A continent ages fast once we come to it.
Ernest Hemingway

Until the mid 1900's Borneo was one of the great jungles on earth, a heart of darkness, dripping, teeming, ripe, and risky. The kind of place that made Joseph Conrad's pen restless. This emerald island, third largest in the world after Greenland and New Guinea, was largely unexplored until then, a land of legend that aroused fear in great white hunters. Here lurked lost tribes of head-hunters and man-eating apes called ut-ut.

But that was then. The Borneo of today has aged 200 years in the last 25. She is on the brink of the modern world, with bustling towns, scheduled flights, and even sporadic electricity. Conspicuously absent are neon lights, glitzy cities, and most trappings of 21st century pop culture. Coca-cola is here but fast food is not. Prepare to eat rice three time a day if you go. Boiled chicken twice. Not bad for the first week. Only the larger towns have paved roads. Most highways are rivers carrying people and commerce to and fro. The homes are wooden shacks, stilted and thatched. Native Dayak of the interior still live in longhouses.

 

It is dawn in the rain forest of Borneo. Mist hangs in the air, between branches and lianas, and rises high into the sky as clouds. Frogs and birds beckon, unseen in the morning light. Gibbons begin their staccato hoots from across the valley. Suddenly, in a nearby tree there is a loud snap. I freeze, trying hard to see everything at once without moving or breathing. Then I hear a kiss-squeak and know I am in the company of a legend. The "man of the forest." Only this man is a female with tiny hands and feet clinging to her side. With an amoeboid body twist the youngster's face appears, rimmed by a halo of electric hair. I am spellbound. (next photo)