As I descend the trail I walk with caution and pause frequently to listen for voices or movement. There is no sign that anyone had been there; no tracks or freshly cut vines along the trail. Had I heard the shots? I know I had. Perhaps they had echoed from the ridge across the valley. The Muruts far down the valley had warned me about traveling alone, like spirits do I suppose. They make a person crazy they told me. “Never travel alone in the jungle.” An old man had said to me days before. I always believed forests were places of harmony and safety amidst an ever-increasing modern world. Here in Borneo, I struggled to believe this, with all that had happened in the night, or what I thought had happened. 

It is late February the next year and I have decided to go back to Borneo. I am going to travel light this time, carrying just a small backpack. Inside I will have a tent, headlamp, a knife, fishing hooks and line, a compass for general directions only because detailed maps are difficult to come by, a portable stove that can burn regular gasoline, iodine tablets for purifying water and sun block. 

It is Saturday, the second of March, 2003 and I just arrived at the Kota Kinabalu airport. The crowds are stifling and the air is so suffocating and humid. I grab my pack off the conveyor belt and leave the airport walking.  Immediately, I start heading south toward the town of Sipatang on the coast. I walk well into the cool night and then I set up my tent behind some trees off the side of the road. I want to walk the entire distance, just to say I walked under my own power the whole time, but I end up getting rides part of the way. People see me walking but they do not mind it and I continue on.

I sleep from dawn to noon the first day. I travel fast and light  and I jog part of the time. My ankles are tapped today for added support and I use an old pair of ski poles to alleviate some of the weight and work from my legs. I stop at an outside market along the side of the road to get some rice, beans and bottled water. 

I get a ride with two young men in a dilapidated mini van through Sipatang and beyond. The driver gives me his watch because I tell him I don’t have one and I leave my ski poles in the back when I get out in the town of Lawas.  I get a nice room and buy more food, cooking fuel, and a bush knife. I know that this will be my last comfortable night for awhile. In the morning I have a taxi driver take me out of town to the road that leads into the interior and the toward the kampong (the word for village in this part of the world) Long Semado. He over charges me but I am too tired and excited to make a fuss.  I start walking again and soon another van full of two adults and school kids offers me a ride to the end of the paved road. I accept and get in. 

At the end of the paved road I cross a river on a swinging bridge. It is my first swinging bridge and I cross it slowly, but it is well built and I make it across just fine. Then I continue up the dirt path toward the Maligan range. The mountains rise up abruptly and soon I am dripping sweat as I try to hike up the road in the afternoon sun. It’s like blast furnace and I rest at a creek shaded by large trees. Most of the forest here has been mutilated by the timber companies. They have built roads everywhere and cut down only the biggest trees. Dragging these enormous trees from the forest has heavily damaged the soil. And tractor marks scar the land. This logging road that I'm walking on leads all the way to Long Semado, and I follow it there. A Murut man stops and picks me up in his truck that the Sampling logging company has provided for him. 

"We don't want to live in the forest anymore. " He soon says to me."There is no future for us there. We log the trees but we need to do it sustainably. We must think of the future. Is there logging in your country?" 

"Not as much as there was ten years ago. But we replant the trees we cut."

"Here we don't replant. We just cut. It is not good, but what else can we do? There is no other work and we want to live a better life."

"Yes, I'm sure." I say knowing that their future will be even bleaker once all the forest has been cut. Then they will have no jobs and no forest to hunt in or gather wild plants from. 

"We Muruts are the ones living the most like the Penan." He says.

"What, who?" I ask not wanting to mistake what I heard.

"The Penan. They live in the forest and Muruts are still a lot like them." I don't ask any questions about the Penan because I don't want anyone knowing my intentions and where it is exactly I am going, but the Penan are the last hunter and gatherers in Borneo. The few hundred that remain in the forest are completely nomadic and I’ve come here to look for them. Soon the man drops me off and I continue on until late afternoon. I camp in secondary forest off the side of the road where there is a nice clean creek. I climb a tree to get some sort of nut I like climbing trees and I do it in Oregon a lot for exercise. I tie a rope around my feet so I can use them together as I push with them and pull with my arms. I’ve seen documentaries on Amazon Indians doing this, like the Machigenga of Peru. Then I bathe in the creek. The water is surprisingly cold and refreshing.

