Casting Off by Emma Bamford Page A

never been abroad before, and
had in fact barely left Swindon, but had somehow managed to scrape together the cash and the courage to fly to the Borneo jungle to live on a boat with a strange man. It sounded familiar. Ron was
taking them up the Kinabatangan river to see the rainforest wildlife and asked if we felt like tagging along. Go on a bona fide river jungle expedition with the chance of seeing pygmy elephants,
orangutans and proboscis monkeys in their natural habitat? You didn’t have to ask me twice.

7
The jungle books
    W e went in convoy up the river,
Blue Steel
leading the way, as Ron had been there a few times before. The GPS was useless – it
showed us motoring across dry land – and the water was a murky yellow-brown, meaning we couldn’t see any obstacles like rocks or sand banks. We followed Ron, sticking to the outside
bends of the river’s curves, using the logic that that was where the water flowed fastest, so the river was likely to be deepest there, and gritted our teeth, praying we wouldn’t get
stuck in the mud.
    I’m not very good at judging distances but I’d estimate that the Kinabatangan was a couple of hundred metres wide. When we first entered the mouth, from the sea, it was lined with
mangrove trees that gave way to nippah palms, dense, stubby little trees with no visible trunks. The water was full of clusters of lily leaves that had broken away in the force of the current and
were being swept downstream and, more worryingly, branches and giant logs the size of battering rams. As well as keeping an eye on the depth reader and monitoring the curve of the river, we had to
keep watch for these monsters and dodge them – while not running aground. They were doing a few knots downstream and we were motoring at a similar pace upstream and our combined speeds could
have taken a nasty chunk out of the hull.
    After a few miles the nippahs changed to grassy banks and we passed scattered houses set back from the water’s edge. Naked children were being bathed by their mothers in the brown water. I
wondered if they didn’t end up dirtier after their baths than they were before. One woman was hand scrubbing her laundry, her bare feet sinking into the mud. They stopped what they were doing
in order to stare at us as we crept by.
    A right-hand turn after the houses and then we were into the jungle proper: trees of every height and shade of green imaginable, all crowded together and jostling for space, the shorter ones
ducking their heads under the canopies of their taller cousins, the giants luxuriating in the space their height afforded them and stretching out their branches to catch as much sunlight as
possible. I’d seen rainforest before, in Australia, but then I was driving or walking among it and everything was happening above my head. Here, with the water separating us from jungle, we
had perspective. I could see the wood
and
the trees and it was unbelievably beautiful in a chaotic, here’s Mother-Nature-at-her-rawest kind of way.
    I couldn’t wait to spot some jungle animals. When I wasn’t checking the instruments or the water’s surface for objects I was scouring the trees, desperate to catch a glimpse of
a monkey or an elephant. But all I saw was birds. Large white egrets surfed down the river, perched serenely on floating logs. Every time we approached one it would unfold its long neck, extend its
wings and flap, flap, flap until it was up and away. There were eagles soaring above us, from time to time diving to the water to snatch fish in their talons, and kingfishers who were no more than
orange and blue blurs as they zoomed by.
    Another of the boats in Sandakan had given Steve the latitude and longitude co-ordinates for where they had seen wild pygmy elephants. ‘They said it was wonderful,’ he had reported
back. ‘They were on anchor and a whole family of elephants crossed the river right in front of their boat, babies and everything, swimming at