Thirty Pounds and a Passport * Part V

Asian Rainforests

June 21-22 Singapore Airlines #405 Johannesburg to Singapore via Mauritius

After a frazzled start with the great rush to the Durban airport, the day settles down to a long stretch of traveling. Durban to Johannesburg is a seventy-minute flight followed by a two-hour layover. Then a twelve-hour flight to Singapore takes us another quarter of the way around the globe and through six time zones.

We are learning to sleep on airplanes when we can but flights like this one make it difficult to get any satisfactory rest. When darkness falls and dinner is over, we catch a couple hours sleep but then we’re awakened by the flight crew to prepare for landing in Mauritius, an island nation in the Indian Ocean. It is a one-hour stopover but we can’t get off the plane. So we sit there in the middle of the night with all the cabin lights on and people coming and going.

While we wait, part of me is wishing the plane would get going so I can go back to sleep and the rest of me is inclined to get off the plane and stay a few days. Mauritius may have only 82 species of birds but seven of those are found nowhere else in the world.

Finally the lights go out and the plane takes off again. We get a few more hours of sleep and a good breakfast, then it’s 8:00 a.m. and we are on the ground in Singapore and ready for a new day. A promotional package from Singapore Airlines turns out to be one of the best bargains of the trip. For $190 we have three nights at the Hotel Concord, round trip transportation to the hotel and a three-day pass for the bus that makes the rounds of all the tourist destinations including parks, gardens and shopping. We arrive at the hotel by midmorning. We still have all day and we will make the most of it.

Singapore is our first exposure to the Asian economic miracle of the 1990s that we heard so much about. Here in downtown prosperity is all around us. Skyscrapers are everywhere and they all look new. Everything is bright and shiny and clean. Thousands of business people bustle around us on the sidewalks and everyone walks fast with a sense of purpose. Shops are filled with all the latest electronics. Even I enjoy shopping here, although there is no purchasing. We are still sticking to our thirty-pound limit.

In the afternoon we relax at the Singapore Botanical Garden, which is famous for its orchid collection. There are many paths to walk and the gardens are immaculate. Obviously the gardens are maintained with a high degree of pride. As we walk, I spot a few new birds in the trees but mainly we stroll, enjoy the flowers and sit on the grass and watch the people. This park is a favorite with the locals and families bring young children here to play and watch the ducks on the pond.

After a chilly beginning of winter in South Africa just the day before, we are now hot. We have crossed the equator, just barely, and it is now summer. Shade feels good and air conditioning is a necessity in the hotel. We are so close to the equator (80 miles) that the difference between the longest day of the year and the shortest is only nine minutes.

In the morning we’re out of the hotel by 4:00 a.m. There are owls to find. Bill, our guide for today, whisks us out to a country club where we prowl the fairways in the pre-dawn darkness. We manage to find a Brown Hawk-Owl and a Malaysian Nightjar before the sun rises. Then we are off racing from one good birding spot to another. If the ranger is a Type A birder, then Bill is a Type AA. He knows exactly where he wants to go and exactly what he wants to find there and exactly what the best shortcuts are for getting there. It is a busy day.

Without leaving the island of Singapore we run down 74 species of birds of which 61 are new for the millennial list and 32 are life birds. We start off with a Brown Hawk-Owl at 5:00 a.m. and end with a Spotted Wood-Owl at 7:30 p.m. It is a very busy—and breathless day. We will sleep well tonight.

The birds in Asia are wonderfully diverse in shapes, sizes and colors. Their names provide hints to the enormous variety. Just on this one day in Singapore we find birds like:

White-bellied Sea-Eagle—a huge, powerful eagle that swoops down and catches fish on the fly.
White-breasted Waterhen—a chicken-like bird that hides in the reeds.
Pheasant-tailed Jacana—a relative of the African Jacana that walks on lily pads with its long toes but this one has a long tail.
Malaysian Plover—a smaller version of the Killdeer found in the Americas.
Common Redshank—a long-legged shorebird with red legs.
Zebra Dove—it’s obviously black-and-white striped.
Red-breasted Parakeet and Long-tailed Parakeet—they’re certainly colorful additions to any tree.
Stork-billed Kingfisher, White-throated Kingfisher and Collared Kingfisher—their names describe them.
Blue-throated Bee-eater—it really does catch flying bees and eat them after first beating off the stinger on a branch.
Dollarbird—it has large white wing patches like silver dollars.
Common Flameback—a large woodpecker with a bright red back.
Pied Triller—a beautiful singer.
Green Leafbird—that is exactly what it looks like.
Common Tailorbird and Dark-necked Tailorbird—they actually sew leaves together to form a nest.
Pied Fantail—he shows off to a potential mate by spreading his tail wide.
Plain-throated Sunbird as well as Copper-throated, Purple-throated, Olive-backed and Crimson Sunbirds—the sunbirds are the most colorful family of Old World birds and rival the hummingbirds of the Americas.
Scarlet-naped Flowerpecker—a tiny bird feeding inside flowers.
Nutmeg Mannikin—a small spice-colored seedeater.

Bill pushes us hard all day. He’s like the bunny in the battery commercial on television; he keeps going and going and going! But he finds lots of birds and at the same time he gives a great tour of Singapore while driving from one birding spot to another. He never stops talking.

Bill is a British expatriate who has lived in Singapore for forty years. He is an insider who knows the city and an outsider who still brings Western eyes to this Asian country. He likes the city and yet can’t help commenting on how different things would be “if the British still ran this place.” At times he is in a colonial time warp but he is a fount of information. His bird tour is fun but in the long run it is the running cultural and political commentary that we will remember the most.

The following day our guide is K.C., a life-long citizen of Singapore of Chinese decent. We take information from both of these guides to piece together a picture of this beautiful and complex island nation.

Singapore is an island, a city and an independent country, all in an area of 25 miles by 15 miles. The island, only a few hundred yards offshore from the country of Malaysia, is connected to the mainland by both a bridge and a causeway. From the city’s shore we see several smaller islands that are also part of the country of Singapore. Most of these are military reserves and uninhabited because military security is a high priority in Singapore. Just beyond the small islands of Singapore are a number of small Indonesian islands, so all three countries, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, are very close together here. The waterways between the islands are full of ships. Commerce and the technological revolution are the lifeblood of Singapore.

Singapore is a relatively new country. Upon independence from Great Britain in 1963, it was part of Malaysia but that union did not last long. The city of Singapore had little in common with the rest of the Malay Peninsula, which has a majority Malay population, most of who belong to the Muslim religion. Singapore, however, is predominantly Chinese and its residents practice various Oriental religions or Christianity. Singapore does have some Muslim Malay citizens but they are certainly in the minority. In general Malaysia is more of a religious society and Singapore more of a secular one. The ethnic and religious differences translate into philosophical and political differences and the two areas were and are very far apart. By 1965 Singapore split off to become an independent country, one of the smallest countries in the world.

At the time, Singapore was one more large Chinese city in the backwaters of Asia. But in less than thirty years it became one of the world’s economic powers. The Asian miracle of the 1980s and 1990s is nowhere more evident than in Singapore. Today, the city reaches towards the sky. Building construction is booming; prosperity is seemingly everywhere. Singapore is one of the few countries in the world that actively recruits new immigrants to service its blossoming economy. We see new apartment blocks going up everywhere to house new workers. Even the island itself is growing. Barges bring in rock and soil from nearby Indonesian islands to fill in shallow bays to increase the buildable land area of the nation.

