Casting Off (11 page)

I felt like such a ridiculous, hysterical
woman
explaining when Steve asked me what was wrong. I kind of mumbled out my answer while he put a comforting arm around me. He didn’t
laugh at me, he didn’t try to push his case again; he was kind and understanding and it felt nice to be able to count on him as a friend.

When we reached them, Greg and Debs said they had seen elephants a day or so earlier. We immediately got started on round two of the Great Elephant Hunt but still had no luck. Greg and Debs came
with us, showing us the places where they’d had sightings before. There was a muddy footprint here, some trampled grass there, but no actual elephant life. Steve and I were starting to think
we were cursed. We hadn’t come across a crocodile, either, even though several yachties had reported seeing a large one, which seemed to get bigger with every telling of the tale, until it
reached a massive 5 metres from snout to tail tip.

As a change of scene from the main river, Greg took us in their dinghy up a small tributary where, he said, macaques liked to hang out. It was barely wider than the boat and we had to push
branches away from our faces to work our way in. Dejected by our unsuccessful day’s safari – there weren’t even any monkeys there – we took advantage of the shade to have a
rest and a drink. We were chatting about how unfair it was when Greg asked: ‘Why is there an elephant over there?’

I thought he was joking but he was looking off into the bush and I
followed his gaze. And there he was: a male with short tusks, standing, on his own, staring at us. He had approached so quietly that we hadn’t heard him coming. I assumed that elephants would
make a lot of noise, snapping every twig they stepped on, but no. It was like an apparition.

The elephant stood on the spot, swaying his trunk from side to side. He took one small step forwards, tentatively, but then moved backwards again. He did this a few times while we stared.

‘I think he wants to get in the water to go for a swim,’ Debs said. ‘But he’s too scared to do it while we’re here.’ Greg and Steve grabbed an oar each to
punt the dinghy backwards to give the elephant a bit more space. The elephant’s behaviour was flighty, like a bird that has seen a tasty crumb it wants to get hold of but it isn’t sure
if it’s safe to go forward to snatch it up. Except he was 2 metres tall and weighed more than the four of us and the boat we were in combined.

After a few minutes of toing and froing he made up his mind that we were too much of a menace and turned away and lumbered off into the trees. We were so close to the river bank that I was able
to scramble up after him. I walked in the direction he was going slowly, partly because I was barefoot and also because I was wary of the rest of his herd suddenly coming charging towards me. I
think Steve was a little bit startled by my behaviour – she’s too much of a wimp to swim in the sea but brave enough to go off-roading barefoot through jungle – but he recovered
himself after a minute or so and followed me.

The elephant was gone but I found something much more surprising. The beautiful rainforest, the wild jungle that I loved, which was home to so many thousands of animals, from the tiniest tree
frog to herds of wild elephants, was a façade. Literally a front, hiding a palm oil plantation. The jungle extended only about a hundred metres back from the river’s edge; after that
it was neat, cultivated row upon row of palms, all exactly the same height, extending as far as I could see. When the farming corporations had cut down the primeval forest they had left a thin
strip in place so that it looked like business as usual from the river. I suppose that in doing that they had at least preserved something of a habitat, albeit a small one, for the animals. (And,
the cynics might add, for the tourists.)

Steve was totally opposed to the logging and palm oil industries. Every chance he got he would take a pop at them. My opinion is that poorer people don’t always have the choices we do in
life. Not everyone is fortunate enough to be able to save some money and go off to see the world for a year or buy a boat for £100,000 (half a million Malaysian ringgit) and live without
working for the foreseeable future. Europe built its wealth and civilisation on agriculture and development and using what resources it had, and that is what Malaysia is doing now, except instead
of timber and coal it is palm oil. Maybe there is a happy middle ground between development and conservation but I don’t know much about it and I don’t want to judge people when
I’m ignorant of the facts myself. That was the argument I put forward if it came up in conversation between us. But standing there, rooted to the spot by the shock of seeing what had been
done to the rainforest, I felt unbelievable sadness. I only hoped that the cultivation wasn’t mirrored on the other side of the river. The hills we could see opposite as we had motored along
the Kinabatangan seemed to still be covered with original trees – palm-oil plantations form a very distinctive pattern, like pompoms, from a distance – so maybe it wasn’t as bad
as it seemed.

That was probably optimism talking. Every day we had to check the anchor chain to make sure there was nothing lodged up against it that could drag the anchor and set
Kingdom
adrift. One
evening there was a log 20 feet long caught on the chain. It was so heavy that Steve had to use the dinghy under engine to tow it off the chain and let it flow down river. And that happened more
than once.
These are big bits of valuable hardwood
, I thought.
Surely the loggers wouldn’t just toss them away?
But if the trees were being cut down not for timber but to
clear the area for planting, that would explain the jetsam. Probably it was a combination of both.

