Kijana Read online

  The Samarinda airstrip was as I expected – very basic. Several buildings lined the bitumen runway and a refuelling truck was parked on the grass. The MAF hanger was the last building along. It was only when we got there that we learnt what the initials meant – Mission Aviation Fellowship. If that wasn’t the name of an airline for adventure, I was yet to hear of one.

  On the wall of the office hung an old laminated map that had been pieced together using aviation charts to make up the entire island of Borneo. At the end of one flight path from Samarinda, marked in pencil, were the words ‘Long Suleh’.

  Bingo. We’d accidentally struck gold!

  The MAF was funded mostly by churches and generous benefactors to allow remote areas of the globe access to the outside world. The cost of a flight for a villager was heavily subsidised, while we westerners paid full fare to keep the fellowship alive. However, they could offer what we were looking for, so we happily coughed up the money for three tickets to leave in a few days. It may have been more expensive than our riverboat plan but it meant we could get there in hours rather than weeks, which was vital with our visas due to expire.

  Now that we had changed our plans, I dropped off an envelope containing 100,000 rupiah to the family who lived by the riverboat we’d earlier organised to rent. I asked them to pass it on to the owner, with the message that there’d been a change of plan and here was a little compensation for his troubles. The last thing we wanted was an angry businessman taking out revenge on Kijana while we were away.

  To prevent anything untoward happening to Kijana, the airline helped arrange for a local to live on board in our absence. He happened to be the brother of one of the MAF employees and a member of their church, so I was confident we could trust him.

  A few days later we arrived at the MAF hanger at 8 a.m., our packs holding everything we expected to need for at least three weeks.

  As we were the only passengers, our packs were weighed and placed on the last two seats of the plane, a single-engine Cessna that could seat five passengers and the pilot. The pilot was an American, named Peter, who’d flown mission planes all around the world. He, his wife and two children, had lived in Samarinda for three years. He was surprised to see three young men wanting to be taken into the wilds of Borneo.

  ‘Not many people go in,’ he told us after our introductions. ‘We take mostly only supplies and villagers coming out if they get injured. I did take one anthropologist in once, but that was a few years back.’

  We weren’t sure if we should feel honoured or worried.

  All we had to hope for, Peter warned us, was a clear runway at the other end. If we ran into heavy cloud cover, landing would be impossible, and we’d have to fly home and try again another day.

  Peter outlined our flight plan, which took us over the low-lying forests along the coast, then up into the foothills and eventually to the highlands, where the rivers began their long journey to eventually become major rivers like the Mahakam.

  We took off and circled Kijana, which looked like a mere speck on a trickle of muddy water. The ‘Mighty Mahakam’ didn’t look so mighty from that height. We flew north-west, over a carpet of dense forest. The noise of the engine made talking impossible. A tap on a shoulder and a pointing finger was enough to let each other know about a view worth sharing.

  As the mountains began to form, great scraggly peaks passed not far below us. Deep gorges were evident only from directly above. It seemed a miracle that beneath the sea of trees below were small tribes of men, women and children untouched by ‘civilisation’.

  As we flew over a ridge, Peter pulled down his microphone and proudly announced: ‘waterfall’. What would have been a towering cascade of solid water if we’d been on the ground, appeared as a tiny white tear in the green canvas of treetops that spread as far as the eye could see. It was a scene that made me feel we were truly heading to the end of the earth. Who knew what we would find there.

  CHAPTER TEN

  LOST TRIBE

  FACES. TINY LITTLE FACES. FIRST ONE, THEN another, followed by a few more. Soon they were everywhere. After an hour in the air, Peter had put us safely down on a dirt runway, scratched into the forest on the top of a small hill. As the dust from the propeller began to settle, the faces began to appear – mostly children, but then women wearing wide-brimmed sun hats they’d made themselves. They’d been waiting not for us, but for the fresh supplies of fuel, salt and washing powder. It had been three weeks since the plane last landed here.

