The mastery of his position as neither predator nor meal sets the male gorilla apart from the petty squabbles of monkeys. His notoriety in countless films and books affords him a cult status but only when you are face to face and his eyes meet yours do you succumb to his presence. His huge sumo bulk and arms that could crush one to pulp are tempered with gentleness, languid movements, the human gestures of scratching an ear or inspecting toes. There was a casual disregard for visitors and a single grunt that seemed to come from an unfathomable depth of gut. Staring straight into my eyes I saw no interest and certainly no fear but there was a perceptible intelligence. Neither was there any disdain, only an imperial recognition that unchallenged superiority did not need to be paraded.
On another day in another lower but equally difficult environment, we came across a family group. An infant was captivating with its exploration of a young tree but the silverback leader of the group, a giant named Ruhondeza, displayed such contemptuousness that awaking from a snooze to find five visitors with their fingers on their photographic buttons, he let out a fart that rocked the undergrowth and fell back into contented sleep.
Driving back towards Kampala, we were struck by the proliferation of schools and Moses our driver told us that you paid no income tax on any part of your earnings if you built a school. ‘Built’ was the crucial thing, and many schools had been built and were devoid of pupils. But there were clearly establishments that were properly up and running: Uphill College suggested a rigorous routine, St Theresa’s Convent of the Sacred Jesus Child was a branch from Calcutta, The Divine Mercy Renewal Center seemed worth considering for enrolment and, if only for its knockout name, there was The Isaac Newton College School Total Learning Academy.
We spent a happy hour in the 48 acre (19 hectare) National Botanic Gardens at Entebbe, laid out in 1898 by A. Whyte and the setting for the Tarzan films of the ’40s. As we walked around with a young botanist who displayed an impressive knowledge and a winning smile, the grassy park with its magnificent trees seemed far too benign for swashbuckling deeds of jungly valour. Then the thunder rolled farewell and the rain washed away our footprints.
Postcard Home
The natural world has nothing thriller
Than face to face with a gorilla.
500lbs of flesh and fur
Whose stare reflects a king’s hauteur.
We’ve followed chimps through trees and swamp
(For us exhaustion, them a romp)
Then, in this land of mists and rain
We found the mountain’s suzerain.
Kalimantan
November 2009
‘The real voyage is not in seeing new landscapes but in having new eyes’ – Marcel Proust
The introduction to Bertram Smythies’ great two volume classic The Birds of Borneo is succinct.
‘Borneo is the third largest island in the world after Greenland and Guinea. It is five times the size of England and Wales. It is one enormous forest.’
Redmond O’Hanlon in Into the Heart of Borneo gives the island a more alarming spin.
‘As a former academic and natural history book reviewer, I was astonished to discover, on being threatened with a two month exile to the primary jungles of Borneo,… the strength of that irrational desire to find a means of keeping your head upon your shoulders; of barring 1,700 different species of parasitic worm from your blood stream and Wagler’s Pit Viper from just about anywhere; of removing small, black, wild-boar ticks from your crutch with minimum discomfort (you do it with Sellotape); of declining to wear a globulous necklace of leeches all day long; of sidestepping amoebic and bacillary dysentery, yellow and blackwater and dengue fevers, malaria, cholera, typhoid, rabies, tuberculosis and the crocodile (thumbs in its eyes, if you have time).’
Elsewhere I read that encounters may be had with the Mangrove Cat Snake, the Mock Viper, the Grass Green Whip Snake, the Common Malayan Racer and the Banded Coral Snake. Kalimantan (part of Indonesia) is the southern two thirds of Borneo. And Lonely Planet says:
‘Kalimantan is one of the world’s last, vast wilderness areas. Few tourists make it and travel is difficult.’
It seemed just the place to visit.
Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim nation and of its 124 million people, 90% are Muslim. Of the country’s 17,500 islands, Bali has the only Hindu pop ulation, East Tenjgara the only Roman Catholic population and Papua the only Protestant population. On the day of my arrival, the Jakarta Post reported that the Corruption Eradication Committee was to be disbanded and that the Commission for Disappearances and Victims of Violence was to be terminated for lack of witnesses. But first I flew to Yogyakarta to see the Borobudur temples. It turned out there was only one that seemed worth seeing: a square, multilevel lump elaborately decorated with Buddhist images. School children in a uniform of Hawaiian shirts lit up dark enclaves of the volcanic stone and a troop of crew-cut soldiers were racing up its stepped sides singing out a chant of mutual encouragement. Spoilt by the wonders of Angkor Wat, the Pyramids and Mayan temples, I was uninspired.
Of the three passengers on the plane from Semarang on the northern coast of Java to Pankalan Bun on the southern coast of Kalimantan, I was the only Westerner. I was not sure whether to be grateful or alarmed at the lack of interest in ‘the wild, untouched, wildlife paradise’; O’Hanlon again. I was met by Aidis Usanto – “Call me Eddy”. He was only a touch over a metre and a half and had the teeth of a giant. For once ‘tombstones’ were appropriate; they could probably crack rocks. He was cheerful and resourceful, particularly in obtaining beer. I had read that alcohol was banned in Kalimantan but with his graveyard grin, Eddy explained that the source of beer was a secret that was universally known and stopping off at a karaoke bar – well that’s what he called it in spite of the six leggy and listless young women playing cards in the porch – he later appeared with six bottles in a bin bag.
My boat, Mama One, was painted in Cambridge blue from the top deck canopy to the waterline. Built to accommodate six, the top deck (open on every side) was all mine. Hassein steered, Samy cooked, squatting on the rear deck beside the loo that overhung the stern and Alam did the chores. We chugged peacefully along the slack and muddy windings of the Seikonyer River, 350 ft (100m) wide from one dense nipah palm covered bank to the other where local fishermen in slim and sleek skiffs fished for crayfish with rods that a fly fisherman would be proud of. As the water lost its salinity, pandanus palm crowded the banks and would have closed up the river if constant traffic had not kept it controlled. At dusk, proboscis monkeys squabbled for the best spots in the trees overhanging the river and long tailed macaques made Olympic-length jumps. The proboscis is one of the eccentrics of the primate world. Endemic to Borneo, their body is reddish-brown down to their waist but with white arms and legs, they seem to be in pyjamas. The males have a grotesquely droopy nose and on an elderly male, the nose can drop so far that he has to lift it up with one hand while eating with the other. Younger males can straighten out their nose like Pinocchio through which they then let out a shriek like a party whoopee whistle. They also glory in an almost permanent erection and, if this was not enough to attract a bride, they make almost suicidal leaps into water. No wonder they are shunned by zoos.
The beer the previous evening was a mistake. Four journeys to the stern were needed during the night, each hazardous even by the dim light of a quarter moon. There was the mosquito net to be opened with its yards of enveloping muslin, then the garrotting cord that held it up to be avoided and next, the trapdoor to five unprotected steep steps. Continuing through the dining area I hoped not to step on any of the cockroaches that flew in earlier (each as huge as a mouse and considerably faster), and then there was the bargeboard to be stepped over before the final sanctuary. The stillness of the night brings an audible focus to each individual sound. Whoops, whistles and wails; cackling, croaking and clucking; hooting and honking; and sounds mechanical such as clanking, tinkling and whirring. And laying layers
of aural continuo, the cicadas and frogs keep up a desperate search for a mate. In the river things splash, plop and squelch. Fish are leaping at moths, a crocodile lurches after prey or fruit falls. In the forest, unknown beasts scavenge for a meal so that there are shrieks, crashes and an occasional roar. At dawn I awoke to the twe, twe, twe of the drongo, the babblings of babblers, the flutings of pittas and the chattering of bulbuls. All these slink mysteriously away as a female gibbon hoots the coming of day, a woodpecker drums into a tree for breakfast, hornbills cackle, the silver macaques search for the tenderest leaves and others take up the aural challenge calling across the river or announcing a territorial claim. And it is only 5 am.