Singapore became independent from Malaysia because strong-willed men in the city wanted to do things their own way and not the Malaysian way. These determined men and their political descendants constructed a strong central government that plans and directs almost every aspect of Singapore life. The government does not let anything get in the way of what it thinks is best for the people of Singapore—in big things or small.

Singapore formerly had a fair amount of small farms on its island but the decision was made that agriculture was not the way to prosperity—business and commerce were. So when a farm stood in the path of progress, the government appropriated it with payment and sold it to businessmen. Under close government direction Singapore has become one of the most prosperous economies in the world.

This centralized control extends far beyond the economic sphere. The government decided that air pollution is bad for the country. Too many cars and particularly old cars cause pollution, so the government regulates ownership of cars. A citizen of Singapore must have a government license to buy a new car. The license actually costs more than the car and the license is only good for five years. At that time, the owner must buy a second five-year license, which again costs more than the original value of the car. The license can only be renewed once and then the car must be removed from the island. There are no cars over ten years old in Singapore and many people have no car because of the high cost of the license. That, of course, is the government plan.

Driving is further regulated by a little mandatory electronic box on the car windshield. Electronic sensors are placed along major freeways that read the electronic signal from each passing car. As a form of a toll, the sensor sends a bill to the driver’s bank account each time the car passes by. If the car passes by during rush hour, the charge is higher. There are many such sensors along the roads to monitor traffic. Some downtown areas have special zones. If the car is detected there during business hours, the charge is even higher yet. In addition some vehicles, such as trucks, have limits on which special zones they can be in. If they are caught in the wrong zone, there is a hefty fine sent to the electronic bank account.

The government owns much of the housing stock in Singapore. It was decided that apartments are better than single family houses on the small island so the government is building many new apartments. Now many people have the government as their landlord. If a citizen makes political trouble for the government, he can be evicted and may not be able to find another place to live. The government does not tolerate dissent easily.

Military security is also very important to Singapore, which fears an invasion from either of its close neighbors. Two years of military service is mandatory for all males. Interestingly, citizens of Chinese decent seem to receive different military training than citizens of Malay decent. The government fears a fifth column movement. New high-rise apartment blocks built on the edge of the city are located in a way to slow the advance of tanks and create avenues of military firepower in case an invasion ever occurs.

The international airport has fighter planes but the small country worries that a surprise attack could catch the air force on the ground. A country that is only 25 miles wide can be crossed in only a couple minutes by an enemy plane. In the Gulf War the Kuwait Air Force was bombed by Iraq before most planes could even get off the ground. Singapore does not want to repeat the mistakes of Kuwait.

Some of the freeways in Singapore are designed as alternate runways in case of emergency. Each year the country has a one-day drill where the freeway is closed and the military practices how fast it can take down streetlights along the highway and land planes on the road. Part of the Singapore Air Force is not even in Singapore. Some is stationed in the nation of Brunei on the island of Borneo and at other places outside of Singapore. In case of sudden attack Singapore will not have all of its planes in danger.
This is the Singapore that we visit in late June. It is a prosperous city/country that is tightly controlled by its government. Traffic is orderly and amazingly all cars stop for pedestrians. What a change that is from South Africa. Service in stores and restaurants is excellent. The city is beautifully landscaped. Singapore lives up to all of our expectations as an example of the Asian economic miracle. We are told that government has even found a way to keep the crime rate very low for theft, murder and all major crimes. To us as visitors, Singapore seems to be a utopia where people have found a better way to run a society—an orderly way to run a society.

But we also learn that orderliness has a price. To keep everything running smoothly, the government passes a seemingly endless series of orders (laws) to regulate human behavior. There are strongly enforced rules about vehicles stopping for pedestrians, so everyone is afraid to break the law. There are strong laws against jaywalking, or chewing gum in public, or parking violations, or criticizing the government, or any of a hundred other things that the government feels might lead to disorder. This is a police state—with a very polite face—but a police state nonetheless. Newspapers cannot publish without a license from the government. The licenses have to be renewed every single year, thus the government can keep a tight control on the press.

Even small things can have big penalties. Like many countries around the world, Singapore tries to keep its money in the country and not let it flow out overseas. But Singapore goes farther in this direction than many countries. Hundreds of cars leave Singapore everyday to cross the causeway to Malaysia to do business and then return in the evening. Gasoline is much cheaper in Malaysia than in Singapore. So to stop Singapore residents from buying gas in Malaysia, the government passed a law that all Singapore cars leaving the island must have their gas tanks at least ¾ full. At the border, police check the gas gauge of every Singapore car leaving the country. Guilty drivers are fined over $300.

So, the lesson seems to be that people can create a very orderly society but it can be done only with the government giving lots of orders and the people having to follow the orders or face punishment. In this society order comes from orders. It is a concept that is different from the American model of individual rights and a lifestyle that would be difficult for many “freedom-loving” Americans. The ranger and Ms. Shirley leave it to others to debate the betterness of the respective societies.

Shirley does find one immediate benefit though. On the third day in town when the ranger goes birding, Shirley finds that she is very comfortable taking the day off all over by herself for shopping, sightseeing and riding the bus. Singapore is such a safe city that a woman alone is secure from crime or harassment.

While Shirley enjoys a day alone, I am off birding with K.C. It isn’t often that I need a passport for a birding daytrip but today is such a day. Off before dawn to escape rush hour traffic over the causeway, we have our passports checked at the Malaysian border as we leave Singapore. An hour later, at sunrise, K.C. stops at a roadside stand where a man with a propane burner is cooking something that K.C. calls breakfast. All I can tell is that it is rice and something else. I don’t ask what that “something else” is. It is certainly not pork; this is a Muslim country. Beyond that I don’t have a clue.

Off the highway, down a dirt road and into the forest, we are quickly in good birding country. As soon as I step out of the car I find elephant tracks in the dust. Now there is something to watch out for! The Asian elephant is much more of a forest animal than its African cousin and therefore harder to see. I do keep one eye out for elephants so I don’t have an unexpected surprise but it later turns out that I am watching for the wrong thing.

Soon I’ve forgotten about elephant tracks because I’ve plunged into the forest in pursuit of new birds—not just new species but whole new families of birds that I’ve never seen before. There are babblers and broadbills, spiderhunters and white-eyes, drongos and Asian barbets. Even birds that I am familiar with like woodpeckers now come in a surprising variety of colors and sizes. In most of the United States there is only one kind of kingfisher but here in Malaysia I find six to go along with the eight kingfishers we saw in Africa and the four more in Ecuador. But here in the Malaysian forest there are other things I should be looking for as well.

In the afternoon K.C. and I come across monkeys in the forest. These look like the African ones and spend a fair amount of time on the ground looking for fruits that have dropped as well as insects and even lizards. Later we spot a deer-like animal and then are startled by a four-foot monitor lizard hidden in the leaves almost at our feet. The butterflies and dragonflies are abundant and beautiful, with so many different kinds. I’m seeing lots of wildlife but it turns out that I am still not seeing everything that I should be looking for.

“Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!”

“What’s that? It sounds like a steam locomotive in the air.”

“Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!”

