Adventure Divas (10 page)

The jungle appears fast and definitively, like spilled ink from a well. From up here it looks like a petri dish of mold. Dusty dark green, bumpy, with tiny creases and valleys and shadows. A patternless pattern of crumpled anarchy. Definitely alive.

Once we land at the tiny, humid airport, we look for the two people who will round out our team: Dutch producer Vanessa Boeye and British director Rik Lander, both of whom have been on the ground in Borneo for a week doing reconnaissance. Vanessa, blond, blue-eyed, tall, and willowy thin (and posh, I suspect, in spite of her casual travel attire), walks up as our pile of twelve aluminum boxes and backpacks appears on the back of a tractor. As the producer, part of Vanessa’s job is to feed “the talent’s” ego. In short, it is her place to tell me I look fabulous even when we are two weeks in the bush,
sans
shower, grimy with bat guano.

“Nice to meet you. You look like hell,” she says cheerfully, with a British accent.

We’re going to get along just fine.

We take over
every socket in the lobby of our hotel in the small town of Limbang before setting off for the interior jungle. While the batteries charge, I wander outside the hotel and spot an Internet café, or more accurately, a tiny cinder-block room located behind two cows tied to a metal fence post leaning at forty-five degrees.
WIDE WIRLD WEB RM1 TEA 2,
reads the handwritten sign. I scuttle around the cows and log on to see if there’s any word from Diva HQ.

TO:
H
OLLY
FROM:
J
EANNIE
SUBJECT:
A
IRDATE!

Hol—MJ called and PBS is buying the show! We did it. Looks like they are going to schedule Cuba to broadcast on a Monday night in prime time. They’ve asked us to take out your reference to menstruation in the narration “the revolution has moved to my uterus”; and they want you to add a reference to yourself as a “journalist” (more credibility, I guess). But those are the only changes—which MJ says is remarkable for a first submission. Unfortunately, they won’t commit to the entire series until seeing how the pilot rates. She signs all her e-mails, “Onward!” I love that.

Jeannie/Mom

p.s. I was looking at your itinerary—why did you go through London? Isn’t that the wrong way?

I return to the hotel,
recharged by the exciting news from home. Our team gathers in the hotel lobby and we set out for the interior jungle of Sarawak. Our guide, Martin, is in his early twenties and has chestnut skin and jet-black hair. He is Dayak (the indigenous people of Borneo) and of the Iban tribe. Though he has taken ecotourists into the jungle before, I wonder if he understands the constant demands and challenges of a film crew.

The network of chunky, easy-moving, tea-colored rivers is the closest thing to infrastructure in this part of Borneo. Our young, barefoot boatman is poised at the front of our hip-wide longboat, ready to pole when shallows, still water, or rapids threaten our progress. A beefy old outboard motor dangles from the back of the boat like a very important, yet untended to, participle. Vanessa and I stare suspiciously at the sputtering two-stroke.

On the river, the jaggy mold I saw from the sky has become a dark green, menacing mass that lines the river. The jungle seems aggressive, as if the vines and trees are taking back the water’s edge, instead of cohabiting with it in pastoral bliss, as a forest might meet a babbling brook. I imagine the density beyond our sight as unreasonable and unforgiving. A vicious chaos. I notice Vanessa noticing me recoil.

“Sorta feral looking,” I say to Vanessa, explaining my discomfort.

“Rhoyyt then,” says Georgie, with a game smile. “How much longer ’til the lodge?”

Periodically the jungle breaks and gives way to waterside communities. Longhouses with roofs of corrugated steel (rather than the traditional wood and rattan) pepper the river highway. People work together on the long porches and nod when we quietly chug by. “Dayak do not like to be alone,” says Martin, and I think of Assata Shakur’s saying that, in Cuba, she’d never met people so unafraid of other people.

The dwellings appear fewer and farther between as hours drift by and we sink deeper into the anarchy I first identified from above, from outside. I’ve come to crave these rare places that are off the grid; they can thrust one into the epiphany zone. Ironically, it is TV, that most “on-the-grid” medium, that now brings me to this state.

