Casting Off (9 page)

Then he added quietly: ‘I’m going to ask you to move back into the forepeak.’ Just as abruptly as I had ended up in his cabin, I was now being kicked out of it. An enormous
rush of relief flooded through me.

I had stayed in that aft cabin for two weeks but I had had very, very mixed feelings about what I was playing at. I knew Steve liked me a lot – always touching me and telling me he adored
me and would do anything for me. He made it obvious that he wanted a girlfriend. I should have sat him down, right at the beginning, and spelled it out to him but, hating confrontation as I do, I
was too much of a wimp. It wasn’t fair to him and it was a very silly thing for me to have done but done it I had. I had made my own bed and for a while I literally had to lie in it.

It was a surprise, his asking me to move out – perhaps he was more perceptive of my feelings than I had given him credit for – but now, I thought, there would be no guilt that I was
leading him on and we could have fun and enjoy making each other laugh without any added pressure.

‘We can still sail as friends,’ Steve said and made up the bed in the forepeak for me, tucking me in that night. I felt like a weight had been lifted.

The other issue that had been preying on my mind was the money situation. Back in the UK, when I had been chatting with Steve over email, we’d had a brief discussion about finances. He
told me he normally charged people £25 a day, plus a share of food, alcohol, fuel, gas, laundry and marina fees when they were on board short-term. Over a longer period of time it worked out
cheaper, he said. ‘When I was cruising with my girlfriend it worked out at about £15 a day each.’ We’d passed the free two-week trial period and I’d asked him a few
times for his bank details so I could set up a standing order but he’d fobbed me off with, ‘Oh, it’s not all about the money, is it?’ I wanted to get it sorted out so I
pestered him again for his details and he gave them to me. I knew John had paid the £25-a-day price with us and Steve hadn’t charged him extra for any alcohol – and he’d
drunk a lot over a week – and I had been here a month so I set up a payment to him of £15 a day and told him that I’d sorted it out. Another problem solved. Things were looking
up.

Fair winds blew in and we took advantage of them to move to the Turtle Islands, where we’d read there was a sanctuary and a hatchery. We took the dinghy to Pulau Gulimaan, where, the
Lonely Planet
had informed us, hawksbill turtles went ashore to lay their eggs. But this was not their breeding season, the book said.
The
Lonely Planet
is wrong
, I
thought after we landed on the island: there were turtle tracks everywhere, distinctive wide marks where the female’s belly had been dragged up the steep beach, lined on either side by small,
deep indentations left by her claws. We thought the tracks might have been old but when we reached the other side of the island we found a hatchery with 13 egg collections labelled as having been
laid the previous night. It looked like a sandy allotment. A pair of white shorts were drying in the sun outside a hut but there were no workers around. We cleaned up plastic bottles from the beach
and I found some turtle egg shells. With hard but flexible skins and spherical in shape, they looked and felt like deflated ping-pong balls.

At dusk we returned to the island, hoping to spot a turtle come ashore by moonlight to dig her nest and lay her eggs. There was a stony-faced warden at the hut who told us we had to leave
because we needed permission from the other island, Selingaan, to visit here.

‘Let’s go,’ I told Steve but he wouldn’t budge.

‘Leave this to me,’ he said. ‘The Malaysians are so polite, we can get anything here if we’re nice and smile.’

And he was right (again. Had I not learned anything yet?). Despite firmly ordering us off his land, the warden seemed happy to chat and took us to see a green turtle, about four years old and
30cm long, that he and his colleagues had fished out of the sea that afternoon. It was unable to dive and they were worried that the sun exposure would kill it so they’d brought it ashore and
placed it in a small saltwater pool built out of concrete next to the hut. In the adjacent pool was a team of hawksbill hatchlings (take that,
Lonely Planet
!), each about three inches
long. They were swimming around in a haphazard fashion, bumping into each other and the sides of their pen, wiggling their flippers out of synch. The warden let us help him put them in a basket so
he could release them on the beach. They were so light and quite soft and one hooked its back flippers around my little finger as it sat in my palm. Another fell on to its back in the basket and
couldn’t right itself, no matter how hard it waved its flippers in the air, so I turned it over. On the beach, the warden tipped them on to the sand about two feet from the water’s edge
and while some of them were off to the sea like a shot, others needed a bit more time to think about it and to build up either their courage or their sense of direction. It was a struggle for them
to swim out; every time a wave lapped on to the sand it carried a group of floundering hatchlings back with it.

Steve stayed up half the night listening for turtles. He described it to me as a very human sound, like a diver gasping for air. The next morning, still full of excitement, we motored in the
dinghy to Pulau Selingaan to ask for permission to come ashore at night to take part in one of the turtle vigils they held there. We were flatly refused and, deflated, set off back to
Kingdom
.

While we had been away another yacht had anchored close by us. Steve diverted to head towards it and as we approached a very tanned, forty-something man wearing a floppy hat, a lot of sun block
and a long-sleeved shirt came on deck to greet us. Australian? I wondered.

‘G’day! How’s it going?’ he said.

It being a small world, you can bump into someone you know even when you’re on anchor hundreds of miles away from the nearest city in a country none of you can call home. Steve recognised
the Aussie, Greg, from a regatta in Thailand. Greg and his wife Debs, both in their forties, were cruising Borneo aboard
Southern Cross
. We chatted briefly, us sitting in the dinghy, them
crouching on their deck, and they recommended that if it was turtles we wanted to see we should visit Pulau Langkayan, a small island with an upmarket resort on it where the staff will radio you on
your boat if a turtle comes ashore at night so you can go and take a look. But Langkayan was back beyond where we’d come from and we were running low on fresh water reserves so we thanked
them for the tip and sailed off towards the town of Sandakan instead.