I rush out into the dirt road to be able to look up at the sky just in time to see a huge bird land in the treetops. It is a hornbill—a Rhinoceros Hornbill. This gigantic bird, over four feet long, is black and white and has a humongous yellow and red bill. The casque on the top of the bill turns up and gives the bird its name, rhinoceros. This huge, heavy bird has tremendous wings to propel it along with wingbeats that are deep and ponderous. When the hornbill flies I can hear the wings beating the air, “Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!” It really does sound like a steam train.

Through the spotting scope K.C. shows me that this bird is a male. It has red eyes. A female would have white. And this bird has long thick curly black eyelashes. Hornbills are among the few birds in the world with eyelashes. This Rhinoceros Hornbill is clearly the most spectacular sight of the day but there is still something that I’ve missed while concentrating on birds.

That becomes obvious in mid-afternoon when K.C. points out that the back of my pant leg is bloody just behind the knee. Where did the blood come from? I know that I am not injured. K.C. points to the ground and I have to look twice to see it in the leaf litter. It’s an inchworm. Or at least it looks like an inchworm. That’s what I should have been watching for. It’s Dracula of the Forest.

Anyone who thinks that man is at the top of the food chain has never met a mosquito or a leech. Welcome to the Asian rainforest!

Actually mosquitoes are not bad here, for the most part. There were a few places in the forest yesterday where Shirley felt like she was the main course in the mosquito buffet line but generally we do not use insect repellant, even in the rainforest. Leeches, however, are a different story.

Anyone who has seen an inchworm knows what a forest leech looks like. It is black, less than two inches long and a sixteenth of an inch in diameter. Leeches move along on the forest floor just like an inchworm. They feed on blood, mammal blood—including human blood. Of course they find no blood on the ground, so they wait for an animal to come by and then they latch onto the foot of the passerby. When leeches are ready to hitchhike, they don’t move around like the inchworm. Instead they attach one end of their body to a leaf or twig in the trail and stick the rest of their body straight up in the air. The body then moves back and forth like a finger wiggling. If a person passes close by, the leech hitchhikes onto the person and works its way up to find bare skin. Crawling inside the sock from the top is a favorite “hunting” technique.

Once the leech reaches bare skin, it bites. The puncture is painless and the person does not even notice that he has been bitten. The leech then sucks up a belly full of blood and drops off the “host.” When full of blood (my blood!) the thin little leech swells to the diameter of a slug or about four times its former width.

All of this is painless and really presents no health hazard—except perhaps to the psyche. The leech carries no diseases or parasites and a leech bite is thus better than a mosquito bite. The problem is that the bites are messy. To keep the blood flowing while they feed, leeches inject an anticoagulant into the skin. When the leech has finished dining and drops off, the wound keeps on bleeding for another ten minutes or more and I end up with a bloody sock or pant leg. That’s gross!

So a great day birding with K.C. tallies monkeys, elephant tracks, hornbills, colorful small birds and a pair of red-stained trousers to clean up in the hotel sink back in Singapore. Now I can warn Shirley, “Beware of the leech. He’s a bloody nuisance!”

June 25 Malaysia Airlines #604 Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

After a short, 6:00 am flight, we check into our downtown hotel and have all day to explore the capital city of Malaysia. We soon find out that only tourists call the town Kuala Lumpur, which translates as “Muddy River.” All the locals just call it K.L. Like Singapore this is another clean city that is easy to walk around. Our first stop is only two blocks away at the Petrona Towers, currently the tallest building in the world at 1453 feet. It is a beautiful twin-towered structure that does not look anything like an American skyscraper. This one has an Asian design; each tower is round not square. I’m usually not a fan of skyscrapers because they all tend to look alike but this one’s unique design seems special. The Petrona Towers will soon be eclipsed in height by a new building in China is designed to be fifty feet higher but at the moment Kuala Lumpur stands tallest.

Downtown has a number of tall buildings in the twenty to forty story range but something looks different about this city. Finally we figure it out. There seems to be only one tall building per block with a number of short ones in between. The effect is of a low-rise downtown punctuated at intervals by taller structures. This makes for a much more open feeling than a typical American downtown where the streets are canyons between two rows of tall buildings that block the sun.

We have learned that the quickest way to experience a city and have an urban adventure is to go shopping—not just window-shopping to see what there is to see but purposeful shopping to find something that we need. This form of shopping forces us to interact with the local people, to ask directions and find out which store sells what. We walk over several blocks trying to follow directions given in broken English, making several wrong turns and talking with more people. It is amazing how many different kinds of shops we can find along the way.

Today’s shopping is for a simple but essential item. We left our electrical adapter behind in Singapore. We must find a new one or we cannot use our electrical items: electric razor, hair dryer and electric battery chargers for computer and digital camera. Throughout much of the world the electric current is 220 volts instead of the 110v. used in the United States. That itself is no problem. All of our electrical gadgets can run on either 220 v. or 110 v. We don’t even have to flip a switch. The razor and computer sense which current is being used and adjust themselves. But what we do have to have is a plug converter. Different parts of the world use different kinds of wall sockets that require different sizes and arrangements of prongs on the plug. Our American plugs just won’t fit most places. A converter fits over our plug and matches the local wall outlet. It is a little thing and costs less than a dollar but if we do not have it, we are completely out of luck. Our number one project for the day is to find a converter.

People on the street direct us to a modern high-rise shopping center. From the outside it looks like a shopping mall in any large city anywhere. But inside is a five-story warren of numerous small shops and crowded narrow walkways. It has the feeling of an outdoor market moved indoors. The press of people is almost overwhelming and we have difficulty making our way from one shop to another. Shops are overflowing with merchandise. The general rule of marketing here seems to be to stuff as many goods as possible in a very small shop. A number of shops are selling radios and CDs and they advertise by turning up the volume on their sales stock. This competes with a constant Babel coming from the mass of shoppers. We slowly push our way through all five floors of small shops and eager clerks and finally stumble across a small hardware store. Like an Ace Hardware store back home, this one has two of everything. There in a corner is just the converter we need. We and our gadgets will be charged up again and ready for what comes next.

The next morning we meet up with our group. We have signed up for a three-week birding tour of peninsular Malaysia and northern Borneo with Dennis Yong, a local Malaysian of Chinese ancestry who is an excellent birder. Our group numbers eight with one from England and seven from the United States. We include a computer programmer, a counselor, a retired cryptologist, a college Spanish teacher, a public health specialist and a widow whose husband left her enough money for several overseas trips a year—plus a retired accountant and former park ranger. After a round of introductions, we depart for the western coast of Malaysia.

Kuala Sangalor is a hot and steamy place. An after-lunch swim in the hotel pool helps us refresh before we plunge into the afternoon forest in pursuit of new feathered quests. A diminutive Ruby-cheeked Sunbird becomes the first new bird on our guided tour. Later in a marsh a pair of roosting Lesser Adjutants stands tall in a bare dead tree. I still get a special treat out of finding storks such as these.

After getting leech bites on the ankle and thigh on my first day in the forest, I learned to spray my boot socks with an insect repellent containing a high level of deet. Then I tuck the bottoms of my pant legs inside my boot socks so nothing can crawl up my legs. The resulting effect looks like a dorky kind of knickers but it works. Now I get no more bites on my legs. I still get bites on my forearms and under my watchband, however, but then I am forever going off the trail and into the bushes where leeches can easily get onto my clothing from the leaves.

