Who's Thoreau?

He must have been at least a bit amused, seeing us struggling along the path. He must have had to suppress a chuckle, when we took 51/2 hours to hike the trail. I know I laughed at myself when I saw an elderly couple, bent almost horizontal at the waist from years of working in the rice fields, even now carrying a load on their hunched backs, pass us on the road at a speed significantly faster than our own. But Lian showed no sign of amusement at our lack of trekking abilities. Instead, he took our minds off the heat and humidity and slippery path by telling us about the jungle that surrounded us. He told us of how you could make a soup from the leaf of a common local plant (when boiled in water, it releases a milky viscous substance resulting in a soup resembling eggflower soup), or reduce swelling by rubbing the crushed leaves of another plant on a bite sting. We probed his knowledge with questions and kept him talking, not just to slow him down but because he had so many interesting things to say. Whenever he'd tell us about the bounty available in the jungle (which he referred to as his "supermarket"), he'd mention growing up with his grandfather.

"Please granddad, let me go! I want to come with you." Young Lian always went with his grandfather into the jungle on walks, but sometimes his grandfather would not want him to come along, and would refuse. But persistence usually paid off, and sometime Lian would just follow along until grandfather acquiesced.

Wandering through the forests in his clothes made of the bark of a local tree, pounded, dried, moulded, sewn, and pounded more into a suitable softness, Lian and his grandfather would mostly just walk. Grandfather was sometimes hunting, sometimes had a destination, and sometimes was merely walking because the jungle was home. Whatever the reason, these walks meant a lot to Lian. He learned which plants could be eaten, which used for medicine, which were useful for making fires, making shelters, and which were poisonous. Lian learned a little, but never as much as his grandfather knew. His grandfather knew so much, and was so accustomed to the jungle, that Lian's respect was immense.

One day after a long walk, Lian's grandfather sat on the porch, and look at the soles of his feet. It was typical that at the end of a day's walk, the sole of his foot would have a number of things stuck into it, such as sticks, rocks, and other things of the jungle floor. The callouses were so thick that they did not bother him, but nonetheless many of them were sharp and worked their way into his flesh. This time, there was a huge thorn that had made its way deep into the area under his ankle, near his achilles tendon. As Lian stared, his grandfather took out his machete and calmly cut out a huge chunk of flesh, without flinching.

Lian spent much of his early childhood with his grandparents, and the day came when his father, who was a preacher and the local Christian church, noticed that Lian was closer to his grandparents that to his own parents. Lian was brought home, and to watch over his son, the father stopped preaching at the church. "And that was the beginning of my long history with the church."

Soon after, Lian was sent into the big city of Miri to continue his schooling. Coming from jungle and villages, Miri was astounding the the teenage Lian. He said that his first purchase was to buy a pair of sandals like he saw everyone else wearing; he had never owned shoes. Soon, he had to buy dress shoes for school, but with feet unaccustomed to shoes, he soon developed severe problems, and had to be given time off from school for his blisters to heal.

After his schooling, Lian decided to stay in the city, where there was more of interest and more opportunity for a young man. But Lian had no work skills, and could only make money as an entertainer. He knew how to play guitar, and would work occasionally at local night clubs, playing American songs, country as well as popular music. One night, after playing "Suzie Q," Lian was grabbed by a fat man in a business suit.

"That was amazing! You are a great performer. What's your name? Can you play that song again?" Lian was taken aback a bit by the man's enthusiasm, but decided to play the song again for the man. After his set was over, Lian packed up and made to leave, but was again grabbed by the fat man. This time, Lian was taken to a large table full of fat man in business suits, and their wives. He was introduced all around, and then pulled into private conversation with the fat man.

"You really are an amazing performer. That song just moved me. Moved me! Lifts my spirits, hearing that song played with such spirit so far from home. But are you planning on just playing in clubs all your life? What's your plan for a career?" The man didn't really ever give Lian a chance to reply. He was extremely boisterous and enthusiastic. "How about working for Shell Oil?" The whole table was full of bigwigs from Shell Oil, and this man was one of the highest.

A week later, Lian entered the fat man's office, dressed in his full performance garb to ensure that he'd be recognized. He was given a series of tests in esoteric subjects like engineering, calculus, trigonometry, advanced chemistry. Lian didn't know how to answer the questions, but he knew how to bullshit, and he had a knowledge of basic mathematics and chemistry, so he did his best. The bigwig looked over the answers, frowned a lot, and finally offered Lian a job in electrical engineering.

