I felt surprisingly good when I woke in the wee small hours and met the others outside. It was pitch black but still very humid. We piled into a taxi to take us down to the Kapuas River, the longest in Indonesia. With so few good roads, it is the lifeblood of the whole area. All I knew about the town of Pontianak was that the place was smack on the equator and the local restaurants served turtle soup and fried python. Anton told me that a couple of hundred years back the town had been the capital of its own little sultanate, a major trading area strategically placed at the mouth of the river.
It really was incredibly dark still, and the air was full of smoke. They’d been burning the fields and the smog added a man-made mistiness to the atmosphere that gave the river an eerie feel. I was excited about the day ahead - an adventure within an adventure, really - and as we left on our three-hour voyage I felt a rush of adrenaline.
The boat - the
Hutan Express
- was sleek and powerful with plenty of seating, and it carried all of us and our gear pretty easily. It was powered by a 200 hp V6 Yamaha and we were soon cruising at about thirty-five or forty knots. It was a smooth ride, the river lit by a powerful headlight to avoid obstacles, though the driver told me he’d done this trip hundreds of times and could navigate just about blindfold. It was a good job because the surface was littered with bits of wood, rocky outcrops and fallen trees. Sitting back in the dark with the wind in my hair and the sound of the engine I had to pinch myself that this was Borneo and we were actually here.
They say the coldest part of the night is just before dawn and as the sun began to rise I huddled in my jacket under the canopy as the first rays of sunlight scattered gold across the black of the water.
We pulled into Teluk Melano just before eight. The town was a sprawl of wooden buildings built on deep pilings, the largest an imposing pagoda right on the water. A group of men watched with interest as we unloaded the gear then picked our way through an alley made of wooden planks. Kids crowded around us - youngsters in bare feet and no shirts, teenagers on mopeds - smiling and laughing and wanting to say hello. There were lots of people on bicycles - I helped one poor woman who’d fallen off and scraped her leg. It was all reminiscent of Nepal - the tightness of the streets maybe, and a kind of dustiness now to the humidity.
While we were waiting for the car that would take us to Ketapang I got a call from Lucy, explaining that we could no longer get the plane to Bali. We’d planned to spend tonight with the villagers, carry out the vaccinations tomorrow and be on our way after that. Now we would have to spend a night in Ketapang and another in Pontianak on the way back. I wasn’t going to worry about it now: this was turning out to be the best day in the whole expedition.
When Anton mentioned the sultanate I asked him to give me a little history lesson. He explained that Indonesia is made up of seventeen thousand islands, though only six thousand are inhabited. The population is around two hundred million. Up until 1998 they were governed by a military dictatorship and since they became a democracy, centralised government has been replaced with four hundred and fifty district offices. It was one of those who’d elected a new leader. I’d heard that a couple of days ago there had been demonstrations outside parliament in Jakarta, thousands of students protesting at the hikes in the cost of fuel. Ten years ago the police would have cracked down on any kind of public disturbance, but Anton told me these days debate was more easily tolerated.
Arriving in Ketapang we made our way to the UNICEF District Health Office, which serves twenty-three outposts and some seventy thousand women and children, and met up with Adi, the health officer for the village upriver. A trained nurse, he’d been working in this field for seventeen years. It struck me then that we were back on the ‘Cold Chain’, doing here what we’d done in Nepal, only this time we were inoculating against tetanus. That is if someone could find the key to the room where the vaccine was refrigerated. It had gone missing and everyone was hunting high and low.
It’s amazing to think that UNICEF supplies more than 40 per cent of the world’s vaccines, but it’s a fact; and if you go online you can sponsor the activities of one of these outposts. You can choose to fund a cool box or the vaccine itself or the cost of transporting it. Lots of people I’ve spoken to do it that way because then they know exactly what their donation is being spent on and it makes their involvement so much more personal.
The purpose of our visits was to highlight the type of transport needed to get UNICEF and their medicines to remote areas - and you couldn’t get much more remote than the village we were heading to. The key found, we crossed town in a truck for the Pawan River. Borneo is a land of rivers - they act as the highways, not the roads, which can present their own set of problems.
