Jazzy, too, tossed him gently upward, this time toward the tree where she had first found him. The draco curved his glide toward the trunk, then nosed up on his approach and stalled, landing abruptly to scamper around to the backside of the tree where he hid from the human family that had no doubt terrified him.

Later, we would handle harmless ants the size of Jazzy’s thumb and a thrumming cicada the size of her tiny fist, the bug’s proboscis as long as her pinky. We would catch and release fish we had seen before only in freshwater aquaria; feed beetles to nepenthes; feel the pinch of a neon blue-fiddler crab; pull open an ant plant and watch its protectors scurry; taste a dozen new fruits and cuisines from three nations. The discomforts of heat, humidity, and the odd pockets of foul odor were all erased by the hands-on discoveries of new sights, scents, and sounds.

Eager for more, we headed deeper into the heart of Borneo.

Chapter 10

Gunung Palung

Snorkeling, GP, 1996.

Courtesy of the author

We arrived in Kalimantan the day after Peggy convinced me we should push on to GP. Cars were absent, motorbikes few, and bicycles the most common wheeled vehicle. Up to three people at a time rode on a single bike, but most simply walked in flip-flops or bare feet. Traveling as a family, we found that people were eager to please, quick to help, happy to interact. But nobody spoke English in a countryside where houses were little more than palm-thatched roofs over half-walls on stilts.

After crossing the hundred-mile-wide Kapuas River delta by riverboat, we waited alongside a dirt road for a minivan. Our boy and girl sat patiently on our duffels. By the time the van arrived, fifty people surrounded the kids. Caucasians were rare and their children exceptionally so. At first the two enjoyed the attention, but it got old fast. People simply couldn’t keep their hands off the blond-haired, blue-eyed little children.

Reaching Teluk Melano, we stayed in a guesthouse next to the river. The Anopheles mosquitoes that carry malaria emerge after dark and last until dawn, so at night we covered ourselves in insect repellent and long sleeves, then climbed under our mosquito nets for the next twelve hours. Peggy tracked down and killed every mosquito that made it inside. Taking a weekly dose of antimalarials, I could duck out from under the net if needed. The kids and Peggy didn’t risk the drug’s neurological side effects. Once we reached the wilderness of GP, there’d be little chance of contracting tropical diseases because mosquitoes generally only carry parasites from humans who have them. Rural areas are the most dangerous; wilderness and urban areas less so.

There was no running water in Melano. Instead we took mondis by ladling cool water from a rain barrel to wash the sweat off our sticky bodies. At the equator, the mondi is the most refreshing way to stay comfortable in the oppressive heat.

All the way from Harvard, Tim had arranged our transport to the little village at the edge of the forest, downstream from Cabang Panti. There, in the last settlement before the park boundary, two sinewy men with muscles like knotted hardwood reached to the bottom of the clearwater stream and pulled up a sunken sampan to bail. Peggy looked at me, her eyes wide, her smile gone.

“They keep it underwater to prevent the wood from splitting. The boat will float,” I said reassuringly.

While the boatmen emptied the long, narrow dugout, our kids drew the usual crowd. These villagers, though, shared with us their local red rambutans, a sweet, spiky-skinned fruit Roman and Jazz loved to eat. We loaded our gear into a cargo boat with two more boatmen, got in with our paddlers, and shoved off. The boat was tippy with little freeboard and the seats were hardwood planks. Too afraid to move for fear of dumping ourselves into the water, we sat still for hours as our rears went numb.

At first the river meandered past spiny, palm-looking pandanus plants whose twisted stalks emerged on stilt roots from deep, black water. We weren’t alone here. Gnarly men in loincloths and tattered white shirts poled skinny rafts of logs tied together with rattan.

Logging in Borneo would reach its peak in the late nineties. During our visits over the next fifteen years, the seemingly inexhaustible forests of Borneo would disappear, just as the buffalo of the American West had gone nearly extinct a century before. Instead of watching cattle replace buffalo, we would witness oil palm plantations replace rainforest.

