On Foot Across Borneo

When I borrowed this book from the Library, I didn’t start reading it until a week later.

It was my second daughter who was more fascinated by the cover – the eye of a man peeping through a folliage of leaves. I told her it’s a story of a man who lived in a jungle. She then christened it, the “Jungle man” book, claimed ownership  by scrutinizing the cover for a few days and even putting the book under her pillow.

While she was enthralled by the cover, I was hooked from the very first paragraph of Eric Hansen’s “Stranger in the forest : On foot across Borneo” :

“When I was eight years old, I found a piece of bamboo in my parents’ garage. It was yellow with age and five feet long. It may have been and old rake handle, but from jungle movies on televisions I knew what to do. With my pocketknife I sharpened one end of the bamboo and made a spear.”

Having some idea of what jungle and jungle traversing is like, the account of a Westerner who decided to reach “Apo Kayan“, a remote highland valley in East Kalimantan, via Sarawak on foot by himself, equipped not with some gps systems but a map that was incomplete and decades old – is intriguing.

Imagine – eating the Kelabit’s version of meat preserved for at least a month in a bamboo, nearly getting lost in a valley of grasses taller than him days away from any villages, forced to circumvent a valley that the Penans believed was inhabited by a dragon and others.

Being a Borneon myself, these are familiar or at least imaginable scenarios. But his writing is so articulate  and the humourous situations he included are excellently described.

He made it sound so easy and so much fun.

Although it did make me feel like packing up to explore the deep interior of Borneo, I think I’ll just have my jungle adventures in my head as I read this book – for now.

**Here’s a lovely album of pictures taken at Apo Kayan (Central Kalimantan) taken by Dave Lumenta.