Once on the Pawan we headed inland in another large speedboat. I couldn’t get the grin off my face - and we had another three hours ahead of us before we reached our destination. The engines fired up, the driver spun the wheel, hauling us away from the wharf. We were off. The buildings soon disappeared behind us and we were in thick jungle with villages built along tall banks where people climbed down ladders to get to their boats. Sitting back in daylight now I was able to take in the real span of this river, the narrower tributaries, the flotsam and jetsam floating on the top. We could see sprays of palm trees and thicker, deeper jungle behind. Every now and then we’d pass areas where the trees had been cleared altogether to make way for rice or coffee.
By four p.m. we were on the second leg, another town built on stilts where there seemed to be a lot of building work going on. The air rang with the sound of machine tools. The streets were skinny, pitted with potholes and lined with men in shorts and flip-flops squatting down to watch us. With the cool box over my shoulder, I jumped on a moped and made my way out of town, Anton on another moped beside me. Every corner I turned people were pointing and laughing. It had been the same in India and China: as soon as I followed some local worker onto his normal mode of transport I was the subject of much laughter and finger-pointing.
We rode along roads dug with gouges so deep that lengths of wood had been laid to try and flatten them. Of course we gathered another convoy. No matter where we seemed to ride bikes, the people came out to ride with us. Here it was a load of young guys and one older man with his three kids tucked in behind him. There are no laws in Indonesia about wearing a helmet and there were no helmets available so I rode very carefully. But we weren’t doing any kind of speed and there was plenty of lush vegetation to fall off into.
Half an hour from town we passed through a few run-down villages where the houses were mostly hidden by trees. Beyond them the road narrowed even further. I could feel the box of vaccine bouncing around behind me. I hoped to God I wasn’t ruining the stuff, the bottles were well packed but I was conscious of the temperature and how far we had to travel. The bottles are marked with heat-sensitive paper carrying a light grey circle on a darker square. If the temperature changes so does the colour of the circle, and if it becomes darker than the square the vaccine is useless.
Leaving the villages, we crossed a river on an old iron bridge and rode into thicker, denser jungle. The heat was absolutely stifling here and the roads about as bad as roads can get. We were riding street bikes but this was crappy dirt with cavernous potholes, and piles of earth and bits of stone littering the way. We did manage to find a little tarmac, but we soon had to leave it for a track that became no more than a footpath. This took us through a couple more villages then up a hill. I caught the smell of the river and sure enough, as we crested the rise, I could see it snaking between the trees far below.
I was pretty tired now. We had been travelling for fifteen hours and this was the fifth form of transport we’d been on. The sixth was waiting below, more speedboats bobbing about on the water. These were much smaller and open-topped with outboard motors. The river was narrower here, the banks not quite so high with trees overhanging so steeply their branches were almost scratching the surface. Mungo and I jumped in one boat, the UNICEF team jumped in another, and Anne took a third boat so she could film. As we set off a great gaggle of kids looked on, shouting and waving from the jetty. Glancing at them I realised this was my ninth UNICEF visit and by far the most remote outpost we’d been to. Talk about by any means - we were on our sixth transport change and I was having a ball.
Our pilot was a young kid with shaggy hair and a baseball cap worn backwards. He took us from one side of the river to the other, skipping shallow rapids, dancing around black rocks and branches that had been ripped from the trees when the river flooded. We raced on and on, rocking wildly on the wake of the boat in front of us, twisting the bows to avoid yet more debris. I loved the smell of the two-stroke engine and the backdrop was just incredible. As with other remote places I’d tried to imagine what Borneo would be like but I’d never come up with anything like this: the trees, the black surface of the water, the rocks and rapids, the sweaty smell of the jungle and these boats. I’d been thinking canoes, dugouts maybe, but nothing like this.
The four boats were not all keeping pace with each other, though. Our guy was taking us into the flatter sections by the shore so we could avoid gravel bars, and sometimes we were so close we could reach out and touch the bank. He rarely slowed, just avoided whatever hazard was ahead and kept going. Only when the sun was gone did he ease back on the throttle. By then Anne’s boat was nowhere to be seen behind us. It got darker and darker, the gloom descending so quickly and so completely it was almost spooky. I kept looking back to see if the others were all right. I could see two boats but there was no sign of Anne.