Turning off the main stream down a creek so narrow that it seemed to squeeze the timber planks of Mama One, the banks were hung about with pandanas, lianas, great green spiky water plants and overhanging trees and then the water clarified from cappuccino to espresso. It also started to rain. Great plump drops hurtled down, bubbling the brown water, bending branches and obscuring the way. An hour before, the sun had shown from a clear blue sky and I had lathered on the Reiman P20. But then, like the valve of a fountain being turned off, the waterfall stopped, the clouds vanished and the water became as polished as jet and pacific swallows took to the air once more.
An orang-utan is so endearing, a twenty stone (280lbs, 127kgs) male excepted, that there is an impulse to rush to it for a hug. I had spotted a pair from the boat intent upon gathering the fruit from nipah palm, but at Camp Leakey (a research station now in its tenth year), they are habituated so that a hug seems possible and tempting. Add to this a baby (there were five when I was there) and the impulse is almost overwhelming. With huge, brown, innocent and naïve eyes, clinging instinctively to its mother’s back with 20 gripping fingers and toes, an infant orang-utan is a universal favourite. Strung out like furry laundry as they limber up on a liana, they melt all hearts. Two hours and 100 photographs later, it was hard to leave.
My plane from Pankalan Bun to Banjamarsin had been cancelled. With admirable efficiency, the message was sent upriver as we were about to moor. As an alternative, cars had been arranged to drive through the night and so we chugged on in the dark with fireflies dotting the banks in a profusion of flashing bulblets. At the dock, a youth was waiting with a car; he appeared to have just passed his 14th birthday. Once, in Costa Rica, the pilot of my ten seater Cessna looked similarly immature and was so small that he had to sit on a cushion. At the end of the trip (through a scary thunderstorm) I enquired as to the age of the pilot and was told that he was 26 and had been piloting cargo planes for six years. I hoped my driver was as experienced but in any case we shot away before prayers and protests could be mustered. After three hours, at midnight, I was transferred like a DHL parcel to the care of Ali. I took him aside and carefully explained that should I detect so much as a twitch of a yawn, he was to stop and sleep. I also made it clear that if we reached our destination, eight hours away, there would be a substantial tip and the possibility of a glowing letter to his employer. The first of these instructions appeared to be understood since we covered the next few miles so sedately that the next day’s programme seemed in jeopardy. We made stops on the way for a pee and a prayer; the former at a police station and the latter at a mosque that appeared to be open 24 hours. Providence prevailed and as I sank into the arms of the Swisshotel at Banjamarsin, Ali turned around for the eight hour return journey. As I wrote this in the ‘cocktail lounge’ (the only non-Indonesian word there), a chanteuse was belting out My Way. Taking a call on her mobile phone during the second verse, she stopped to read the text for a minute or so before carrying on to the end of the song.
The diamond mines at Chempana were surreal and close to hell. Here was the ‘basso loco’ of Dante’s Inferno, the sunless place of restlessness and now the ultimate despair of any health and safety officer. Several great craters had been excavated and huge tree trunks, buried for a millennium, had been preserved in the gravel at haphazard angles and at different depths so that as the pits grew deeper, these trees were left, sometimes bridging across a cavity while men laboured underneath and struggled to lever out boulders and direct high-powered water jets. Eight inch (20cms) diameter hoses were manipulated to suck up the sludge to filtering trays mounted in four layers of bamboo scaffolding 80 ft (24m) above. From these Heath Robinson contraptions, the silt was washed into other smaller pits where men and women stood up to their chests in muddy water panning the residue for specks of diamonds. Each retrieved a teaspoonful of these in a day. As I photographed this place of the damned and those who earned little more than three bowls of rice a day, I encountered smiles, thumbs up and that magic name that keeps the oppressed cheerful – Beckham.
