Borneo

It was a sign of great and crazy things to come when my flight to Borneo kicked off with Flo Rida blasting through the airplane.

Borneo is the world's third largest island, and is shared between Brunei, Malaysia and Indonesia. It is home to many exciting things including orangutans and monkeys, the filming location of Survivor 1, and headhunter tribes.

My first stop was Mulu National Park in the thick of the Sarawak jungle. I felt like I was flying into a movie set with misting-over mountains and endless jungle. The first stop was Deer Cave, which was about the size of a Vegas casino and home to 2 million bats, that I got to see fly out in the evening for food, which they did like a school of fish all moving in unison. (The BBC Planet Earth series filmed a clip of it.) The trek through the jungle to Deer Cave passed another cave, which contained human bones which have never been moved for fear of evil spirits.

My tour also stopped by an "indigenous" community - the Penan people. (And by "indigenous," I mean exploited). Most of the Penan were visited by Australian missionaries in the 1960's, and have abandoned their hunter-gatherer lifestyle and native beliefs in favor of church, farming, and relying completely on Western tourists for money. I filed in with all the fanny-packs and cameras to check out the handicraft market, where items for sale included "God is Our Lord" beaded wall-hangings, and miniature versions of blow-guns used by men to hunt animals. (And previously, people. The Sarawak brochure said that men used to take heads to impress women.)

I watched the woman load up the hollow blow gun with darts and shoot them at a sweater hanging on a fence post. It was pretty awesome, but since I suspected the U.S. customs agents might find it less-awesome, I settled on a nose flute. A nose flute is an instrument made of bamboo and is played by blowing hard across a hole with one nostril. I figured it may liven up a party someday.

3% of the Penan people are still nomadic, and live deep in the jungle close to the Indonesian-Malaysian border. I had the pleasure of visiting this particular community with a German anthropology student who told me that in one of his first lectures, the professor detailed numerous ways that Western "help" actually does much more harm than good. I've read Ishmael (and more scientifically and historically, Guns Germs and Steel) so had heard several examples before as well. Visiting this community was troubling in several ways -though I guess I'd rather try and learn from the community that is already exploited/dependent on me than attempt to venture deeper into the jungle to find that "authentic experience" and further rub my Westernness off on them (which many of my fellow backpackers do, and proudly.) Anyways, it's a tough problem to find the "right" answer on, since there are obviously many people who benefit greatly from Western resources.

I stayed at a really nice jungle lodge with good cocktails and food, and a TV where I could watch the Olympics with people from all over the world which was really fun. On the night I was there, the U.S. lost to Nigeria in soccer, and the announcer triumphantly exclaimed, "The Americans are laying on the ground and crying! The Americans are going home!" (I suspect coverage at home may be slightly different?) That night I also got to make an attempt at using the blow-gun. Holding and shooting it was like playing a trombone, so obviously given my fine trombone-ing skills, I scored. (No animals, just balloons.)

On the last day in the National Park, I took a cruise down the river, where bats, butterflies and dragonflies flew overhead. The trees created a nice canopy, and there were so many vines hanging down into the river, that I was sort of expecting Tarzan to swing down out of a tree. A few days later in Kota Kinabalu, I overheard an American accent and it turned out to be someone better than Tarzan: a real life U.S. government agent like Jack Bauer (though he laughed and insisted "not really" at my suggestion and they never seem to show Jack Bauer writing lots of reports. Whatever, he was cute.)

I headed back into the jungle for a wildlife expedition, where I got more wildlife than I bargained for. In addition to spotting lots of monkeys and tropical birds, I ventured into a cave with thousands of cockroaches - so many that I couldn't touch the railing or wall because then I'd be touching cockroaches. Later I did a trek that involved leech socks and long-sleeved shirts, since leeches wiggle up through the mud and drop off tree branches onto unsuspecting humans. The evening concluded with some Aussies telling me some Scuba dive horror stories and one woman telling me how she got robbed in Italy with 2-weeks left of her 4-month trip. (Yup.) All led to some interesting or perhaps paranoid dreams, especially when you add in the psychedelic side-effects of my malaria pills, and monkeys jumping around right outside my cabin.

Finally I headed to one of the world's top 10 dive sites - Sipadan Island. Sipidan is a small island close to the Philippines that drops 600 meters straight down into abyss. I stayed on Mabul island at a very chill guesthouse on stilts, with all the makings of a good time: a crazy Brit, a guitar player, a nice cat, a mean cat, instant coffee and cocoa, plenty of rum, and the world's happiest, friendliest kids. Unfortunately the island was also home to a rare breed of rooster who clearly smokes 10 packs of cigarettes a day, judging by its horrific, raspy Cock-a-doodle-doo, which begins at 5 a.m. and lasts for 3 hours, slightly dampening the aforementioned "good time" of the previous evening.

The three days at Mabul/Sipadan were really laid back and enjoyable. I met tons of people, saw about twenty white-tipped reef sharks and turtles larger than me, and generally just enjoyed the island community and dives.