  Peter swung open the aircraft door, jumped out and landed on both feet like a cat. He wasted no time in unloading his cargo, for he could see his customers were pretty keen to get their hands on the goods. Beau, Josh and I struggled with our seatbelts, then hesitantly emerged from the craft to be immediately surrounded by the wide-eyed locals. Peter explained to the crowd who we were as he continued passing cardboard boxes to the many helpers, and asked in Indonesian if they would lead us into town and find us someone to stay with.

  No sooner had the dust settled and the boxes been unloaded, than the aircraft propeller was again spinning and Peter and his noisy aircraft were off, set to return in two weeks to collect us. As he rose into the air and disappeared, the noise of the plane was replaced by crickets and chattering children.

  We found ourselves led along a dry dirt track to the centre of the village. As we arrived, a dozen men halted work to watch the arrival of the new visitors. These people were not exactly the naked race I’d imagined. They were mostly clad in worn-out denim shorts and stained T-shirts. The men were attempting to tip a pole, freshly cut from the local forest, into a hole in the ground, directly behind a smaller pole that already supported a suspension bridge that crossed a river.

  This was the Long Eut River and a little further down it joined another estuary. The village was right where the Blair brothers had described it, at the intersection of two rivers, yet the people looked nothing like they’d described. I imagined them to be more ghostlike. These people looked and dressed like many people we had met during our travels through Indonesia.

  Along the riverbank several women looked up from their washing while their children, covered in soap suds, danced about, oblivious to our arrival. We were directed by our young leaders to the porch of a house built on the river’s edge. The smell of smouldering wood wafted from inside. Some of the men ceased work on the bridge and began to mill around us. It became evident that no one spoke English, but they did speak Indonesian, which we could, by that stage, understand enough of to communicate the basics.

  We asked if there was somewhere for us to sleep, drawing blank expressions. Only when we made the universally understood sign of tilting the head and closing our eyes did we get a response. Chattering erupted as many of the men pointed at a middle-aged woman who stood with her hands on her hips. I immediately got the feeling it was her porch we were standing under.

  While this commotion went on about us, my eyes darted from face to face. I caught glimpses of what looked like typical Punan features, but predominantly these people resembled the Dyaks, the coastal dwellers found around Samarinda.

  As I scoured the faces I saw, standing away from the adults among a small circle of girls, a face that was definitely not Dyak. She looked markedly different from everyone else we’d seen so far. She had to be a Punan, I figured. My spirits lifted considerably as I stared at her.

  My concentration was broken by the arrival of a young man who squeezed through the growing crowd. He had a different build to the sweaty workers around us who all sported well-trimmed bodies. He was stocky, with slightly flabby arms and wore a clean white T-shirt.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ he said in an unnatural fashion, as if he had learnt his pronunciation from a Buckingham Palace butler. ‘My name is Charlie.’ At last, an interpreter! We immediately explained that we had arrived on the MAF plane and were wondering if there was anywhere we could set up our tipi.

  He spoke to the woman, her arms now folded, who appeared to b
e the centre of the village’s universe. She glanced up and down the river, then gave a snigger as if she’d just had a disgusting thought. She replied to Charlie, who stared at the ground, nodding his head until she finished. As she spoke I turned my head to sneak another look at the Punan girl, but she was gone.

  ‘Are you a scientist?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘No, we are students,’ I replied. It was the easiest answer to give people, considering none of us had a profession and ‘student’ was widely understood.

  ‘What do you study?’

  Josh held up the camera. Charlie gave a nod of recognition.

  ‘We are looking for Punans,’ I volunteered. ‘Do you know where we can find them?’

  Charlie translated our question to the woman, but we didn’t have to wait for her answer. She began shaking her head halfway though the question.

  ‘Are there any in the forest?’ I asked.

  The woman’s reply this time was more elaborate, relayed to Charlie for about a minute.

  Finally, Charlie translated for us. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘How many days to get there?’

  Again, Charlie relayed the question and the answer.

  ‘They walk back to the village in the afternoon.’