Even GP’s national park status, with its Ivy League research station at Cabang Panti and its exposure in National Geographic magazine, wouldn’t be enough to keep the loggers out. In the 2000s, when most of the big timber outside of Kalimantan’s parklands was gone, Indonesian military leaders financed locals with chain saws to cut and sell GP’s giant dipterocarps. Documentary filmmakers visiting Cabang Panti to record its orangutans were forced to bribe the loggers to silence their chain saws during filming.

But in 1995 the virgin forest was empty of the sounds of motors and chain saws. GP was still an undisturbed Eden. We drank freely from the stream that tumbled cool, clean, and fresh from Gunung Palung, the park’s namesake mountain canyon. The juxtaposition of abrupt mountains with lowland rainforests and peat swamps made the area exceptionally rich in wildlife, especially Borneo’s endemic proboscis monkeys, gibbons, and orangutans.

HEADING UPSTREAM IN our overloaded sampan, the kids sang songs, much to the delight of the boatmen, who paddled tirelessly with short digging strokes, propelling us against the current. Over lunch, Peggy and Roman complained that it didn’t feel like Borneo. But as the forest canopy closed in over the stream for good, we passed a trio of gibbons in full view, only twenty feet up in a tangle of trees and lianas.

The long-armed, short-bodied little apes were so close we didn’t need binoculars to watch their nimble antics. Arboreal gymnasts, they swung rapidly through the low canopy, hanging loosely by their oversized fingers, legs dangling like those of hyperkinetic kids on a schoolyard jungle gym. Roman and Jazz were convinced they did somersaults.

Hours later, the creek narrowed to four or five feet. “Does this feel like Borneo now?” I asked.

“Yes!” Peggy and Roman answered as we passed through a dark forest where tree roots dragged in the water like dirty mopheads and long ferns twisted down from overhanging limbs. Sometimes fallen trees crossed low to the water, forcing us to get out and carry cargo while the boatmen slid the boat beneath sweepers. “These trees are so big and old, they look wise,” observed young Roman as he clambered through a forest that had never seen an ax or a saw.

After eight hours, we reached Cabang Panti. Jumping out of the boat, Roman immediately found a shiny black millipede. A foot long, it looked like it had crawled out of the Carboniferous Age, three hundred million years ago.

“Dad, is it safe to pick up?”

I had asked Tim the same question the year before, so gave Roman Tim’s answer: “Yes, it is. He’s harmless.”

As the enormous bug crawled over Roman’s arms, its hundreds of legs swarmed in a miraculous wave that tickled and delighted him. Squinting closely, he said, “Look, you can see two pairs of legs on each segment!”

The camp compound was fifteen minutes away from the dock. No trees had been removed to build it, so the humidity was near 100 percent, twenty-four hours a day. The constant warmth, wetness, and shade left mold on anything not aired in the sun at least a few minutes each day or sealed up against the moisture. Immediately after waking, we put our bedding into dry bags—the kind used on whitewater river trips—to keep our sheets and clothes dry, comfortable for the next sleep.

The first night, Peggy recoiled at our accommodation. We arrived at a creekside hut just before dark to find mildewed mattresses and rotten floors. The conditions distressed her and Jazzy, but the inch-long giant ants, palm-sized hunting spiders, and other bugs that had taken over the squalid shelter excited Roman. We moved to a cleaner, drier hut the next day and Peggy soon forgot the previous night’s discomforts.

On our first day hike in GP, Roman spotted an orangutan mother and baby feeding on figs high in a tree. We passed binoculars around for an hour, until she “kiss-called” at us in warning and we backed away and left. Returning to camp, we watched a yard-long giant squirrel as it bounded through a tree crown. Farther on, a hunchbacked lesser mouse deer darted across the path. The tiny deer’s size, stature, and movements brought to mind a cottontail rabbit. We looked at its tracks in the trail’s mud: cloven hoofprints the size of my thumbnail.

Later, Roman climbed inside a one-hundred-foot-tall strangler fig. The host tree had died and rotted away long ago to leave the fig as a natural, cylindrical ladder. Eight feet up the fig ladder, Roman found a tree frog. As he reached to catch the reddish-backed frog, it jumped, then glided away with toes spread wide, revealing oversized webbed feet as wings. It even circled back to land below him.

“Whoa!” he chuckled in surprise. “Dad! Was that a flying frog?”