‘Never heard of the Pooh-nans,’ he told us. ‘They’re all natives to me. I do an occasional run up to Long Nawan. Never been into the village, though – just drop ’em off at the airfield, fly back in time for supper. I know what they’re like. Here,’ he said, ‘look at this.’ He showed us a cutting from a Singapore newspaper which was taped to the fridge, and the only visible sign of decoration in the whole house.
It reported an industrial quarrel in the major coastal town of Balikpapan, when the picketing Dyak employees of a Javanese-owned sawmill had not merely assaulted their white-collar management, but separated a number of them from their heads.
‘There’s your Pooh-nans for you,’ he commented. ‘Give ’em a head start, and they start taking ya head.’ He was amused by this little crack, and nearly laughed. We brayed quite loudly, partly because we needed his help, and partly at the news that, contrary to official assertions, head-hunting in Kalimantan was not entirely a thing of the past.
‘We’ve got to walk through the big white patch, Ted,’ I told him. ‘Are you sure there isn’t anywhere you could put down for us in there, if things don’t work out?’
When we produced our International Aviator’s Chart, he laughed. ‘It’s all wrong, you know,’ he said. ‘Here, look at mine.’ He unfurled his own well-crumpled and doodled-upon copy, and pointed at several pencilled crosses in the big white. ‘There’s only about two usable landing spots in here and they’re usually out of the question in the rainy season. They open them up, and they grow over or sink all the time. Maybe they’re building another one round here, somewhere.’ He pencilled a circle in the heart of the white patch.
We were puzzled. ‘You mean they just sprout in the jungle like mushrooms?’ Lorne asked.
‘Don’t you know?’ he said. ‘It’s a good system. We send the native evangelical scouts in to reach the remote pagans on foot, like you foolish characters. They pray with them, tell ’em what they’re missing in life, and leave them exact instructions on how to flatten an airstrip. Length, flat as the river, and all that. I check them every few months to see if they’re safe enough to land on with preachers.’
He said he could not promise anything, but would make some flybys if he hadn’t heard from us in Samarinda or Long Nawan in two months’ time. On that cold comfort, we prepared to leave, but he called our attention back to his chart.
‘About there!’ he said, squinting forward again, triangulating with his plastic instruments, and he drew yet another neat crucifix in the white void, with a longitude and latitude which I quickly cribbed. ‘There’s a waterfall,’ he said with some excitement. ‘Coming off the Apo Kayan plateau. Looked like heaven to me. Drops sheer to the Mahakam jungle – minimum 15,000 feet high. That ranks near Angel Falls in Venezuela, amongst the highest in the world. But it ain’t marked on any map, and nor is its river. Keep a look out for it if you’re in the neighbourhood. I’ll keep an eye out for you, too. Thursdays is the only day you can expect me, but I’m not risking any hairy landings.’
Three-and-a-half days of breakneck river-travel brought us to Tabang, a handful of Kenya longhouses adjacent to the hastily built timber barracks. The following day a group of seven alert-looking Punans swept into town in their dugouts. They were the first we had ever seen, and we delightedly accosted them before they had barely set foot on the bank. Leah, their leader, was to become a closer friend than we could have imagined. They laughed a lot, spoke a slow and thoughtful Indonesian, and looked us directly in the eye. They were the semi acculturated cousins of the wild nomads – weathering the tide of progress better than any other of the island’s tribes. These free-ranging amphibians rode the bow-wave of change; as equally at home in the deep forest as with their wives and gardens at Tabang, they were sophisticated travellers and linguists. When they tired of the frontier villages; they could return to the more rewarding skills of hunting bears, pythons, and the valuable bezoar stones from the crops of monkeys, and collecting aromatic and medicinal plants.
Yet even they were not sure whether their pure nomadic cousins still existed. If anyone knew, Leah told us, it would be Bereyo, a renowned old Punan rhinoceros-hunter who apparently lived a six-day scramble through the forest away in the longhouse of Long Belinau, on a river system which, enticingly, was no longer marked on our map. On the understanding that the old rhino-hunter might well have gone ‘walkabout’ by the time we arrived, Leah then set about inspiring his colleagues to lead us in at least as far as Long Belinau, for a small fee. They would take us no further, as they would have to return to their families, but at least we would be going in the right direction.
