Before heading onwards, we paused at the edge of the reserve, to ask the longhouse nearby if I would be able to stay with them. The plan was for me to accompany Cayce's team for the first three days, then, when they needed to move to the second survey site, for me to spend the next three staying in an Iban longhouse.

I wanted to see something of the human culture of the rainforest, and felt sure an overnight or afternoon stay wouldn't be nearly enough to absorb anything. Three days alone with the longhousers seemed a good amount of time.
The longhouse, deep inside the forest, was on the verge of dying out. Enough rooms for maybe ten families, now merely seven people remained. The gloom of silence lingered there, even during conversation.

The steps up were nervous and rickety, the badly spaced beams of the floor cracked under my weight. We sat on mats, waiting to meet the headman, me trying to avoid losing my bum in any holes in the floor. The headman was spectacularly old looking, his skin seemed to have shrunk at slightly faster rate than his flesh. Two fans of skin conected his Adam's apple to the front of chin, his voice was reedy, brittle. The others of the house were also rather old looking, with the exception of a youngish old woman and her little toddler: a pretty, extremely shy girl with widely spaced eyes and a pudding bowl fringe. Cayce thought this would be a much more notable experience than staying in the half modernised longhouse near the dam - this would be traditional Iban living. I was, if I'm honest, a little scared by the prospect of living with these people, as if such oldness shouldn't be got too close to, as if such isolation was contagious. There was little warmth in the inhabitants' eyes at the prospect of a visitor, and the little girl was terrified at the sight of me. We haggled down their outrageous opening bid for me staying, agreed I would be returning on Saturday, and bade the eeriely quiet house farewell. Slightly unsettled, I got back into the boat and we continued our journey deeper upriver.

The trees got thicker, vines wrapped around trunks became more assertive, the river's rapids harder to climb over. Steward and Beginda in the front were frequently wrenching themselves almost horizontal, trusting their bamboo staffs to bend double and bring the boat forwards. Nyanggau and Belansai at the back steered and pushed and bailed water.
We stopped for lunch at an obstacle not passable by boat - a jagged rock outcropping took up most of the waterway, forcing the river to smash down a narrow short waterfall at its edge. We ate lunch on the stones, and by the time the meal was halfway through, wasps and flies filled every available part of the air around us. The wasps licked at my clothes, buzzed into my hair, landed on and crawled all over my laid out yellow towel in clear happy bliss. Brushing them away only brought a few moments respite. Yet, the wasps merely buzzed, they didn't choose to sting - a trait that other inhabitants of the rainforest I was due to meet wouldn't share.
Lunch cleared away, the Ibans laid a few logs strategically across the heights of the rocks, and proceeded to heft and slide the longboat across the logs to the calm river beyond. At first, I helped out, Nyanggau shouting, "One, two, three!" for my benefit. But quickly, I could barely balance on the rocks, let alone stand in the right place where I could be some help to these compact olympians. Feeling at best half a man, I gave up my role in the boat moving, and stood with Cayce watching.

We arrived at the campsite as the rains began properly - Nyanggau's men struck up a section of sheeting for the two of us to stand under, while they erected the rest. A latice of logs - an A frame holding up plastic raincovers, logs to hold the flat plastic "military" hammocks we would be sleeping on.

The finished camp, my pink hammock from Thailand hanging. See a very, very short silly film of this here (click on the file "setting up camp").

We were now alone in the reserve, or at least we should have been. Cayce had already spotted a spent shotgun shell on the riverbank and had packed it for evidence; at many times in Batang Ai, the "protected" status of the reserve seemed nominal at best. Hunters from the nearby longhouses, from elsewhere in Sarawak and from across the Indonesian border drifted through, more or less freely and without fear. Even if the porcine faced ranger back at the edge of reserve had been a paragon of efficiency, there was no way he could have enforced Batang Ai's protected status on his own - and I was pretty sure he was some distance to paragonness.