Urban Borneo thrives with the cultural and spiritual diversity of all of Southeast Asia, but the upriver longhouses, though no longer offering the display of bare breasts and bloodletting a broadcaster might hope for, can be a reservoir of traditional spiritual beliefs—a reservoir spiced with baseball caps, T-shirts, and, not so infrequently, film crews.

Malaysia’s official religion is Islam, but zealous missionaries and North Borneo’s status as a former British colony make Christianity widespread. Yet here in the interior of Sarawak, the rules of the West and the rules of the East are handily trumped by the rules of the Jungle—and animism is operative. Unlike Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, and other doctrines of the world, Kaharinga—Iban animism—does not distinguish between this life and the hereafter, between the religious and the secular. Religion is everyday life. Animism, quite sensibly, is more interested in the here and now and the supremacy of nature. Natural phenomena, as well as things animate and inanimate, are all said to possess a soul.

To the upriver Iban’s traditional eye, the steamy, humid atmosphere is thick with
antu
(spirits) and
petara
(gods). The spirits and the people work in concert. (A quid pro quo of sorts: We give you offerings, you help the rice crops grow.) The spirits hold the upper hand, to be sure, and their behavior can run the range from benevolent to capricious.

Our small procession of overloaded canoes sputters up toward the traditional Rumah Bala Lasong longhouse, where Vanessa and Martin have arranged for us to spend the night with Iban tribal members.

Martin grew up in a longhouse and, partly due to his excellent English, has landed a coveted job in the world of tourism. I am quizzing him about the surrounding area.

“What are the biggest hazards?” I ask.

“A few leeches, sometimes a snake. Only drink the bottled water,” he responds casually, offering a whitewashed version of reality. In fact, I know there are tens of thousands of species in this national “park” (a misleading term that implies the jungle is somehow under the control of humans) and some of them, particularly the cold-blooded ones, could be a problem.

Put a frothing rabid dog in my path, and I respond with the calm of Atticus Finch. Bring on a mama grizzly, and I am as sharp as her claws slicing through the flesh of a wild king salmon. But show me a cold-blooded, slithering critter and I turn into an irrational, mute, quivering . . . appendix.

Indulging a strange habit of dashing toward what I fear, I press Martin on the snake issue. Vanessa has told me there are twenty-five kinds of snakes in this part of Borneo, many of them poisonous.

“Yes,” Martin admits, “there’s the
Python reticulatus;
the Javanese reed snake,
Calamaria borneensis;
the red-headed krait,
Bungarus flaviceps;
the banded Malayan coral snake,
Maticora intestinalis;
the cobra,
Naja naja;
and the—”

I hold up my hand to stop the recitation.

“You had me at
python,
” I say.

My phobic (that’s phobic,
not
phallic) response to snakes irks me. I can’t stand having an irrational fear that plays right into the hands of Freudian pundits.

We move through the hours at double the river’s slow pace: outboard time. The rhythm is in marked contrast to my time in Cuba, when we were constantly racing from one diva to the next. Here, we tinker with equipment, apply sunscreen, and get to know one another with banal small talk, as if it were the first day at camp.
What tribe are you in? How many languages do you speak? How much tape stock do we have? Where do we pee?

After hours of collective ruminating, we round a bend and, out of nowhere, Martin says, “They are expecting us.” When, thirty seconds later, we hear the distant sounds of a welcoming party, I look over at Martin and think of Spock, his deep Vulcan wisdom, always right and always three steps ahead of his earthly comrades. Then again, I know the ring of a telemarketer a mile off, so it makes sense that Martin is tuned in to the greeting rituals of his home turf. As we close in on our destination, a collaboration of gongs and drums begins to overtake the jungle’s cacophony of cicadas.

We round a gentle curve on the snaking river highway and see a headman, or
tuai rumah,
walking down a planked pier followed by a dozen boys, women with babies on their hips, and excited children. The headman is small and must be seventy; lithe and bent, but not at all decrepit. On his shoulders are swirling floral and reptile tattoos. He is wearing a flamboyant arching warrior headdress decorated with enormous black and white feathers of the locally revered hornbill, a species no longer found in these rain forests. We have heard of this sacred welcome ritual, called a
bedora,
but didn’t expect we’d earned such a greeting—which is clearly camera-worthy.

