Kijana (30 page)

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.

From Samarinda, these handicrafts are sent to places such as Bali, where tourists pay a high price for them. It's ironic that in this most remote of places, a small basket-making industry will most likely suffer the economic impact of the Bali bombing. Our attempt to get to the ends of the earth clearly wasn't far enough away to escape the troubles of the world.

The locals are paid very little for their effort, so it takes a long time to afford the things that make life easier. At the top of the list for most is a canoe, which allows locals to travel up and down the river to hunt and collect rattan vines. For those with a canoe, a long-tail outboard motor is definitely worth saving for. It's called a long-tail because of the long shaft from the engine to the propeller. This allows the propeller to be lifted quickly over rocks and rapids. However, once you have a motor you also have to be able to afford the fuel, which doesn't come cheap in those parts, costing A$1.50 per litre compared to 30 cents on the coast. Chainsaws are also highly sought after, as they can be used to clear fields for rice paddies and cut timber for huts.

As our faces became familiar around the village, the locals became more relaxed around us. One day, as we wandered the streets, we were invited to a villager's house for lunch. We knew we had to accept, as it was an honour for them to feed us, almost a statement to their peers declaring their popularity. This became evident when we realised the woman who'd invited us didn't even want to eat with us. Instead, she ushered us into a back room were we waited on a bench seat. In a corner a baby monkey was tethered. It was still young enough to be looking for a mother – anybody would do. In this case, it was Beau. It reached up to him in a way that no one could resist. When he leant over, its long arms hugged him.

Out came three plates from which we could choose fried river fish, vegetables in a thin white sauce and, of course, steamed rice. Our hostess laid the plates on the table, smiled at us, then left us alone in her dark and dingy abode.

We looked at each other, wondering if she would return to eat with us. We eventually assumed we should start. Lucky we didn't wait because she didn't reappear.

After eating our fill, there was still no sign of her. So we climbed under the table and awaited her return. Not long after, she entered the room only to find it empty. From under the table we could see her hesitate while she tried to figure out where her guests had vanished to. On the count of three we burst out from under the table with the loudest ‘Boo!' we could muster.

In utter panic she bolted out of the house and onto the porch where her family and friends were chatting. Immediately we felt guilty that perhaps we'd gone too far with our shenanigans. But once we heard her laughter from the porch, we knew we were safe to step outside. News quickly spread of what had happened, and we watched as the incident was re-enacted by the woman to a growing crowd.

After a few days we were amazed how much we were able to understand what was going on around us without speaking the language. But sometimes we had to ask Charlie about something we didn't understand. We noticed that occasionally a couple of dogs would start howling, then more would join in until every dog on both sides of the river had joined the chorus. Josh asked Charlie why they howled together. He responded, very seriously, that they were spooked by ghosts.

Despite the disappointment of being told all the Punans now lived in villages, I was not convinced. I continued to see the distinctive girl from the day we arrived. Her parents must share her Punan features, I figured, but we never saw any adults carrying those characteristics.

One afternoon Beau was having a sleep and Josh was out walking about through the village. I was downstairs at Shian's at the pool table, which served as the local hangout. Shian had just topped up my coffee, while I watched her husband, Abraham, the local policeman and Charlie playing a game, when Josh rushed in and sat down. I could tell he was excited.

‘Guess what?' he asked breathlessly.

I was in a playful mood, so I strung him along.

‘Um ...' I said, while I thought. ‘You were just walking back from the gardens and you saw a naked Punan with a blow dart gun scamper off into the forest?' I teased.

‘No' he said, ‘but close.' I stared at him, thinking that he was now taking me for a ride.

He then blurted out his story. He'd wandered over the bridge, to some huts near where Charlie had taken us on the first day. He'd been invited to sit on the porch of a family's house while they tried to engage in a conversation. It wasn't what you'd call a fast-moving conversation until one of the teenage daughters produced an ancient Indonesian to English dictionary. Josh took the dictionary and found the Indonesian word ‘asli', which meant ‘original or traditional'. Going backwards and forwards he wrote the question on paper to ask if there were any original Punans in the forest. They read his Indonesian and the daughter took down the mother's response.