Chapter 27
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
Marcel Proust
First Contact
After Thambi departed his family’s village to return to his Ranger duties, the plans he had set in motion to get Ernest properly equipped and set up, with two dependable guides for his questionable journey, were underway. There was an atmosphere of underlying trepidation and outward optimism as preparations progressed.
Given that the terrain Ernest was about to enter was humid, remote, leech-filled, and especially unpredictable, with trails barely visible to the trained eye, the journey would be rife with unending challenges.
In their rattan backpacks, each of the three men carried lightweight jungle hammocks, rope, one change of clothing only, rice, some fresh fruit, smoked fish, a parang (machete), fishing line, and the list went on. Ernest had brought with him some detailed topographical maps of World War II vintage, which would prove in the end to be virtually useless. He also had a compass, which was of minimal value.
The catch of this expedition was that it would take at least three weeks of hiking to reach the highlands. The hope was to connect with a wandering tribe of Penan who could be just about anywhere and, when the food runs out, be self-sufficient and live off the land. What could go wrong?
Ernest began to take his situation more seriously and regretted having laughed when Thambi had scolded him for his naive, cavalier attitude about hiking into his so-called destiny. Thambi’s family village had been relocated by the government to a site closer to the coast. Relocation was just a euphemism for the joint government/logging company's ruthless takeover of traditional Indigenous lands.
Even in this relatively remote area of Sarawak, there was evidence of logging operations penetrating ever deeper into the forests, illegally claiming and poaching native lands through a process of intimidation, bribes and coercion. The logging companies worked in close co-operation with corrupt government officials at every level, including the office of the governor, to gain access to valuable hardwood stands, which were inevitably clear-cut, with exports sent to Japan, Korea, Europe, wherever demand was high. As with Indigenous groups in other countries, their pleas for land rights, fair play, recognition, and some measure of equality were readily ignored with the headlong pursuit of profit fuelled by insatiable greed.
No sooner was an area logged and decimated than it was replanted as a palm plantation, as the world had a seemingly bottomless demand for palm oil, which today is found in everything from ice cream to peanut butter and has, as a result, become the major driver of deforestation. The natives were increasingly falling victim to the large logging companies and the government, whose greed supported them. Seeing Thambi’s relocated village was but one sign of worse things to come. The invasion of this once totally isolated land was being forced open against its will into the modern era. An era that had nothing to offer in terms of quality of life or standard of living in the modern world.
Hiking inland with his two guides, Rafi and Johan, managed to get further from any of the more recent evidence of logging roads, clear-cutting or palm planting and evidence of the ever-expanding plantations encroaching on native land. The further and longer they marched, the more they were absorbed by the natural sounds and rhythms of the grand tropical equatorial Borneo rain forest. It swallowed them whole. It was a vibrant realism that rejuvenated Ernest like nothing in his life had ever done before. To him, this experience of immersing in the forest was a rebirth, shedding his old urban ways. He felt good about what he hoped he would soon discover and what he had never admitted to anyone before, not his family, not Thambi, not even himself. He wanted to live here. He wanted to live amongst the primitive Penan and discover a new life away from absolutely everything. But first, he must find them and be accepted, a tall order. They marched on through the thick forest, making camp before dusk to allow time for hunting.
Over the next three days, the rain did not abate. It came in long, silver veils that blurred the jungle's edge. Ernest moved slowly; the straps of his pack cut into his shoulders. He struggled to keep dry under his poncho.
Ahead of him, his guide Rafi, a wiry Iban man from Limbang, his skin dark and slick with rain, a parang swinging from his belt. Behind Ernest came Johan, a quiet Kelabit hunter with a blowpipe strapped across his back and a pouch of darts tipped with the sap from the Ipoh tree. They made an odd yet resolute team.
Together, the three men trekking east, through the Borneo highlands of Sarawak, across nameless ridges and flooded valleys, toward the Kalimantan border, following faint traces of old nomadic paths said to lead to the last of the Penan still living free in the forest.
By day nine, their clothes were dry, the last of the leeches had been removed from around their ankles, and the smell of smoke clung to their hair; the jungle had swallowed up all signs of roads and human order.
They set camp beneath a giant strangler fig. Johan showed Ernest how to make a shelter from Atap palm leaves, overlapping them to channel rain. Rafi built a fire with the inner wood of Belian, the ironwood that burns even when wet.
The food they carried dwindled rapidly. As they travelled, they foraged for paku midin (wild ferns), bamboo shoots, and forest snails. Rafi taught Ernest to split bamboo, fill it with river water, and boil rice inside until the water hissed and turned to steam. The rice tasted faintly of wood and smoke, better than anything Ernest had eaten since leaving Thambi’s family.
At night, they sat close to the fire, the damp air thick with forest scents and their own sweat. The forest never slept; its voices rose and fell like a chorus, the croak of frogs, the rasp of insects, the distant crash of fruit falling through leaves.
“Forests test you first,” Rafi said one evening, feeding the fire. “If you listen wrong, she keeps you. If you listen right, maybe she shows you the way.”
Crossing over into Kalimantan was little more than stepping over a river. There was no sign, no line on the earth, only the soft bend of a current that flowed south.
Here, the forest changed, denser, older, darker. Trees rose higher like pillars of time, their trunks furred with moss and fungi. The men followed a stream bed where animal prints told their stories in the mud: deer, boar, civet.
They set traps of rattan and sharpened stakes. Johan checked them at dawn, moving like a shadow through the mist. His voice broke the silence. “Babi hutan,” he said, wild pig. A young boar hung, caught in the snare, thrashing weakly. He expertly dispatched it with a single thrust of his spear.
That night, they roasted the meat on bamboo spits. Fat hissing into the fire, sending up a scent that made Ernest’s stomach ache. That day, they feasted.
Johan taught him to stalk game by listening, not for the sound of animals but for the absence of sound, the sudden silence betrayed by presence. Rafi taught him how to read trees for direction, how certain mosses always face the morning sun.
They found wild honey by following a stream of bees to a hollow trunk. Johan climbed barefoot, cutting open the bark with his parang. Honey poured down his arm, thick and golden. They laughed like boys as they caught it in leaves and licked it clean.
On day seventeen, they awoke to silence. Not even the cicadas sang. Rafi’s eyes narrowed. “Someone is near.” After several days of hiking into the highlands and into what was known to be Penan territory, the guides, speaking in their Malay, had an uneasy feeling that the Penan were present but, through their natural stealth, were not showing themselves. It was not just a feeling of being followed; it was more like a feeling of being constantly surrounded, but without the ability to see or hear anyone or anything, simply a very uneasy feeling and a certain unnatural quiet in the forest.
In response, Ernest and two guides made the universal owl sounds as an obvious message that “we are here.” This so-called cat-and-mouse routine of the strange, spooky feeling and owl calls went on for two more days as the trek continued deeper into Penan country. On the morning of the fourth day, the cycle broke as there was finally a response. Contact.
A soft whistle came through the trees, too patterned to be a bird. Johan raised a hand. “Penan,” he said quietly. “Must be.”
Out of the green mist stepped several figures, barefoot and watchful. The eldest man, his face a map of weather and time, carried a blowpipe across his shoulder. A woman and a child followed, both unafraid.
The elder’s eyes swept over Ernest and his companions. Then he spoke a single word, measured and slow. “Sapa?”
Rafi stepped forward, lowering his parang. “Travellers. From Sarawak. Looking for your people.”
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