Cayce’s car took the two of us through the four hours drive out of Kuching, towards the rainforest at Batang Ai. Small, bleary coloured towns, long haul diners, eyes turn and stare at me. Lush trees along the sides of the road, but no birds fluttered across the sky, nothing moved inside this green.

90% of Sarawak is under forest cover, says its government – but an increasing amount of this official ‘forest’ is made up of commercial plantations or recently felled plots, and hunters have wiped out what wildlife remains. It was hard to remain neutral as Cayce, heartfelt conservation NGO employee, pointed out the ongoing fall of nature in Borneo. The opposite lane of the road had been repeatedly repaired, fresh black sections, while ours looked fine in its original state. Why? Because lorries fully laden with illegal logging, coming up from the border with Indonesian Borneo, had worn the road down with their weight.
A friend once described me as a brilliant "mediator", someone who knows how to adjust themselves to get on well with all kinds of people. Perhaps because of this, I massively admire people like Cayce, who hold firm to their view of how the world should be, even against indifference and opposition.

Faces stare at me in these small towns, faces of the indigenous people of Borneo, Ibans that have left the wooden longhouses for the modern world. People believing they could continue an ancient living off the land, but today’s vehicles and shotguns making their hunting too powerful for nature to regulate. Cars ahead of us threw today’s non degrading waste, cans and cigarette stubs, from windows, making Cayce fume out loud each time we saw it. We crossed a police checkpoint that invariably stopped her (but not the loggers or the poachers) whenever she used this road; this time they waved her on, possibly not interested in pulling her over now a hairy white guy was sharing the car.

The hydroelectric dam built twenty years ago outside Batang Ai created a great lake on the edge of the rainforest, and made the rivers through it deeper and more navigable. At the edge, we met the first of Cayce’s Iban field assistants, Steward; we packed our possessions and food supplies onto his thin longboat, and he took us humming along the still water. The sun was bright, white or moss green trunks of the forest rising around us, the ride smooth.

Cayce and I sat in red plastic chairs in the middle of the boat and I was immensely happy – I kept turning round to grin at her. It sounds cheesy perhaps, but in sometimes too comfortable South East Asia, I have rarely felt the edge of adventure, of not knowing what will come – I was feeling ithere; sensing it liven up my face, quicken my alertness, my urge to write. I felt, and still feel, immensely grateful to her for bringing me along for this field research trip.
Steward’s piloting carried us through a graveyard of trees, sunk beneath the dam-risen waters of the lake, white antler branches we danced around and through. Taller thick trunks rose out from the water like a cryptic Stonehenge, sad solitary bare branches pointed us onwards. Sailing towards the nature reserve, we finally began to see and hear birds – two hornbills flew high over us.

We arrived at the ranger station in the late afternoon, and had dinner in Steward’s house. Pictures of Jesus on the walls, little children watched a glowing TV in the bedroom.
His father, Nyanggau, was the leader of Cayce’s Iban team of four field assistants; slim, lean, flecks of grey in his hair the only suggestion that age (we guessed he was in his late forties) had been able to impose on him. Nyanggau’s English was very good, his story of his trip to Laos to teach canoe building techniques to villagers added to the impression that was already obvious from his presence: this was an extremely intelligent and capable person. A good person to have along in the jungle.
After dinner, we made a night time trip to a nearby longhouse. Nyanggau at the motor, Steward and the two others holding powerful torches shining at the protruding antlers in the water; they steered us through. The black sky hung above us enormous; in the far distance, silent lightning flickered against the clouds. The forest on both sides hummed with unseen insect life.