Unfortunately, to be dignified and move fast at the same time is the rare province of Bolshoi ballerinas, successful NASA liftoffs, and, occasionally, Nelson Mandela, but hardly ever film crews in boats.

CANOE #1

I stand too quickly and Martin lunges for my ankles to keep the canoe from tipping over. I will the headman’s eye contact to me so he does not notice the frantic fumbling about that is emanating from Canoe #2.

CANOE #2

“Goddammit, start filming.”

“Bugger, the battery just died. Get another, quick.”

“We don’t know how long this will laaaast.” The obvious is stated with friendly Brit urgency.

“Martin,” Vanessa queries with a nervous smile toward Canoe #1, “do you think the headman would do it again for us?”

He looks at her blankly.

We clamber
out of the canoes and follow the welcoming procession up the walkway to the longhouse, which stretches into the distance like an army barrack, but is much more inviting—especially as it rests on wooden stilts. Stilts, meant to protect the house from floods and animals, are surely the friendliest of architectural elements.

The longhouse is the traditional communal living structure, home to approximately fifteen families and up to a hundred people. We climb a wooden ladder to reach the first of three primary areas: a “porch” that stretches the length of the structure and is exposed to the outdoors. This is the area where clothes hang to dry, visitors arrive, and muddy shoes are removed. The second is a screened avenue, or gallery, that also runs along the length of the building, and has a bamboo floor. The gallery seems to be where life happens: One woman is in a distant corner mending a fishing net while another is weaving an intricate cloth with a wood loom; children romp around, excited by the prospect of visitors.

The third area, which we have yet to see, is beyond a rattan wall, and is the families’ individual cooking and sleeping quarters. Under the structure reside, according to my keen olfactory and auditory sleuthing skills, pigs and chickens.

I say good afternoon to an older woman who is sitting on the floor with a red and yellow sarong knotted above her breasts, husking rice.
“Salamat tongah-hari.”

“Rindu amat betemu enggau nuan,”
she responds in kind with a blood-red smile, and then spits between the slats in the floorboards, adding betel-nut juice to the menagerie below.

“You are our honored guests and the festivities will begin soon,” says the headman, with Martin translating.

Our ungraceful arrival was hardly honorable, but clearly Vanessa and Martin had done their groundwork. My expectations for the evening are high after having read
Rajahs and Rebels
by a guy named Robert Pringle, who wrote in 1970, “A vigorous tradition of hospitality has come to be a hallmark of longhouse life. . . . Longhouse dwellers are typically open and gregarious with foreigners, eager for news of the outside world, and extremely fond of entertaining. There is often dancing and more often drink, and the fun may go on for most of the night.” The Iban are also known for their confidence and pluck.

I ask a young girl about a toilet.
“Dini endor kitai mandi?”
She takes me back through her family’s private space beyond the rattan wall. Our sleeping bags are already piled in an area where we will sleep with our host family. In the rear of the space, the floor slopes down into a short passage that leads to a dark room with a blazing open hearth. Giant black pots sizzle with the impending feast, and an older woman crouches next to the fire tending to an eviscerated critter twirling on a spit, flames dancing off its charred hide. The girl shows me to a door off to the left of the cooking room. At this point, with Seattle three sleepless nights in my rearview mirror, my exhaustion has graduated to the daze phase, and my synapses sputter instead of fire. I go into the dark and tiny room with a cement floor and corrugated metal walls. I look down and barely make out a squatter toilet. That is, a hole in the ground with imprints for footpads to aid in your balance and aim-taking. There is no flushing or toilet paper involved—merely a saucepan of water to move things along.

A tiny stream of light slices through a crack in the wall. I have not slept since Tuesday and we have been traveling in ninety-five-degree heat (and just about as much humidity) all day, yet the London series producer’s pleading that I “spruce up” (“Just a bit of color would be grand”) is what echoes in my mind. I want to please the broadcaster, but I don’t want to appear vain to the crew—or ridiculous to our Iban hosts—and thus I find myself bent over in a wet, slightly putrid, cement-floored room, trying to catch the single shaft of light in my two-inch drugstore pocket mirror and apply Bobbi Brown’s Brillant à Lèvres Raspberry Shimmer #8 lipstick.