  I was stunned. We looked at each other with excited grins. Surely we couldn’t have stumbled across a lost race with such ease. The woman addressed Charlie, who translated for us.

  ‘You can stay here, with Shian. She will look after you. The next MAF plane won’t be for a few weeks.’

  I smiled at the lady. Her face lit up and she smiled back, changing my impression of her immediately. She showed us upstairs to a room where we could sleep. Charlie sat with us for a while as we talked and looked out over the second-storey balcony at the river below.

  The men had gone back to work, for we could hear them heaving on long ropes to get the pole into place. From our vantage point we could see the children watching their fathers and grandfathers working hard. A few of the cheeky boys were imitating them, pretending the rope went slack then toppling backwards to great laughter.

  Shian’s daughter, Ahyena, entered the room and gave us fried plantains, a type of sour-tasting starchy banana that turns to the texture of potato when cooked.

  Charlie revealed he was the only person in the village who spoke English. He was from the coastal town of Tarakan, north of Samarinda, and was employed by the Indonesian Government to oversee the building of suspension bridges in remote areas of Borneo. He’d been in Suleh for five months building the bridge the men were working on.

  With accommodation arranged, it was time to explore the village. Charlie bade us farewell and told us he’d catch us later on. We crossed the suspension bridge to the other side of the village where the dwellings were much more simplistic compared to our ‘guesthouse’. Most of these huts were fashioned from rough-sawn forest timber, with tin metal roofs and a small verandah, where the occupants would sit weaving baskets or preparing food. I calculated the average dwelling to be a meagre four square metres, about half the size of the average bedroom at home. I also figured, by the number of huts, that the village had a population of about 200 people.

  It didn’t take long before we had a growing line of children following us. Josh found it most amusing. One particularly cheeky boy walked next to us, his head rubbing our arms. He then dashed off and did a flying karate kick, making sure to land facing us so that he could see if his performance had been noticed.

  ‘Nama?’ Josh asked.

  ‘Tommy,’ he answered.

  ‘Nama Josh, nama Beau, and nama Jesse,’ Josh said, pointing to each of us. This set off a chain of introductions among the 30-odd children around us. We heard all their names, except for one girl. She looked very serious, too serious for a girl her age, and froze whenever we looked at her. Josh asked her name again but got no reply. All the children stared at her, which only made her more determined to defy the game.

  ‘Gimme five,’ Josh said, putting out the palm of his hand in an attempt to break her defences. All the boys began yelling at her, willing her to play with us.

  ‘Gimme five,’ Josh repeated.

  A smile slowly crept across her face, then she slapped his hand. The rest of the children went wild, hooting in excitement. To the kids at least, we were the hottest property to visit Suleh in a long time.

  The entire village could hear us coming simply because of the noise of the children. We walked past a group of women sitting by a smouldering fire, weaving rattan baskets. An older man chipped away at a solid log, shaping it into a canoe. On the riverbank nearby lay half a dozen finished canoes. Upstream, an old woman with saggy boobs knelt in the shallows of the river, washing herself. She quickly reached for a sarong when she noticed three foreigners among the children. Aware of our intrusion, we turned and headed back along the river.

  We came to a landing built just above the water level. Suddenly a barrage of small naked bodies swept past us as singlets and shorts were thrown into the bushes.

  Within seconds, our entire following was in the water. The boys scrambled from the water back onto the platform and formed a neat little line. One by one they jumped into the water, doing their best to impress us. Tommy led the procession, jumping off with one of his karate kicks. The second boy jumped out and spun 360 degrees before hitting the water, the next a somersault, and so on. As each performed his trick, the next in line moved forward, paused for a second as they thought of something original, then leapt in.

  The girls, meanwhile, had waded further out, away from the splashes, and were watching us cautiously. When we caught their eyes, they giggled and ducked under the water.

  When it came time to leave, little effort was put into getting dressed. Most merely clutched their clothes to their bodies as they followed us up the river embankment, battling each other to get in front of us. At the top of the embankment we found Charlie. The Punans had arrived from the forest, he announced.