Wiesmar was now wearing his paramilitary costume, topped incongruously with an Aussie bushman’s hat, and sported a revolver in his belt. It was a dismaying symbol of authority, and a number of our porters came close to resigning with indignation on the spot. We gave him yet another opportunity to return home and leave us to our private madness, but we could see the glint of 19th-century empire building in his eye, and nothing would dissuade him from continuing with us. He managed to talk Sumber Mas into providing their outboard-powered dugout to take us the four hours upstream through the rapids to where the Belayan Falls made it impossible to continue by boat. It required two journeys to take what were by now 18 of us, so half went ahead in the afternoon, with the straggling porters and the rest of the equipment joining us the following morning. During those few sunlit hours waiting for the rest of the team to arrive, I experienced one of those rare moments which seemed more than to compensate for the entire effort thus far. We were filming clouds of butterflies, attracted to the uric acid left by drinking animals at the water’s edge. Our technique for screen-filling close-ups was simple, and periodically effective, even if it did have our Dyak companions in hysterics. I would lope around with my home-made butterfly-net in one hand, and in the other our medical kit’s aerosol freeze-can, intended for anaesthetizing sprained muscles. A brief blast would instantly freeze an insect or a small reptile long enough to focus on and film it before the sheen of ice left it and it obligingly hopped or flew off screen. We were actually talking about the Raja Brooke Birdwing, one of the most coveted butterflies in all Borneo. Being a denizen of the high canopy, it is so rarely seen in the wild that it is bred in captivity for high-paying collectors. It was first caught and catalogued by Alfred Russel Wallace, who named it after his host and friend in Sarawak, the British Raja Brooke. Wallace’s memorable description in The Malay Archipelago of first catching its closest cousin, Ornithoptera croesus, rang clear:
The beauty and brilliancy of this insect are indescribable, and none but a naturalist can understand the intense excitement I experienced when I at length captured it... my heart began to beat violently, the blood rushed to my head, and I felt much more like fainting than I have done when in apprehension of immediate death. I had a headache the rest of the day, so great was the excitement produced by what will appear to most people as a very inadequate cause.
I had seen them in photographs, and a few dusty corpses in display cabinets, but now amidst this flittering carpet of Lepidoptera I thought I saw the real thing. Barely 10 feet away, with a vivid red collar, and seven-inch blade-shaped wings of deepest black slashed with bars of iridescent green, was a monstrous Raja Brooke Birdwing. I was as frozen as if struck by my own freeze-can. Then two more alighted, and a fourth swirled by. I stalked a step closer, and they soared upwards – real fliers, rather than flappers. With my heart in my throat I hunted them, to our porters’ increasing delight, for 90 minutes.
Then to my disbelief, and to a rousing cheer, I netted a perfect adult. Lorne hovered close with the camera, I froze it (perhaps, I thought, too enthusiastically for its own good) and unveiled it, at which it instantly ascended to heaven. Within a few seconds it swooped downwards again and I swiped it out of the air. We froze it more vigorously, shot some film, and then released it. As the ice-sheen left its wings, it quivered for a few moments, then flew up to the tree-tops again – an h
allucination which has somehow remained captured on film.
Our expanded party now included the surprise of Leah’s nine-year old nephew, M’bau, who was to eat, walk and talk the rest of us off our feet. Fourteen porters might seem rather excessive, but half of them were needed to carry the rice required to feed us all on the planned two-week journey. The rest carried out ‘movie chattels’ and quantities of salt, which in the iodine-poor interior is the best currency.
