My head had gone bad.
There, on a narrow strip of asphalt, 70 miles into Borneo’s mountainous interior, my body began to shut down. Seven hours of riding beneath the equatorial sun had bled me dry.
Encrusted in thick patterns of crystalline salt, I pulled my bike to the side of the road and reached for my map. I shook my head. I still had 20 hard miles to ride before I reached the next village.
I looked over my surroundings.
I was in the middle of nowhere.
I turned my attention to the road ahead.
I traced it as it leapt in a series of merciless arcs, forever climbing toward the mist-enshrouded summit of Mount Kinnabalu.
I had nothing left.
I opened my bags and began to dig. After a moment of searching, I found my vial of salt. I removed the lid, poured a small pile on my tongue, then cringed. I chased it down with water that had grown piping hot from the sun.
I’d consumed 6 liters since morning and was nearly out.
Without water, I was in trouble. Or soon would be.
I climbed back on my bike and attempted to press on, but my limbs were useless.
I got off and began to push.
Then it began to rain.
Within minutes, a singular sheet of liquid had formed across the roadway.
That’s when I heard the sound.
The distinctive sound of car wheels skidding out of control.
I lifted my head and watched as a small sedan swerved out of control across the median, then head-on into an oncoming big rig. I heard the crash.
All of this took place just yards ahead of me.
“No!” I shouted, throwing my bike to the ground. I ran around the front of the mammoth truck.
When I rounded its front end, I stood for a moment in disbelief. The small car was now crushed and wedged accordion-like beneath the truck’s massive front bumper. “No!” I shouted again, and ran toward the crushed vehicle. There were six people inside. Six precious human beings. They were bloodied, moaning and impossibly compacted into a space meant for two.
For a moment, I was the only one there.
Then, out of nowhere, another man appeared — a passing driver.
“Call an ambulance!” I shouted at him.
The man shook his head. “No ambulance here,” he returned in softly broken English.
I swore.
Then the two of us went to work.
“UNLOCK THE DOOR!” the man shouted, pounding on the rear window. A shaky hand reached from the pile and unlocked the knob. I opened the back door, reached inside, then pulled out a girl of perhaps 13. I carried her like a rag doll toward the man’s waiting vehicle.
Suddenly she came to and began shrieking and grasping for those left in the car.
“It’s OK,” I said softly. “It’s OK.”
When I returned, her mother was dead.
After extracting three others, we began concentrating on the driver who was pinned beneath a crumple of metal. He had large swaths of flesh torn from his face and was in and out of shock.
A crowd gathered, then someone offered a pry bar.
As the rain increased to a downpour, each of us took turns gnashing the folded metal — all of us aiming at the simple door mechanism. Two inches of metal kept the man ensnared.
After 20 minutes of thrashing, we freed the man, then four of us carried him to a car bound for the hospital.
Then almost as quickly as they’d arrived, they got in their cars and drove away.
Moments later I was alone, covered in blood, standing near that crushed car. The dead woman was still lying inside.
There was nothing more I could do.
So I picked up my bike and continued to push into the oncoming darkness. This was my first day of riding in Borneo.
I arrived in Borneo a week earlier in the easternmost province of Sabah.
After assembling my bike from a box in the parking lot of the Sandakan Airport, I set out to find a cheap hotel. Within that short ride, every preconception I’d ever held about Borneo was instantly and permanently dashed.
Instead of pedaling into python-infested jungle, or happening upon grass-skirted head hunters, I came upon something far scarier: two mammoth signs advertising KFC and Pizza Hut.
A succession of strip malls, housing tracts and block-stores followed, all of it littering the landscape in a jumble of low-rise cement. Even the rare bamboo huts I’d come across had satellite dishes.
Within 15 minutes of my arrival in the city, I wanted out.
The next day I made a dash for the Supu Forest Reserve, one of east Borneo’s last stretches of primary rain forest. It’s an amazing natural area located on the lower Kinabatangan River near the rustic village of Batu Puteh.