Shirley is more circumspect. She stays on the trail and is the only one in our group of nine who is not leeched. She has picked leeches off her boots and fingers but none actually have bitten her. Her flesh is reserved for the mosquitoes.

After a successful day for the birders (and for a good number of the leeches), it is time for an evening dinner and a chance for the group members to get to know each other. In any such birding group the question eventually comes up, “How did you get started in birding?” For the ranger the answer goes back 31 years.

In 1969 the ranger found himself stationed at Tonto National Monument in southern Arizona. There in the shadow of the Superstition Mountains, there was no television reception and radio was available only at night when a clear channel station in Los Angeles, 500 miles away, increased to maximum power. The ranger needed a hobby for off duty hours but his salary of $110 a week limited the choices. He had just become a permanent employee of the National Park Service and was at the very bottom level of the pay scale.

The ranger loved to hike and was interested in all aspects of the out-of-doors. As he hiked the mountains and canyons of the park he noticed the desert birds and tried to look them up in the park library. But birds are small and it is hard to pick out all the field marks with just the naked eye. One day Sears in Phoenix had binoculars on sale for nineteen dollars. The ranger could afford that, so a new hobby was born.

Finding a life bird—seeing a new species for the first time—was like finding a new prize and it was not long before birding became a treasure hunt. Soon the thrill of the hunt became even more important than actually finding the bird. In thirty years, birding took the ranger to the top of mountains; to desert oases in the middle of nowhere; to sandy ocean beaches; to the four, or six, or ten corners of the country; and even onto small boats bobbing in the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean. Along the way the travel bug and the birding treasure hunt combined to lead him outside the landmass of the United States. He found himself in an Eskimo village on an island thirty miles off the coast of Russia and in the jungles of Guatemala chasing the sound of a jaguar’s roar.

The ranger felt that nineteen dollars for a pair of binoculars was all the investment he would ever have to make for a lifetime hobby. How wrong he was but it wasn’t evident right then. The cheap pair of binoculars lasted a year before they were dropped and broken. The replacement pair was fifty dollars and it was replaced in turn by four more pairs, each costing twice as much as the one before. Over a period of thirty years his one small bird book was followed by another and another until the ranger’s library of bird books numbered over fifty. Carfare, bus fare and airfare added up to many times over the original investment in a pair of binoculars. The ranger warned his friends in jest, “If you’ve never done any birding, stay away from it while you can. Birding is habit forming—and it costs a lot more than nineteen dollars!”

June 27 Road travel by bus from Kuala Sangalor to Frasers Hill, Malaysia

The lowlands of the Malay Peninsula, site of all the cities and commerce, are hot, hot and humid. Here the Europeans, who formerly controlled Malaysia, faced a climate unlike anything they had known in Great Britain. These colonialists needed to be in the Malaysian cities to carry out their duties but they wanted their families to be in a place where they could avoid the hot temperatures and diseases of the lowlands. So in Malaysia and throughout southern Asia, the British built hilltop retreats to escape the heat and coastal mosquitoes. Frasers Hill was such a place.

Driving up the twisting mountain road to Frasers Hill, we can feel the temperature moderate. By the time we reach 4,000 feet, it is fifteen degrees cooler than on the coast. After the steam bath of Kuala Sangalor, it is a pleasure to breathe cool air again. We will need blankets tonight. Looking around us, the first thing we see is something very familiar from home—a golf course. Frasers Hill has evolved from a British family retreat into a golfing resort. Here a number of hotels and summer homes allow Malaysian businessmen and middle class families a chance to get away and enjoy cooler climes. This turns out to be a great place for birders too. The forested trails in the hills around the resort have a totally different bird population than the coast.

Once again we find a long list of beautiful birds with exotic names: Silver-eared Mesia, Fire-tufted Barbet, Streaked Spiderhunter, Fire-breasted Flowerpecker, Golden Babbler Chestnut-capped Laughingthrush, , Little Cuckoo-Dove, Greater Yellownape, Orange-bellied Leafbird, Racket-tailed Drongo, Green Magpie, and Pygmy Wren-Babbler. In three days the ranger adds 56 new life birds.

July 1 Road travel by bus from Frasers Hill to Jerantut, Malaysia
July 1 River travel by boat from Jerantut to Taman Nagara, Malaysia

Up the rocky Tembeling River into the central highlands Ms. Shirley and the ranger travel in a narrow boat with twenty tourists and birders on their way to Taman Nagara National Park. The river here is swift and shallow, so the boat operator needs good skills to read the river and avoid hitting bottom on the many gravel bars. The fast moving boat creates a great breeze and the three-hour trip is cool and comfortable in the Malaysian heat. Water monitors and monkeys watch from shore as our tourist taxi speeds upstream.

Taman Nagara is Malaysia’s premier national park protecting many square miles of primary forest. Park headquarters, at the edge of the river, is a splendid collection of a hundred tourist cabins, plus dormitories for backpackers. A large dining hall serves plentiful meals and good breakfasts. It’s great to have variety in our diet. “Just don’t expect bacon with the eggs. This is still a Muslim country.” Luckily there is even a small store where the ranger picks up cough drops for the persistent cough that has nagged him for a week.

Our cabin is large and spacious. It is a pleasant treat to have something larger than a hotel room after all these weeks. There are even comfortable chairs to sit in. Sitting on a bed to read gets tiring after a while. A solid wooden roof keeps the night’s rain off but we wake up in the wee hours of the morning with a series of loud thumps on the roof. We are under a fruiting tree and the wind knocks off fruit that hits our roof. The bombardment goes on for an hour.

The park headquarters is well laid out and beautifully landscaped but twenty feet beyond the last cabin the jungle begins. Just five minutes from our cabin we are seemingly deep in the forest and birds are plentiful. Trees crowd in and the forest darkens with no sun hitting the forest floor. The smells of damp earth and decaying leaves drift in the still air. Wind seldom invades these lower levels of this forest. Bird songs are muted and only the loudest sounds carry very far in the heavy air. The briefest walk into this forest leaves all manmade sounds behind.

A big treat comes on our first foray into the forest—a pair of Crested Firebacks. Large brightly colored pheasants, they first appear as some sort of exotic chickens. They have come out into the middle of the trail unaware of our presence. We freeze in place to watch the large, dark blue male with his sky blue head, white tail and bright red back that gives him the name fireback. South Asia is the land of pheasants and these firebacks are the ones that I most wanted to see. I was already familiar with the Ring-necked Pheasant, the state bird of South Dakota where I was stationed at Badlands National Park. But the ring-neck is not native to the U.S. It was imported from Asia for American hunters. Now here in Malaysia I can see wild pheasants in their native habitat.

Taman Nagara is also the home of hornbills, those gigantic birds that sound like steam locomotives when they fly. From the clearing at park headquarters we see them flying over or sitting at the top of huge trees. In addition to the Rhinoceros Hornbill that I saw before, we now find Bushy-crested, Black, Wrinkled, White-crowned and Wreathed Hornbills. They are such huge, wonderful birds.