The Dyaks went barefoot – for balance and for sensitivity to the terrain, they said. We set off in single file up the jungled escarpment at an Olympic pace. Our companions carried an average load of 80 pounds each – more than twice the international airline allowance. Everything, including whole ice-chests of film stock, was strapped to their backs in rattan baskets, leaving their arms free for balancing, climbing and cutting a swath with their mandaus – the distinctive machetes of Borneo, which we were warned to carry at all times. We three novices, in our canvas United States Army jungle boots, and carrying only our mandaus, had a devil of a time keeping up with them. We panted so hard that we couldn’t even talk to each other. M’bau, like a leprechaun, clambered jauntily upwards singing to himself, examining things closely, doing cartwheels and splashing in the mud where terrain permitted, suddenly shouting at us from the tops of boulders or the forks of trees, and showing not the slightest signs of fatigue.
After a gruelling first day we reached the top of the ridge, where we had our first experience of what it would be like to sleep in the jungle proper. Our companions had it down to a fine art. Entirely from scratch, and within 20 minutes, they built an elegant bungalow large enough for us all. It required three particular trees: pliable saplings for the frame, firmer supports for the slightly raised floor platform, and a 40-foot tree for the flooring itself. This particular species was felled solely for its bark, great tubes of which were unfurled to provide a seamless floor-covering whose top side made a spongy mattress and whose underside oozed a noxious insect-repelling sap.
The Punan guides don't pitch camp, they build a home from scratch every evening, and abandon it the next morning.(LORNE & LAWRENCE BLAIR)
‘Very lucky you bring this big sheet of plastic,’ Leah said, referring to the item which Wiesmar had liberated from the timber company to protect our equipment, and which we now saw had been unpacked to cover our jungle Hilton. ‘Without that, it takes twice as long to make a house. The trees with the big leaves for the roof are harder to find.’
We reserved a section for our most perishable gear, ensured that Wiesmar was satisfied with his ‘master nest’, observed the equitable democracy with which our party established their sardine-like sleeping positions, and retired to our own arrangements, into which we had put considerable thought in advance. The seamstresses of our village of Pengosekan in Bali had produced two enormous banana-shaped mosquito nets, which could be attached to the ropes of our magnificent Yucatecan ‘matrimonial’ jute hammocks. Topped with tarpaulins, these baroque tensegrity structures were ingeniously suspended on a number of independent wires. Assembling them required locating the appropriate pair of trees, cutting a number of correctly proportioned ‘spreaders’, and a certain clear-headedness. The first two requirements abounded, but assembling these aerial mobiles before darkness or exhaustion set in became a sort of malarial nightmare.
But here, this first night on the jungle ridge, our companions breathing contentedly in the instant longhouse next to us, I remember sinking exultantly into the arms of the night music, suspended in my muslin cocoon. Things flashed and flickered around me in the dark. I felt like the pioneering oceanographer Professor Piccard, cosy in his deep-submersible bathyscaphe, 12,000 feet down in the sea. And I slept.
At first light, my feet felt numb, and my hammock was stained with blood. Three black leeches, like enormous ticks, were burrowing between my toes. A fourth, also swollen like a chewing-gum ball, nestled behind my earlobe, and several more were optimistically tightrope-walking down my hammock rope towards me.
They had sensed us from the ground, climbed the supporting trees, descended the hammock ropes, wormed their way through the folds of the ‘banana’s’ tightened drawstrings, and made it to the lunch counter. The tortuous brilliance with which these little suckers achieved their goal was a disquieting indication that, evolutionarily speaking, they were a very far cry from the blind worms I had imagined them to be. We were to encounter multitudes over the months that followed, some areas being so infested that we would have to struggle on in semi-darkness before pitching camp. In some places, if we stopped for a moment, they would detect our rising warmth and drop down on us like sticky rain.
We abandoned our instant longhouse and moved on. On one side of the ridge, immediately below us – and seemingly only a stone’s throw away’ – lay the ruffled ribbon of the Belayan river, which it had taken all the previous day to struggle up from. On the other, rolling forever into the haze, were the untouched jungled hills of the Big White. We left the ridge, and any links back to the safety of the outside world, and submerged beneath the unremitting canopy of the deep forest.
For six days we struggled in single file, through vegetation so thick that we could never see more than two or three companions before and behind us. Leah spearheaded the column, hundreds of yards ahead of us, while the three novices slithered and panted near the tail where the ground had been pretty well cleared by the time it was our turn.
