The Ferry-Boat Parrot.

It's the afternoon now and I'm eating a big meal - two big pieces of chicken, vegetable soup, and the requisite big plate of rice. I pay and walk across the street to the jetty, embarking an hour after the scheduled departure - nothing leaves on time in Indonesia. Wedging myself and bulging pack past oily trucks packed two stories high with white nylon bags of rice and dozens of motor-scooters I ascend the steep slippery steel stairs to the passenger deck. I find a free seat devoid of cigarette butts, persons or mystery liquids. In front of me a TV, old and fully infected with white noise, coughing out a soap opera. Swarming around me are old women franticly selling rice balls, rice cakes, rice with fish (and 3 dozen other variants of rice) along with warm sodas and water.

Sitting around me are dozens of Indonesian families all fully transfixed on me whispering "...bule..." (foreigner) and pointing. Children stare wide eyed, bewildered at my very existence. Girls giggle and hide. Young men stand back trying to show indifference to this intruder in their domain but as curious as anyone at my presence. Once they find out I speak more of their language as they do mine I am asked where I'm from, my age, marital status and the basic small talk. The conversation then moves to "What in the fuck are you doing here?" (I might be paraphrasing). My explanation is simple in this language "jalan-jalan" cruising, roaming, rambling, freewheeling, gypsying. 

Geckos zig-zag across the walls and ceiling all jockeying for the best spot, closest to the light bulb. Occasionally going on a  frantic chase after a mosquito. Cockroaches scurry from in and out of baggages. 

As the boat starts to pull out from the harbour there's a mad dash, all the food and trinket hawkers scramble over the railing and these old women impress as they hop to the boat docked adjacent. Nuts.

This is all somehow normal to me. I'm hardly stirred by the insanity of third world transportation anymore. It's become my normal everyday life, being a rock-star on Mars. But then something does stir me. A parrot. Beautiful in powerful colours and  perched not 2 metres to my left on a horizontal metal bar. She is chained by the ankle by a  short chain, having about a half-metre. two dimensions of freedom. 

She gnaws at her shit-crusted chain - a great escape on her mind. She paces back and forth on her perch.  She bobs up and down crying out loudly. She pecks at the small plastic cup that once had food for her, who knows how long ago. Small children and adults alike take their turns waving their hands at her, taunting her with food. I am transfixed. Furious to a point of violence, if only there was a singular person to whom I could direct this anger. 

To try to explain to them how horrible and barbaric these people are is futile. Just as trying to explain what's wrong with throwing your cigarette butts, plastic garbage, entire cigarette packs and diapers directly into the ocean. As their prisoner - their en-route sadistic entertainment - begins to call out loudly the Indonesians look at her annoyed. How dare she interrupt their soaps! 

I daydream of her cries being not just of pain and longing but a true bugle of war. Two hundred rabid parrots descend on the boat from all directions freeing their comrade and exacting revenge on her slave-masters. I picture them pecking out the eyes and sucking the ocular juices of these evil fucks. They don't come. And if they did nothing would stop them from liquidating my skull as well. I'm no different.

So I sit there watching this beautiful birds horrible existence. I fantasize about walking over ripping off her chain and sending her flying for the jungle, free. She'd have a hard time finding land from here, and if she did there's hardly any jungle left thanks to logging, mining and consumer-capitalisms new malls. I don't move I just watch. 

I stand at the sidelines of this culture. This is the same country where the night before a man I met in a minibus immediately invited into his house and fed me, giving me a bed for the night. The country where fathers hold their children in their arms while smoking unfiltered kreteks right in their faces. Where a few weeks previous an old woman was crying when she learned of where I was travelling to and how, so worried for me, a stranger she met minutes previous. A country so full of corruption and greed by a few, subjecting millions to a level of poverty this middle-class Canadian can't ever know. All I know how to do is observe. Apathy is almost necessary to keep mental health intact. 

When the boat docks fourteen hours later I leave her there. I move on to further islands and further boats and more things beautiful, disgusting, inspiring and infuriating.

.

Corpses and cigarettes.

The things I travel with affect the way I travel much less than things I travel without. I travel without a partner; this forces me to be responsible for curbing the inevitable loneliness by reaching out and talking to as many people as possible. I travel without a camera; this forces me to be more conscious and mindful at all times in order to better preserve memories. I travel without a Lonely Planet or similar holy book of the gap-year generation; this gives me the freedom of arriving in a completely foreign place with zero prior knowledge and no expectations.

Feeling in the mood for some companionship I find myself glad to be accompanied by a Dutchman by the name of Remy. We have spent the last two days going to towns near Makassar, Sulawesi to seeing waterfalls and butterflies and multiple hours of punishing public transport in between. The name we have heard almost every time we ask for a recommendation for our next destination is a region called Tana Toraja. Knowing nothing about the place we roll into the central town, Rantepao, around 9am after a surprising luxurious night bus from Makassar. We walk up and down a  few streets and all the hotels we find are either full or of a price range approximately equivalent of a weeks budget for us. We are now nervous that this region will turn out to be a tourist trap hell full of plaques with politically correct paragraphs about culture and history leading down a path to a gift shop.