Hornbills nest in the hollows of tree trunks. After the female lays her eggs in the cavity, she begins to incubate. The male then brings mud and the male and female work together to seal up the opening to the nest leaving only a small hole. The female is thus imprisoned in the tree by a mud wall, which protects her and her eggs from monkeys and snakes, the major predators of hornbills. The male brings food up to twenty times a day for several weeks to feed the female through the small opening until the eggs hatch. He doesn’t bring her fruit. That would take too many trips. Instead he brings regurgitated food sealed in a membranous sac.

While the female incubates, she undergoes a complete feather molt and for a time is unable to fly even if the mud wall were removed. Hornbills are one of the few bird species that have a simultaneous complete molt. Most species molt gradually because they need their feathers for flight. The ability to fly is so crucial to birds that a period of flightlessness can be fatal.

The female hornbill has grown all new flight feathers by the time the eggs hatch. Feeding the young as well as the mother is too big a job for the male alone, so the female breaks open the mud seal and escapes the cavity. She and the young birds then immediately seal it back up again except for a small hole through which both adults can feed the chicks. The young birds finally remove the mud when they are ready to fly. Sometimes, however, a situation develops where one youngster is ready leave the nest and another is not. The first one will be pulling down portions of the mud wall while the second one is busy trying to build it back up.

Taman Nagara is also a great place to find monkeys. Asian monkeys are like their African cousins; they do not have prehensile tails. We frequently see them feeding on fruit on the ground and in trees. The monkeys are wary of us but also curious. It is probably good that they are wary. In parts of Asia they are hunted for food but not here in the national park.

I had noticed that both here and in Africa, monkeys seem to react differently to us than did other animals. Most animals seemed to ignore us unless we were too close, in which case they ran away. Monkeys, however, seldom ignore us. They are always watching us and frequently show anger towards us. They screech in our direction and may even throw fruit or bits of branches. Mothers hide their young from us. I asked Dennis about this behavior.

“Monkeys think that people look like some type of large monkey, so they are interested in us. At the same time they expect us to act like monkeys and observe monkey etiquette. When we don’t, it makes them mad.”

“Monkeys, like most communal animals, have a hierarchal community—a pecking order. Those on the bottom of the social scale defer to those at the top. If they don’t, there can be a fight to put everyone in their proper place. Fighting all the time is destructive, so a set of signals evolved to show deference and avoid fighting and killing.”

“In most animal societies one animal staring at another is a form of a challenge, so an animal lower on the totem pole will avoid staring at an animal on the top. To do otherwise is to invite an attack. Likewise exposing one’s teeth is a strong threat of aggression that will force an animal to either back down or come out fighting.”

“So here are monkeys in a tree looking down at humans who sort of look like another kind of monkey. And this new monkey is staring at them, which is a sign of aggression. To top it off, this new monkey is showing its teeth, the ultimate threat sign. So the monkeys in the tree respond by either running away in defeat or threatening back by screeching, baring their teeth and throwing things.”

“But,” says the ranger, “I don’t go around showing my teeth at the monkeys.”

“Of course you do. People think that monkeys are cute and that makes people smile. A smile exposes the teeth. You think that you are smiling at the monkeys and showing pleasure. What the monkey sees are bare teeth, a sure sign of aggression.”

As the old movie line said, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”

For three days we hiked the trails of Taman Nagara. Having nine pairs of eyes was helpful for finding birds in the dense rainforest. But sometimes nine pairs (or even two pairs) were just too many and we scared off some of the birds that I really wanted to see like the Malaysian Peacock-Pheasant. I could hear a pair of pheasants calling in the forest but there was no way a group of nine birders could get close enough to see them.

So when the group left this part of the forest in the late afternoon, I stayed behind to walk the trails quietly by myself. I moved as silently as I could and after an hour I was within a hundred feet of their calls. I sat quietly just off the trail in the undergrowth to see if they would come out to where I can see them with my binoculars. Sunset was approaching and the dense forest was getting darker.

A slight noise to my right caused me to look in that direction. Forty feet away but unaware that I was there was a Stone Age vision. An aborigine was coming down the trail carrying his eight-foot blowgun. He wore a loincloth and had a quiver of darts slung across his bare chest and a small basket on his back for carrying his kill. Perhaps he was hunting the same pheasants that I was but for a different purpose. My visitor was a member of the Bateq, part of a group of people whom anthropologists call Negrito or Melanesian. More people of this type live in New Guinea and other South Seas islands. He had a very flat face and a bushy head of hair. With his very dark skin and peppercorn hair he might first be confused with an African but his facial features were Asian not African.

I rose from my hiding place and we each sized up the other. Then we silently passed each other by, each absorbed in our own thoughts. I do not know if he found the birds that he was looking for but I certainly found mine.

I waited until after sunset when there was little stirring in the dusk light. My pheasant was still calling from the same location, a tantalizing hundred feet away. It was now or never. I plunged off the trail into the jungle and the trail disappeared behind me before I had even gone fifteen feet. Almost immediately I came to a small swamp with standing water two inches deep with a mud-appearing bottom. I said a quick, “I hope this is not quicksand,” and proceeded on drawn by the cackling pheasant and the fading light. On the other side of the swamp and in another twenty feet into more jungle I found the tree where the pheasant was roosting. I had a quick look and then it suddenly flew off with an indignant chatter at being disturbed.

I wanted to stop and savor the moment but night was coming fast. I needed to quickly find my way back to the trail and then follow the trail out of the forest. No, I did not remember to bring a flashlight. I didn’t know that I was going to be out after dark chasing elusive pheasants and Stone Age visions.

July 6 River travel by boat from Taman Nagara to Jerantut, Malaysia
July 6 Boat and road travel by bus from Jerantut to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
July 7 Malaysia Airlines #2608 K.Lumpur to Kota Kinabalu, Borneo, via Labuan, Borneo, Malaysia

One of my goals in life is now accomplished. I have actually made it to the island of Borneo. As a child I was sometimes accused of acting like “The Wild Man of Borneo,” so I wanted to see my spiritual home.

Borneo is the third largest island in the world, after Greenland and New Guinea, and contains portions of three different countries. The southern three-fourths of the island is owned by Indonesia and called Kalimantan. Malaysia owns most of the northern one-fourth, the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak. Also on the north coast is the small independent nation of Brunei. Before World War II Sabah and Sarawak were British colonies while Kalimantan was part of the Dutch East Indies.

Except for a fairly broad coastal plain, Borneo is mountainous, topped by its crown jewel, Mt. Kinabalu, at 13,000 feet. The entire island was originally rainforest but much of the coastal plains were cleared except for swamps and nature reserves. Now clearing and logging are eliminating many square miles of mountain rainforest each year. In fact Borneo is being deforested at a faster rate than any other area of the world. There is still a fair amount of rainforest left but it will not last long at this rate. Logging for tropical hardwoods, like teak, is a big part of the economy in Borneo on the Malaysian side and even more so on the Indonesian portion of the island. The beautiful outdoor furniture found on many American patios is made of wood from the rainforest, probably from Borneo.

The tropical island of Borneo has wonderful wildlife—at least in the remaining rainforest. The endangered Sumatran rhinoceros is here as are Asian elephants. Two of the four great apes of the world are on Borneo, the gibbon and orangutan. The other two, of course, are the gorillas and chimpanzees of Africa. Borneo has flying lizards, flying frogs, and even flying snakes. They don’t actually fly; they stretch out flaps of skin and glide from tree to tree. Borneo also has archerfish, which shoot out jets of water to knock down insects from overhanging leaves into a stream where they can be eaten. And for a globe-trotting birder, Borneo has over 450 species of birds including 38 that are found no place else in the world.