At night, round the dwindling cooking-fire we would question and listen to their forest stories for those all-too-brief moments before we surrendered to exhaustion. They talked of Bereyo the Rhino-Hunter, a legend for many rivers around, and of how much gold he had once been given for his rhino horns by the Chinese merchants. Wiesmar hung back from these sessions, aloof, exhausted, in a sort of trance, but at the mention of Bereyo’s gold he jerked visibly into greater consciousness.
On the sixth morning we reached the Belinau river, and found the rather astonished Bereyo in magnificent residence. At first he was wary, but he had not seen his wandering cousins for more than 20 years and was intrigued by the idea of finding out how they were doing. After we had spent a few days as his guests, Bereyo decided he would lead our search, a journey which he said might take 25 days.
‘Difficult to hunt and find in rainy season,’ he told us in halting Indonesian. ‘First we hunt deer, and harvest our rice to feed us all for long journey.’ This was a relief, since we now had supplies left for only another week.
Two of our new party were the impressive Hidjau and Raja, master trackers and blowdart hunters, and without them we would probably not have survived. Leah and the boys also changed their mind about leaving us here and going home when they heard Bereyo would be leading us, and his community providing free food.
Young M’bau remained with his mother in Belinau, and with six canoes and a party of now 22 people we embarked on an even more demanding journey, beginning with three days’ poling our way upstream against a boiling current.
‘Modiking’, as the technique is called, is an impressive speciality of Borneo’s riverine Dyaks, in which, working to a single and perfectly poised rhythm, five to 10 standing men punt their way upriver. It is wet and frighteningly precarious. The bows must be kept pointing directly into the current, and the most dangerous moments are at the riverbends when one must ‘tack’ from one side to the other. As one porter observed with skilled understatement: ‘If we turn over and get this lot wet, it’ll take a whole week to dry out, won’t it, Tuan?’ We were ordered on no account to move a hair, and we crouched with our passports and money in our pockets, our cameras and tape-recorders on our trembling knees – even when they had to get out to haul the canoes ahead over boulders. It was in the wicked inland rivers of Borneo’s rainy season that so many other expeditions had come to grief. But our team propelled us with the dexterity of surfers to where at last the river was too shallow for us to proceed, and we tethered our canoes for whoever might need them, striking out on foot again
behind Bereyo the Rhino-Hunter.
Bereyo was proud and humorous, and was treated like royalty by everyone except Wiesmar (who was Sumatran royalty, and treated him almost as an equal), but he was usually so far in the lead that we hardly ever saw him during the day. By the time we caught up with him at the rest-stops he had already been there for half an hour and was ready to move on again, while it was our turn to rest and remove leeches until the person immediately ahead of us followed his leader onwards. Thus our whole party moved through the forest like a giant leech, contracting at points of rest, and extending itself onwards again, for what would be 25 days before we saw another human being.
Our guides and providers, teachers and playmates, house-builders and cooks – for they were all of these and more – were also as responsive to our inquisitiveness as they were alert to our general welfare.
‘Never touch that,’ they would say, indicating an innocuous looking green shrub. ‘Cannot see its teeth – but bites like red ants.’
Or: ‘Quickly, this way! Never get closer than 10 men to those.’ It was a bulbous brown swelling on a bulbous barked tree – a nation of sleeping bees condensed to a camouflaged nucleus a yard across. ‘Very bad-tempered when they wake up. Whole travel-parties have been killed by bees.’ The man in front grinned back at me.
The terrain was far more treacherous and the pace faster than anything we had yet experienced, and as the days progressed we discovered how varied were the ecological islands hidden beneath the forest, and how different from the monotonous ‘green hell’ so often used by foreign travellers to describe the jungle. We crossed deep gorges and roaring whisky-coloured streams balancing along the slippery skins of immense fallen trees. Sometimes these were so rotten that we would halt for a while to fell our own arboreal bridges. We crossed quagmires, expertly disguised as firm land, hundreds of yards across, tiptoeing along gangways of freshly felled saplings which gradually sank. The least-experienced went first, for the last would be up to his knees.
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