Banjamasin, the capital of East Kalimantan, is a watery city reputedly below sea level. Given that the city is only a few miles from the sea, this seems to have a medieval disregard for geographical facts. Half of the town’s inhabitants live, or at least exist, either beside the Jorong River which cuts through the centre or along the canals that spread out like pulsating arteries. Outside its impassive and dreary modern centre, it is a city of shacks, wooden planked, corrugated-iron-roofed and stilted to rise above the eight feet (2.5m) tide. Each has its own floating privy and the water is the universal depository for these and other rubbish of all kinds. In this oily, salty, filthy, fetid and scummy environment, hair is washed, clothes scrubbed, pot and pans cleaned, bodies soaped, teeth cleaned and dreadfully, children swim and play. Oven baked in summer, pounded by monsoon rains, odorous and of doubtful stability, these are homes to people who seem remarkably healthy and certainly cheerful. Travelling down these watery lanes, children cried ‘bale’, meaning white man. I was assured that this was only out of curiosity and without exception all gave a friendly wave. They also called out ‘Kodak’ whenever I raised my camera. Upriver the scene is less intense, with the houses still stilted but neater and the water here littered with bunches of water hyacinth storm torn from the banks. Groups of hyacinths stud the river in a profusion of little green islands. A number of taller buildings played recordings over a loudspeaker of the songs of swifts to encourage their nesting, bird’s nest soup being a highly prized and expensive delicacy.
Syahdian, “Call me Shady,” was 29, tall, bony and with a mass of black hair as untidy as a mop. He could have been a Bedouin but was more like a dervish. He whirled, jerked and fidgeted; his windmill arms waved around and his hands and pianist fingers gestured as though helpless with palsy. As he explained the history of Dutch colonisation, this spring-loaded marionette clutched at some imaginary fly and emphasized some point of importance with a desperate semaphore of twirling limbs. He was an English language graduate and his brain seemed always three words in front of his speech so that as they tumbled out, his mouth made a futile effort to catch up. A single word, ‘whatd’youknow’, ended every sentence and I ducked to escape the manic gyrations that accompanied it. He was well informed on history and politics, hopeless on birds and plants and inquisitive of the facts and customs of other lands. He also laughed a lot, was reliable and willing and I felt he would make a good companion for the ten days ahead.
The reed-covered marshes of Nagara oozed over a huge area that was ingeniously sliced through with a web of canals and streams that drain parts for the cultivation of rice and vegetables and other parts for the breeding of ducks and water buffalo. Small towns have grown up accessible only by water and I went to explore them. A white foreigner was clearly rare around there and a crowd gathered, probably intent on seeing me tumble into the soupy stream as I stepped off the slimy steps into a small and slim plank of a boat with an outsized outboard motor. To hoots of laughter, we shot off at astonishing speed down ditches barely wider than the plank. Often the ditch was clogged with plants but opening up the throttle to achieve maximum speed (and maximum fright from its occupant), we cut through or simply leapt over the obstacles. Pacific swallows zoomed around and stork-billed and common kingfishers per
ched on every pole. Black crowned herons and lily trotters meticulously lifted their wire-drawn legs as they hunted frogs, a greater coucal with its plumage of feuillemort tawny tones looked out from a withered tree and a brahminy hawk drifted lazily over the eutrophic wetlands. And there were eagles too; they preceded us with leisured wing beats, alighting on a branch until we neared and then taking off again like an avian vanguard. These pathfinders were yellow eyed lesser fish eagles and the more sluggish grey headed fish eagles.
Making a two day detour to Loksado, an attractive little town spread out along a bank of the River Amandit in the Meratus Mountains, Shady suggested a forest walk and I eagerly agreed. There were two options on offer: short and steep or longer but gentler. I chose the latter thinking that if rain came, the steeper route would be tricky. A thick coverlet of mist hung over the forest as we started and a strange pharmaceutical smell leaked out from the trees with the odour of medicinal roots or benzoin. The air was as flabby as the captured moist warmth of one’s last exhalation and at 8 am the heat and humidity squeezed around one like the rank coils of a hungry python. After ten paces I dripped with sweat, after 20 paces I was soaked and at 50 I was awash. The walk became a trek and the way three degrees off vertical – heavens knows what the steeper option would have been. There were streams to cross on a single length of bamboo, streams that required leaps from boulder to boulder and streams that we walked up, sometimes struggling against the flow coming down. The trail grew to be as narrow as my foot. I cursed the humidity, my misplaced enthusiasm and the pace that Shady insisted on. “We must go as we cannot walk in the dark,” he yelled over his shoulder. I hoped the dark would come in the next few minutes. “If I die,” I cried, “you will have to carry my body.”
The Last Blue Mountain Page 30