July 7 Road travel by bus from Kota Kinabalu to Sukau, Borneo, Malaysia

From Sukau we and our companions motor down a slow lazy river to Sukau River Lodge in northeastern Borneo. Tugboats and barges loaded with logs pass us by as part of the rainforest is being carried away right in front of us. Still, from our boat we see forest as far inland as we can look.

At the riverside lodge comes a reminder that we are back in the lowland tropics. The lodge is up on stilts to allow breezes to blow underneath. A 300-pound man in a Malaysian sarong greets us at the dock. This is the cook and lodge manager. One look at his huge girth and we know that we will eat well tonight.

Birding here is by boat. There isn’t much dry land around, only muddy forest. The first evening, just before sundown, we go up a side tributary of the Kinabatangan River. Here we turn off the noisy outboard motor and use an electric trolling motor. Now, we have a totally silent boat and can better sneak up on birds and animals. We have two target birds, an owl and frogmouth. The Buffy Fish-Owl turns out to be easy to find. It is sitting on a branch right over the stream waiting for a fish to swim by. Flashlights give us a good look.

It takes a much longer search to find the Sunda Frogmouth. This is a large, fifteen-inch, curious-looking nocturnal bird. Like the rest of the frogmouth family, this one has large mouth with a very wide gape that looks too big for the rest of his head. Frogmouths glean insects off branches and the ground in the dark. Like many nocturnal birds this one has excellent night vision for finding its prey. During the daytime it sits perfectly still in the middle of a tree or bush and is almost impossible to detect because of its mottled plumage.

The concept of bird’s nest soup is totally foreign to me. I have seen a lot of bird’s nests and would not want to eat any of them because every nest I’ve ever seen was made of dead grass and small twigs, which has no culinary appeal to me. But nonetheless, today we are at the home of the bird that makes the nest that makes the soup.

The Gomantong Caves are a series of holes in the side of a limestone bluff. The largest go back over a hundred yards and have huge vaulted ceilings more than a hundred feet high. With a large opening to the outside they are not totally dark inside like a true cave but are dimly lit. Here, millions of bats over thousands of years have left deposits of guano on the cave floor that are meters deep. The guano smell is overwhelming and some of our group beat a hasty retreat. The rest of us venture in to see the birds and the famous nests.

The birds we are looking for are swifts, small six-inch birds with cigar-shaped bodies and swept-backed wings that zip through the air. Swifts are common birds. Various species are found in almost all parts of the world. They are insect-eaters and spend their entire day on the wing chasing flying bugs. They are such efficient flyers that they do everything on the wing except nest and sleep. They catch food while flying. They drink while swooping low over water. They even mate on the wing. Because of their tiny legs, swifts cannot sit on a perch. Their short claws can only cling to a vertical surface. In the eastern United States one species of swift gets its name, Chimney Swift, by nesting in old chimneys. In other parts of the world swifts nest on rock overhangs and here in Borneo in shallow caves.

The walls of Gomantong Caves have numerous small ledges and rocks sticking out. Here the swifts build nests. Because swifts don’t land in trees or on the ground, they can’t pick up much grass or twigs for nests. They can’t even pick up mud for nests like the swallows do. Swifts pick up little bits of things on the wing and then glue them all together into a nest made with their own saliva. The saliva hardens into a gel and makes a sufficient nest on the narrow ledges of the cave. Swifts are colonial nesters and thousands may nest in one place.

One species of swift makes its nest entirely from its saliva. There are no bits and pieces of anything else. This is the nest that is used in the soup. After the bird has hatched its young and departed, the nests are collected and made into soup. When the soup is boiled, the gelatinous saliva dissolves and flavors the soup.

Collecting nests is a challenging task. The nests are all over the sides of the cave, often fifty or more feet off the ground and yet an industry has evolved around these nests, which sell for a high price in Asian markets. At Gomantong Caves an entire village makes its living collecting and selling nests. Long homemade ladders are used to reach many of the nests. Others are just too high or in areas where ladders do not work such as on the curve of the vaulted ceiling. A cherry picker crane would work well here. These people don’t have one so they invented something that works just as well.

Out of bamboo they constructed a tower in the center of the cave and secured it with taut ropes. Then they constructed a bamboo boom that sticks out from the side of the tower and can be swung in a circle around the tower by means of more ropes pulled by men on the ground. A brave man rides the end of the boom and reaches out to collect nests off the walls and ceiling. The bamboo structure looks very much like the tower cranes found on modern construction sites for tall buildings. Yet, these people have been using the design for centuries. The only design change is that now guy wires replace some of the ropes.

The villagers have a renewable resource that they can harvest every year. They jealously protect the cave and the birds that nest there. They have learned not to disturb the birds during nesting and only collect nests after the birds are gone. The birds are not harmed. They would make new nests every year anyway whether the old nests had been collected or not.

Today, we are eager to go in to see the birds that are still nesting. Most have already finished their annual parental chores but there are still several dozen nesting pairs left. We’ve seen the swifts flying outside but it is important to us to actually see the birds on the nest.

There are several species of swifts on Borneo and most are small and black and impossible to tell apart when flying. But each species builds a different type of nest and the three species that we want to see are all nesting here in the same cave. If we can match the birds with the nests, we can tell them apart. These birds are even named for their nests. Sure enough, there are the Black-nest Swiftlet and the Mossy-nest Swiftlet. The one up high with the off-white nest is the Edible-nest Swiftlet, the one of soup fame. We can add three new species to our list.

Swifts are not the only ones living in the caves. At dusk bats come out by the thousands to find their dinner and cleanse the forest of a few million flying insects each night. As we watch the bats pour out of the caves, it is staggering to contemplate the billions of insects that must hatch each year just to feed the bats of Gomantong Caves. But the bats are not the top of the food chain here.

As we watch, a large Bat Hawk flies into the cloud of flying mammals and grabs bats in mid-air with his talons. We count twenty-seven bats caught by one hawk in less than an hour and there are three Bat Hawks. These hawks do not need to chase their prey because the bats don’t seem to try to escape. The Bat Hawk just soars into a bat cloud and starts grabbing. I wonder how many bats a hawk can eat in an evening?

Those persons of a certain age will remember the movie comedian Jimmy Durante who was famous for his huge nose. Rumors are that he died some years ago. Not so! Jimmy and all of his relations are alive in Borneo. They are reincarnated as proboscis monkeys. These large monkeys have comical human-appearing faces with huge noses that would make Jimmy proud. Find, if you can, a picture of a proboscis monkey. It will make your day.

While I think of a comedian when I see these monkeys, the local residents had a different idea. The large hairy monkey with a big nose and a potbelly reminded them of the early European colonizers, so they called it orang belanda, which is Malay for Dutchman. Found only in Borneo’s mangrove swamps, proboscis monkeys are often seen swimming across rivers to reach fruiting trees.

These comical fellows (and ladies) are a frequent source of amusement as we canoe up quiet rivers in Borneo in search of kingfishers, pittas and hornbills. We have been lucky in finding monkeys this year. We found eight species in Asia, three in Africa and eight more in South America.