"But sir, I have no experience in electrical engineering, and no interest." The fat man frowned more, and decided to place Lian in the pipe-laying department (not the technical term). After a few years of work, he became the manager, and learned such things as trigonometry and calculus and engineering. He learned how to do all the calculations and operations required to transport oil from offshore oil rigs under the ocean along the ocean floor, the the mainland. For years he worked for Shell Oil, rich by Malaysian standards, with a big home, cars, and money to spend.

"But the more I made, the more I'd spend. It seemed like I saved more at the beginning when my income was low than later, when it was high. And I smoked more, drank more. My friends were fake, just business friends. If I had stayed in that career, I think I'd be dead by now."

Instead, he quit. Upon questioning by his boss, he admitted that he had no real plan on what to do instead. Maybe farm, he said. His boss questioned him about farming, and as it turned out, he had been a farmer in Minnesota before the oil career. So he called Lian's bullshit and revealed that he didn't know how to farm.

But Lian ended up guiding tourists like me. He went home, bought a house with income left over from his old job, planted a large garden to help sustain himself, and supplemented it all with the income from guiding. His days were spent walking the trails and the jungles, hanging out with old and new friends, real friends, peaceful, back in nature and real life, happy, healthy. He's nearing 60, but looks 40, and could outwalk Ciara and myself easily, probably for the next 20 years. He's planning on buying some land out in the jungle and building a small hut, living in isolation, and living an even simpler life, as retirement. I asked him if he had ever read Walden by Thoreau, and his only answer was, "Who's Thoreau?"

Borneo

Ever watch that episode of the TV show Planet Earth where they show these crazy caves around the world? Remember the cave with friggin' millions of bats, where locals harvest the bats' nests for the making of bat's nest soup, an asian delicacy? I'm gonna be there in a couple of days, and I'm really excited, because so far, Borneo has been awesome.

After Bali and the Gili islands, I was fed up with developed tourist crap and food poisoning and basically tired of the aggressive tourism culture of Indonesia. I was reminded of John and I visiting Italy: after hardly a day in Rome, we realized we hated that city, and took the first train to Cinque Terre in the Italian countryside. We ended up staying in Cinque Terre for a week, and it is still my favorite place I have ever visited. With that memory in my head and Ciara being of the same mind, we ditched our plans to explore more of the Indonesian islands, and flew to Malaysian Borneo.

The difference was immediate. Within 15 minutes of landing, we had received our luggage, gone through customs and immigration, and were waiting for the bus into the city. The guy at immigration was very friendly and started chatting about how we were born only 10 days apart, and how he wanted to go to California, but then apparently remembered that there was a line of people waiting, and waved me through. The bus driver told us the ride was free even though there's officially a fee. While looking for a hotel, a guy asked us if we needed help finding a place to stay, and still being used to the aggressive guys selling accomodation in Bali, we replied with gruff No's and kept walking, but he said "just trying to help, sorry." We felt really bad, because from his manner and tone of voice, it was obvious that he'd actually just been trying to help, with no personal gain in mind. The first hotel we found, the guy behind the counter replied "Yes, we have rooms, but they are very expensive. You can look, but there is also a good hotel down the road that is quite cheap." And since we've been here, people have continued offering us help, saying hello and asking how we are, smiling, and laughing.

The food has also been better. The first night we went to a packed Chinese-Malaysian restaurant with no English on the menu or in the vocabulary of the waiters, and a nice lady just brought us food, realizing our plight. It was like 8 different dishes and tea that were damn good, though Ciara was less enthusiastic. The next night, we went to the market, where veggies, fruit, jewelry, fresh fish and packets of MSG (I bought some...tastes like Top-Ramen) were sold. But the best part was the giant barbeque being held. Maybe 40 different vendors had fish, cuttlefish, chicken, beef, damn near every kind of seafood, some sauced-up and ready to be cooked, some on the grill, all for sale for next to nothing. We got some amazing chili-lime sauce fish, and chicken and some other unknown meat (tasted like kidney) on sticks. I actually orgasmed on the spot, it was so good.

Though Kota Kinabalu was a nice city with good people and food, we had to keep on moving on. We'd planned to climb the huge mountain called Mount Kinabalu, but a single company has a monopoly over the right to climb the mountain, and they charge exorbitant fees and limit the number of climbers to a very low number, so you have to book way in advance, or else just hike up the mountain at risk of being sent back down halfway up. We talked to other travellers and the buzz was: fuck it, it's jut not worth it.

So instead, we decided to take a bus to Semporna, a small town that's the launching point for trips to dive at Simpadan Island, one of the top diving sites in the world. But we missed the bus.

