michael@ucbiris.BERKELEY.EDU (Tom Slone [(415)486-5954]) (01/29/86)
An Adventure in Borneo by Thomas H. Slone I stood in line at the ticket counter of the San Francisco International Airport and as I pulled out the ticket for my flight to the orient, I rechecked the date and saw that it was for tomorrow, not today. A flash of embarrassment shot through me, but I overcame it and decided to straight-face-it through, Paul Gardner and Anna Goldworth, my friends who drove me to the airport from Palo Alto had already left. I remembered that when I had made my flight reservations, I had gotten a standby for tomorrow and a reservation for today, but the standby \fIdid\fP go through. I must have forgotten to change the date on my calendar. So, I hauled my luggage which consisted of a frame pack, a day pack and a fanny pack, onto the scale and showed my ticket to the ticket agent. I had decided to bring only what I could carry. That was what was advised by the trip leaders, Mark and Dede Leighton, since as it was explained in our briefing, we might have to walk part of the way to our destination. The agent said, "Did you know that your ticket is for tomorrow?" I curtly replied that I knew and that I wanted to go tonight. She conferred with another agent about whether there was room for me all the way to Jakarta, where I would spend the next night in a hotel, and finding that there was room, she gave me a boarding pass. After boarding the plane just before midnight on May 11, I sat back and pondered how it was that the flight mix-up had happened. I had received the Earthwatch Magazine last December and was immediately attracted to the description for the Seeds of Life project. It seemed far away from my job, which at the time was not satisfying me. It seemed far away in many senses, in distance -- all the way across the Pacific Ocean, in travel time -- it would take close to 24 hours just to get to Singapore, followed by two more planes and then two days of motorboat rides, and in cultural. What interested me in this expedition besides distance was that it was to aid in the study of tropical rainforests, specifically how seeds are distributed. Rainforests are important because they are dwindling daily, because they contain immense and unique species diversity and because they are a source of a large portion of the Earth's oxygen. As it turned out I left my computer programming job before my original April departure date approached and I consequently decided to go with the second expedition in May instead, thus causing me to leave on the wrong day. The way that Earthwatch (P.O. Box 127, Belmont, MA 02178) typically works, is for researchers in the life sciences to submit proposals describing field work that they plan to do and how volunteers would be needed in the field to help in that research. Earthwatch acts as a clearinghouse for these researchers and links them up with qualified volunteers who pay the costs of transportation, living accomodations and a donation. Thus, the volunteers act both as research assistants and as grant sources. The qualifications are generally that you have interest and that either have knowledge of the subject or that you are able to absorb enough of it from pre-trip readings. On the plane, a phrase leapt off the page of a magazine at me, "to become what we do not know," it caused me to no longer the fear that I had of going alone to a far-away place and not being able to speak the language well. I had picked up what I considered to be a market level speaking ability of Indonesian through studying with books and a cassette tape. Indonesian is an amazingly simple language to learn, though I am told it becomes complex as one learns its intricacies. Back to reality, somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, one of my molars started to throb and when I felt the tooth with my tongue, I noticed a sharp spot. I figured that dental care was going to be going downhill after Singapore where at least I would be assured of being able to speak English to the dentist. So between flights, I rushed to the airport dentist, but he could not find a cavity, though he found a chip in my tooth. He numbed the area for me and gave me some pain killers (just in case) when I told him I was going to Borneo. The plane arrived in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, during the evening rush hour. The weather was humid and the sky was overcast. As I looked out the window of the taxi that took me to my fancy hotel, I could see smog streaming through the streets of this overpopulated third-world city, and I was glad that I was leaving for Pontianak the next morning. The smog was so bad that motorbike drivers often wore bandanas over their mouths do keep some of the particulates out of their lungs. Up in the quiet of my hotel room, I reflected about how the woman at the airport reservation desk asked me if I was sure I wanted to stay at the Hyatt. I said, "Is there a reason I shouldn't?" She said no and gave me the reservation. I suspect that she asked me that question because she was looking at my passport photo that was of me with shoulder length