiday Inn. Oh damn I'll have to rough it with hot showers, air con, TV and swimming pools.

We dumped our stuff.  I had one of the best showers of my life, not particularly powerful, but hot for the first time in 12 weeks and just to get rid of all the forest mud and tension it was amazing.  Then of course we hit the bar for two rounds of stiff G&T's to watch the sunset over the Sarawak river.  A fairly mad day and one to bore the kids with for the first 14 years of their lives!

A couple of days later I was sitting by the pool, reading a book and catching the rays.  Charlotte came bursting out of the doors and called over.  “He’s gone, Suharto resigned”.

I was up river trying to set up a community forestry project , but spent most of the time facing illegal logging