The next day I am picked up by a Murut family just outside Long Semado. They drive me there and let me stay the night in their long house. It has clean wooden floor, and all power is provided by a gas generator that they don't crank up until dark. They make a huge meal. "We eat a lot." Says the man’s wife who picked me up, as we all sit on the floor. This is their custom and despite the growing modernity of Murut territory, they still cling to their traditional ways as much as possible. 

They still grow most of their food and the men often kill wild pigs to eat. They are healthy people. They work hard and eat unprocessed foods unlike the coastal Malays living in the cities, who seem weak and frail by comparison. The Muruts are all Christians and have a great respect for white people. Possibly this attitude was gained when the English ruled Borneo, and has never been lost. After leaving Long Semado the road becomes a muddy track as it heads straight up into the higher mountains. The forest along the side of the road up here is thick and pristine and soon I find the location I want to strike out cross-country from, hoping to reach the Adang River and the nomads some days walk away.

I take a compass bearing and then walk off the muddy road and travel west. I follow an abandoned and overgrown track into the forest. Soon it ends and I find a deer trail and continue down the watershed to the Kalelan River. I camp at the river's edge. At night I get a taste of the intense array of sounds of a night in the Borneo jungle. Insects make up the bulk of the symphony. They are loud and unsettling at first, but I get used to them. I also hear the constant wailing of a barking deer. I think night is a dreadful time for him. Deer don't see that well in the dark, and with hearing limited because of the many sounds competing to be heard, the barking deer cries out as if to let predators like leopards, who see very well in the dark, know that he is alert and unable to be caught.

The next morning while I fish I am surprised by the appearance of a group of five Muruts on the trail early, hunting monkeys. They are modern and speak Malay and English. But still they catch me off guard because the sound of the river dulls my ability to hear them approach. "Hey." One of them yells. A little startled, I turn and shout back.

"Hey. Oh, I'm just fishing." And I know I am on their hunting grounds without any permission. The four of them quickly line up on the bank and I know I am in a tight spot if something happens. They all carry sharp long knives at their sides and two carry shot guns.

"You camp here?" One of the two older men asks.

"Yeah last night. Is it Okay? I was just trying to catch a fish because I was hungry. Is it okay?" I say sincerely.

"Oh, it's Okay." The other man says with a smile. 

"Where do you go?" I ask anxious to know if they know of the Penan over the next divide. The front man pointed into the deep forest across the river, not saying more.

"Is it okay if I stay here?" I ask again not wanting any hostile Muruts lurking around when night comes.

"Yes, it's okay. Thank you sir." He says politely.

Then the men depart across the Kelalan River. They wade it with water to their wastes. One man calls out like a monkey in hope for a response. After they had been gone an hour, I too cross the Kelalan, but with a bit more difficulty considering I was carrying a loaded pack. However instead of following the Muruts down river, I go upriver about a mile and then head west up the divide out of the watershed. I labor up a slope that baffles my comprehension of steepness. 

I hike up for about one hour, hauling myself with my hands as much as I am walking with my feet. I try to make adequate time, but the going is slow and I finally decide to make camp where I can see a small creek just fifty feet down off the ridge. The ridge I’m on is like a miniature ridge in a vast watershed of ridges of various sizes, each always separated by a steep ravine. It’s incredible, the up and down of the terrain, combined with the dense foilage, makes travel even more difficult. However it is passable with the aide of a bush knife to cut the most stubborn lianas which always seem to block the route. 

Dawn arrives and the light comes quickly. I get up and make coffee on my multi burning fuel stove. Gasoline was all I could get, but it does well enough. It keeps me from having to cook on a fire, which is often hard to get going in the damp jungle. My make shift camp sits on a sloping ridge which rises abruptly from the Kalelan River.  Often I travel farther vertically than I do horizontally, making the distances that appear short on a map, much greater in reality. 