You wait ages for an elephant and then an entire herd comes along at once. Like with the monkeys, as soon as we’d seen one, we saw them all. Steve and I were across the river from
Kingdom
, in the dinghy, when I saw ripples in the water a short distance away. The ripples got bigger and bigger and something dark broke the water’s surface.

‘Steve,’ I whispered, pointing. ‘I think there’s a crocodile.’ As we watched, a black head emerged – and then a trunk. It looked like the same young male
elephant and he had been sitting completely submerged in the river. Maybe they really were hiding from us? Whether or not it was the same animal, and he had finally got that swim, he was alone. I
had read that young males were often cast out from the herds by the dominant male once they became seen as a threat. He lifted himself out of the water and on to the bank, climbing easily up the
slippery step, his hide slick with mud. And he ambled off again.

After that a whole herd came right to the water’s edge, exactly opposite
Kingdom
and
Southern Cross
, and stayed there for two days. We didn’t even have to get in
the dinghy, we could sit on the yachts and watch them eating, eating and eating. Called pygmy elephants, they are considerably smaller than their Asian cousins but they are not tiny, like their
name might suggest. There were calves that were probably about my height, and full-sized adults with and without tusks. When they weren’t eating they were bathing. I don’t know when
they slept because after dark Debs and I went closer in her dinghy and they were still wide awake, and eating. Their eyes shone white in the light of our torch but they didn’t mind us and
didn’t stop munching on their midnight snacks. Their trumpeting calls and bellows echoed through the jungle, competing with the hornbills for the loudest cry. The tourist boats didn’t
faze them much, either. They seemed to be on a bit of a mission to eat up all of the available grass in that area before moving on. Now I had seen how narrow the forest was I understood why
reported sightings of them were so frequent and why they didn’t just go deeper into the vegetation to avoid humans. They had little choice but to plod up and down this small promenade,
hunting out what food they could, putting up with the paparazzi and being chased along the banks by over-eager tourists who jumped out of their boats.

The excitement of elephant hunting over, things turned a bit more introspective on the boat. In the middle of the night I would wake up to go to the toilet to find Steve on his computer in the
cockpit, emailing his women, trying to strike up a relationship across thousands of miles. Flies would swarm around him and the laptop, attracted by the light of the screen.

I asked him if he was having any luck.

‘Four attempts have been failures now,’ he said.

‘Am I a “failure”?’ I made quotation marks in the air with my fingers.

He said nothing, just gave me a look over the top of his reading glasses, like a stern schoolteacher telling me off for being dim.

The next afternoon, trying to be helpful, I suggested he could rewrite his advert to make it more obvious that he was looking to meet a long-term partner.

‘Your original ad was a bit ambiguous,’ I pointed out.

‘What? What was ambiguous about it? Why didn’t you realise I was looking for a girlfriend?’ he demanded.

‘You said you wanted someone to come “for fun or something more”. That doesn’t necessarily mean a relationship.’

He handed me a printout of the reply I had sent to his advert. I took the paper and read it, wondering how he had a printed out copy of a message sent five months earlier, what was going on and
why I felt a bit like I was being ambushed. In the email I had introduced myself and written mainly about sailing, stating what I had done and what my level of experience was. It wasn’t
formal like a job application; it was friendly and chatty, but there was no flirting or innuendo. At least none that I’d intended.

I tried to point that out to him but he didn’t believe me.

So much for the tense atmosphere dissipating. Now it was as thick as fog. Next up was a question about how if I wanted a boyfriend ‘so badly’, I wasn’t able to ‘let
myself go’ and be with him.

‘What?’ I said. ‘What do you mean I want a boyfriend badly? When have I ever said that? Not everything is about looking for a boyfriend. I didn’t come away to look for a
boyfriend. That’s you. That’s what you’re doing. You want a girlfriend so badly it influences everything you do. But I’m not like that. If it happens, it happens.’ I
had joined
Kingdom
looking for excitement, for travel, for something completely different from life back home. All joking about hot sailors aside, that was why I had replied to
Steve’s advert.

His eyes widened in disbelief and then his expression changed to a sneer. ‘Oh, and while we’re on the subject,’ he went on, ‘isn’t it convenient that you arranged
to pay the lower rate to me? Funny how you shagged me early on.’

My cheeks started to burn and my head swirled. I could recall that, in an exchange of emails ages ago when we’d talked about his girlfriend and money, I’d joked, ‘So if I shag
you I get a 60 per cent discount?’ Obviously I had intended it as a gag and I was sure from his reply at the time that he had taken it as one.

But there was no joking now – he was straight-facedly accusing me of sleeping with him to save myself £10 a day. I felt ashamed of myself, both for writing the shag joke (I
remembered going to delete it before I sent the email but then changing my mind because I was trying to be witty and I really wanted the chance to go sailing in Borneo) and for setting up the
standing order for £15 a day without double-checking with him. I had offered since, twice, to increase the rate if he wanted me to but he had just dismissed the subject.