Name: Stranger in the Forest
ISBN: 9780375724954

Eric Hansen

The author of Motoring with Mohammed recounts his seven-month, three-thousand-mile walk across Borneo, and compares life in the jungle with Western civilization. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

On Foot Across Borneo

Stranger in the Forest

Andrew John Kinney

This is the best wilderness travel / indigenous people encounter book I have ever read, hands down. Eric Hansen had the experience of a lifetime in walking across Borneo in 1982, and his descriptions of how the Penan and other indigenous people of the forest treated him, and how they made a living in the jungle is uplifting and eye-opening. At one point, Hansen runs into a researcher at a village where he stays for about a week, and she has done a tally of all the plants and fungi the Penan people use for food and other purposes; her list of species run to 233, and it is likely incomplete. The author experienced this cornucopia with his guides in the rainforest; every day they would venture out after making camp and return with game, nuts, greens, fungi or some combination thereof. Hansen tells how there was often so much food that he could barely eat it all - the rainforest was the tribes' "farm", and it provided meals every day of the year - for those who carried in their heads the knowledge of its gifts. The guides knew from memory all the plants in the forest: what nuts or fruits were in season, which plants or fruit were poisonous, which had medicinal value, etc. They also knew hundreds of forest routes by memory, whereas, as Eric says, if he had taken three steps off the trail, he literally might have never found his way out of the jungle, especially during his first month in the forest.

With one exception, when he was mistaken for a forest spirit (a bali saleng), he was well-received at each village where he stopped, with courtesy that varied in warmth but was always generous, and some of his stays resulted in real friendships. He learned to be respectful, to approach questions obliquely, to be endlessly patient, and to pitch in and help in whatever way he could. He learned to leave behind his American ideas of how to behave, and to remain humble, and by doing so he found acceptance by the Penan. Crime was almost non-existent in the longhouse communities; his guides wondered aloud to him about the crimes they heard of in the coastal communities, and when Eric asked his guides what they considered one of the worst crimes they had encountered in their own village, they thought for a moment and then replied, stinginess.

Only as he approached the "civilized" coast did the welcomes degrade a bit, or at least become much more variable, and he had to be more careful. If the governments of Malaysia and Indonesia had had more foresight in the 1980's they would have set aside all the then-remaining rainforest as a national treasure, and sought resources from NGO's and the UN to protect the incredible biodiversity of the interior of Borneo. Sadly, that is not the way it has gone; since 1982, the extractive and ruthless logging industry has destroyed at least 25% of the forest Hansen walked through, and today the Penan are under siege trying to retain their remaining forests, which are their livelihood. Borneo has somewhere between 2500 and 3000 tree species, and the tallest tropical trees in the world live there with individual specimens greater than 300 feet tall. By comparison, all of Europe has about 500 tree species. It is the immense biodiversity of the forest in Borneo that provides the wealth of food, tools, and medicine to the Penan.

I have done a little hiking in tropical forests in Honduras and the Caribbean, and a lot of hiking in the US, and I completely related to Eric Hansen's ultimately comical description of trying and failing to keep his footing on muddy slopes in the rainforest, while his guides smiled and helped him up time and again. After weeks of unintentionally providing comic relief for his guides, he began to get the knack of finding toeholds in steep slopes, and ultimately he became confident enough to travel alone - which caused other problems.

His descriptions of the dark and cool rainforest are wonderful, replete with the sounds of birds, visions of hundreds of orchids in gaps in the forest, monkeys with their greeting-the-dawn choruses, pigs that climbed trees, and more. His sense of wonder translates beautifully and compellingly to the page. Highly recommended.

Stranger in the Forest On Foot Across Borneo

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