Trees here vary in size, from saplings and small trees of about six inches in diameter to colossal ones, measuring six feet in diameter. But the giants are spread out and occur with less frequency than the average size trees of about two feet in diameter. All the trees seem to possess a flaring out affect of their canopy, with the branches of one tree reaching into another. The monkeys have exploited this trait to their advantage, and they only come down to drink from the creeks late in the day just before dark. They don't seem to like the forest floor and dash about the branches with tremendous agility and speed. They are quick to spot an intruder like myself on the ground. An alarm call is given and all move off away from my direction. 

The morning is cool and I put on an extra shirt, but I don't really need it. It is mainly habit from camping so much in the cooler climate of Oregon and also it keeps some of the flies off me, but there are not many flying insects that bother me here. I drink coffee and then cook some noodles. After I eat I pack up my gear and start a long hike up toward the top of the divide which separates the West Bank of the Kalelan River (because it runs parallel with the divide not away from it) and the upper headwaters of the Adang River. I hope I can find the Penan when I reach the Adang, but it will be hard to get to. 

I hike up out of the immediate drainage and start walking along a ridge, which leads away from the Kalelan River. First the ridge goes west, the direction I need, but soon it turns directly North. But I know it must lead to the main divide so I follow on for the rest of the day. Soon the ridge turns back to the West and then freakishly it turns south. I become a bit disoriented. I can't simply go do west because I would have to cross steep dense ravines. By about two in the afternoon I climb a tree, straight up. 

When I climb up the tree as far as I can, I see that the top of the divide is still so far off, so I decide to turn around and go back to camp near the Kalelan River, because water up on the ridge is hard to find. 

I reach the Kalelan a few hours later and realize that I have descended by a different route, and I don't know if I am up river or down river from where I crossed the Kalelan the previous day. It was something I would eventually need to figure out or risk having to hack all the way back to the main dirt road instead of walking back on the old tract that I came in on.. 

I camp along a large clear creek. I bath, cook dinner and set up my tent in a rare flat location. The next day I start out for the divide again, this time marking my way with blue plastic strips that I cut from my tarp. I get farther up than the day before, but the vegetation becomes thick and hard to move through. My progress slows as I cut away lianas and sticker bushes. 

I realize I won't make it over the top of the divide this day either. I am reluctant to turn back and press on until three in the afternoon. I debate about camping without water, but I know it would be foolish and agonizing. I turn around again and retrace my path to the river. Not having adequate maps, it is difficult to risk pressing on toward the divide because I don’t know how far the next water actually is. It feels like it would be very far. 

I try this hike two more times, carrying all the water I can, but each time I turn back. I’m not a huge risk taker.  I like to stay in control by knowing how far it is to food and water. I am running low on food now and to reach the Adang River would be very hard it seems. Sure I could find food if I had to, but I didn't have to. I know I could eat some of the fruit that falls to the forest floor if I boiled them up in a pot. I could eat insects. But only the Penan know the wild edible plants and I wanted to find them and learn a little from them. I wanted to learn enough to at least survive.

I go back, heading for the Kalelan River again. When I reach the river, I'm not sure if the proper crossing location is up river or down. I have a fifty-fifty chance. I choose down, but later I realize that I have chosen wrong. I struggle down river until dark, skirting sheer rock walls. I go around impassible ones by climbing way up until I can again traverse parallel with the river. Soon the sun sets and I am forced to set up camp before darkness engulfs me. There is nothing like the blackness of a Borneo night; so dark and so loud. I am forced to camp before I have figured out where I am and this leaves me a bit on edge, and anxious for morning to come.

As a child I had dreamed about getting lost in Borneo, or some other remote, exotic jungle, or at least I wanted to become unseen and on the move there. I wanted to disappear from the world, from modern humanity for a while and become a nomad myself, efficient, fit and capable of surviving in the most extreme natural conditions. 

