Kijana (29 page)

The interior of the island was so dense with jungle that the only means of getting in were by light aircraft or riverboat. However, both had their limits. Planes need an airstrip to land, yet these are often washed out by heavy rains. The riverboats are at the mercy of rapids, which grow more frequent the further inland the rivers wind. Also, they can only pass after heavy rain, when there is enough water to cover the boulders that dot the riverbeds. An option was to carry the boat around any rapids but this would require a light boat that could be lifted by the three of us. However, storage space was limited on a small boat, and we wanted to avoid buying fuel inland, as it was extremely expensive and scarce in the areas we needed to get to.

Our best option appeared to be to buy an old derelict riverboat, patch it up and head up the Mahakam River as far as time would allow. Our Indonesian visa had already been extended to the hilt and was due to expire in a little over three weeks.

We began scouting possible boats, looking for something we could carry around rapids. However, every boat we saw was in good nick. They were freshly painted and sported newish-looking long-tail outboards on the back.

Eventually we came across a boat that showed promise. It lay half-submerged and was still tied to a jetty. The engine had been removed a long time ago, which suited us, because our plan was to bolt our outboard onto the back. We pulled up in our dinghy and held onto the jetty while we inspected it. As we did, more and more people came to inspect us. Few foreigners visited that part of the world, so we received special attention.

We asked who the owner of the boat was. They either didn't know, or didn't understand us. Eventually, someone appeared to understand what we were asking. Josh stayed to look after the dinghy while I was led along the jetty, through the back door of someone's house, right past a family eating a meal on the floor and out the front door to a road at the front of the house. The man I was following jumped aboard a motorbike and motioned for me to sit behind him. Having been in Indonesia for more than three months, I was accustomed to hitching rides on motorbikes. What I couldn't get used to was putting my arms around a bloke's waist. I'd leave them there for a few seconds so as not to offend, then, on the first bump, I'd opt to try my luck and hold onto the back of my seat. Of more concern, in this case, was the fact that I had no idea where I was heading with this stranger, who couldn't speak English.

After riding for about ten minutes we stopped outside a shop. We entered to find a large man dressed in a robe, lounging on his side and snacking on peanuts. It was like a scene from the Roman days. The two men spoke, then the big man looked at me and, in broken English, asked if I would like to sit. He told me he was the owner of the boat and asked why I was interested in it. I gave him a sketchy outline of our plan, being careful not to give away too many details. I said I'd like to know how much it would cost to buy or even rent. He declared five million rupiah would secure it. His men would help raise it from its watery grave and patch the holes. That was about A$750, which was way too much, so I suggested one million rupiah on the proviso that I return the boat in three weeks. He agreed, so I arranged to meet his men the following afternoon.

It felt good to finally have a plan. Beau began gathering supplies, while Josh organised the camera gear and worked out what to take and what to leave. I resorted to the guidebooks again to work out where the hell we were going.

I knew we had to head towards the centre of Borneo, because that was the general area where other explorers had found the Punans. But the maps of the interior were clearly marked ‘survey incomplete'. It all came down to a bit of a wild guess. I flicked through a well-leafed guidebook one more time. Suddenly I saw something that was to change the course of our adventure.

At the bottom of a page outlining air routes around Borneo was a name that rang a bell. ‘Long Suleh', it said. Long meant village, while Suleh meant – I had no idea. But I knew I'd seen the word somewhere before. Samarinda to Long Suleh it said. An airline by the name of MAF flew the route, but it had no times or dates. I racked my brains as to where I'd come across the name.

I put down the guidebook and reached for another. It was the account by the Blair brothers. I found the section about discovering the Punans. I was getting excited. I read down until I found what I was looking for. That was it! Suleh. It was the village near where they'd found the Punans. I checked the guidebook again for the flight details. Yes, it certainly said Samarinda to Long Suleh. This was despite it not appearing on any of my maps. All of a sudden we had a change of plan. I showed Josh my discovery, then we piled into the dinghy and went to find the airline.

