Contact!

June 2016

Cheating a bit.  I wrote this trip up for Gaia Discovery and have copied the piece here with some additions that are more personal:

After an arduous and extended journey of delays, technical problems and missed connections I stumbled into a smoky Medan bar in the middle of Ramadan to be greeted with beer. What a relief! 

Here in the esteemed company of some true leaders in worldwide environmental protection, people with victories under their belts and lifetime’s of experience, I sat to gather myself and enjoy the beer but before a moment has passed a challenge was issued:

“Why are you going to take a bunch of kids into the forest, why not just leave the animals alone and watch a program about it on tv?”

 No names obviously, but these were real experts in their field, worn out and feeling cynical at the end of a hard week's negotiations, of battling to save what may not be salvageable, grinding against the deal that we have made to bring kids in to raise the public profile of the forest, and thanks to the recent visit by Leonardo Di Caprio propel the preservation of the forest into a cause celebre.. which quite clearly is not everyone's ideal scenario but personally I think if the good guys don't get in the bad guys do and I'd rather have eco-tourists tramping about than loggers and plantations.

It was a  good question, and one I did not answer on the spot but spent the next five days thinking about as I explored, in Ketambe, a small section of the last remaining forests of Northern Indonesia, the Leuser Eco System that straddles the borders of North Sumatra and Aceh Tengarra.

To reach this part of the Eco System you can drive eight hours or take a Susi Air Flight for 45 minutes. I was to trial both as my goal was to experience everything in advance of the party of students to check out all the possibilities.

Susi Air is a small privately owned airline that was run by Ibu Susi Pudjiastuti until her appointment as the Minister of Marine Affairs and Fisheries in the current Indonesia Government. Susi does a great job and four passengers and the two pilots got from Medan Airport into a clear sky with magnificent views on time. The plane was small and the view of the encroachment of man into the forest system is clearly etched out in the ariel view.

Susi Air was great, I had watched the reality tv show The most dangerous place in the world to be a pilot which is all about Susi Air and I loved being in the plane with all the familiar commands and switch flicking.  

Then I was there, in the forest, and asking myself the same question : Why do we want to bring students here to this edge of nature where man’s imprint is harsh and damaging? What if we did just watch it on television, why is it so important that it is real?

The forest, when you are trekking on your own with guides can really give you too much head space, I found it challenging to keep focussed, the mind has a mind of its own and while I was physically scrambling over roots and under vines my thoughts were dredging up the most obscure random and frustrating thoughts, I felt like I was unpacking my mind and had to pull my self together mentally in order not to unravel. It was interesting in that when I got out of the forest this stopped and I was untroubled by these random irritations even during quiet times when I was alone elsewhere. 

I was reminded of a quote by whom I forget.. "They are thoughts, let them come and go, don't invite them to stay for tea"  and as my tea drinking was quite a source of humour to my guides I think it was appropriate to recall. 

Rudi and Putra who did not drink tea 

As the arching trees swayed with the weight of a mother orangutan and her baby, as their orange fur no longer a blur, shone in the sun I watched silently, holding my breath,  the mother swung her baby to the side and slipped from branch to branch eventually out of sight.

As we walked through the soft paths littered with damp leaves and the moss carpeted branches of fallen boughs I thought about the question and watched as a deer ran from our footfalls. I gazed at the hollow shell of a mosquito eating plant, I stood within the furled trunks of a tree over a hundred years old, and I crept up beside orchids to sit by the rushing of a waterfall. 

I paused at the sound of the hornbill’s wings, beating on the air with a bass drum rhythm and heard with a smile the laugh of the Thomas Leaf Monkey before witnessing the deep black softness of the Siomay, or gibbon, as it broke through the canopy dropping split fruits to the forest floor.

I scrambled over roots that tangled into staircases that drew me along precipitous pathways to the steaming waters of the hot springs which mingled with the cool spring waters. Where they descended into shallow pools I sat and I asked myself the question. Why don’t we just watch this on television?

Holding on to vines in descent, flashes of red plumage glimpsed in the tree tops, the wave of the wind passing above us, and the soft air dropping in temperature, we edged our way out of our first trek, the sun shifting against the horizon turning the evening sky into a spreading bruise and I answered the question.

We come here, we bring students here because the forest is alive with life, with ideas, with creation, destruction, with cycles of life, with inspiration and spirit. It’s existence holds back floods, it’s layers nurture lives on the edge of extinction, it’s darkness protects the tigers and the rhinos, the snakes and the bats, it is home to the butterfly, the bee, the ant and the honey bear, it grows sensuous orchids, and poisonous vines and it gives the mind a place to understand. And this is what we need to understand, that while Conrad wrote with eloquence and beauty:

The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life,

a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence. And it moved not.

It still moves not, not by it’s own force, but move it does, rapidly and defiantly perceptibly each year it moves inwards, contracting with increasing rapidity a victim to the greed of the ‘little man’ who sees it as nothing more than a vast tangle of unnecessary nature, standing in the way of greater profits. And that will be eventually how the forest to sweeps us out of existence, in a sacrificial gasp it will take every living thing down with it. 

So that is why we take kids. So they can see and feel the force that supports all life, touch and smell the cycles of growth and decay, and by recognising it for what it is, learning what it contains and indulging in the thoughts it provokes we can only hope they become moved to protect it. Not for themselves, or the trees, or the orangutans or the hornbills but it, the entire fabric from which life is woven.