The Honey Trees of Kalimantan

I was sitting in a ger in Mongolia when I put up my hand to go to Indonesia. My ulterior motive was to get a chance to get into the rainforests. In 1988 I read Eric Hansen’s “Stranger in the forest : on foot across Borneo”. The guy spent weeks under a forest canopy – walking across Borneo, and back again. It was wild place. When I did get to Kalimantan I found it was pretty much all over/. I was there a month before I even saw a patches of intact forest – in the high country near the Sawawak border. And even there they were surrounded by old logging coups. But on my last stint I kept seeing some trees, obviously original, towering up above the regrowth and rubber trees. They had a regular series of bumps up their trunks, and had obviously been avoided by the loggers.



One day, while we were plodding up a forested stream, the story came out. We came across one of these giants which had fallen across the stream. There was a lot of sniggering about the shape of these bumps - and then my Dayak guides explained to me that this was a honey tree. The bumps were formed by outgrowths of the honey tree around pegs of iron wood, which had been driven into the honey tree – to allow people to climb up into the canopy, and get honey from bees nests.






But that wasn’t all. The fallen tree was beside some rock I had to look at – and while I was doing that, I saw my guides using their parangs to hack off some of the lumps. When I asked what they were doing, something else finally came out – the old pieces of iron wood, perhaps 300 years old, were now charms – to pick up chicks! They explained to me that they worked “just as well on ex-pat girls as Dayaks”!






Unfortunately these trees are both botanical and cultural relicts. Although they were left by the loggers, I’m told no-one climbs these trees any more. You cant by natural honey on the village markets. There are now easier ways to get honey. I was later taken to a standing tree which was visited by two men in 1978. One climbed – and fell all the way out of the canopy, dying on the buttress at the base. His mate is still in the local village.

 Escaped death by about 15 minutes today.  I worked my way down into a coal pit via the low-wall, a sheet of rock at 46 degree slope (the line going down at the far left end in this photo - past the dark patch). Didnt think it was a big deal. I worked out that if I slid, I could handle it and not go far. I got into the pit, followed it a long fr a while, took the above pic, then climbed right out and back up on top - the far left of this pic on the left. Then heard a roar - I rushed over to the edge to look - and saw and the rock face that I had climbed down was avalanching into the pit - meter sized boulders crashing down, Hmmm........  The pic on the right is from the other direction - has my colleagues in it to give some scale.

 So today we had half an hour to wait on some people, so I went up to my room and flicked the TV on. I'd been watching the Korean-English channel. There was a great orogramme on about Korean food, and how its the most healthy in the world. lots of detail about how black beans are fermented til :"white material oozes out". 

Then there was this sort of ad - a Korean youngster is paining, and he says (so the sub-titles say) "I want to be an environmentalist".  So far so-good (dumb kid - heading for a life of penury...._.  But then he says how wants to live in a "clean" world. He is painting leaves, and some digital wizardry morphs those leaves .... into leaves being swept up off some pavement along a street. Yep, in our clean world, we gotta clean those leaves up...  And the rest was about cleaning up the water supply.  Hmmm.....

 When I was a kid I used to lie in the hallway of our house and doodle in a big scrap-book. I pestered my Mum for family history info and made family trees in the book by tracing circle around coins. Each circle was some ancestor. I asked about all the usual stuff - eye and hair colour, etc, but also more unusual stuff that might be inherited. I still have no idea where I got it from, but I decided I must have a "collecting" gene there somewhere. From stamp and fossil collecting this has now progressed to seeing all the conifer trees in the world, all the biggest/oldest trees, and going to all the wettest parts of the world. I've just been to one place where I can add ticks in all these last categories. Its Yakushima Island - to the south of the main Japanese islands. Its very wet - over 8 meters a year in some places, I saw four different types of pine, and some of the trees are several thousand years old. The best day was the one where there was constant rain and drizzle. Basically I was in a cloud. I laboriously photographed below an umbrella and on a tripod. Here are a couple of shots.