hair, a full beard and a peculiar grin. Mark Leighton said in our expedition briefing that things would go a lot smoother with the police officials if the hair of the men who were going was cut short. Also I had read in a guidebook that Indonesian children were afraid of beards and thought that men with beards were monsters, no doubt due in part to Indonesians not having much facial hair. I had shaved and gotten a haircut just before leaving, but later in the trip I let my beard grow out after seeing Mark with a beard in Pontianak. Mark said that he only shaved when he had to meet with police officials in Jakarta. In the light of the morning I could see from my hotel window an encapsulation of Jakarta. Adjacent to the hotel and below me was a muddy brown river lined with shacks. The river is many things to many people in Indonesia -- bath, food source, drinking water, and sewer. In one shack a family ate breakfast outdoors by a wood fire, at the edge of their yard was what appeared to be a garbage dump. The richest people and the poorest people of Indonesia live in Jakarta. In the distance was the last monument that the deposed President Sukarno built, shaped like the Eiffel Tower with an electric torch on top, it is known humorously among tourists as Sukarno's Last Erection. Sukarno had eccentricities like building a monument to a restaurant waiter, but he was responsible for uniting the diverse cultures of the colonial Dutch East Indies into what is now Indonesia. The act of unification has however turned out to be a double edged sword because provinces like East Timor and Irian Jaya (Indonesia's half of the island of New Guinea) have had persistent and violent separatist movements. These movements claim that the government of Indonesia does not represent all the islands and that Javanese culture (Java is the most populous island in the country) is being pushed at smaller islands. Violence has unfortunately been an integral part of modern Indonesia. During the 1960's Indonesia had the third largest communist party in the world until perhaps one million people accused of being communists, were murdered. The violence is paradoxical, since Indonesia prides itself on its religious tolerance (as long as you are not an atheist) and on its governmental consensus decision making. On the Garuda flight to Pontianak (the capital of East Kalimantan, Kalimantan is Indonesia's portion of the island of Borneo) from Jakarta, I was treated to the most unusual airline meal I have had. I had solidified tapioca with a banana slice in the middle wrapped in a banana leaf -- no utensils. As Indonesia is primarily Moslem, one is expected to do clean things with one's right hand (eating, shaking hands) and dirty things with one's left hand. I arrived at the Dharma Hotel in Pontianak (a city of over 150,000) at around noon that day. Being a tourist, as far as the government was concerned, I had to register with the police at the Pontianak airport and when I reached the Dharma, the clerk phoned the police to verify that I had arrived. The government it seems is paranoid about guerrillas in Kalimantan and thus they require police permits for travel to and around the island. Their paranoia stems from there being some guerrilla activity in the past and from the island being such a vastly untamed land and, consequently an excellent place for hiding out. I met Mark at the hotel this day as well as Lisa Curan, a student assistant from Harvard as well as Jim Alton and Bob Schilling, two of my fellow Earthwatchers. Mark told us that we were lucky that we had not tried to come the previous week when all the local hotels were booked up for the International Koran reading contest being held in town. Indonesian television was a strange mixture of domestically produced cultural programming, imported American cartoons with Indonesian subtitles, and Taiwanese Kung Fu movies dubbed in English with Indonesian subtitles. The reason that the Kung Fu movies were not simply subtitled from the Chinese version is that there is a law against importing anything into the country with the Chinese language in it. The reason for this is that the government fears losing Indonesian culture, especially in places like Pontianak where most businesses are owned by Chinese immigrants. On my desk in the hotel room was the symbol of Pontianak, a circle with an arrow through it, representing that Pontianak is less than ten miles from the equator. Also on my desk was a piece of paper with an arrow pointing to Mecca and a silhouette of a person kneeling to pray. In contrast to this, showing how liberal Indonesians are as Moslems, there was beer in my hotel room refrigerator. The next day, May 16, all the Earthwatch volunteers had arrived. We were supposed to depart by river for Gunung Palung National Park, but Mark was surprised to learn that it was a national Christian religious holiday. Because of this, he was unable to finish getting our police papers in order. We were unable to figure out which Christian holiday it was so Mark told us that since there are more Moslem holidays than Christian holidays, the government in an effort to