The Adventurer's Son(19)
We had averaged one mile an hour, eight hours a day, making twelve and fifteen miles the last two days. But the numbers didn’t matter. We’d grown close. Roman had learned about nature and about himself, how to deal with discomfort, wind, and rain, walking day after day. I’d learned how to pace, care, and sacrifice for my son.
Maybe it was too soon, but I asked anyway. “Roman, did you like this six-day trip? Would you want to do one again?”
“Yeah, Dad, it was okay. But let’s bring Mom and Jazzy next time.”
“Okay. We will,” I promised, smiling at the thought of a Dial family adventure.
“Now. Can we finish Charlotte’s Web?” he asked.
We pushed ourselves together to read the final chapters and fell asleep contented, trip partners for life.
Chapter 9
Borneo
Draco, Malaysian Borneo, 1995.
Courtesy of the author
In the heat and humidity of the equatorial night, Peggy and I lay naked, unable to touch. Outside our open hut, tree frogs piped incessantly while katydids sawed and cicadas buzzed, a cacophony pierced by the screeches and hoots from an inky blackness. We were careful not to press against the flimsy mesh of the tent-like mosquito net that protected us from Borneo’s biting insects and the diseases they might carry. The kids, now six and eight, slumbered under their own mosquito net in a bed next to ours.
We were in Bako National Park on Asia’s largest island. Bako was meant to be a warm-up for Gunung Palung National Park, or “GP,” where we planned to spend a month. GP is a roadless Indonesian wilderness of rainforests, mountains, swamps, and rivers. Its sole structures then were a small collection of tin-roofed open-air huts set deep in the jungle, reached only by dugout canoe. The primitive Cabang Panti (“Cha-bong Pon-tee”) Research Station served as base camp for the scientist or two working there at any given time. A network of trails and incredible wildlife, not yet discovered by National Geographic, provided a glimpse of tropical rainforest perhaps unmatched in the world. I had visited GP the year before and left a changed man.
“Indonesia is a lot more primitive than this,” I told Peggy. “Nobody speaks English. There’s malaria, dengue, hookworm. I’m not sure we should go, really. I’m worried about the kids.”
Peggy turned to me. “We’ve come this far. We’re close. Your pictures from last year make it look amazing. We can protect the kids. And you know where to go and how to get there. I think we should do it.”
TROPICAL RAINFORESTS IN Asia, Africa, and South America have long fascinated scientists and laymen alike with their stunning, overwhelming array of life. Straddling the equator, Borneo’s tropical rainforest supports a higher-order biodiversity than any other on Earth. As in the Amazon, there is a dizzying array of small and tiny fantastical creatures that fill every square inch of rich, green plant life. But Borneo’s rainforests are twice as tall as those in South America: Borneo’s dipterocarp trees grow as high as redwoods. The world’s largest flower, Rafflesia, three feet across and smelling of rotten meat, lives there, too. Lianas—woody vines as big around as pine trees—hang from buttressed trees. Gourd-shaped carnivorous pitcher plants called nepenthes grow in spectacular diversity, with some specializing in catching bird droppings, some trapping rats and frogs, and others, with a more prosaic diet, feeding simply on ants and flies.
Unlike South American jungles, where there are few large animals of any kind, Borneo has pygmy forest elephants, dwarf rhinos, even wild forest cattle called banteng, and like the Amazon, it has big cats and small. But while the New World tropics have only the familiar white-tailed deer, Borneo has five species, ranging from the rabbit-sized mouse deer to the elk-sized sambar. The strange, fanged muntjac deer even barks like a dog. Besides eight varieties of monkeys, there are primitive primates, too, including the fist-sized tarsier that snatches insects with its alien-looking hands and the nocturnal slow loris, a small bear-shaped fruit eater. Best known are Borneo’s lesser and greater apes: the acrobatic gibbon and the 150-pound orangutan. Less famous are its dozen kinds of “flying” squirrels, flying lemurs, flying lizards, flying frogs, and even flying snakes, all of which glide from tree to tree. These wonders and more live on an island half the size of Alaska. Visiting Borneo is like going to another planet.
My first trip followed an invitation from Tim Laman, then a graduate student at Harvard. We had met at an international canopy conference and with mutual interests in science, adventure, and documentary photography we hit it off immediately. A tall, mustachioed redhead, Tim studied strangler figs in Borneo’s forest canopy and when he suggested we climb strangler figs together at his research site in GP, I jumped at the chance. Tim faxed me directions from a faded Xerox copy. It took me ten days in December to get from Anchorage to Cabang Panti by way of a malarial village called Teluk Melano. From Melano, I hired two locals to paddle a dugout sampan canoe to meet Tim at GP. As two young canopy scientists at the beginning of our careers, we climbed trees, took photos, and recorded observations in the forests, mountains, and swamps. We woke every morning to the delightful whoops of serenading gibbon families. We watched orangutans hang upside down by their hand-like feet feeding for hours on wild durian, then we tried the delicious fruit ourselves. And of course, we picked hundreds of terrestrial leeches from our clothes and sometimes—plump with blood—from our skin. While a nuisance, those bloodsuckers didn’t deter us from going out day after day in search of wonders.