The monkeys we found in Africa primarily walk around on the ground, although they frequently feed and sleep in the trees. In the parts of Africa that we visited, trees are far enough apart that a monkey must go to the ground to get to the next tree. In the Ecuadorian rainforest, however, the trees are touching one another and monkeys can move from tree to tree. They walk out on a branch and then jump to a branch on the next tree. They specifically choose which branch they will jump to and they seldom miss, even when jumping a long distance.

In Malaya and Borneo the rainforest trees are also close together, so the monkeys can again move from tree to tree. But unlike the South American monkeys, which select a specific branch to jump to, the Asian monkeys here just jump. They aim for a big clump of leaves and branches on a nearby tree and then jump—landing in the middle of the clump, figuring that they can get a handhold somewhere. It looks clumsy but it works.

The other big difference in monkeys between South America and Asia is that New World monkeys have prehensile tails, so they can hang by their tail and can use the tail in climbing. Old World monkeys cannot hang or grasp with their tails. They use their tails strictly for balance.

All the monkeys are fun but today we are enjoying Jimmy Durante. “Good night Mrs. Kalibash, wherever you are.”

July 10 Road travel by van from Sukau to Sandakan, Borneo, Malaysia

The most famous animal in Borneo is called orang utan, old man of the forest, in the Malay language. They are found only in Borneo and Sumatra. The current population is estimated at 30,000 but the species is declining at the rate of 35% each decade due to rainforest clearing. Near Sepilok in eastern Borneo, a forest reserve preserves a home for orangutans. We are here to hike and look for birds but even more to see the orangutans. I could not leave Borneo without finding one.

After we enter the forest, it isn’t long before a mother and infant come through the trees along our path. Orangutans are apes, not monkeys, and are among the closest living species to humans. As I watch them, I see very human-like facial expressions and actions. The mother orangutan’s loving attention to her infant seems very familiar.

These apes live in trees like monkeys but they do not move through the trees like a monkey. The orangutans are too big and heavy to swing from branch to branch and jump from tree to tree. So instead of swinging through the trees, they get the trees to swing them. For moving through the forest, orangutans seek out trees about thirty feet tall and five inches in diameter. Like a child starting a swing, the ape will make the tree sway back and forth, similar to an upside down pendulum, in an arc of fifteen feet to each side. When the tree swings far enough to touch the next small tree, the orangutan grabs hold of it and lets go of the first tree. This new tree then swings back and forth towards the next one and so on. The orangutan actually moves quite efficiently and smoothly through the forest ignoring the huge trees and using the thin trees to get around.

Swinging through the trees takes tremendous strength. This strength was witnessed by the 19th Century naturalist Alfred Wallace who saw one orangutan kill a crocodile by pulling open its jaws and ripping out its throat. Although extremely powerful, orangutans are not a threat to humans unless the animal feels threatened.

We watch the mother and youngster go through the forest together with the mother in the lead. The child does fine in the tree but is not large enough to transfer from tree to tree. So when the mother swings the first tree far enough to grab the second she stops, holds onto each tree and hangs suspended from both. The youngster then uses the mother as a bridge to get to the second tree. They use this bridge method at every tree crossing.

The baby does not ride on the mother’s back until they come to the elevated boardwalk, which we are using to go through the nature reserve. Here the mother walks the boardwalk for a while until it descends down a hill in a series of stairs. The mother orangutan doesn’t use stairs. She climbs up on the wide handrail and slides down the banister headfirst with her baby on her back. This happens right in front of us and Shirley shoots picture after picture.

Periodically the mother stops to feed or rest on the boardwalk and the baby uses the opportunity to explore his surrounding but he always keeps a hand or a foot attached to his mother. The baby stretches out as far as he can go to explore but is always careful to maintain contact with mother.

Seeing orangutans up close is certainly the highlight of the year so far. I have always wanted to go to Borneo and this is the fulfillment of a dream. Retirement is great fun.

July 13 Malaysia Airlines #2043 Sandakan to Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia
July 13 Road travel by bus from Kota Kinabalu to Mt. Kinabalu, Malaysia

After a short flight back across the northern end of Borneo we reach Mt. Kinabalu National Park, home of the tallest mountain in southeastern Asia. I would love to hike to the top of the 13,000 foot mountain but not all of our group could make it. So we concentrate on the mid-elevations where there are species of birds that are found nowhere else on earth. A hike to the 9,000-foot level brings us in pursuit of the Friendly Bush-Warbler. After hiking and searching for this bird for four hours, I am not sure how much of a friend this bird really is. And yet when it finally does appear, it comes up within eight feet of us so I guess that qualifies as “friendly.”

By the time we reach 9,500 feet, half of our group has dropped out from fatigue on the steep rocky trail. The rest of us are resting frequently. I am in good shape but I have been at sea level for most of this trip and for the last twelve years. I am not used to the thinner air here on the mountain. While we rest, young college-aged Malaysians are passing us by as they climb the mountain trail with a light daypack and good hiking boots. I don’t feel too bad about being passed. They are much younger.

Then comes a steady parade of porters passing us by. There is a hostel at the 11,000-foot level on the mountain where hikers stay overnight on their way to the top. All food and supplies for the hostel come up this trail. There are no pack animals in southern Asia, only porters. Today’s porters, both men and women, are local residents, twenty-somethings to forty-somethings. They carry huge loads up this rocky trail everyday wearing sneakers or even flip-flops. Several cases of Coca Cola seem to be an average weight. The lightest load I saw was an entire case of toilet paper, all 96 rolls. The poor woman was just bent down with this huge box. Some porters also make extra money by carrying backpacks for hikers. I am just amazed at what these small-statured people can accomplish on this mountain. Just carrying binoculars and a liter of water is enough for me today.

Yesterday in the Borneo rainforest we found a blooming rafflesia, the plant with the world’s largest blossom. The flower that we saw was about sixteen inches in diameter although some grow up to three feet across. It was amazing to see a flower so huge.

Rafflesia is a strange plant. It is a parasite that implants itself in the underground portion of a forest vine that is similar to our grapevine. Rafflesia has no leaves and no visible stem. The only part of the plant above ground is the flower bud, which later opens into a leathery orange flower. The plant is slow growing. A flower bud a month old is only the size of the last joint on my thumb. By five months the bud is the size of a medium, reddish-purple cabbage. It takes nine months for the bud to open and then the flower lasts only three to five days. We find the flower in the forest by following our nose. This plant stinks! Actually, it smells like rotting meat. This odor attracts carrion flies that pollinate the plant. The seeds are then scattered on the forest floor by rodents who come to eat the flower when it is past its prime. No one knows how the seed becomes implanted in the roots of the forest vine which serves as the host plant or why only this one kind of vine will suffice.

These are only two of the many mysteries in the tropical rainforest. Currently there is a race underway to understand as many of these unknowns as possible while the rainforest is still relatively intact. Many of the medicines that we use today are derived from chemical compounds taken from rainforest plants. In the future mankind may find that the rainforest literally means the difference between life and death for people afflicted with diseases that today have no cure.