Turns out this was great luck. Turns out that Sipidan is a national park and limits the number of divers, so you have to book in advance. If we'd just arrived, we'd have been fucked. Instead, now we could book diving for 4 days ahead, and in the meantime, do some jungle adventuring. So we headed to Uncle Tan's.

Uncle Tan's is a cooperative in a protected area on the Sungai Kinabatangan river, composed of a series of huts in the jungle, run by 15 or so young locals. But though simple, it is well arranged. They were great cooks (if you ever get the chance to eat Filipino prawn salad, do) and were amazingly knowledgable about ever plant, animal and bug within 20 kilometers. We hiked the jungle and rode the river searching for wildlife in a sort of low-budget, roughing-it safari. All told, I saw 3 baby crocodiles and one adult, 13 bearded pigs, 4 monitor lizards (these guys are about 3-4 feet long and look a bit like dinosaurs), 4 Kingfishers (crazy looking, colorful birds), maybe 100 or so long-tailed macaques (small, acrobatic, playful monkeyish fellas), some Proboscis monkeys (probiscis is latin for nose I think, and they have really big noses), a giant wolf spider, a fist-sized tarantula, a few species of frogs, some other unremarkable birds, and several million mosquitoes. The travellers we met were awesome fellas and so were the staff, and our last night, the guy who runs the place, Lan, decided to throw a part and declared beers free for the night, in celebration of the start of soccer season (the staff had a team who, according to Lan, were basically the under-funded totally amateur dark horse that nearly won the tournament last year) . So Ciara and I got really drunk for the first time in awhile, and had a lot of fun (Ciara was a star, with nearly every Malaysian guy wanting to take pictures with her...it's pretty overwhelming how much attention she gets here in Asia). It was pretty badass and the most fun we've had all trip, but by the end of it, we were extremely happy to take a couple buses to Semporna, where long hot showers and more good food awaited us, returning us to a human-like state. Tomorrow, we dive Sipidan, but tonight, we will rest, and recover from our adventure so far in Borneo.

Waxing Philosophical

I've just read an inspiring book that has renewed my belief in the value of my travels. When we were kids we'd read books from my dad's 7000+ book personal library and often these books would be about adventurers, travelers, pirates, other cultures, so on...they definitely dug something deep into me. Books are amazing records of the mind of a man, or the experiences of a woman, and I recently realized that I had picked up the habit from dad of thinking and speaking as if certain authors were personal friends. I might say "Well a friend once told me that when couples argue, what they're really saying is 'BE MORE PEOPLE', and I think he meant that petty arguments stem not from the apparent source of anger, but from a deep-set need for community and family that we're lacking in our world. I really want to bring that back." Or I might say that a friend had told me once that the Gulf of California was great for tide-pooling, by which I'd mean John Steinbeck. Well, I have a new friend I'd like to introduce.

Armand Denis was a minor genius whose professional live stretched across the first 2/3 of the 20th century. I call him a minor genius because he is own of those fellows who made serious contributions to professions where he was a self-taught amateur. For example, he invented the device that keeps radio volume constant (up till that time radio volume rose and fall rather constantly and unpredictably), and became an expert in recording sound on film with no training, merely by dicking around with the equipment for awhile. He spent most of his life making films of the animals and people of the world. He was a conservationist when the term did not exist, and was instrumental in changing the public view of wild animals...although now we're used to seeing animals in Disney movies as the heroes and hunters cast as evil, back in the day it was man versus nature, and killing an animal was the greatest show of courage a man could show. Anyway, lest this turn into a book report rather than a blog, I'll let the man talk then end this.

"Richness and variety were constantly succumbing to sameness and uniformity and I suddenly felt an almost obsessive compulsion to see what was left of the world before it was too late." This quote...it's the soul of why I'm travelling, alongside a love of change and adventure, and it's why I encourage everyone I know to travel.

"No single group, I am convinced, ever has a right to claim a monopoly of goodness or wisdom or political sense, still less to try imposing its views on other theoretically less enlightened people in the name of religion or politics. Societies are usually best left to work these things out according to their own traditions."

"As a scientist I was theoretically on the side of progress and I had always been impatient of the kind of sentimentalist who always crop up to defend whatever is picturesque or inefficient or out-of-date. But gradually I realized that what was happening in Bali was something different. Progress was not replacing here---it was simply destroying. Wherever it penetrated, the old way of life seemed to crumble, and however much I tried to convince myself of the benefits that progress would bring the balinese, I knew in my heart that their contentment would go. Their culture would degenerate into a caricature of their former civilization to amuse the tourists. This whole rich, unique way of life around me would be turned into one more bad imitation of America." After my dissapointing visit to Bali, this almost made me cry, to realize that what he'd predicted had come true, and that I as a tourist was part of the problem. I try to be a responsible tourist, but...it's frustrating.

