From Desert to Dipterocarp

As I’m sure you can imagine, the transition from harsh, desolate Mongolia to lush, vibrant Malaysia was a 180-degree about-face. Not only was the climate change a shock to the system, but the social culture was as well.

We arrived in Malaysia on September 26^th after the whirlwind tour of China, and after what I thought would be the roughest travel day of the year. Little did I know, the flight from Malaysia to Vietnam would entail a full 48 hours without sleep, but more on that in a few weeks. We had to take three flights (Shanghai > Hong Kong, Hong Kong > Kota Kinabalu and Kota Kinabalu > Kuching), which messed with my internal clock a bit. But we made it, exhausted and a little cranky. Our first Malaysian destination, Kuching, is the capital of Sarawak, one of the three states that make up the country. Here is a map in case you are unfamiliar, which I was until about day three of my visit.

I enjoyed Kuching immensely. It was a much-needed break from the sensory overload that was China. The city is clean and vibrant, the buildings a rainbow of cheerful pastels. Here are a few pictures:

We were lucky to stay at a wonderful hostel called Singhasana Lodge, which had a quaint rooftop bar and lounge area where we met for our first days of class. I felt like I could finally stop and take a breath in Kuching; the people were friendly and warm, no one tried to rip me off, and the my spirits were lifted by the amazing natural environment.

But the relaxation was short lived. Just moments after we arrived at the lodge after our hellish day of travel, our professor for our class in Malaysia (who flew in from Tacoma to teach us for a month) greeted us with an invitation to a 6:30am nature walk the next morning. We were unenthusiastic to say the least. Luckily he made it optional, so most of us opted out. But that’s just how it goes on Pacrim. You gotta roll with the punches, which I’m sure will become second nature for me before too long.

With the new setting came a new class, this time on the amazing biodiversity of the island of Borneo, and Sarawak itself. It was a science-ish course, but a huge portion of it was focused on conservation and wildlife rehabilitation. For those who are unfamiliar with Borneo, I will fill you in:

• Borneo is the name of an island, not a country.
• It is made up of three countries: part of Malaysia, part of Indonesia and Brunei.
• One third of Malaysia is known as peninsular Malaysia and is located next to Thailand.
• Borneo is the third largest island in the world.
• The island is a ‘hotspot’ of biodiversity (and yes, ‘hotspot’ is a scientific term), meaning it has the highest number of total species of any other continent on earth, as well as the highest number of endemic species.
• How cool is it that I got to go there?!?
• Of the 200+ mammal species on Borneo, 44 are endemic, meaning they appear nowhere else on earth.
• The forests of Borneo are in major crisis mode; over half have been lost to logging and/or oil palm plantations (palm oil is the new cooking oil of choice around the world – check your packages). Obviously, deforestation has major environmental consequences, which I won’t go into now.
• Dipterocarp is one of the five forest types found on Borneo, and the most ecologically diverse. Most of our time hiking and trekking was spent in dipterocarp forest.
• With deforestation comes species loss, which is happening at an alarmingly depressing rate.
• Some of the iconic endemic species in Borneo are orangutans, gibbons, clouded leopards, hornbills and binturong (or bearcats), all of which are   either endangered or on their way.
• Many indigenous people of Malaysia actively maintain a tribal lifestyle on their ancestral forestlands to this day, which creates major conflicts with the conservationists and government organizations that are also interested in the land they inhabit.

While conservation of these rapidly deteriorating forests may be a priority for scientists and academics in the west, Malaysians and Indonesians have yet to adopt the same sense of urgency. The forest and its resources are obviously economically lucrative, creating an incentive that would be difficult to resist from any socio-economic perspective. Consequently, a huge ethical controversy ensues, involving indigenous rights, the economic well-being of the country’s citizens, animal rights and more.