Iban longhouses are very long. Imagine a simple wood cabin, but about fifteen or twenty strung together. The back holds families’ rooms, thin separating wood walls offering a false promise of a little privacy; the front, an immensely long unbroken hall where the social activity of the house takes place. Only about two dozen people were sitting about this area, leaving it looking very empty. There are an incredible number of things in a longhouse’s hall area, (called a “ruai”) – woven brown mats for people to sit on, machetes hanging in scabbards, clothes drying on lines, a Native American chief staring out of a venerable “Nail Pouch Tobacco” poster. We all sat cross legged with the brother of the longhouse headman, on a mat laid over the clean strong boards. His shirt and trousers were deeply worn and tatty, he was almost completely blind, one eye closed and one milky, open only a crack. The headman came out of his room, very old like a headmaster, wearing glasses, bare-chested, on the front of each shoulder a circular flower tattooed. He looked a proud man, but one who had nevertheless become used to apologising. His wife, with a kind smile, brought out tea; Nyanggau and Cayce talked with him. Another group of old and a few younger Ibans nattered near us; an ancient man whittled a handle for a knife. I smiled sweetly at two of the aunties sitting near me, this set off a round of cackling inuendo in obvious Iban.
Nyanggau and Cayce took me to meet an old man of the longhouse. Dark skin, arms and legs black in places from long ago nailed in tattoos. He looked absurdly old, but was easy on his feet, thin (his legs weren’t much thicker than my arms), but only as if time had stripped everything unnecessary from his body. There was something about him that suggested even at seventy plus, this was not someone you’d want creeping up in the darkness.
His story unfolded: Cayce told me had worked with the British air force in the 50s – he grinned to begin once more his much told tales. He brought out a big framed black and white photo, of maybe forty British seated military men, four young looking Ibans in dark uniforms crouched in front of the first row. His best friend among the British, Sandy, had come back to visit his longhouse and had endured the wincing pain of getting some of the traditional tattoos impaled into his back.
Bits of this story were whirling around my brain unsatisfied. Principally: why would the 1950s RAF need a twenty something rainforest Iban with no words of English? I finally looked at the photo properly, and everything coldly clicked into place. The title: 22 Special Air Service Regiment – the old euphemism for Britain’s special forces, the SAS. And now the date made sense too: during the fifties, the British army had been fighting communist insurgents in Peninsular Malaysia. The SAS would have had lots of uses for an Iban tracker, most of them unpleasant I suspected – and indeed, he began recounting and miming stories of killing "a communist eating a cucumber”. He had cut off the heads of three communists during his time with the SAS, leaving them on the ground as bloody warnings.

That night I slept badly. Cayce and I had the visitor’s house in the ranger station; I couldn’t sleep for the sounds of people moving about the-should-be-empty building. I heard steps on the outside wooden walkway, steps coming up to the front door, then periodically people creaking the boards inside. I deliberated whether to shine my torch around, or to call out, but didn’t. I think I had settled on the idea that the intruders would probably come into Cayce’s room first, so if I heard her screaming I would get up.

I slept, and dreamt... The room was bathed in sunshine, I was sitting on one of beds, my old friend from England, Gari, was sitting on the other. There was a gentle knocking at the door; let the guy in, said Gari, he’s the fifth, come to watch over the people in the house. I got up, went to the door, five names were written on a lined piece of paper pinned to the wall, the first four had red ticks against them, this man must have the last shift. I went to open the door for him, and I woke up. The room was in complete blackness, and the knock-knock-knock continued into the real world. “Let me out of this freaky house and too human creaking floorboards!” I cried out mentally. The knocking stopped, I convinced myself it had been someone in one of the other houses of the station knocking somewhere else, and slept again.
I mentioned later my bad night’s sleep to Cayce. “I hear people moving around every time I stay in this house”, she shrugged, “I’ve just got used to it – not sure to be relieved or not you heard it too”. I idly mentioned my dream to her, she looked at me firmly: “Your dream said they were looking after the people in the house - do you remember what their names were”? “Ummm”… I hadn’t expected my dream to be taken so seriously, “Only that they were Iban type names”…

After a dawn breakfast, we pushed the longboat off towards the park proper – this station was still on the outskirts, and far from the officially protected area. Cayce and I the passengers in our red plastic chairs, four Ibans, led by Nyanggau, eased the pack laded thin boat upstream.
It didn’t take long for me to develop complete admiration for the Ibans. Nyanggau guided the outboard motor around the big rocks of the fast current – the boat hung lightly in the water, able to zoom like a surfboard over rocks I felt sure we would smash into. The two men in the front used bendy but iron strong bamboo poles to push us forcibly over rapids and away from the stone banks. They could stand or crouch for hours, seemingly untouched by fatigue, and whenever one of the front men turned to look back at us he was inevitably grinning. The muscles all over their bodies stood out as they wrenched us forward among the beautiful rainforest scenery. Steep hills pulled away from our river, trees towering green around, in front and behind us.

Kingfishers and butterflies were our companions between the thick foliage. I began to see why Cayce loved this job, loved returning here, despite the difficulties of trying to combine a normal life with being a field researcher. The trees here were tall but few were thick – years of Iban longhouses farming the trees had left this perhaps not as grand as primary (i.e. untouched) forest, but for city boy me, it was still a singular experience to be here.

We reached the final ranger’s station, at the edge of the official boundaries of the park, in the late morning – the ranger was a lazy looking man with a pig’s protruding lower canines. Had I been here independently, I would never get far beyond this point – but our group would be heading deep along the rivers of Batang Ai, to Cayce’s research site, to continue her surveys of Orangutan activity in one of their last wild habitats in Sarawak.

Daniel, July 29, 2004, Kuching