be fair assigns extra days for the Christians! Unable to leave until 4pm the next day, many of us went to town to shop for batiks, to the fish market, and to the zoo. The Pontianak zoo was naturally small, but for the most part it was well taken care of. There were sun bears, cassowarys, barking deer, an orangutan and other wildlife native to Indonesia. There was even a nesting pair of birds with eggs. The worst part of the zoo was the orangutan who was isolated in a barren cage and was obviously morose. The orangutan had taken to throwing things at zoo visitors. Larry Dew, a 16 year old from North Carolina, petted many of the caged animals who proved to be tame. Larry was able to go with us on the condition from his parents that someone from the group accompany him. Joanne Turner, a management consultant from Irvine agreed to accompany him. On May 17th, we left at last, taking a forty minute bus ride to a resettlement village. The government in Jakarta has been unsuccessfully resettling Javanese to sparsely populated areas, such as Kalimantan. Mark told us that the Javanese farming techniques that these people were using did not suit the Kalimantan ecology and were using up the soil. Consequently, the people living here would probably soon be forced to become urban poor in Pontianak, something that as far as I saw did not exist. Our first boat on the journey to Gunung Palung was a long, thin speedboat. The setting sun, highlit lone trees with orange where huge tracts of land had been clearcut. At night we passed barges that pushed log rafts that seemed to be bigger than football fields. A light was placed on each of the corners of the rafts, so as to avoid collisions. At 9pm, the speedboat put into the town of Batu Ampar so that we could eat dinner and sleep for a few hours. We were wakened before dawn so that we could change boats (the speed boat was not sturdy enough for crossing the bay). It seems amazing in retrospect, but it took us only five hours to travel this first half of the distance from Pontianak to Gunung Palung and over a day to travel the second half. This second boat ride was a let down after the first ride. The boat was a noisy, slow, two-stroke, on-board diesel engine. Not only that, but it broke down in the middle of the bay and there was some fear among us that we would not be able to restart the engine. Soon after restarting the engine, it started to rain. There was a roof on the boat, but the rain did come in through the sides, and I for one got completely soaked. The rain did not let up until after we had reached the other end of the bay in mid-afternoon at Teluk Melano. The implication of this was that we would have to overnight at Teluk Melano, since we would be changing to an even slower boat and because of the heavy rains, the river would be running too fast for us to reach Gunung Palung by a reasonable hour. Consequently we had to entertain ourselves in this town of 5000 by walking down the one row of shops two or three times, just walking around (in Indonesian, jalan-jalan), and almost alway being followed, especially by children. Larry was more creative in finding entertainment than most of us. He read and pointed to body parts in Indonesian with the children, then he sang "Row Row Row Your Boat" with them. He drew the largest crowds from then on and greatly missed his loss of privacy. The men slept at a friend of Mark's house. A generator ran all night, as the family was in the importing/exporting business and a ship was being loaded up to set sail the following morning. We left early, but this time after dawn, on the morning of the 19th. We left most of our luggage behind as there was not room enough on the third boat for all of it. This boat was covered and with an outboard motor. By midday, the river was getting too narrow for our motorboat just when we arrived at the way station which was a simple platform on stilts with a hut on top in the river. We were greeted by four Indonesians who were under Marks employ. They told Mark that they were almost flooded out from yesterdays rains. We could well imagine this since the water was just under the main part of the platform and since it would have been futile for one to use the outhouse, for it was waist deep under water! Again we changed to yet slower boats. For this final change, we were to use three canoes, one of which had a motor, the other two were paddled by Indonesian men. The job for us passengers was to bail the water out of the canoes. This turned out to be a major chore for the motorized canoe, since it had a serious hole in the side. Soon after leaving the way station, we no longer heard the buzz of chainsaws and not long after that, we saw a sign that must have said something like "Welcome to Gunung Palung National Park -- no logging." As we neared camp, we had to get out more and more frequently to lift the canoes over fallen trees and past shallows. We used the first two days at Gunung Palung for getting oriented to camp, the trail system and the leeches. The leeches as we were to find out were generally harmless, though Mildred Beer, a retiree from Georgia, had a leech