"My father...was what the French call "econome". He believed that money should be prudently laid out for certain definite ends, and that to waste money was not only immoral, but one of the highest forms of stupidity." This reminded me of dad, and also us sons, since we all picked up the attitude.

"Plan your itinerary as thoroughly as you can beforehand so as to cut down delays to a minimum. At the same time, you have to accept the fact that things will go wrong, so that within your plans you must leave yourself as many alternatives and as much flexibility as possible." Seems to me like the perfect description of how to travel, and for that matter approach any project in life.

"The only principle I have ever worked to has always been to do whatever interested me at the time." This reminds me of what you said once about that movie "Adaptation." One of the characters constantly changes careers and finds some happiness in it, and it gave you the idea that the happiness of a man can be maintained by his interests, and that finding hobbies and professional interests can provide meaning. At least that's how I remember it, I suppose I'm sort of paraphrasing. Anyway, his quote continues, "I have gambled quite consciously with myself and with my career, and I am lucky that the gamble has paid off. But in case anyone feels like following my example, it is only fair that I should give the same warning that I always give to any new cameramen who join me. I tell them that if they come with me they will enjoy themselves. They will savour the satisfaction that wild life has to give, but they will also change. For once they have tasted a wild existence, they will never be really satisfied to settle down to life of the cities again. The canker of restlessness will be within them for the rest of their lives. Only in the wild will they ever be really at peace with themselves." I think I've got the canker.

This guy is really an inpiration. And if you're thinking that my opinions are too easily influenced by books (as many people said after I read some Ayn Rand), the fact is simply that while most people's opinions are subconsciouly formed as the result of TV shows, commercials, ads, and other people's opinions, so we aren't so different. I choose books, music, movies, and other people's opinions as the source of my opinions, but screen them with a highly discriminating eye, as my conscious means of forming my own opinion.

Bali: Humidity and Hawkers

"You want transport??? Taxi??? No??? Maybe tomorrow, ya? Maybe you want need taxi tomorrow???"

"Tidak. Maaf." Indonesian for No, Sorry. The trick seems to be to say the words in Indonesian without breaking stride or making eye contact and never saying anything else or turning, no matter how much they follow you and continue shouting about how they have transport available. And they will follow you for a good 20 feet sometimes.

I blame we tourists for being lazy and accepting the transport rather than using our quite functional feet and legs, thus encouraging this crap.

Some of the taxi drivers slash currency exchangers slash sunglass dealers aka all-around husslers aka every local male on Bali are a little more clever, subtle you might say.

"Hey, where you from?"
"California. The States."
"Oh, America. I like America. My friend is from Boston."
"Oh. That's awesome. You're from Bali?"
"Yeah, my whole life. I make my living here making handcrafted necklaces. I'll show you. Not to buy, just to look."
"Uh, that's alright." He will have already pulled out his bag of necklaces by now.
"See? Beautiful, ya? Only 50,000 rupiah, because you are from California."
"No, tidak, I'll pass. I don't need a necklace. Have a good one, selamat tingal."
"Wait, wait, ok, final price, good price, 30,000 rupiah!" I walk faster.
"Okay, I'll go broke, but 20,000." I really don't want a crappy sweatshop necklace, even at $2 US. Neither does Ciara, so to avoid getting into about 50 of these conversations a day, we have to largely ignore the seemingly friendly queries by locals about where we're from and our names. It's frustrating, because the best part about travelling is meeting the locals, but on Bali, the locals don't see us as people, but as sources of money. I have had a couple of decent conversations with locals, seriously, two, and even those two ended, after 5 minutes or so, with them attempting to make money off me. One guy offered to show us a trail through some rice fields. Ciara mentioned that we had no money, and he left us to fend for ourselves immediately.

But that's just the bad part. The good parts are the crazy winding shittily paved alleyways and streets and crowded markets and cheap food and beer and kids playing and chickens and dogs and old people living in the same house and massages for $4/hr and awesome beaches and soul-touching sunsets over black sand beaches and being shown how to play weird Balinese instruments under the tutelage of an old fogie who possessed very little English to accompany our far shittier Bahasa Indonesia and wandering through rice fields during a thunderstorm and adjusting to the many oddities of being far far from home and my usual comforts. I think it'll only get better, and so far, it ain't too fucking bad.