Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo

“During our stay I had a familiar sensation in my stomach, the one we all get when we return to a familiar and loved place. I felt as though I had ‘come home’. If a two-week visit was so full of wonderfully strange events, what would it be like to live in Sarawak?”

It’s funny how Eric Hansen’s decision was based largely on a rather rowdy, drunken, crazy party that started out with him having to hit all the partygoers’ heads with a live rooster (no, that’s really what it says) in an Iban longhouse that lasted several days. Six years later, in 1982, he returns to Borneo and begins his journey with many false starts, as Hansen’s first attempts to make it inland show his lack of preparation and knowledge about what he was getting himself into. For instance, he buys 10 kg of salt as he hears that it is in demand in the interior, days later, he returns with it and has to sell it to the hotel. He speaks no Malay and his maps are incomplete because the terrain is largely unexplored by westerners and non-tribal people. The blanks on the map are partly what tempts him to make this trek. (Just a little snippet of information about Borneo: it is the third largest island in the world, and – at least at that time – was 80% rain forest. Its people are divided into some 12 tribal groupings such as the Iban, Kenyah and Penan.)

“Travel is the act of leaving familiarity  behind. Destination is merely a byproduct of the journey.”

In Hansen’s case, it is a case of the completely unfamiliar:

“Nothing had prepared me for the terrain through which we slowly traveled. The rain forest felt magical and enchanted as long as I was sitting still, but the moment I began walking it became an obstacle course of steep razorback ridges, muddy ravines, fallen trees, slippery buttressed tree roots, inpenetrable thickets of undergrowth, and a confusion of wildly twisting rivers running in every direction.”

What makes the journey more tricky is that he intends to travel in the most traditional way possible, that is, hunting and gathering:

“I learned to adapt my appetite and tastes to such foods as bee larvae and rice soup, roasted rattan shoots, boa constrictors, lizards, monkeys, bats and the large animals – pigs and deer.”

I mean I really have to give it to this crazy white man who is willing to submit his stomach to such, erm, delicacies and his daily life to the whims and wildness of the rain forest. Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo is a truly fascinating account of Hansen’s forays into the jungle, sometimes relying on guides, sometimes on his own, depending on the generosity of the village headmen and villagers for lodging and shelter (usually in exchange for some gifts and goods), some of whom stiff him for as much as they can get. He traveled some 1,500 miles over 7 months. I have to credit him with his honesty about his inadequacies in this unfamiliar territory and culture, and continually marveled at his courage and determination to make his way overland. A perfect read for the armchair traveler!

Hansen’s book Motoring with Mohammed: Journeys to Yemen and the Red Sea sounds like it’ll be another fun read, and I look forward to checking that out soon.

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