October 7th 9:40 am  Kumai River, Kalimantan, Indonesia, Borneo  02′ 44.566 S   111′ 43.917 E

Just finished three loads of laundry and shrinking 500 photos.  And I deleted a bunch so you can imagine how many I took.    The overwhelming theme of our 2 adventures combined is the destruction of the rain forest.  The orangutan conservation area is one small part that is being saved.  The orangutans we saw live in their jungle, but it’s hard to believe that they haven’t been changed by their contact with humans.  It is like seeing them in a huge zoo.  The proboscis monkeys won’t interact with humans.  The gibbons did somewhat and the macaques also.  But when you get close to an orangutan, you feel the frustration of not being able to communicate.  Depending whom you read we share 95 or 98 % DNA with the orangutans so maybe they just are attracted to their human cousins.  I will start working on my real emails. 

We also went to see a native Dayak village.  It was a 3 hour bumpy ride through what once was rain forest and is now palm oil tree plantations as far as the eye can see.  ( And a 20 minute speed boat ride at the end.)   Also, small parts of the forest are burned down so rice fields can be planted.  The people in the Davak village chop down and burn the forest to plant rice.  They have to eat.  In this area of Borneo you can work for the logging companies and chop down the forest.  Or you can work for the gold mines and pollute the rivers with mercury.  The people in the Dayak village are poor but like everywhere, the kids seem happy and playful.  The old men seem happy.  The women work hard and the wife of our host never smiled.  The kids go to the small local school.  They are in the process of building a library with government money.  Our host is a teacher there.  He went to the local teacher training university in Pangkalan Bun.  We saw his 10 year old daughter reading and he said she was very smart.  Izzy, our orangutan guide and our Dayak guide translated between us and the villagers who spoke no English. Randal and I hosted (paid for) the traditional ceremony held in our host’s longhouse the evening we were there.  It is how the village makes money.  It was interesting, not too long, and Randal and I even took part as we danced the bird dance.   Randal was draped in a giant sarong and I looked more like a scare crow to scare away the birds with my arms stiffly out to the sides instead of gracefully floating in the symbolic breeze.  I was ok until I heard Izzy’s infectious giggles.  Then I almost lost it. Thankfully it was only almost.  Well they had made us drink a glass a rice wine in an early part of the ceremony during which they sprinkled rice in our hair and tied a traditional folded leaf bracelet to our wrist.  The whole experience was a mix of the ancient, recent past, and modern since they had a satellite dish and a cell phone, a generator for the night time electricity and a squat toilet installed for when guests come as well as a head hunter buried not far from their house.  Yes a real head hunter from their village so he still had his head.  Our host showed us his blow gun but not the magic arrows.  The blow gun was to protect the children from the head hunters who prized the heads of children.  Pretty much a thing of the past.