With Muhammad Aidid's help, Hansen was soon on his way back into the interior, paying his guides with wages made up of shotgun shells, manik-manik, and sugee. He managed to secure guides for his particularly successful first half of his trip with two Penan men, John Bong and Tingang Na; being his first guides, they were vital in his become proficient on the island. Communicating in bahasa pasar, a basic form of modern Malay that is the trade language of Sarawak (the Malaysian side of the island) and Kalimantan (the Indonesia side) - and later on in Indonesian with other guides - Hansen spent four weeks with these two guides before reading the Kelabit highlands (where he spent two weeks). These two guides (and after leaving the highlands, two other Penan guides, Bo `Hok and Weng) showed Hansen the ways of the rain forest; how to walk without tripping all the time, what plants and animals were good to eat and which were not, how to make camp for the night, how to hunt, and a great deal of tribal and jungle lore. The journey through the rain forest was portrayed in vivid prose and was extremely well-written. Hansen learned of many locally useful plants, such as akar korek (the "matches vine;" once lit, the dried vine smokes for days and is excellent for transporting fire), akar sukilang (a vine that can be beaten to a pulp and spread in water to stupefy fish, making them easy to catch), and most of all the sago palm (from which the Penan get their staple food, sago flour, which he was able to witness being made). He encountered many animals also; flying snakes and lizards, fire ants (with which he had an unfortunate encounter), flying foxes (which taste terrible), wild pigs (which taste excellent and are an important food source), gibbons, black hornbills (which come when called), and barking deer among others.
|