Upturned satellite dish, implying latitude appx 1 deg south
Our faithful ship
The Sungai Makham "River"
The Navigator at work
Ben clearing the wayDetermining latitude has always been one of the easier navigational feats (relative, at least, to longitude), and in recent years it has become even simpler. A simple trip down any populated waterway, with a casual gaze cast at the middle class houses built on stilts to avoid the floods, will provide ample satellite dishes pointed directly at an azimuth some 30,000 miles above the equator. In the northern hemisphere, these dishes would point south, but here, in the tropics, they point straight up. Like bowls of offering, set to receive the blessings of the god in the form of the latest RAI soap, or motorcycle race on Eurosport 3.
I must have gazed at thousands of such dishes, as we cruised up the Sunghai Makham, the main artery of Indonesian Borneo. It’s the first stop on my honeymoon, and while I certainly will deliver my wife into the lap of tropical luxury, as usual we feel the need to earn it a bit first by being bounced around along broken roads and doused with tropical rain. An air conditioned room with clean sheets is only properly appreciated by flea-bitten bodies.
We flew via Singapore to Balikpapan, the commercial hub of the region, where we were met by a father and son team who were to be our guides on the river. The father took up river guiding after retiring from first the oil industry and then the coal industry. The Balikpapan airport’s advertising inventory dispensed with the usual cell phone and hotel ads, and instead flogged the latest in industrial pumps, and oilfield services. Most of the travelers through here would apparently be interested in such things. The region is Indonesia’s wealthiest, containing as it does most of the nation’s energy reserves and some of the world’s largest coal mines.
The industry has spawned a substantial middle class, darting to and from along under-built roads on smart looking scooters. Whenever I see large number of scooters I shudder, since the scooters reflect a transition, not equilibrium – every single one of the tens of thousands of scooter drivers I’ve seen in the past two days would have been on a bike or ox cart twenty years ago, and will certainly be a family car twenty years hence. Watch out, global temperatures!
The nominal purpose of the river trip was to visit some Dayak communities isolated from civilization, but as is so often the case civilization’s reach appears to be longer than our own, and despite two days travel by river, we never quite escaped cell phone range, and even had an electric fan in the home-stay room we shared overnight. The Dayak, a name given to the 4 million or so indigenous inhabitants of Borneo, are a loose collection of tribes, who claim to be descended from Mongolian princes (the king sent them here in search of medicine for an ailment that had befallen the royal princess. They were given orders to return with the cure, or not at all. They stayed.) They are the original head-hunters of popular myth, a practice that earned them splendid isolation through the end of nineteenth century, when the pressure of neighboring Java’s teeming masses proved too much. The Dayak were dragged into modernity first by thousands upon thousands of Javanese immigrants (who now number over ten million in Borneo), and then by the oil majors and mining companies that followed. Interestingly, it has always been the land-seeking immigrants who have caused the most offense. As recently as 1996, a group of several hundred farmers resettled from Java under a government program were found beheaded right under the noses of the police placed there to prevent exactly such an occurrence. In defense of the Dayak, according to our guide, it must be noted that the Javanese had unprovoked placed a hex on a Dayak chief’s son, causing him to die.
Most Dayak make their living as fishermen along Borneo’s impressive inland waterways, giving up their traditional communal longhouses for elegant homes perched on stilts along boulevards of water, set in the midst of vast inland lakes. I’m told in the dry season these boulevards become more normal rivers, but now, with the north-west monsoon just a month behind, the impression is that the entire country is covered with a sheet of water several yards deep. Men smoke clench clove cigarettes between their teeth as they steer their canoes with one hand and work a net with the other. Women, only a few in headscarves, chat gamely on their front porches, sorting fish or tending shop. Healthy looking kids outnumber both handily.
We rode a motorized canoe, the kind where the engine is attached directly via a long shaft to the propeller, with the whole apparatus mounted on a pivot and used to steer as well as drive the craft. It’s a model which I’ve spotted in Africa, South America, and beyond, but we are told is indigenous to this archipelago. And why not? The boat captain we hired for the trip up river was as skilful as any we’ve seen. We sliced through water as still as a mirror, and just as easily cut through vast fields of tall water grass on our way up river to our destination.
At one point, when the vast pools had narrowed to a channel through the swamped forest, we very nearly ran directly into a large tree which had fallen completely across our path. With no way around it, I quickly declared defeat and prepared myself for a night in the rather shabby looking stilt-town a few miles back. But just then the captain leapt up on the trunk of the tree with a two-foot machete and proceeded to whack away, easily severing the vines and branches from around the tree with single expert blows. After a few minutes of this, he handed me the machete and headed back into the boat. Thinking that I was to help play hero, I leapt forward and started gamely whacking away. I had almost hacked by way through a small branch when up from below me, from the water, emerged a saw, and attached to it the boat captain, now shed of all clothes, who had jumped in the water to attack the main trunk of the tree. No more than ten minutes later, the captain was back behind the engine, clove cigarette in teeth.
Update: After reading Richard Lloyd Parry's excellent book In the Time of Madness which recounts his first-hand experiences witnessing the slaughter of the Madurese people in Borneo at the hands of the Dayaks and the Malays, I must reconsider my flippant remarks above, informed mostly by the guidebook and the comments of several Malays I've met -- Madurese are a poor minority, labeled as "dirty", "thieves", "uncureable" and so on. The general consensus is that he genocide was well justified -- it sounds remarkably like what some present day Europeans might say about Romany Gypsies... or what used to be said about Jews.