The Samarinda airstrip was as I expected – very basic. Several buildings lined the bitumen runway and a refuelling truck was parked on the grass. The MAF hanger was the last building along. It was only when we got there that we learnt what the initials meant – Mission Aviation Fellowship. If that wasn't the name of an airline for adventure, I was yet to hear of one.

On the wall of the office hung an old laminated map that had been pieced together using aviation charts to make up the entire island of Borneo. At the end of one flight path from Samarinda, marked in pencil, were the words ‘Long Suleh'.

Bingo. We'd accidentally struck gold!

The MAF was funded mostly by churches and generous benefactors to allow remote areas of the globe access to the outside world. The cost of a flight for a villager was heavily subsidised, while we westerners paid full fare to keep the fellowship alive. However, they could offer what we were looking for, so we happily coughed up the money for three tickets to leave in a few days. It may have been more expensive than our riverboat plan but it meant we could get there in hours rather than weeks, which was vital with our visas due to expire.

Now that we had changed our plans, I dropped off an envelope containing 100,000 rupiah to the family who lived by the riverboat we'd earlier organised to rent. I asked them to pass it on to the owner, with the message that there'd been a change of plan and here was a little compensation for his troubles. The last thing we wanted was an angry businessman taking out revenge on
Kijana
while we were away.

To prevent anything untoward happening to
Kijana
, the airline helped arrange for a local to live on board in our absence. He happened to be the brother of one of the MAF employees and a member of their church, so I was confident we could trust him.

A few days later we arrived at the MAF hanger at 8 a.m., our packs holding everything we expected to need for at least three weeks.

As we were the only passengers, our packs were weighed and placed on the last two seats of the plane, a single-engine Cessna that could seat five passengers and the pilot. The pilot was an American, named Peter, who'd flown mission planes all around the world. He, his wife and two children, had lived in Samarinda for three years. He was surprised to see three young men wanting to be taken into the wilds of Borneo.

‘Not many people go in,' he told us after our introductions. ‘We take mostly only supplies and villagers coming out if they get injured. I did take one anthropologist in once, but that was a few years back.'

We weren't sure if we should feel honoured or worried.

All we had to hope for, Peter warned us, was a clear runway at the other end. If we ran into heavy cloud cover, landing would be impossible, and we'd have to fly home and try again another day.

Peter outlined our flight plan, which took us over the low-lying forests along the coast, then up into the foothills and eventually to the highlands, where the rivers began their long journey to eventually become major rivers like the Mahakam.

We took off and circled
Kijana,
which looked like a mere speck on a trickle of muddy water. The ‘Mighty Mahakam' didn't look so mighty from that height. We flew north-west, over a carpet of dense forest. The noise of the engine made talking impossible. A tap on a shoulder and a pointing finger was enough to let each other know about a view worth sharing.

As the mountains began to form, great scraggly peaks passed not far below us. Deep gorges were evident only from directly above. It seemed a miracle that beneath the sea of trees below were small tribes of men, women and children untouched by ‘civilisation'.

As we flew over a ridge, Peter pulled down his microphone and proudly announced: ‘waterfall'. What would have been a towering cascade of solid water if we'd been on the ground, appeared as a tiny white tear in the green canvas of treetops that spread as far as the eye could see. It was a scene that made me feel we were truly heading to the end of the earth. Who knew what we would find there.

CHAPTER TEN
LOST TRIBE

FACES. TINY LITTLE FACES. FIRST ONE, THEN
another, followed by a few more. Soon they were everywhere. After an hour in the air, Peter had put us safely down on a dirt runway, scratched into the forest on the top of a small hill. As the dust from the propeller began to settle, the faces began to appear – mostly children, but then women wearing wide-brimmed sun hats they'd made themselves. They'd been waiting not for us, but for the fresh supplies of fuel, salt and washing powder. It had been three weeks since the plane last landed here.

