Two mountains

The morning started early, arriving at the park office at 7 am and soon getting on the speedboat for our first look at Danau Sentarum. Usually this time of year (July-October) is dry in Borneo, but this year the rains have not let up and the lake is flooded. The situation makes transportation by speedboat highly convenient, as the boat can zip through flooded forests with ease, taking shortcuts not available in lower water. Aesthetically, the flooded lake is stunning, and the photo-ops are endless. The speedboat took us first to a small settlement on the lake that subsists via income from fishing, honey, rubber, and shifting rice agriculture. Danau Sentarum is a major honey producer in Borneo, and communities here have worked with NGOs to brand and market organic honey from this region.

Living on a lake makes life interesting in the eyes of a person who has spent most of life on dry land. All the houses are raised on stilts, so high that even the highest water levels will not cause flooding. Everything else in the village floats – outhouses, cows, fish tanks, even grass! The cows looked particularly happy, cooped up in small cages munching on large quantities of this floating grass. The children also looked satisfied, playing in canoes and in the water like little mer-people. Anyone who cannot swim here has a true disability.

After our stop in the village we took the speedboat to the base of a flat mountain – Bukit Semujan – sticking up out of the center of the lake. Heath forest (hereafter called “kerangas”, which apparently means “land on which rice cannot be grown”) is rumored to be on top of this mountain, and we were on a heath hunt. After 2 hours of climbing, including scrambling up vertical inclines hanging onto a rope with one hand, we reached the top, which indeed contained kerangas and offered breathtaking views of the lake below.

We spent last night in a very comfortable national park post on an island (or, in the dry season, a mountain = Bukit Tekenang) in the middle of the lake. For the first time in Borneo I bathed in water that seemed exceedingly clean, with no one washing/bathing/etc upstream or anywhere nearby, as this island is in the middle of the sparsely populated national park. Today is the first day of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, so Pita and Neli awoke at 3 am to eat breakfast and pray. Unfortunately, the fasting practice means that our two amazing field assistants will have to take it easy in this hot climate, where not drinking from 3 am to 6 pm could be rather unhealthy. On the other hand, Ramadan means a month of delicious snacks and goodies at ~6 pm every evening, even for those of us not fasting ;) Upon our return to Lanjak in the late afternoon, we stocked up on fried donuts filled with bean paste, small pandan cakes, egg rolls, and krupuk basah. Who needs dinner?