frighteningly near her eye once. The two species of leeches, both less than two inches long when stretched out, lived exclusively on land and were able to do so because of the consistent rain. The idea of leeches sucking our blood was of course repugnant to all of us, yet we eventually grew accustomed to flicking them off our bodies with our fingers, and some of us even played with or tortured them. On the third day at the Park, Roger DeHaven, a forester from Walnut Creek, and I did a "tree-watch" together. A tree-watch meant sitting camouflaged near a tree that was fruiting and writing down notes when fruit eating animals (primates, birds and squirrels) approached, ate and left the fruiting tree, noting any significant behavior. We were led out to the tree by Lisa after a quick predawn breakfast into the swamp. Through the semi-darkness we strode over the rutted terrain, sometimes one of our Vietnam-style army boots would land in muck other times solid ground and other times splashing in water. By the time we reached the tree shortly after dawn we were wet up to our knees. At the tree we saw 2 gibbons who did not stay long, but on the way back to camp, we saw three red leaf monkeys and a pig. Also on the way back from camp we saw a trail system that was not laid out by anyone at camp and therefore must have been used by illegal loggers. On the 23rd, I went on two censuses with Bob, we did not see anything interesting, probably because we walked too fast. To do a census, we would walk along the trails noting the time and location and direction of travel that we saw animals. In the afternoon we met a torrential rain. The next day, I was recovering from a runny nose and sneezing that I got from last night's rain. Lisa took some of us out in the afternoon to a fig liana (a liana is a vine that grows on trees) that had much activity in the morning including an adult male orangutan. At the fig liana, we ran into Dede Leighton who was watching from the morning and left soon after we arrived. A few hornbills showed up for us, then the afternoon rain started pouring down on us at dusk. We were waiting for Lisa to take us back. She did not show up so we started HOO-ing (our signal call) and she still did not show up. The four of us men (the two women were with Lisa below us and out of sight) decided to leave since it would be harder to find the trails in the remaining light if we waited longer. We crashed through the brush, bushwacking down the steep slope, luckily stumbling on the trail that led us back to camp without much difficulty. Back at camp, Dede said that Lisa thought Dede was going to go back with us and Dede thought Lisa was going to go back with us. The schedule for most days was like this: 5:15am wake up eat in breakfast in dark at communal house 6:15am leave at first light for animal census noon back at camp for lunch bathe and wash clothes in the river 2:00pm lecture by Mark Leighton 3:30pm leave for a census or tree watch 6:30pm eat dinner go to sleep soon after dinner At the communal house there was a large supply of canned foods, a kerosene powered refrigerator and kerosene stoves. We drank rain water and river water, since no one lived above us on the river. Once clothing got wet, it was hard to get it dry again. The best technique was to lay it out flat under direct sunlight at noon for an hour, anything else did not really work. The first week it rained 6 out of 7 days. The second week it rained 3 out of 7 days and was probably the start of the dry season, when it is supposed to rain 2 out of 3 days. Typically, it will rain for about 2 hours in the late afternoon, but occasionally, there is a "hari ujan" when it will rain almost all day. Gunung Palung is rarely quiet, there is usually a cacophony of cicadas and crickets going on all day and night long. Occasionally one hears gibbons chattering to each other. Dusk is particularly loud. Some cicadas sound like saw mills, some sound like feedback from an electric guitar. One species of hornbill (a 2-3 foot high toucan-like bird with a boney casque on top of its head) makes the following noise: Hoo.....Hoo....Hoo...Hoo..Hoo..Hoo.Hoo.Hoohoohahahahaha. I saw on this trip: 1 Orangutan, gibbons, leaf monkeys, macaques, 4 snakes, a crocodile, pigs, deer, hornbills, inch long ants, foot and a half long oak leaves, and I heard a barking deer and pheasants. I have been bitten by numerous mosquitos and leeches, and I contracted a mild rash from a tree in the poison oak family. We returned to the fig fig liana in the early morning of the 26th with Todd Truesdale (another one of Mark's students). A male adult orangutan showed up and browsed. At first he shook the hundred foot tree that supported the liana to try to scare away the hornbills that were competing with him for the figs. But then, he gave up after seeing that there were too many hornbills and that he was not being effective. The hornbills flew in and out all morning, often several at a time. When it started to drizzle, the orangutan sat quietly in the tree with his long arms crossed over his orange and hairy chest until it let up. We watched the fig liana until