Finally the darkness was so total we had no choice but to stop and pull the boat onto a bank of rocks where a group of men were camping. I spoke to them, thinking that this was actually a pretty good place to camp, and they told me they were going inland from Ketapang. The trip to their village took four full days. I was amazed; four days to take your goods to market and another four to get back again.
A few minutes later we heard the others approaching. I tried to see what was happening but by now the whole jungle was pitch black. A boat came in, the engine died and thankfully I heard Anne’s voice. ‘Are you all right, Anne?’ I called.
‘I’m fine, I’m glad to see you guys again, though.’
‘Wasn’t it fantastic? Or were you a bit nervous?’
‘I was having a great time,’ she said, ‘until it began to get dark. There was no one on the boat I could speak to and I had no idea where you were. Then I was a little nervous maybe . . .’
After some discussion with the pilots we decided to carry on. We were just a few miles from the village of Riam Dadap and if we were careful we could make it without disaster. To be honest I would have been quite happy to crash out on the rocks with the night air on my face, nodding off to the sound of the river. We’d had our moments on boats on this expedition and the last thing we needed was someone to wind up in the water. But on we went and ten minutes upriver we could see lights glowing like fireflies along the bank, and a little after that we docked at a jetty where the villagers were waiting.
They gave us the most amazing welcome: flowers had been laid before a symbolic bamboo archway and they blessed us as we walked through. Women were beating the earth with long poles, a wonderful drumming sound backed with a kind of high-pitched chatter.
It was hard to work out the layout of the village at night - there were lights in the houses but none on the street and with people crowding everywhere it was difficult to get any sense of where we were. The chief - a man in his forties - came out to greet us and invited us into his house. We sat down in a long room with a TV, tiles on the floor and a coffee table surrounded by wooden chairs. He blessed me with flowers dipped in water, and wished me luck on my journey. Then one of the elders wrapped a leaf bracelet around my wrist and told me that when it rained it would not rain on me and when it was hot the heat would not wither me. I was incredibly touched to be so honoured, and after the most brilliant day’s travelling. Not since I’d left my dad’s house had I had such a wobble in the old chin: the villagers’generosity and kindness was very humbling.
Before we ate, the chief apologised for the food, which he said was all they had managed to prepare in time. It was palm-based, with local vegetables and coconut oil, served on plates like half shells. It was the best food we’d had in ages.
I woke up to rain, and Mungo looking out the window. We’d been sleeping on our mats at the chief’s house.
‘How did you sleep?’ he asked me.
‘Like a log, except I had to prod you a few times. You sounded like the foghorn on the
Titanic
.’
‘And that was just my arse.’
‘What are you looking at?’ I wandered over to the window.
‘That pig.’ Mungo pointed to a slender-looking saddleback snuffling around in its sty. ‘I love pigs, but they really piss me off.’
‘Mungo, how can you love pigs if they really piss you off?’
He scratched his stubble. ‘I never thought about that. Good question.’
It really was hammering down, but it was only six and there was plenty of time for the sun to come out and scorch us. Out on the porch I watched the rain bending the palms and rattling tin roofs all along a little street of baked earth that meandered away from the river. Now it was light I could see that the houses were beautiful - wooden homes snug among the trees, many sectioned off by white picket fences. The people clearly took pride in their village; they took pride in their culture, their way of life, themselves. We’d seen that last night - after dinner they had put on a performance of traditional dancing and singing then passed the local grog. They were so pleased to welcome us, so open and generous; just like people all around the world. Sitting there on that porch watching a tropical storm I thought again how privileged I am to travel so much and meet all these different people. So many countries’ reputations are misconstrued by news or gossip. The reality is most places in the world are safe and most people will go out of their way to help a stranger. I’ve learned that if you travel with an open mind and a good heart, and remain respectful of the country you’re in, then you should be fine.