Travel with Indigo

From Bali, we cruised for a few days to the south shore of the large island of Borneo, the southern two-thirds of which is the Indonesian state of Kalamantan. There we traveled a short distance up the shallow mocha colored Kumai River and dropped anchor alongside a deserted stretch of beach. This placed us out of the main twisting channel used by aged wooden freight boats carrying cargo to the primitive settlements upriver. The world’s entire population of orang-utans is found only here in Kalamantan and on the nearby island of Sumatra, not counting those seen in a few Clint Eastwood movies. Also found here exclusively are all of the world’s proboscis monkeys.

It was on the Kumai that we saw for the first time the ubiquitous local boats, called long tails, that we would soon see all along our journey into Southeast Asia. These vary in length from twenty to forty feet though most are at the shorter end of this range, are flat bottomed, built of local wood, have a narrow beam and are double-ended meaning pointed at both bow and stern.

But their most curious feature is their propulsion. Each is powered by a four stroke gas or diesel engine from lawn mower to car sized, air or water cooled, mounted at the stern on a small platform that both tilts and swivels. The aft end of the motor is connected to a quite long propeller shaft that extends up to ten feet behind the stern with a two-blade prop attached. At the forward end of the motor is a shaft gripped by the helmsman, tilted up or down to raise or lower the prop and swiveled side to side for steerage. When underway the helmsman maneuvers the gripped shaft in such a way as to keep the prop about half way above the water surface resulting in an aerated plume of prop wash appearing behind the craft, the long tail.  The arrangement results in a small fast boat that’s inexpensive to own and operate, reliable, easy to repair, has an extremely shallow draft and a prop that can’t be damaged on the ever present reefs. They are used by fishermen, freight haulers, and tour operators.

From our anchorage, the crew took me by tender 15 miles up a narrow, winding river lined with pandanus trees and dense malarial jungle to Camp Rimba. This rude collection of huts on platforms and boardwalks raised four feet above the flooded jungle floor was once a zoological research station, since converted to a primitive eco resort. Its staff all come from a remote village located just a hundred yards from the camp and accessible, as is the camp, only by river. My room was one of the few with air conditioning powered by a single generator turned on at 5pm each day and off at 10am.  I wore long pants, long-sleeved shirt and hat and sprayed myself generously with high-DEET insect repellant to discourage the malaria carrying mosquitoes as well as other nasty bugs.

On a stroll along the boardwalks I came upon a family of proboscis monkeys, large goups of the pesky macaques, and at one point an enormous male orangutang, who announced his presence with a very loud harrumph. He was hanging from vines with all appendages fully extended in an aggressive stance intended to warn me away, a ploy that worked just fine. My guide said I should not look him in the eye, should lower my head in a gesture of submissiveness, and slink away. I did this while the big guy glowered at us.

Next day the crew and I traveled in the tender another ten miles into dense Borneo rainforest up an increasingly narrow river, at places no more than twenty feet wide. Along the way we passed a few colorful putt-putt tour boats, closely resembling Humphrey Bogart’s African Queen, taking a few intrepid tourists deep into the Tanjung Puting National Park, home to some 5,000 orang-utans (literally “forest man”). Other than these and a few locals in paddle-powered dugout canoes, the river was vacant of any signs of human life.

Our destination that day was Camp Leakey, named in honor of the famed paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey. Dr. Leakey in his time was mentor to Jane Goodall, who studied chimpanzees, and to Dian Fossey, who studied gorillas. He also was mentor to Dr. Birute Galdikas, who undertook an extensive study of orang-utans and established Camp Leakey, naming it in her patron’s honor.

When we finally arrived at the camp, we were greeted by a wet and tired team from BBC there to film a series on gibbons. They had been at it for six months, which seemed to me like quite a long time to be filming anything, and lived in a smallish local boat tied to the camp dock. The series will air sometime next year.

At the camp dock is a sign warning visitors not to swim in the river. A few years back a research assistant, hot and sweaty from a day’s work, dived off the dock into the river and was promptly devoured by a crocodile. Pythons are another menace killing a few village children every year in Kalamantan alone. But these pale in comparison to the toll of diseases, like dengue fever, malaria, typhoid, typhus, all the hepatitis varieties including E and Japanese B, rabies from monkeys, schistosomiasis, TB, amoebic dysentery, giardiasis, and more. Indeed, there is hardly a tropical disease not found in Indonesia and especially in Borneo. It’s a happy place for viruses and parasites.

Walking over the flooded jungle floor on a raised boardwalk, we came to the camp where Dr. Galdikas lived and worked for many years. In a light rain we walked deeper into the forest soon coming upon a mother orangutang with a baby slung upside down under her body and an adolescent close by. They descended from the trees and began ambling along a forest trail paying little heed to our presence even when we stood next to them for photo ops. It was a wonderful experience to encounter these placid apes (not including the aggressive and territorial males) roaming wild in a Borneo jungle and worth the long travel to get there.

Upon leaving the Kumai River and entering the Java Sea on our way to Singapore, we promptly encountered bad weather.  Winds blowing at twenty-five to thirty knots across the very shallow sea, mostly just sixty to ninety feet deep, caused the waves to steepen to 15 feet or so and become knife edged and widely spaced. Even worse they came at us right on the bow. The result was three days of violent heaving and pounding, by far the most uncomfortable ride of the entire voyage. Everybody on board got seasick, even me for the first time. My skin turned clammy and pale and a tight knot formed in my gut. I lay on my back on the salon sofa, closed my eyes and wished for the feeling to go away, which of course didn’t work.  It was a miserable ride, the worst in more than 25,000 sea miles and three years of adventure.