July 16 Malaysia Air #2815 Kota Kinabalu to Kuching, Borneo, Malaysia via Bintulu, Borneo, Malaysia

Our tour with Dennis Yong is over and we are back on our own again. We promise ourselves some down time—no mountain climbs, no birding in the rain and NO LEECHES—so we head for a remote resort to relax. But first we’ll spend the afternoon enjoying the city of Kuching before heading to the resort tomorrow.

Kuching, in the far northwestern part of Borneo, sits on the wide slow Sarawak River. We are as far west in Borneo as we can go and still be in Malaysia. During our walk around town we follow the riverbank to enjoy the view of traditional Bornean boats. While we watch, a group of racing shells comes sculling by with young Malaysians wearing their school colors. Obviously there are still some remnants of British colonial culture here.

Across the street a Chinese temple lends an Oriental flavor to the town. There is an outdoor religious ceremony going on at the temple and the music sounds foreign to my Western ear. Much of downtown has a Chinese look to it, particularly in the shops. In this part of the world ethnic Chinese seem to control most of the small businesses and the native people are more involved in agriculture or working as employees for someone else.

The next morning we take a long 150-mile drive to catch a boat across a reservoir to a resort in Batang Ai National Park in the hills on the border with Indonesia. Here our most ambitious plans are to lie by the pool and read a good book—and if we are really ambitious to actually get into the pool. In three days I do so little birding that I only add one new species to the year’s total, a Banded Bay Cuckoo.

But a ranger can only sit and read for so long. On the third day it is time for another adventure. From Batang Ai we travel upriver in search of the famous Borneo headhunters. Ever since I was a child, I have heard about The Wild Man of Borneo. Here is my chance to find him. Along with three boatmen, there are seven of us—four Americans, a German, a young Swedish woman and a mysterious man who never speaks and never reveals his accent. We travel in three longboats up the river as far as we can go to where shallow rapids prohibit any further travel.

We are heading to a village of the Iban, the local people who inhabit the interior of Borneo where there are no roads, only rivers. The entire village of 48 families lives in two buildings but oh, what buildings. These are Long Houses, each about a hundred yards long and about fifteen wide. A wall runs the full length of each building dividing it in half. The right side is public space; the left is private. The public area is open the full length of the building and has many doorways to the outside. This public area is where much of the daily activity of the village occurs.

When we arrive, women are weaving fancy grass mats for the floors and plain mats that will be used outside to dry grain and peppercorns. Other women are using a giant wooden mortar and pestle to grind up tapioca. Small children are playing everywhere. They all seem well behaved. There are no older children in sight. They are all in boarding school about an hour away by canoe further upriver.

Men are outside clearing steep hillsides just beyond the village. Now is the time to clear last year’s vegetation so that rice can be planted in September at the start of the rainy season. It will be harvested in February and then the hillside will go back to thick vegetation until cleared next July and August. Rice, tapioca and a little corn are staples along with chickens, pigs and river fish to provide protein. The small amount of cash for the village comes from growing pepper. The peppercorns they harvest and dry on grass mats will become the ground black pepper and white pepper for the world’s dinner tables.

We take off our shoes at the door and enter the Long House. The Iban are friendly and want to shake our hand and then they go back to their daily activities. Are these the headhunters I’ve heard about? Walking through the public area, we can see that the left half of the long building is the private living space of each family. Off the public area there is a door and a window into each family’s room, which is about fifteen feet long and maybe twenty wide. Looking through the windows into the rooms we see that there is no furniture inside. The clean spotless rooms have cabinets and shelves lining the walls to hold all the family’s possessions. The rest of the floor space is open. At night mats will be put on the floor for sleeping. I can see some of the rolled mats stacked against a wall. Many of the private quarters have a second room added onto the back of the building for a kitchen but two rooms are the most that any family has including the chief’s family.

The people are wearing a variety of clothing. Many of the young men around the house and most of the old women are wearing just a sarong tied around the waist. The younger women are more modest wearing a sarong tied under the armpits. A few wear a blouse and an Asian skirt. One woman wears jeans; a few of the men wear shorts. The little children are wearing an assortment of clothing. Several two-year-old girls are attired in frilly dresses. A little boy in a Winnie-the-Pooh shirt and nothing else completes the picture. Are these headhunters?

We are invited to sit on mats in front of the chief’s quarters. We know that this is an important place because not only is it at the center of the building but it also has a battery-powered clock on the wall. It functions just like the clock in a town square, which is placed in the center of the community so everyone see the time.

Some of the villagers sit with us and offer glasses of tuak, a rice drink. I can tell right away that this tuak was not made just yesterday. It is well fermented and has a kick. Well, this should loosen up the party—and it soon does.

A musical ensemble comes out consisting of a drum, two types of gongs and a set of inverted bronze pots that are played like a marimba to carry the “tune”. Men and women of the Iban dance for us in the flowing style that is often associated with Southeast Asia. The first dance shows the flight of the hornbill through the dancer’s graceful movements. It is hard to tell what the other dances depict but probably one has to do with hunting and one has to do with love. All tribal societies seem to have dances about hunting (either men or animals) and about boy meets girl.

We all appreciate the dancing and applaud appropriately. Secretly, I am hoping that this is not a prelude dance prior to the hunting of tourist’s heads but no, it is something worse. The locals want us to dance! Apparently this is great entertainment for the Iban: get the tourists high on fermented rice drink and invite them to dance for the local’s enjoyment. The ensemble strikes up the gongs again and that non-Western tune sounds forth. The young German and the young Swedish woman get right into the swing of things just as if there were a disco ball overhead and everything. Soon we are all involved. The locals love it and laugh and applaud. I think we just found the wild men and women of Borneo and they are us.

What about the headhunters? I should have mentioned it before. Right outside the chief’s quarters, right beside the clock and just next to where the wild men are dancing, are five human skulls, with leathery skin attached, hanging in a woven net.

The heads are indeed real and are probably over a hundred years old. They are still important trophies for a village that remembers its traditions and is proud of its prowess in war. Headhunting was an important part of Iban culture and taking a head was a sign of manhood. No self-respecting young woman would consider a young man who had not collected a head.

We and the Iban each have a fun morning seeing a culture that is different from our own. As we visitors go back downstream, I look around and count heads. Yes, there are the same number of heads going downstream as went upstream a few hours earlier but it does seem that a few of the heads are now much larger after that rice drink. The headhunters are alive and well in Borneo.

It is hot in the tropics. Hot and humid! Periodically all that heat energy, which is really solar energy, builds into tremendous clouds. Usually the energy will slowly dissipate with the cooling of the night and the disappearance of the sun. But sometimes the heat energy builds up so much that it takes only the slightest trigger of a weather change to set off the biggest electrical show on the planet. Tonight is one of those nights.

The thunderhead has been building all afternoon and now reaches almost eight miles into the sky and more than twenty miles across. Over the lake is another thunderhead and over the distant hills is third one. At dark something pulls the trigger. We see lightening—continuous lightening. The clouds glow with that eerie inner light that comes from cloud lightening where we can’t see the individual bolts, only the light from them. These clouds don’t merely glow; they pulsate with all the energy being released in them. For three hours there is never complete darkness. Our three clouds flash continuously in an enormous electric light show. Strangely there is no sound. Because of the distance, the sound of thunder never reaches us. So in almost complete silence, we watch three clouds erupting with more electrical power than all of the electrical generating plants in the entire nation. The storms slowly fade into the night and then so do we. This is our last night in Borneo.