Old man in the jungle

Day 135 - Borneo

Drifting along with not much of a plan suited me down to the ground, my itinerary was a grass stalk in the wind. But I'd covered some ground as well - Thailand, Laos, Malaysia. At the bottom of the Malay Peninsula Southeast Asia shatters into 25,000 islands and land borders become a foreign concept. Except on Borneo. Consulting my not-much-of-a-plan I'd flown there. The Malaysian part of the island accounts for about a third with the rest belonging to Indonesia. The idea was to see some Orangutans then nip over to the border to my next new country. While crossing the border was possible onward travel to the rest of Indonesia seemed to unavoidably involve a change at Kuala Lumpur where I had just flown in from. Despite the time and cost efficiencies of them I'd tried so very hard to avoid flights on this trip. There had been the two Australia flights which were necessary given the distance, the flight over Cambodia and the flight to get me to Borneo, so, four. I'd let my romanticism tell me that ferries and fishing boats would plough the watery lanes between the many Indonesian islands and that there would be someway for me to zig-zag down through the Java Sea. Once upon a time no doubt but a fantasy in 2023. If I'm not pretending to be Hemingway then I'm being Conrad but I do a pretty poor impression of both. Time wouldn't have really permitted that sort of travel anyway as I only had a month and half left before I had to be back. Reasoning that it wasn't enough time to do justice to Indonesia and The Philippines I reluctantly struck the latter from the itinerary. The fact that it was the beginning of the wet season there blunted the disappointment slightly. It is inevitable with travel that things get missed as there is always too little time and too many places. You console yourself by saying 'I'll come back' but will you? It's an easy promise when you are young and life stretches beyond the horizon but it is an odd realisation at 42 years of age that there are places that I will not go back to. Places that I will never see again. This fact scares me as it is a very straightforward representation of my own mortality. It's not that I don't want to go back to those places, simply that there isn't time between now and my death. I can feel the ridge beneath my feet that represents, with some optimism, halfway. Half a life behind me and half a life ahead.
I had also decided that time did not allow me to go hunting for wild Orangutans...wait that doesn't sound right. To go looking for wild Orangutans I mean. They are rarer than a French medium so I took myself off to a sanctuary instead. These great apes have a laconic sombreness to them as if they've seen it all before and know how it is all going to go. They cling to a single tree as hang from a single thread. Perhaps our fates are intertwined like that, if we can save them in some meaningful way then we can save ourselves. A young Orangutan obligingly presented himself on the feeding platform not long after I arrived. Another lolled on the floor at the visitor centre feeling under the weather we were told. Orangutans done it was onto the cats. Kuching was the name of the city I found myself in and some say the name is derived from the Malay word for cats.

The story goes that a Englishman called James Brooke arrived in 1839 and asked his local guide what the name of the town was. The guide thought that Brooke was pointing towards a cat and replied 'kucing'. No matter the veracity of this the locals took to the idea of a feline mascot and they now appear in various forms around the city as well as on the council's coat of arms. Via some deft political manoeuvring and by virtue if having a ship with cannons on it Brooke actually came to rule Kuching within a short time. The family held onto it for 105 years as 'White Rajahs' before giving it to the British government after WWII and it then becoming part of Malaysia when it gained independence in 1963. Beyond the estimable diversions of orange apes, fibreglass cats and dead 'civilisers' I spent the rest of my time playing cards with an American called Dan. He taught me his favourite game and, for there to be any challenge at all, handicapped himself by taking more cards than me (the objective being to get rid of them all). Borneo in two days is barely Borneo at all and I felt the need to be a bit more strategic when choosing the rest of the stops on the trip. But I would always rather take a few wrong turns than sign-up to a holiday on rails (unless it was literally a holiday on rails, which is the very idea of heaven). The world's largest archipelagic state loomed in front of and the last leg approached.