A day later, I found myself on my hands and knees, covered with mud, while I planted more than a thousand trees as part of a volunteer restoration project. This floodplain restoration work was part of an ecologically sustainable community tourism cooperative developed in part by Australian tour guide Martin Paul.
Paul began collaborating with a group of local fishermen, farmers and villagers after a 1997 study revealed that upstream logging and palm oil plantations had cleared more than 90 percent of the surrounding rain forest.
With part of the proceeds, the group began securing and restoring a 1,200-hectare strip of river-corridor rain forest.
I was walking rather mindlessly across a boardwalk on the edge of the Kabili-Sepilok Forest Reserve when I rounded a corner and stumbled upon a young male orangutan — the Malay word for, “man of the forest.”
He sat on a railing and seemingly smiled, no more than an arms length away.
I was dumbfounded. And for a few magical moments we exchanged glances. He seemed to have a message for me, but at the time I couldn’t decipher it.
As we did, I noticed something deep in the creature’s eyes, something intelligent, tender, curious. Then he tumbled off back into the woods.
This small creature was one of many brought to the Sepilok Rehabilitation Center, a 43-kilometer reserve that rehabilitates captured, injured or abandoned orangutans. The center aims to return these creatures to the wild.
Orangs like this one had become partially domesticated and entirely dependent on human beings. Each day they returned from the forest and gathered in this area to be fed.
Much of this resulted from them losing their habitats to logging or being captured and sold as pets.
But by far the greatest threat to these wild orangutans come from Malaysia’s ever-expanding oil-palm plantations. Many of these last great apes are frequently found on the plantations — wandering dazed and confused — without food.
After watching a handful of adult orangutans eat from the hands of their human caretakers, I left the Sepilok reserve a bit saddened. A day later, I hopped on my bike and began pedaling madly toward the west.
On my last day in Borneo, after getting my bike fixed, I pedaled 30 miles out of Kuching deep into the surrounding hillsides. There I came upon a fairy tale waterfall.
I ditched my sweat-soaked clothes and slid beneath the surface of the cool, green waters. I swam until I reached the cascade’s frothy spillover. I hovered on my back for a moment, laying upon the surface and taking in each tiny bubble. As I did, I looked up at the canopy. The light seemed to eloquently penetrate the foliage, glowing with a kind of calming reverie.
What occurred to me at that moment was how temporary it all was: these trees, this forest, the animals — my life.
My mind snapped back to my chance encounter with my young orangutan friend — the man of the forest. Soon, we would be gone forever.
That’s when I recalled those eyes and realized the message this creature had entrusted me with.
It seemed to say: “Tell them. Tell them who I was. Tell them of my beauty and my uniqueness. But most of all, speak to them of my ability to walk upon the earth in balance. Tell them that for millions of years I, too, held a place on this planet, just like you. …”
Where in the world is Rick Gunn?
June 8-30, 2007
Mileage log: 16,679-17,266
Elevation: Sea level-750 ft.
Locations: Sabah, Sandakan, Batu Puteh, Tulepid, Kota Kinnabalu, Abdul Raman National Park, Beufort,
Brunei, Bandar Seri Begawan, Tutong, Sarawak, Miri, Lamir Hills National Park, Niah Caves National Park, Bintulu, Sibu, Kuching, Bako National Park, Kalimantan, Pontianak
“What is man without the animals? Without the beasts men would die of a great loneliness of spirit.”
– Chief Seattle
“The idea that we can simply replace this fossil (fuel) legacy — and the extraordinary power densities it gives us — with ambient energy is the stuff of science fiction. There is simply no substitute for cutting back.”
– George Monbiot
“The real work is becoming a native in your heart, coming to understand we really live here, that this is really the continent we’re on, and that our loyalties are here, to these mountains, and rivers, to these plant zones, to these creatures. The real work involves a loyalty that goes back billions of years.The real work is accepting citizenship in the earth itself.”
– Gary Snyder