Amazingly, I was able to get up close and personal with a lot of these endangered animals at our second stop of the visit, Matang Wildlife Center, where we worked as volunteers. This is where the bulk of our class was taught, and where many of us were pushed to the edge, mentally and physically. Don’t get me wrong, our time at Matang was one of the best experiences of my life, but it was tough. For one thing, it’s located in a protected national park in the middle of the rainforest, which meant zero opportunity to connect with anyone outside our group. No Internet access either.

This was the first time I had truly been disconnected, but it was surprisingly easy to deal with. My peers and I are all in this weird Pacrim bubble, which became even more insular in the isolated environment. Crazy things start to seem normal when you only have 24 other people to compare your experience with. We share a lot with each other, verbally and materially. I really enjoyed getting to know my professors (both of whom joined us in our volunteer work) on a much more personal level, and I noticed my friendships becoming much stronger, even those I had before the trip began. All we really had was each other for two weeks. And you learn a lot about a person after doing physical labor with them for four hours every day. But more on that later.

Life was simple. Three meals per day were cooked for us by a group of totally delightful local women, each married to one of the rehab center staff members. We were housed in a longhouse-style dorm building, four students to a room, each with its own bathroom. Longhouses are the traditional indigenous style of housing in Malaysia. Each room had one fan, but no air conditioning…and it got real hot in there. And damp. The humidity was pretty relentless and overwhelming. I thought the Minnesota summer would have prepared me at least a little bit, but it did not. I learned that if you resign yourself to the fact that you will be wet and smelly all day, it becomes more bearable. By the end it was routine.

Another issue we had to face was the pervasive stench of mildew mixed with wet, semi-clean clothes. We did our own laundry at this place, and our limited wardrobe coupled with daily (smelly) volunteer work created a relentless laundry routine. A new scent my nasal inventory during those two weeks: old, salty sweat + mildew. It’s worse than B.O., I’m telling you. But it was unavoidable sometimes; no matter how often you did laundry, it was up to Mother Nature as to whether or not it would ever get dry. Even if you were able to wash out all the sweat, which I often wasn’t, the clothes would still end up sitting around wet for days at a time, sucking up the pervasive mildew musk all the while. So our definition of ‘clean clothes’ became a bit less rigid.

As we were in the tropical rainforest, there were a myriad of critters with which we were forced to share our living space, number one being mosquitoes. They were different from those in the states, or in the Midwest at least. They were slower moving and their bites didn’t last quite as long. But they itched a lot more. Even with my DEET repellent my legs got pretty devoured. We became friends with the leeches too. Well, some of us did.

On our first day hike into the forest, we were all pretty freaked out about them. Leeches are very common on Borneo, and they grow to four or five times their original size after filling themselves with your blood. Initially, they stick onto your skin with their tail and swing their little bodies around to find a place to latch their mouth. Sometimes it feels like a pinprick when they start sucking, but sometimes you don’t feel it at all. I was pretty lucky on the leech front; the worst one I had was hiding underneath the collar of my sock for only a few minutes, but it had gotten pretty fat. Anna had to scrape it off of me with a stick L. Usually they are pretty easy to spot though. And they aren’t dangerous. They carry no diseases, but the prospect of their tiny razor-like teeth and their anti-coagulant venom is pretty unnerving.

In my opinion though, the worst pest we had to deal with was the ant. Small, unassuming and seemingly harmless, right? Now I know better. On one of the first nights at the longhouse, I woke up to find my backpack swarming with them, sniffing on a piece of Mongolian candy I had been saving for my family (sorry guys…). I carried the bag outside to brush them off, only to discover that they were biters! A few minutes later, while I was outside cleaning up, my roommate was undressing and getting ready to take a shower when she wrapped herself in her towel that had been hanging on the wall above my backpack. She failed to notice the dozens of ants that had crawled up from the floor, and got bitten up pretty badly all over her body L. It was quite a fiasco. And it happened at least three or four more times. I swear, they will go crazy over the tiniest crumb.

But that’s enough complaining! The good far outweighed the bad in Malaysia, I promise. Stay tuned.