the orang left, close to three hours after he had first arrived. On the 28th, we started to check out swamp plots with Manuel Lerdau (another student) -- the plots were to be used for measuring vegetation changes over time. Many of the plots were disqualified from the study because of evidence of past logging. On the 29th, most of us hiked up the UB ridge trail. We were able to see over 100 kilometers to the north to the mountains past Pontianak and to the west we could see the South China Sea. The next day, we sent most of our luggage down river to Teluk Melano in preparation for our voyage home. Our activities until we left consisted primarily of censusing. On June 1st, Mark took us down river. We had to walk for about a mile because the river was too low for the canoes to hold us. At the way station, the water was 10 feet lower than when we came upriver in the beginning, when it almost flooded over. After changing to the motorboat, it was clear to us that the rain forest canopy had been devastated not far from Gunung Palung. At 6pm we arrived in Teluk Melano and had to overnight there because the local police wanted to keep us and inspect our baggage. On the second of June, Mark sent us off on a slow, almost deafeningly noisy water taxi to Pontianak. Mark returned to camp so that he could spend the few remaining days with his mother, wife and three year old son who would be soon leaving for the United States. The water taxi was primarily a cargo boat delivering copra, coffee and carrots from the hinterlands to Pontianak. But, Mark left us in good hands, the captain of the boat was one of his friends who spoke a tiny amount of English and made sure that we got fed along the way. At 5:30am, before dawn, we loaded up the Sinar Abadi, our water taxi with our luggage and ourselves. The distance in the dark from the dock to the boat below seemed tremendous. Once inside we discovered that it was crowded and that we had sacks of copra for seats. Shortly after dawn at 6:30am we were stranded on a sandbar at the edge of the river's mouth. We spent two hours figuring out if the tide was going up or down and whether some of us were going to miss our planes in Pontianak. But, the tide did rise and we were on our way, eating at odd hours, whenever we made port. At 9pm that night we landed at a port and were informed that the police wanted to see us tourists and that there was some talk of leaving us there so the rest of the passengers and cargo would not be delayed! Some of us were in the middle of eating, too. We collectively decided that Jim and I should go to represent us -- Jim because his picture was on the police permit and me because I spoke the best Indonesian. I armed myself with dictionary in hand and with my last pair of footwear on my feet, I proceeded to disembark. My sneakers disappeared somewhere in Asia and I donated my combat boots to the research camp, as the vent hole on the the left boot had come out and given me a large dose of leeches on my last day in the field. I went to the stern of the boat and started walking along the outside to get near the dock. I soon discovered that the side was slippery and that if I wanted to stay out of the river, I had better leave my flip-flops on the boat, so I put them in the stern. In the police station we had all ten of our passports inspected and were given a few perfunctory questions by the assistant police chief who thankfully, spoke English. Jim and I returned to the boat and I had completely forgotten about my flip-flops. Early the next morning after a noisy and mostly sleepless night in the engine room (i.e., the whole boat), I remembered my footwear and checked in the back, but to my chagrin, there was only one of them there! I thought I would surely have to fly back to America barefoot, for surely Pontianak would not have anything to fit my large size 10 feet, or if they did, I would not have time to shop for them. I went back inside and shouted to Roger about my barefootedness above the din of the engine and he said that I could have his flips when we got back to the Dharma Hotel and that he was only 1 size smaller. When we arrived in Pontianak the following morning, Joanne and Larry were rushed off to the airport to make their flight. I did some frantic shopping in town that day before catching a flight to Jakarta with Mary and Bruce Feay (of Chicago) who went on to Bali. In the Jakarta airport, I met up with JoAnne, Larry and Carol Sattler (of New York) where we decided to do Singapore together that night and the next day. While strolling through Singapore the next day, I was wearing my last clothing that could be considered clean (after river washing my sweaty jungle clothing it all had some odor to it). We walked past a stall where some people were cleaning fish and the water was running onto the sidewalk and into the street. I stepped into it with Roger's flips on my feet and started sliding through some incredible acrobatics to try to regain my balance, but to no avail -- I fell in the fishy water, adding more aroma to my clothes. What an international traveler I would be as I boarded the plane that afternoon!