Chopping down trees and losing

This village is obsessed with rubber. Everyone has a rubber garden, and it is hard to find guides because they are all harvesting rubber in the morning. You, too, could earn up to $20/day, working for only 4 hours, if you harvested rubber every day in Borneo! I realize this doesn’t seem like much of a deal, but here in West Kalimantan it is a really big deal – compare this wage to that of a daily worker in an oil palm plantation ($3/day) or how much we pay our guides ($5/day). Thus it is difficult to find guides in Merangin.

My day was spent wading through swamp forest. With two guides, Tono and I were supposed to take GPS points at three border points. We were doing fine until we came to a wide river. The bridge was broken, so our guides decided to chop down a tree to serve as a new bridge. The prospective bridge was growing at the edge of the river. All we had to do was cut it so that it fell across the stream. Using the ubiquitous machete, our guides chopped at the tree for about 10 minutes until it should have fallen – by all laws of gravity this tree should have already become our bridge! But it seemed reluctant to fall, so we began pushing it over by hand. Still unsuccessful, we cut down another, smaller tree to use a leverage. After a full half hour of encouraging the tree to fall with no luck, we gave up and decided to get wet. For once, a tree wins the war against the inhabitants of Kalimantan!