  We followed him until we came to a hut where an old woman hobbled out with a woven basket strapped to her back. Inside the basket appeared to be two cucumbers.

  This lady was a Punan, Charlie told us. She stood still, staring at us as we stared at her. It reminded me of looking at an animal in a zoo. The situation wasn’t exactly how I’d imagined it would be. She looked like every other old woman we’d seen so far. Her face was extremely wrinkly and she stood with a hunch. If she was a Punan, I doubted she was full-blooded. The only outward sign that she was part of the lost people were her ear lobes. They stretched down to her shoulders, where copper rings had once been worn. To the Punans, stretched ear lobes were a sign of beauty. Other than this she seemed no different.

  As I looked at her I couldn’t help feeling disappointed.

  As we walked back to Shian’s house it became clear that when Charlie had told us the Punans returned from the ‘forest’ each afternoon, he actually meant the farmers who returned from a day’s toil in the local fields. They may have been Punans, but they no longer lived the Punan lifestyle that had so captured our imagination.

  I was devastated. It appeared that the only Punans left had been persuaded to give up their nomadic lifestyle and integrate with the Dyak villagers. Of course, I had nothing against the Dyaks. It was just that their lives were similar to ours. With two weeks until our flight out, we had no choice but to bide our time in Suleh. Shian said we were welcome to remain at her house. Gradually our disappointment at our Punan experience changed as we got to know the village and its people better.

  Shian was the perfect hostess. We may not have been able to speak to each other, but she knew how to keep us happy, serving up a steady stream of breakfasts, lunches and dinners. They were sensational, and made all the better by the fact that all ingredients came from the surrounding land and water. We had fried fish from the river, rice, cucumbers and corn from the fields and wild deer and pork hunted in the jungle by Shian’s eldest son. And all were prepared locally – very locally. It was
no surprise to walk to the toilet at the rear of the house and find half a deer gutted but complete with skin and hoofs, lying on the bare timber floor. It would remain there for several days until it was consumed.

  Shian cooked the most delicious meals I’ve ever eaten. The smell of chilli, nuts, salt and oil would waft throughout the house from the open fire she cooked over. Smoke filtered out through specially designed outlets at the pinnacle of the ceiling. She’d slowly cook the pork in her wok for a couple of hours before serving it up. It tasted and smelt so good that even the once-vegetarian Josh began to crave it. He quickly gave the rice the flick and would hoe into the pork and deer along with the rest of us. To see the once-so-strict vegetarian munching away on a gristly bit of wild boar, complete with hair sprouting from it, was a sight to behold.

  How he’d changed. He was a long way from the clean-shaven boy I’d first met in Melbourne in that dark editing suite more than two years ago. In fact, none of us looked the same. Constant strenuous activity had defined our muscles; all of us wore stacks of facial hair and our skin was a healthy brown.

  Suleh, Charlie explained, was actually two villages, one on each side of the river. The Indonesian Government, in its wisdom, had looked upon the local highlanders as a national embarrassment. How could they expect to become a developed country when they still had natives living in the Stone Age? Their answer was to pull together different villages and make it easy for them to become ‘civilised’. They paid for bridges, subsidised washing powder and helped build the churches and schools (one for each village).

  While a few locals have found jobs with a logging company, which means spending a lot of time away from the village, most make a meagre living by selling handicrafts to stores in Samarinda. The most popular items are parangs (bush knives in a wooden sheath) and rattan baskets. Peter the pilot had told us Suleh has a reputation for making the best baskets in all of Borneo. A basket costs nothing to make, only time. The rattan vines are collected from the forest, then left to dry for a few weeks. Once dry, flat strips are shaved off the vines to produce a very strong, almost flat, material that can be bent, wound, tied and woven to become extremely durable baskets. Attach two straps and they become a Borneo backpack. Everyone has one. Farmers carry their vegetables in them, hunters take a parang in them when hunting, and firewood is brought into the village using them.