Man against nature, maybe. I like to think of it as myself being part of nature. I think this is why the story of Bruno Manser has so enthralled me. He actually did disappear, and now that I know that there are still dense wild areas left in Borneo, he could easily be in hiding, living in the wild. I believe I could almost survive in the forests of Borneo, but how long did I want to do it? Not for the rest of my life, I had other places to see; other places that also inspired me. However, now I truly was lost, or at least to a certain extent. I knew if I headed directly east, I would eventually hit the main track I had come south on from Long Semado. The density of the forest in front of me would test me and be the deciding factor on how long it would take me to trek through, or as I would soon find out, hack and force my way through.

In the morning I eat lentils and rice with curry sauce. I save some rice for lunch knowing that I will not have time to stop for long to prepare another meal. Luckily there is a fallen log spanning the river. Its volume is definitely larger here than where I had crossed two days before. After crossing the river I trek, climb and pull myself up out of the river gorge. It is about three hundred yards, mostly vertical. Then the terrain levels off and I begin by heading east, but soon a ridge develops as they always do. I am forced again to follow undulating ridges, again not wanting to try and cross deep ravines. I walk a long time; forever it seems. I watch many monkeys. I see another barking deer and spot some bear prints in the muddy soil. Still I keep on the move, a bit anxious to start for home, knowing that I won't reach the Penan.

Late in the day a heavy downpour rages, like I had not seen so far on this trip. Leeches become energetic with the rain. I stop several times to pull huge engorged leeches off my legs. Actually I apply the heat from my lighter and then flick them off. However the big ones, some the size of my thumb are more stubborn. They release momentarily and as I get ready to flick them I have to remove the heat, and sometimes they refasten to my leg.  This is a little painful and chilling as they sink their many minute razor teeth (It feels like this is what they have) into my leg to hold on. Pulling them off is painful, and is usually unsuccessful.

Insect repellent makes them let go, but I had used up my can of repellent spray trying to kill off a large brood of baby spiders that were beginning to burrow into my skin. I think I brushed up against a rotten log they were living on. I discovered them when I felt them chewing into my flesh on my left arm. I emptied the whole damn can hoping to kill them before they could dig their way into my skin. I wiped them off feverishly. I should have brought two cans.

My clothes and shoes become soaked and my toes begin to shrivel up like prunes. My entire body is wet from the torrential rains, but still I press on wanting to make the most of daylight and knowing that the contents of my pack will stay dry because they are protected in water proof bags and my pack has a rain cover. Just before dark, as the day is fading into a misty gloom I set up camp. I see actual water vapors drifting in the air, melding with the on coming darkness. It is a strange and ominous sight to see alone. I make a sitting platform out of cut poles to sit on in the morning, that is if the rain subsides. I get into my tent and soak some lentil beans in water and eat them an hour later raw, because my cooking fuel has run out and I don' have the patience or energy to build a fire in the rain. I put some iodine in a bottle of water to purify it and twenty minutes later I drink some.

I write in my journal using my headlamp and then drift to sleep to the sound of noisy insects and a barking deer calling out at regular intervals. He barks throughout the whole night as if searching for a companion to share his trepidation. I could not help but think that he was afraid. Maybe this is just my human misconception of this wild place, since I am a little apprehensive about enduring the night alone, not being able to recognize most of the different noises occurring throughout the night, as I could in the mountains of Oregon or Alaska. It is easy to see this jungle as the heart of darkness. Putting all apprehensions and personal sufferings aside one can see the incredible beauty of this place, and it becomes easy to see why someone would be drawn to the forests of Borneo.

In the morning I am dazed and daunted from the day before. I do not know exactly how long I will have to hike to reach the dirt road. I make a fire using the dry bark that was peeling off the sides of some trees, and I split stumps of broken trees that have not yet fallen over. This is the only dry wood I can find. I have to blow on the flames routinely to keep the coals hot enough to cook on.

