Around the World with the Most Travelled Indian
By Nitin Gairola
They say a forest has many stories to tell. Even if they don’t say this, they really should since a forest is full of ancient trees that far outlive our brief lives here on Earth. A forest collectively also has an age and some of these can really make you think about your own brief existence. Did you know that the great Amazon Rainforest is 55 million years old? To put it in perspective, we began branching out from Chimpanzees just 5 million years ago, had our hominid cousins walk the Earth 2 million years ago and become our current species, Homo Sapiens, only around 0.3 million or 300,000 years in the past.
Now compare all of this to 140 million years. That’s the age of the ancient and hyper-biodiverse Borneo rainforest ecosystem that is shared between Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei in an island that sits right on the equator. It makes even the Amazon sound like a baby when it comes to its age. There is only one rainforest older than Borneo and that’s the Daintree in Northern Australia, home to the last lookalike from the age of the dinosaurs – the flightless Cassowary. But when it comes to sheer biodiversity – both large and small, the Daintree can’t hold a candle to Borneo.
That’s why when we decided to go there, I was really super excited to visit yet another forest and in particular yet another rainforest where the species really ‘explode’, given the conditions suitable for life. In the modern age, reaching exotic destinations such as Borneo is really quite convenient as well. All it took were two connecting Malaysia Airline flights from Mumbai to Kuala Lumpur and then from Kuala Lumpur to Sandakan and there we were – in the island of Borneo. From the Sandakan airport, our van was there for the pickup and our capable driver, Mamai, had got us to Sakau within the next 3 odd hours. And Sakau, make no mistake, was in the heart of the rainforest. I still can’t believe that from Mumbai to the jungles of Borneo all it took us was less than 24 hours. It would have been unthinkable in the age before the jumbo jet, or let me say in the age just before the world got hyper-connected, quite recently. All this has happened in the 21st century during the age of the internet, financial abundance and the ‘ballooning’ flight network. And the world thought travel would come to an end after 9/11. Quite the opposite happened.
And there we were – in Sukau which had quite a few decent resorts with reasonable creature comforts (some of the creatures seemed rather comfortable there – aka lizards). However, beyond the ‘comfortable’ resorts, the Kinabatangan River that snaked through the land here was surrounded by a real, old growth rainforest with many exotic creatures calling it home. This really makes me believe that humans and wildlife can coexist as long as the purpose of the humans to be there, in their habitat, is to witness the wild and not to build any other industry. So, wildlife entrepreneurship can be done in the wild (naturally) and all other human enterprise and industry should ideally be limited to mega cities or actually to industrial zones. That is the only sensible model of coexistence in my mind today, but of course, Musk and Bezos can move all heavy industry to the Moon as well – as they envision. That would be truly revolutionary and then we can try to go back to a green planet and I hope this happens one day in the future.
There in Sukau we met our naturalist guide, Ayieml. He was a young man from the city who had picked up a lot very quickly in the world of wildlife. He could mimic the sounds of the animals and attract them to the boat, could spot them up in the canopy during daytime or in the dark mangroves at night and knew quite a bit about their behaviours. And in very old-school fashion, he carried a book called the ‘Birds of Borneo’. Sometimes old-school works, especially in the wild where, thankfully, there is no internet. Ayieml was invaluable.
My very dear friend, Bernie, also gave me the contact of a gentleman named Osman who had once taken none other than Sir David Attenborough and his crew through this stretch of the river to do filming for the BBC. He, along with his wife Yanti, run boat safaris as well and it was fantastic to connect with them.
And with that the scene was set. We had arrived in the evening and had missed the evening safari by a whisker, so we decided to rest and wake up for the night ride. Imagine going through dark, murky crocodile infested waters with wildlife all around us. And remember the wildlife always spots you before you spot it. At night, the jungle comes alive. And in here, far away from the everyday realities of my own existence, even I was coming alive as I had reached yet another forest of Planet Earth. As all readers would know, this is part of my two-decade quest to see the entire natural world. We woke up when it was dark and I was alive to every sound that night…
(Nitin Gairola is an extreme world traveller who has been to every major desert & forest ecoregion on Earth and to around 150 countries as well. He is unofficially known as the ‘most travelled Indian’ and this multi-decade exploration program to witness the entire world is named ‘Borderless Planet’. Nitin is a published travel writer & poet too. Join him @ www.instagram.com/MostTravelledIndian/.)
