Finding Heart In Borneo, Indonesia

The rally had gone late. It was dark and raining hard.

Two tiny women crouched in the bow of the narrow canoe with a headlamp, peering into the darkness. Every few minutes one would holler and pound the side of the boat with an open palm, helping our host, who was driving, to avoid the logs surging downstream.
For some reason I kept imagining the boat tipping over, my laptop sizzling in the muddy water before being swallowed by a crocodile.

As the rain came down harder the boat began to fill with water and our host pulled over to the side of the river. The ladies flipped off the light, and we sat in total darkness listening to the rain and the rhythmic sloshing of the bailing bucket.

I sat staring ahead at the nothing where the river was, drenched and shivering for the first time in nearly a year of traveling in Southeast Asia. I wondered vaguely if we were stuck, but no one seemed terribly concerned about the rain, the inch of water in the boat, or the logs that still kept battering the hull with hollow thunks. The ladies chattered lazily, ripping leaves the size of television screens from the bank and using them as make shift umbrellas.

Then it hit me – while to me this was an insane adventure, a crazy travel story to tell my friends back home, it was an annoying yet normal commute to the people I was with. It was a sudden glimpse into another world that I didn’t think even existed anymore.

I’d landed in Borneo and been horrified by what I think I’d known but didn’t want to believe. It was a land largely denuded, riddled with environmental woes and concrete jungles that sprawled across what most of us still imagine as a verdant forest inhabited by pygmy elephants, tigers, orangutans, and a native people still living a simple, natural life.

I’d stumbled into a small pocket of this romanticized Borneo, yet even it was threatened.
Uma Bawang is a Kayan village up the Baram River in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. No roads connect them to the outside world, and they bathe, drink, fish, and move by the river, which might as well be their life blood.

The village got some notoriety in the 1980’s when they began blockading logging roads to protect swathes of traditional forest territory that the government had begun selling off to oil palm plantations and logging companies.

But on the day I arrived they had a larger problem – the construction of 13 mega dams that would flood over 2,000 kilometers of some of the world’s oldest rainforest, forcing their tribe and 10,000 other native peoples to abandon their homes and traditional territory.

Leaders of tribes in the area had conjoined in the larger town of Marudi, where my husband and I happened to bump into them on our less noble quest to find a few rare durian species. They invited us to visit, and that’s how, a few hours later, we found ourselves drenched and wondering how many crocodiles inhabited the river.

The morning dawned misty but dry, and we set off across the river to visit our host’s grandmother, who had moved there to sleep in a durian grove for the season, as her ancestors had done for the generations.

Durian trees live for centuries. As we stepped out of the boat, their enormous buttressed trunks towered above our heads, making me feel as if we’d been whisked into a fairy tale or suddenly shrunk.

Each tree is given the name of the person who planted it As we tread along the narrow trail our host pointed at each tree, calling it Aunty this and Grandpa that. Most of the people had died long before he was born. But as we got closer to the tiny shack, he pointed to a spindly tree his father had planted.

His grandmother sat relaxing in the shade of the bamboo roof, waving smoke from the damp fire with a woven paddle to keep away mosquitoes. Her bare feet were stretched out in front of her, and I could see that her scrawny legs were blackened with a fine network of tattoos.

Then there was a crash overhead, a cracking and banging as leaves and debris floated down from the mottled canopy. With a sudden thunk a durian hit the ground. The old woman gathered up her sarong and tottered out beneath the megalithic trees, grinning in toothless glee as she pulled the spiny fruit from the leaves.

I returned her grin. This was the Borneo I’d been unconsciously searching for, a place where wilderness not only co-existed alongside human civilization, but was an integral part of it.

We ate the durian.

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