I must have gazed at thousands of such dishes, as we cruised up the Sunghai Makham, the main artery of Indonesian Borneo. It’s the first stop on my honeymoon, and while I certainly will deliver my wife into the lap of tropical luxury, as usual we feel the need to earn it a bit first by being bounced around along broken roads and doused with tropical rain. An air conditioned room with clean sheets is only properly appreciated by flea-bitten bodies.
We flew via Singapore to Balikpapan, the commercial hub of the region, where we were met by a father and son team who were to be our guides on the river. The father took up river guiding after retiring from first the oil industry and then the coal industry. The Balikpapan airport’s advertising inventory dispensed with the usual cell phone and hotel ads, and instead flogged the latest in industrial pumps, and oilfield services. Most of the travelers through here would apparently be interested in such things. The region is Indonesia’s wealthiest, containing as it does most of the nation’s energy reserves and some of the world’s largest coal mines.
The industry has spawned a substantial middle class, darting to and from along under-built roads on smart looking scooters. Whenever I see large number of scooters I shudder, since the scooters reflect a transition, not equilibrium – every single one of the tens of thousands of scooter drivers I’ve seen in the past two days would have been on a bike or ox cart twenty years ago, and will certainly be a family car twenty years hence. Watch out, global temperatures!
The nominal purpose of the river trip was to visit some Dayak communities isolated from civilization, but as is so often the case civilization’s reach appears to be longer than our own, and despite two days travel by river, we never quite escaped cell phone range, and even had an electric fan in the home-stay room we shared overnight. The Dayak, a name given to the 4 million or so indigenous inhabitants of Borneo, are a loose collection of tribes, who claim to be descended from Mongolian princes (the king sent them here in search of medicine for an ailment that had befallen the royal princess. They were given orders to return with the cure, or not at all. They stayed.) They are the original head-hunters of popular myth, a practice that earned them splendid isolation through the end of nineteenth century, when the pressure of neighboring Java’s teeming masses proved too much. The Dayak were dragged into modernity first by thousands upon thousands of Javanese immigrants (who now number over ten million in Borneo), and then by the oil majors and mining companies that followed. Interestingly, it has always been the land-seeking immigrants who have caused the most offense. As recently as 1996, a group of several hundred farmers resettled from Java under a government program were found beheaded right under the noses of the police placed there to prevent exactly such an occurrence. In defense of the Dayak, according to our guide, it must be noted that the Javanese had unprovoked placed a hex on a Dayak chief’s son, causing him to die.
Most Dayak make their living as fishermen along Borneo’s impressive inland waterways, giving up their traditional communal longhouses for elegant homes perched on stilts along boulevards of water, set in the midst of vast inland lakes. I’m told in the dry season these boulevards become more normal rivers, but now, with the north-west monsoon just a month behind, the impression is that the entire country is covered with a sheet of water several yards deep. Men smoke clench clove cigarettes between their teeth as they steer their canoes with one hand and work a net with the other. Women, only a few in headscarves, chat gamely on their front porches, sorting fish or tending shop. Healthy looking kids outnumber both handily.
We rode a motorized canoe, the kind where the engine is attached directly via a long shaft to the propeller, with the whole apparatus mounted on a pivot and used to steer as well as drive the craft. It’s a model which I’ve spotted in Africa, South America, and beyond, but we are told is indigenous to this archipelago. And why not? The boat captain we hired for the trip up river was as skilful as any we’ve seen. We sliced through water as still as a mirror, and just as easily cut through vast fields of tall water grass on our way up river to our destination.
At one point, when the vast pools had narrowed to a channel through the swamped forest, we very nearly ran directly into a large tree which had fallen completely across our path. With no way around it, I quickly declared defeat and prepared myself for a night in the rather shabby looking stilt-town a few miles back. But just then the captain leapt up on the trunk of the tree with a two-foot machete and proceeded to whack away, easily severing the vines and branches from around the tree with single expert blows. After a few minutes of this, he handed me the machete and headed back into the boat. Thinking that I was to help play hero, I leapt forward and started gamely whacking away. I had almost hacked by way through a small branch when up from below me, from the water, emerged a saw, and attached to it the boat captain, now shed of all clothes, who had jumped in the water to attack the main trunk of the tree. No more than ten minutes later, the captain was back behind the engine, clove cigarette in teeth.
Update: After reading Richard Lloyd Parry's excellent book In the Time of Madness which recounts his first-hand experiences witnessing the slaughter of the Madurese people in Borneo at the hands of the Dayaks and the Malays, I must reconsider my flippant remarks above, informed mostly by the guidebook and the comments of several Malays I've met -- Madurese are a poor minority, labeled as "dirty", "thieves", "uncureable" and so on. The general consensus is that he genocide was well justified -- it sounds remarkably like what some present day Europeans might say about Romany Gypsies... or what used to be said about Jews.
1 comments:
I was just in SE Alaska, where I noticed the satellite dishes pointed directly at the horizon, almost down.
Though it's too late, I know, a great read on Borneo is "Stranger in the Forest" by Eric Hansen. If you don't already know his stuff, you should get acquainted with it before you travel to too many more places, he's a hell of a travel writer.
Deep in Borneo - or anywhere there may be relatively intact indigenous cultures - is where the traveler gets so close to something so precious, but touching it may destroy it. It's hard to know what to do from there. A lot of us travel to see cultural authenticity, but there's a bit of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in it - if we can see it, it's probably not what it was.
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