But it works well enough and it takes me about two hours to cook some rice and boil some coffee before getting ready to depart. During the night I had thought I had heard truck noises across the valley in the direction I needed to go, but I wasn't really sure. The ridge I was following was a compass bearing to the Northeast, but I needed to head directly east soon. I set out following the ridge, but I keep trying to veer directly east, which leads down off the ridge into a deep tangled ravine. The ravine quickly becomes too dense for a sane man to go through. So the rest of the day I follow the ridge. The next day I start out again and know I need desperately to go east. So I cut down across the ravine, which might be a mistake, but I want to make better time and stop going in the wrong direction. I wish I could see if this ridge turns east soon. I climb a tree again, way up, maybe eighty feet into the canopy, but I can't quite see if the ridge turns. 

I climb down and go straight east. Down into the creek bed the foliage becomes a tangled mass of stickers, clinging vines, lianas and fallen trees. And it rains again, and the leeches attach themselves to my ankles while I walk.  Perhaps these many rotten logs, heavily entangled in brush, were fallen trees left by the timber company that logged the largest trees in years past. It may have been years ago however, and logging skid roads are the most densely vegetated ground in the entire forest, so I walk next to them, not on them.  I know they should lead to a main road, but in how long and how far? It could be days. 

Halfway through the day, I find myself climbing desperately back out of the ravine to at least a height where I can veer somewhat East. I pull myself up each embankment, through bush after bush, sweating and grunting, hoping not to put my hand on a venomous snake. I cross a stream and see a busy column of ants in a bush at head level.

I hack my way around it and move on parting more brush as I slither through. Finally near the end of the day I climb another tree that juts up from a secondary forest I now appear to be in; it is so dense; I can't see twenty feet in any direction. Every direction is a wall of brush which must have proliferated after the logging companies cut the biggest trees. Sunlight can't reach the ground hear and I feel confined. The tree I climb reaches up through the canopy and although I can't really see much more I can hear more. 

I hear the sound of chain saws destroying more forest. I know there would be a road so ironically I follow the noise. After two more hours of literally swimming through brush and hoping I do not stumble upon a snake, I break out onto an embankment that lies next to the road I had been heading for all along. In my jubilation, I nearly hurl myself down the eighty degree embankment, but at the last moment I realize how steep it is and grab a small tree and pull myself back up into the mess of tangled vines and go around to descend onto the road. When I get to the road after twenty more minutes of plowing through brush I see that the embankment is nearly a cliff and very steep.  I was lucky not to have fallen down it. 

The road is dryer because it has direct sunlight. I sit and dry my clothes in relief before starting back to Long Semado which is another day's hike away.

Although I wasn't truly lost, I did get a sense of what may have happened to others who have drifted into the jungle to never be heard from again. The jungle is another world.

I reach the town of Lawas two days later and meet the Murut couple who let me stay with their relatives in Long Semado. "I just got back from the jungle. It was, really exciting." I said to them.

"Where did you go? Did you go alone?" They asked me, not hearing of many people coming to Borneo to travel alone in the jungle.

"Yeah, I was alone." I tell them. "I went to the forest on the West Side of the Kalelan River near Ba Kalelan. It is a wild place."

"Are you staying here long?"

"For a couple of days, but I want to come back again, to the jungle. It is better than the Amazon." I tell them.

"Many western people now come to the jungle." 

"Yeah I think they like it because they don't have these kinds of trees where they live."

"Many people here never go into the forest. They just stay in their houses and in the towns." Sometimes it takes a person from a far away land to lead the way to ecological awareness. 

"I hope to see you guys before I leave." I say to them and then go to a cheap hotel, but I don't see them again and eventually return home.

Three days later I was back on a flight to Oregon, wishing in some way I could stay in the forests of Borneo. I want to learn from people who understand the forest better than myself. Next time I hope to find the Penan and stay longer. Or maybe I’ll go to Colombia and search out the Maku Indians in the rainforest there, or the Pygmies in Africa. They are nomads too and understand their forests intimately. They have to, because all the food they eat comes from the wild plants and animals they catch or collect. They aren't farmers, or city dwellers like most of us. They are the last people living the way we all used to live, self sufficient and mobile. They know where they exist in the world and in nature. They are not confined my urban boundaries and arbitrary rules. They are free people.

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