Episode summary:
I travelled to Borneo to join Dayak tribesmen heading deep into the jungle to search for an area in which to relocate orangutans displaced by indiscriminate logging operations. The tribesmen work with international charities to help conserve these wonderful apes here. I flew in by helicopter from the coastal town of Balikpapan and then took longboats way up river to find a suitable patch of untamed rainforest. These are some of the last undisturbed rainforests in Asia – in the world – and home to countless flora and fauna species. They offer the perfect environment for the displaced orangutans.
Listen to a podcast about adventuring deep into Borneo’s magical rainforest with Dayak tribesmen.
Photo © copyright Matthew Brace. https://mattbracetravels.com/podcast/
Transcript – S1 E2: Deep in Borneo’s magical rainforest
This week we are way off the beaten track in Borneo, taking longboats upriver with local Dayak tribesmen.
Before dawn, the Dayak tribesmen smoke spicy tobacco and rub their eyes to did them of sleep. They talk in half-whispers, almost chanting sentences to each other.
Their skeletal fingers hold wooden spears and polished machetes, and they tie grey and green cloths around their heads. They are preparing for a journey. In the milky half-light, they crouch with me and we sip caffeine-laced cocoa that makes our hearts race. We’re heading for a remote settlement more than 100 miles inland to see if it’s suitable for rehousing orangutans that have been displaced elsewhere by the indiscriminate logging of their forests.
The settlement is on the edge of Borneo’s untamed ancient rainforest. A couple of tribesmen in our party have been there before and talk of a tall curtain of forest at the edge of the village, beyond which only experienced local hunters and magic men venture. They do not always return.
The only way in is by longboat along the Mahakam River. Mahakam, in case you’re wondering, translates as ‘cut-off head’, a poignant reminder that the Dayak tribes living in these remote areas were headhunting until about 30 or 40 years ago. Poles that once sported the severed noggins of enemies still stand in villages along the riverbank, kept as a warning, perhaps, to unruly strangers.
Jungle journey
With caffeine racing through our bodies, we leap into the longboats and speed off. The outboard motors are deafening. They scatter lavishly coloured birds from their waterside perches and send gibbons rampaging through the forest canopy, whooping as they go. The sun breaks through the trees and blushes the river the colour of ripe mangoes. My guide tells me to hang on as we accelerate, bouncing over small waves and swerving violently to avoid floating trees that can split a longboat in two.
Children run from small villages to the river’s edge as we pass, smiling and calling out to us. There are villages dotted every few miles for the first five or six hours of the journey, but by early afternoon, all signs of settlement have gone. We’re cruising through largely uninhabited rainforest now.
We arrive in the small settlement in the late afternoon and walk past villages, sitting on the ground chopping madang, an aromatic bark burned to ward off mosquitoes. We’re invited into one of the village’s iron-barked longhouses and presented with plates of watermelon and pawpaw, and thin whittled twigs as toothpicks. So civilised. After a long day of noisy, hot, diesel-fumed longboat travel through the rainforest, the quiet stillness and relative cool of a Dayak longhouse is bliss.
An audience with the headman
A storm that’s been building all afternoon hits the village, sending the madang cutters running for cover and scattering the children from their games. As the full might of a booming Borneo tempest shakes the forest, the village headman holds a meeting in his own house. He sits on the floor and welcomes us with cups of sweet tea and a smile that occupies half his face. Around the main room are altars, crucifixes and mournful Madonnas. It looks more like a priest’s house in Rome than that of a Dayak chief.
The headman explains, through an interpreter, that the village doesn’t follow the Dayak gods and beliefs any more. They’re Catholic now. It’s true that more and more Dayak settlements are adopting Christianity or Islam, but I’m not entirely sure the rest of this village got the headman’s memo on this. I don’t see any other Catholic images or icons anywhere else around here.
One change they have made, though, is to stop headhunting. The headman tells me they gave it up because they realised it was a waste of time. “We would fight a village and take some heads,” he says. “Then that tribe would fight us, take some of our heads. Nobody won.”
This is some relief to me. There’s a fair chance I’m the only blond person for several hundred miles. So I was wondering if my head might be seen as a bit of a novelty item.
Entrance to paradise
In the last dying light of the day, I walk with one of the Dayak tribesmen back down to the river to check on the longboats. We smoke spicy tobacco together, and he points out the giant forest curtain a hundred metres or so in front of us. It’s like a mighty broad green waterfall alive with birdsong, like the entrance to Eden. Beyond it, there is nothing human made for hundreds or possibly thousands of square miles. I’m on the edge of one of the world’s last untamed rainforests, home to countless flora and fauna species. I’m not sure I’ve seen anything so beautiful.
In pidgin English, the tribesman tells me this is the perfect environment for the displaced orangutans. “Tomorrow,” he says, “we will go in there – maybe two or three days – to check. But I already know this is a good place, a safe place. This will be their new home.”
“But what if the loggers come here as well?” I ask him. He holds up his machete and says, “we fight”!
© copyright Matthew Brace
