face to face encounters in Tanjung Puting, Kalimantan

Written Wednesday 8th June on looooong car journey from Surabaya airport to Bromo, about Monday 6th June (morning). 

We’re alive! We didn’t get eaten by giant tarantulas or set upon my rampaging monkeys in the night. We didn’t even get any new mosquito bites. Our luck must be in. Emma gets in the shower and I decide to go for a walk in my heart covered socks which I soon shed because really there is nowhere much to walk to, apart from the long lichen covered jetty to the roughly signed bird feeding station. We abandoned the adventure the day before when Emma contemplated that one of the swampy bridges was almost certainly a crocodile hang out. She’s probably definitely more sensible than me.

Somehow I’m drawn back in that direction now though and step with careful toes along the mossy boards, avoiding the odd wonky or ant covered one, kind of hoping that there are no poisonous water snakes or ground residing tarantulas about. I can’t help myself – I start to try and imitate the bird calls coming from the trees as I make my way further from human life. I reach the bird watching platform but it’s barricaded up with a haphazard X structure, even though the (possibly rotting?) steps are still there. For a second I consider shunting around the barrier and trying…. and then realise that really would be foolhardy – even more so then wondering into the jungle in bare feet by myself. Suppose I’ll go back. It’s so calm to be alone here. It dawns on me that I’m used to being by myself now. And I even like it. (Especially when you can do animal impressions when no-one can hear you). I’ve got two of them down: one I whistle with the same epiglottis technique I use for saxophone growls; the other I’m finding hard to pitch high enough but can imitate perfectly at the octave below.

I try out the proboscis call from the back of my throat. Hmm, maybe my impression of Husni’s isn’t as good as I thought. So I go back to the bird ones and stand for a moment on the bridge: Crocodile Hangout – maybe I have a death wish. It’s nice in the sunshine though. Something extrasensory triggers though, I look up and there’s a (curious?) proboscis monkey just looking at me. He’s just 3 metres away at most and we stare, surprised at one another for no longer than a second before he darts away from his spying spot, blushing perhaps, if monkeys do that, to have been caught out.

I grin my way back to the sunny jetty I spied earlier and let this place chant it’s final lines of jungle spell. The heat is already beating down even though it’s only just past 7 and the sun beam lines reflect up from the water on the underbelly of my right hand, shadowing my eyes from the brightness. I vaguely consider meditating (this would be the perfect place) but that would mean missing this alone time with the jungle, dipping into each others soul. Tiny ants tickle my feet, monkeys call in a kerfuffle from the opposite bank as the leaves around them sway and crack, a little brown backed bird glides across the Sekonyer’s surface, diving for a belly-skim every fifty centimetres or so and the hummmm ebbs up from the ground, down from the cloud skimming tree tops and vibrates right through you. It occurs to me that this is meditation. And that I was really good at it as a child. But perhaps it was also classed as daydreaming as my mind would wander off to where it wasn’t in actuality. Whereas now it’s all about being here.

We’re a little sad as we wind back to port but we savour the final moments on our boat borne bean bags. And we’re both still pinching ourselves under our pink-cross-bamboo weaved triangular hats with back snooker cue tip tops. We’re treated to one final encounter and one that Husni had promised last night amongst the fireflies:

Me after gorging on snake fruit: “All we need to see now is a crocodile!”

Him: “Tomorrow, on the way back to Kumai.”

And here she is. It’s definitely a she because I had a book when I was a kid called ‘Cressida the Crocodile’. She was the mummy crocodile and she rescued all the people and children from the sinking boat before the daddy crocodile could eat them.

It occurs to me in this moment that perhaps a number of my first non-real-life-but-exotic-animal encounters happened alongside my Grandma (she must have read me ‘Cressida the Crocodile’ a fair few times – it was a favourite).

Also monkeys (we see a few more troops on our way back to port). The grandchildren had this long-inherited tin pot with a plastic lid which generations must have played with (and will remember). I think it was called ‘Hook the Monkey’ (?) and it had (I now realise) gibbon-long arms with pieces rendered in durable plastic in predictable shades of green and red and blue. So she is with me, wherever I end up. She always was a bit of an adventurer; maybe the only person I know who visited Greenland.

Cressida’s snout is just big enough to see and she’s going the same way as us: leading us back to the safety of whence we came. I stand on the edge straining to get a better view. Emma spots her head almost knocking the boat next to, but a metre of two below me and I catch just the swoosh of water from her tail as she thinks better of the proximity and bids us safe onward journey to Bromo.