hellow world. wish i could give this blog o’ mine the time it deserves but balancing whatever is hitting me demands less time sweating profusely sitting on the ground in an internet cafe in ketapang, and more time doing less.

just completed one of those times in life where you just live thru it and then it becomes something else. just got back from a long jungle trip to lubak baji, then batu barat, then riam beresap, three places in the gunung pulong national park of indonesia. it was supposed to be 8 days in the rainforest, but it was a lot of layovers and not a lot of time in the actual forest, at least until the end. i was pretty disappointed at various junctures, but just hung in there and kept telling myself when i get back i will do my best to talk to the head of the tour company. which i did. because the tour guide on the last and longest leg, who i bonded w, let me stay at his house and took me to the offices the next day. and after a huge and very interesting case study in everything i have learned up to this point in my life about how to express yourself, including the buddhist training in myanmar and even some recent islamic school of soft knocking in indonesia, i managed to get some people pretty different from me to care about my sitch. i felt love in my heart as i helped them see that i had sort of been misled and sold short. they offered to refund a million rupiah. i told them no, i want to go back into the rainforest uninterrupted for 3 straight days starting tomorrow. which i am now doing. and then we went out for dinner tonight and had an amazing time. so the thing that you fret about and drives you nuts, if you stick with it, will be your friend if you don’t freak.

so it’s really a rough and ravaged country, at least the western portion of borneo. cowboy or wild west like. but very muslim. very cut off from the rest of the island, the country, and the world. there’s very little virgin rainforest left, some amazingly appalling illegal logging and palm oil plantation action going on, and a lot of it is pretty heartbreaking. corruption is rampant. i am seeing (and being here, being), a form of Islam I have never seen. I prayed at the mosque tonight and the Imam told me I was a Muslim.

Allah certainly helped me out in the jungle. There was a slippery log so steep I could not stay upright and me and everything went into the river and it was deep and things got wet and never ever got dry. With 10 km of hiking still to go it was an amazingly challenging thing to do to get to the little camp at Riam Bursap. So much up and down, and each step could be a slip, and you gotta be careful what you grab on to. And it’s not that the guide or porter doesn’t care, but it ain’t like white people. Nobody is looking at whether you make the step or cross the chasm or figure out how to get over the tree. They’re there, but there’s an attitude of YOYO (you’re on your own). At the end was the most pristine and amazing waterfall I have ever seen, and, again, I was the only tourist in the whole damn park, let alone that spot, but something was happening to me as I collapsed and began burning up over 10 km from the nearest human and hundreds from anything resembling a hospital. I tore thru it for 36 hours – could not even raise a limb – and then it just broke. I rested the next day and hiked out with everything I had the following. Mind melded w the park staff today around the good, the bad, and the ugly, and now as I say going back to Lubak Baji for a few days. Then another national park in central kalimantan, then banjarmassin, then ambon in the molukku islands early feb., then bali late feb., then sf march 1.