Leeches. With camp set up, Nyanggau got water boiling and brought us cups of coffee. Cayce's team had a near constant happy disposition, seeming to enjoy looking after this rather helpless giant baby. I sat on my hammock, and my happy relish at being in the wilderness was perplexed somewhat when I spotted a little thin line of shiny black on my sandaled foot. The word "leech" conjures up a big, ponderous slug thing. Perhaps elsewhere, leeches get so fat and happy they look like the Hollywood image - but the leeches of Batang Ai were thin black lines of snot, wriggling, devious, doubling their length to evade removal, settling down thickly between a toe or in the sole of a foot to feed. I grabbed at the one on my foot while making very girly "urgh, urgh" noises. It fastened one end to my foot flesh, and waved frantically its other end to try and bite hold of my fingers. I eventually got the loathsome thing on the tip of a finger and suceeded in flicking it with a grimace into the darkening evening undergrowth. "Leeches are a good indicator of wildlife in the area", Cayce said brightly. She continued: "That was the common leech, there's an another type, much more aggressive - they have bigger teeth, so it hurts when they bite in, and they can jump. They're called tiger leeches". "How did I know they were going to be called tiger leeches?", I muttered, "and I notice you only mentioned them now we're actually in the rainforest". Cayce beamed with the smile of a tour guide whose group has just discovered their hotel has no running water - "But, it's good that it hurts when they bite, that way you know you've got a leech on you".
Tiger leeches were not the only thing that bit in our camp. I was standing by my hammock when a needle pain shot into my big toe. It wasn't scream-out-loud-pain, but it was grit-teeth-and-utter-a-loud-GRRRR!-pain. And there was no mark on my toe when I looked at it. "Probably an ant", mused Cayce, "they have stingers here". I loudly questioned why none of this had been mentioned back in Kuching, as the Ibans grinned at my frantic big toe rubbing. "...Oh, and Orangutans have occasionally been known to rape humans", Cayce now offered, with a glint in her eye, "but, that one case was in a rehabilitation centre, where humans and orangutans interact, it probably wouldn't happen in the wild"...

We did two days of surveying, and I was pretty exhausted by the end of them. The second day was particularly tough: just to get to the start of the transect, we crawled along a crumbling slope on a path only the Ibans could see. Well, actually it was just me crawling, sometimes with Belansai physically pushing my bum forward with his palm to generate some onwards movement. I clung to disintergrating roots, let the broadly smiling Belansai pick leeches off my arms I hadn't even spotted, until Cayce was ready to give up this imaginary path too, and she and I just swam upriver until we met the Ibans at the start of the trail.

On each day, we treaded through the rainforest's hills (at least now I was in trainers and protective leech socks), eyes combing the upper branches of trees for new nests and ticking off old ones. Each research trail, or transect, was 2km long, which doesn't sound much of a strain, until one factors in the steep hills, slippery ground, palm sword-leaves with serrated edges, and deceptively friendly branches that gave way only as I put my weight on them. But complaining and leech plucking off aside, it was wonderful to be in the forest, pausing at each noise to scan the trees for movement.

Steward resting for a moment.

The orangutans of Batang Ai live in the trees, and for them the rainforest must be full of light, full of life reaching for a bright dripping sky. But we walked the floor of the rainforest, and everywhere we were surrounded by death. In the rainforest, life reaches for the light, hoping to feed from the sun; trying to fight off the incredible powers wrenching them downwards into the earth. Vines corded around trunks, bugs burrowed into wood and chomped at anything green. Leaves, red and brown, covered the floor - decayed matter piled so high my feet sank with each step. Once anything died in the rainforest, decay was ferocious - the liquid air crumbled, rotted and shattered what lay on the ground. However, this was not the decay of gothic tombs, this was vibrant, joyous decay. The damp air was fresh with the creation of new life. Each in the rainforest had its chance at existence, then when it could strive no more, it was torn apart to fuel the not yet born.

We saw no orangutans on this trip - but, this was the wild, not a zoo or rehabilitation centre, so I wasn't too surprised. We did see a family of leaping gibbons, hurling from vine to branch to vine. They paused to stare at us, then leapt on. We also spotted red langur monkeys, and heard the echoing "woo-woo" of the big Argus Pheasant, and the clumping thumps of a wild boar crashing around nearby.

It sounds odd perhaps, but one of my favourite parts of those days was going to sleep. We slept all but in the open, only a rain cover protecting us from the sky and a rectangular box mosquito net protecting us from amorous insects. The sun set around seven, and Cayce and I talked or played chess for an hour or two each night before blowing out the candle between our hammocks. To lie back amid the clicks and beeps of the insect world, rain pattering on the plastic sheeting above me, in complete darkness, was inexplicably utterly wonderful. I felt content, at peace - we slept until sunrise, then the day's work began with Nyanggau bringing over a steaming cup of coffee.

--

After the two days, we sailed back to the park's edge. Cayce and Nyanggau brought me to the longhouse, we sat on the longhousers' mats, checked I would have my own room, wouldn't be allowed to starve etc. I had brought a supermarket bag of supplies for them, as a gift, this improved the atmosphere immensely. The cadevourous headman, Butak, patted my knee warmly, "You are a good boy". He and Nyanggau strung up my hammock from two beams of the longhouse and I unpacked my stuff in the vacant room I had been assigned. I wasn't sure how the next three days were going to go, but waved goodbye to my friends as the motor of their boat sped off into silence.

Daniel, 31 July 2004, Kuching

PS --
This photo doesn't really fit anywhere in the narrative, but in the ranger's station, red ants would wait on the windows, and when the ever present wasps would buzz around the inside window frame, trying to get out the house maybe, the ants would grab them and hold them still. The incredible strength of the ants was something to behold - a few would catch the wasp, then one or two would grab each wing and limb and pull (and bite?) the wasp until it stopped moving. Then the group would carry the wasp off towards the hive...