Metro Madness: Riverboat Ranting

Jakarta Globe, Simon Pitchforth, May 07, 2010

The heart of darkness is fully wired these days.

This week, I managed to skip Jakarta’s 21st century heart of darkness and headed into the jungles of Borneo for a few days to do a “Lord Jim.” In Conrad’s novel, Jim, a disgraced young seaman, heads into the jungle in order to live with the Dayaks. So I rocked up to Palangkaraya in central Kalimantan with a bag full of mosquito repellent and amusing hats.

Palangkaraya is a small city that received a lot of attention from Sukarno, who considered making it the Indonesian capital at one point. The nation’s first president got the Russians to build some nice, wide boulevards around town when he was flirting with the red menace and also had a fancy woman shacked up here in a rather tasteless pied-a-terre. Even Sukarno’s successor Suharto, rather hubristically decided to make Indonesia self-sufficient in rice by draining the peat swamps in the huge rainforests and jungles that lie beyond the city to start a huge planting program. Not only did the rice not materialize, due to the peat soil being too acidic for the stuff to grow in, but the release of previously locked-in carbon from the dried out swamps has helped Indonesia reach its current status as the world’s third-largest producer of greenhouse gases. In the words of that intellectual colossus, Homer Simpson, “Doh!”

Along with that, rampant deforestation, slash-and-burn agriculture, forest fires, palm oil plantations and a rapidly dwindling orangutan population have prompted a veritable army of tree-hugging, granola munchers to descend on the area to hold conferences and try to engage rainforest communities in conservation efforts.

However, I wasn’t in town to jam with either Sting, Bono or Bob Geldof. My plan was to ford upstream into the jungle on a pleasant three-day riverboat cruise.

For the past few years, a couple of lovely ladies, Lorna Dowson-Collins and Gaye Thavisin, have run eco-tours from Palangkaraya up into the lush jungles of Borneo. The pair have built a huge cruise boat, which can house groups of up to 10 people, with a spacious top deck on which tourists can recline in comfort and spy on the orangutans at the water’s edge as they muck about and exhibit appalling table manners.

The rivers themselves are quintessential jungle waterways. As calm as mirrors and between 50 and 100 meters in width, they meander through lush protected forests with only the occasional illegal gold mining operation or chainsaw buzzing in the distance to remind one of the dangers that this ancient environment now faces. The tour is an educational one and has previously been enjoyed by various European and Australian parliamentary delegations, as well as the prince of Denmark, who apparently had a whale of a time.

We made a brief stop at an orangutan rehabilitation center and learned that some of these hairy chaps are in a very sad state indeed. Orphaned and suffering from malaria, flu or other ailments, the center nurses them back to health and releases them back into the wild. It’s becoming a losing battle, however, as there are now more orangutans coming in than going out.

The cruise itself is magnificent and takes one through idyllic areas of primary rainforest as yet completely unspoiled by man and his vociferous appetite for destroying things and soiling his nest. Mind you, I was still able to get a mobile phone signal for the entire duration of the trip. The heart of darkness is fully wired these days, you understand.

If you’re up for a cruise like this then take a look at: www.wowborneo.com. An interesting one will be taking place between May 20 and May 23, in fact. If you find the Jakarta Highland Gathering a bit passe then the Isen Mulang Cruise will take you to the traditional Dayak games of the same name. One of the events is a game of soccer played with a burning coconut. Silly sods.

Meanwhile, in terms of saving this ancient environment, consumer choice is perhaps your best weapon. Don’t eat the baso (meatballs) in East Java that locals were recently found making from kidnapped monkeys. Perhaps another thing to avoid would be palm oil, which is apparently present in 10 percent of all supermarket products. Giving up Indonesia’s Blue Band palm margarine shouldn’t be too difficult for Westerners though, seeing as the stuff tastes like clarified goat bile. Mind you, the less we eat of the stuff, the more that can be used as chainsaw lubricant. Anyway, let’s all sit in a circle now and sing, “We shall overcome.”

Simon Pitchforth has lived in Indonesia for well over a decade and is the editor of Jakarta Java Kini magazine.