Blue Steel
was at anchor off Sandakan yacht club – well, I say yacht club, but it was more a drinking venue for non-boat-owning rich Chinese locals – and we bumped into Ron
as we walked into the town centre for dinner. He had a case of lager balanced on his shoulder that he’d picked up from a local Chinese restaurant. Again, I say restaurant, but it was more
another drinking venue – this time for gambling, down-and-out Chinese locals. They didn’t speak any English other than ‘Eighty ringgit’, the price of one slab of Carlsberg.
We swung by to stock up.

Ron was in Sandakan to pick up Flora, a traveller he’d had aboard a few weeks earlier for the World Music Festival near Kuching, and her friend Becky, who had never been abroad before, and
had in fact barely left Swindon, but had somehow managed to scrape together the cash and the courage to fly to the Borneo jungle to live on a boat with a strange man. It sounded familiar. Ron was
taking them up the Kinabatangan river to see the rainforest wildlife and asked if we felt like tagging along. Go on a bona fide river jungle expedition with the chance of seeing pygmy elephants,
orangutans and proboscis monkeys in their natural habitat? You didn’t have to ask me twice.

W
e went in convoy up the river,
Blue Steel
leading the way, as Ron had been there a few times before. The GPS was useless – it
showed us motoring across dry land – and the water was a murky yellow-brown, meaning we couldn’t see any obstacles like rocks or sand banks. We followed Ron, sticking to the outside
bends of the river’s curves, using the logic that that was where the water flowed fastest, so the river was likely to be deepest there, and gritted our teeth, praying we wouldn’t get
stuck in the mud.

I’m not very good at judging distances but I’d estimate that the Kinabatangan was a couple of hundred metres wide. When we first entered the mouth, from the sea, it was lined with
mangrove trees that gave way to nippah palms, dense, stubby little trees with no visible trunks. The water was full of clusters of lily leaves that had broken away in the force of the current and
were being swept downstream and, more worryingly, branches and giant logs the size of battering rams. As well as keeping an eye on the depth reader and monitoring the curve of the river, we had to
keep watch for these monsters and dodge them – while not running aground. They were doing a few knots downstream and we were motoring at a similar pace upstream and our combined speeds could
have taken a nasty chunk out of the hull.

After a few miles the nippahs changed to grassy banks and we passed scattered houses set back from the water’s edge. Naked children were being bathed by their mothers in the brown water. I
wondered if they didn’t end up dirtier after their baths than they were before. One woman was hand scrubbing her laundry, her bare feet sinking into the mud. They stopped what they were doing
in order to stare at us as we crept by.

A right-hand turn after the houses and then we were into the jungle proper: trees of every height and shade of green imaginable, all crowded together and jostling for space, the shorter ones
ducking their heads under the canopies of their taller cousins, the giants luxuriating in the space their height afforded them and stretching out their branches to catch as much sunlight as
possible. I’d seen rainforest before, in Australia, but then I was driving or walking among it and everything was happening above my head. Here, with the water separating us from jungle, we
had perspective. I could see the wood
and
the trees and it was unbelievably beautiful in a chaotic, here’s Mother-Nature-at-her-rawest kind of way.

I couldn’t wait to spot some jungle animals. When I wasn’t checking the instruments or the water’s surface for objects I was scouring the trees, desperate to catch a glimpse of
a monkey or an elephant. But all I saw was birds. Large white egrets surfed down the river, perched serenely on floating logs. Every time we approached one it would unfold its long neck, extend its
wings and flap, flap, flap until it was up and away. There were eagles soaring above us, from time to time diving to the water to snatch fish in their talons, and kingfishers who were no more than
orange and blue blurs as they zoomed by.

Another of the boats in Sandakan had given Steve the latitude and longitude co-ordinates for where they had seen wild pygmy elephants. ‘They said it was wonderful,’ he had reported
back. ‘They were on anchor and a whole family of elephants crossed the river right in front of their boat, babies and everything, swimming at night.’

Thus started Mission Elephant.
Blue Steel
went off and did their own thing.
Kingdom
stayed put and day after day, armed with a hand-held GPS, camera, sunhats and a cool box
loaded with drinks, we drifted along with the current in the dinghy for hours, searching out the shy creatures. But they were too elusive for us and we spotted neither grey hide nor whiskery hair
of them, even though we blasted eight miles up the river in the dinghy, further than we dared go in the yacht. During daylight hours the Kinabatangan was busy with tourist boats shooting back and
forth, the guides on board trying to locate the elephants for their clients. A couple of times we jumped into the dinghy and followed them but it led to nothing.

Disappointment at the lack of elephant sightings aside, there was plenty in the jungle to marvel at. This was a habitat that had grown up over hundreds of thousands of years and it was teeming
with life. At night the frogs’ croaks were as loud as dogs’ barks. In the day the Laughing Policeman Bird was always chuckling away at something and the Orgasmic Bird’s fevered
cries rose to ecstatic heights. And, a couple of times a day, there was the call of the hornbill.

The endangered hornbill is like a large toucan gone wrong. Imagine a black parrot but in place of its short, triangular beak it has a long bill, more like a pelican. It has a protuberance shaped
like an upward-curving banana on the top of its head, just above its eyes, that can be white, red or yellow. In appearance, it is exactly what a prehistoric jungle bird should be. It looks like it
is from the age of dinosaurs and it sounds like it, too; a hornbill’s cry is loud and jolting, almost like the supersonic boom given off by a jet when it breaks the sound barrier. The first
time I heard it I thought there were pterodactyls flying about above my head.