I am in Kuala Lumpur, Malayasia now, as you can see from the pic featuring me looking heroic beneath the famous Petronas Towers. I'm preparing to do some work in the forests of Malaysian Borneo for the next month or so. I will be working with a fellow U of Montana grad, Noah Jackson, and his NGO, Forest Voices, to document local ecological knowledge of the Penan tribe. Please check out Noah's website to get an idea of the great stuff he is working on, plus there are a ton of gorgeous photos from the area I will be working in. http://hopeinlight.com/ The Penan are formerly nomadic hunter-gatherers that live deep in the rain forest. In prior times they were infamous as head-hunters and deadly accurate blowpipe marksmen. Now, they are just another group of indigenous people getting a raw deal from their national government that values logging and oil palm plantations over their traditional rights to forest lands. An all-too-common tale across the developing world. Noah and I will be using mixed methods of interviews, short video clips, audio files, still photographs and more to allow them to tell their personal stories about life in the forest in their own words. So in a month's time I should have much fodder for the blog.
Until then here are some passages I wanted to share from Eric Hansen's wonderful1983 travelogue, Stranger in the Forest, chronicling his epic 9 month trek on foot through the forests of Borneo and the time he spent with the indigenous forest communities there.
"My anxiety about wanting to get "somewhere else" was partially due to the fact that I knew too many "other places" in the world. Fo Bo 'Hok and Weng (the author's Penan forest guides) there was no "other place" apart from the jungle, and I grew to envy their sense of place, their contentment with where they were. When I became anxious , I would embark upon extraordinary journeys in my mind. When, for example, a steep, muddy trail became impossible because of the leeches, I might imagine myself on a pair of cross-country skis, gliding across expanses of unmarked snow, a picnic lunch and a bottle of wine in my pack. This sight of bee-larvae soup could send me around the world to the Empress Hotel in Victoria, British Columbia, for afternoon tea and scones with freshly whipped cream and thick strawberry jam. Outside, a light snow would be falling on the passing traffic."
This passage really resonated with me as I have often caught myself completely absent from the present moment at times during my travels. In my head, I am back in Montana, floating the Blackfoot River with a cold can of Kettlehouse beer in my hand as rainbow trout break the surface all around me slurping hatching insects of the glassy surface of the water. And then I realize the little Thai lady that is serving me pad thai, sigh, again, (never dreamed I would or could get sick of the stuff!) has been trying to hand me the plate for a minute or more. The other effect is that everywhere I go is constantly being sized up, compared to, and judged against other places that have formed and informed me throughout my short but rarely sedentary life. To my chagrin I have frequently found myself making snap judgments about a new place. A gorgeous beach in Cambodia in its own right gets reduced by my overactive mind to merely "not as pretty as Hawaii." Unfair, I know, but sometimes my brain is just too quick for me!
"Travel is the act of leaving familiarity behind. Destination is merely a byproduct of the journey."
- For someone who intentionally arrived in Asia with no plan or budget or timeline or return ticket, I can say, definitely, yes, destination is nothing but a byproduct!
Hansen goes on to quote a Victorian-era, British traveler, Isabelle Eberhardt, from her book The Oblivion Seekers. This is a long passage but worth reading all the way through. I don't necessarily agree with all of her sentiments, but it is good food for thought.
"To have a home, a family, a property or a public function, to have a definite means of livelihood and to be a useful cog in the social machine, all these things seem necessary, even indispensable, to the vast majority of men, even intellectuals, and including even those who consider themselves as wholly liberated. And yet such things are only a different form of slavery that comes of contact with others, especially regulated and continued contact.
I have always listened with admiration, if not envy, to the declarations of citizens who tell me how they have lived for twenty or thirty years in the same section of town, or even the same house, and who have never been out of their native city.
Not to feel the torturing need to know and see for oneself what is there, beyond the mysterious blue wall of the horizon, not to find the the arrangements of life monotonous and depressing, to look at the white road leading off into the unknown distance without feeling the imperious necessity of giving in to it and following it obediently across mountains and valleys! The cowardly belief that a man must stay in one place is too reminiscent of the unquestioning resignation of animals, beasts of burden stupefied by servitude yet always willing to accept the slipping on of the harness.
There are limits to every domain, and laws to govern every organized power. But the vagrant owns the whole vast earth that ends only at the nonexistent horizon, and his empire is an intangible one, for his domination and enjoyment of it are things of the spirit." hmmmm....
This is spot on Michael! Not since I read 'Stranger in the Forest' have a travel description come so close to my own experience. If you keep blogging, I'll keep reading!
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