Into the Rainforest

"Rainforest" is such an emotive word.  In ecospeak it's collocated with "depredation" and "global warming".  Seemingly it contains all that's good, including a few naked, pot-bellied humans, so wise they hide from the rest of humanity, apart from the odd photo opportunity with Sting (by these standards I must be very bad, liking humanity and only wanting to hide from Sting).  Apparently, chopping rainforest down is a wholly evil act, akin to rape, worse even than plagiarism, in the minds of middle-class western liberals.

Before I got to Borneo I learned that it has one of the largest areas of rainforest in the world and also one of the fastest shrinking.  Since I arrived I've kept my eye out for it, not sure exactly what I'm looking for.  It's so warm and humid here everything that isn't dead is green and if you concentrate hard enough you can actually see things grow.  Can these trees next to the main road be rainforest?  Surely not, they look too much like a copse in Surrey.  What about on that ridge over there?  Nah, I can see a JCB and a track and a patch of ground that looks like the Somme in 1916, maybe it was rainforest once, but not now.  Like when Sue and I were cruising in our yacht, rainforest is as elusive as the perfect bay, always over the next ridge or round the next headland, but never here.

Well, last Wednesday on Tioman island I found some.  Tioman starred as "Bali Hai" in the film "South Pacific" and the location hunters knew what they were doing.  It's a holiday island, but the numbers are limited by the fact that it has only a small airfield and the ferries from the mainland take about two hours, leave at random times and occasionally sink with all hands.  Apart from the tourist resorts on the coastal fringe the island is a forest covered rock rising to about two thousand feet.

Last Wednesday I walked across the island on one of its few roads then back along a forest trail.  Now I know.  Forest is to rainforest what a small parish church is to a cathedral.  In ordinary woodland the dominant plane is still horizontal, but in rainforest the vertical takes over, with massive hundred metre plus trees, like the pillars of a cathedral knave, supporting a high green canopy.  Monkeys are perfectly adapted to it, shinning up creepers like ratings on an eighteenth century ship of the line.  Rainforest is not jungle, you don't need to hack your way through it - so little light filters down to ground level that very little grows there and you walk on a soft, deep-pile carpet of dead and rotting matter which has fallen from above.  The cathedral metaphor is very persuasive, like in a cathedral it inspires a hushed awe, but unlike one it goes on and on, extending before you as you walk, inviting you to become profoundly lost.

At the end of my walk I emerged back on the coastal strip, blinking in the sunlight and feeling all of a sudden very exposed to the gaze of humans and other predators.

I may not have found the perfect bay, but I do now have a picture in my head of the rainforest.