Peter swung open the aircraft door, jumped out and landed on both feet like a cat. He wasted no time in unloading his cargo, for he could see his customers were pretty keen to get their hands on the goods. Beau, Josh and I struggled with our seatbelts, then hesitantly emerged from the craft to be immediately surrounded by the wide-eyed locals. Peter explained to the crowd who we were as he continued passing cardboard boxes to the many helpers, and asked in Indonesian if they would lead us into town and find us someone to stay with.

No sooner had the dust settled and the boxes been unloaded, than the aircraft propeller was again spinning and Peter and his noisy aircraft were off, set to return in two weeks to collect us. As he rose into the air and disappeared, the noise of the plane was replaced by crickets and chattering children.

We found ourselves led along a dry dirt track to the centre of the village. As we arrived, a dozen men halted work to watch the arrival of the new visitors. These people were not exactly the naked race I'd imagined. They were mostly clad in worn-out denim shorts and stained T-shirts. The men were attempting to tip a pole, freshly cut from the local forest, into a hole in the ground, directly behind a smaller pole that already supported a suspension bridge that crossed a river.

This was the Long Eut River and a little further down it joined another estuary. The village was right where the Blair brothers had described it, at the intersection of two rivers, yet the people looked nothing like they'd described. I imagined them to be more ghostlike. These people looked and dressed like many people we had met during our travels through Indonesia.

Along the riverbank several women looked up from their washing while their children, covered in soap suds, danced about, oblivious to our arrival. We were directed by our young leaders to the porch of a house built on the river's edge. The smell of smouldering wood wafted from inside. Some of the men ceased work on the bridge and began to mill around us. It became evident that no one spoke English, but they did speak Indonesian, which we could, by that stage, understand enough of to communicate the basics.

We asked if there was somewhere for us to sleep, drawing blank expressions. Only when we made the universally understood sign of tilting the head and closing our eyes did we get a response. Chattering erupted as many of the men pointed at a middle-aged woman who stood with her hands on her hips. I immediately got the feeling it was her porch we were standing under.

While this commotion went on about us, my eyes darted from face to face. I caught glimpses of what looked like typical Punan features, but predominantly these people resembled the Dyaks, the coastal dwellers found around Samarinda.

As I scoured the faces I saw, standing away from the adults among a small circle of girls, a face that was definitely not Dyak. She looked markedly different from everyone else we'd seen so far. She had to be a Punan, I figured. My spirits lifted considerably as I stared at her.

My concentration was broken by the arrival of a young man who squeezed through the growing crowd. He had a different build to the sweaty workers around us who all sported well-trimmed bodies. He was stocky, with slightly flabby arms and wore a clean white T-shirt.

‘Good afternoon,' he said in an unnatural fashion, as if he had learnt his pronunciation from a Buckingham Palace butler. ‘My name is Charlie.' At last, an interpreter! We immediately explained that we had arrived on the MAF plane and were wondering if there was anywhere we could set up our tipi.

He spoke to the woman, her arms now folded, who appeared to be the centre of the village's universe. She glanced up and down the river, then gave a snigger as if she'd just had a disgusting thought. She replied to Charlie, who stared at the ground, nodding his head until she finished. As she spoke I turned my head to sneak another look at the Punan girl, but she was gone.

‘Are you a scientist?' Charlie asked.

‘No, we are students,' I replied. It was the easiest answer to give people, considering none of us had a profession and ‘student' was widely understood.

‘What do you study?'

Josh held up the camera. Charlie gave a nod of recognition.

‘We are looking for Punans,' I volunteered. ‘Do you know where we can find them?'

Charlie translated our question to the woman, but we didn't have to wait for her answer. She began shaking her head halfway though the question.

‘Are there any in the forest?' I asked.

The woman's reply this time was more elaborate, relayed to Charlie for about a minute.