While we walk around the town we more than once have to get way off the road to make way for motorbike gangs rumbling around on demufflered bikes each group with their own matching t-shirts, headbands, flags and even large flat bed trucks with dance parties going on on the back. Apparently this how they do political campaigns here. No TV ads promising hope and change just body painted young people seemingly intimidating their fellow citizens for votes.

Eventually the two of us are successful in finding a reasonably priced hotel with an available room. After setting down our bags the friendly owner serves us coffee and we start hashing out a plan. The plan is this: rent motorbikes down the street and head to a town called Palawa, as per the recommendation of the hotel proprietor. We find the man with the bikes and after a bit of haggling get him down to 55,000 Rupiah (about $6) a bike for the day. After buying fuel at the side of the road from glass bottles we are off. Following vague hand waving as direction and dealing with a few more mobile rallies/raves we are soon out of the town area and on the jungle road. Palawa, here we come!

Winding up and down switchbacks we enter and exit pools of mist going through arrogantly green valleys. The road is sporadically paved and we share it with manically driven buses, trucks, cars and fellow motorbikes along with buffalo and uniformed children walking to/from classes. We stop occasionally to absorb the view, eat junk food, pee and drink water and at one point to investigate a deftly spotted roadside cave which turns out to be small and housing no mysteries other than moss, cigarette butts and spiders.

After about an hour we realize we are not at all headed towards Palawa but to some place called Palopo, we missed the turnoff way back near town. A quick examination of a map shows Palopo is on the coast, "OK we're going to the sea" Palopo, here we come!

After another hour of high speed riding we are sweating, our hands and butts are vibration-sore and we are happy to be only 5 kilometers from the sea, a swim in cold water never sounded so good. As we reach the outskirts of a small town a trio of self-important looking men stick out their hands and wave us to the side of the road. Shit, cops! Their English skills are nonexistent but we know exactly whats going on. They have moneybags in their eyes and have just spotted  two fat wallets roll into town. Our crime is not wearing helmets - as if a country where 6 year-olds smoke and drive bikes much more erratically and faster than us is concerned with enforcing health and safety laws. After passing around our dictionaries they make it clear they want 50,000 Rupiah from each of us. Once they have our money (their booze and cigarettes) they become very friendly posing for pictures with us on their camera-phones. We head back to Rantepao, as lightning flashes all around and the rain starts as it does every evening - this'll have to be our swim for the day.

Next morning we opt not to rent bikes, it'll be bemos (vans with wood benches in the back) and hitch-hiking for us today. After many hours of sunburnt walking and a ride on the back of a flatbed we stumble into a small town in a valley to the confusion and amazement of the local children. We walk up a hillside to find many small structures on stilts with swooping roofs housing the dead, along with large boulders also carved out and housing corpses - cigarettes and drinks laid outside, y'know case they wake up with a mad-hankerin' for a coke and a smoke. The rest of the day is more sunburns, hitching and views of beautiful valleys.

Day 3, it's our last in the area so it's back to the motorbike way of getting around (different rental place, helmets this time). After further wrong directions we eventually find Londa, what to expect we are unsure. As we walk up a hill a morbid one is set for the day - bones. On the cliff above are hanging coffins made of rotting wood. Many of them have crumbled and fallen right beside the path with the dude inside sprawled out like an awkward skeleton puddle. More cigarettes and drinks laid beside them (to be fair if I awoke and my skull was on a hillside a few meters from a pile ribs, not clearl mine or my buddies, I'd probably need a cigarette or five-hundred). The top of the hill leads to a cave and you'd never guess what's inside...BODIES! Yeah, everything is corpses in this region. Corpses and cigarettes. Everywhere you look is bones and coffins often stacked haphazardly on top of each other. Another cave a few miles down the road is the same story with the added bonus of spiders the size of a chihuahua.

Returning to town, the land of further political rumbles, sleazy guides and van drivers and Police with well lined pockets it's hard to not picture some of the less lovable characters with their skulls teetering on a slimey cliff walk, spiders crawling through their eye-sockets.

Bako

A short motorboat ride down a river and down the ocean coast takes me to Bako National Park. I hop off the boat, rucksack in hand, and walk through the wild muddy surf to shore. Leaving behind my fellow passengers - matching Birkenstocks, Lonely Planet clutching young Spanish couple; middle aged German woman with "tribal" armband tattoo - standing helplessly aside as the boatman assumes bellhop duties bringing their bags to shore. I scope out the nearby grassy clearing serving as a campground, pitch my tent and head to the cantine for my day's first meal. I ask for a bowl of "air panas" - hot water - and object half heartedly in beyond-broken Malay at being charged half a ringgit.

I sit down for a gourmet affair of MSG instant noodles - lamb flavoured, although I wouldn't know if it wasn't indicated as such on the packaging. The European vacationers in my immediate vicinity whisper to each other in confusion and disgust as I violently hack open a can of sardines and mash the slimy, salty wonders into my noodle soup. Yum.

I slurp up the last of my champion hobo breakfast, sit back and open up a tattered, tape-bound edition of Jack Kerouac's Lonesome Traveler - still attracting stares amongst the polo shirt crowd (to be fair I am sporting a rather unwashed appearance, my hair resembling that of Albert Einstein if he had dabbled in crack cocaine). As I am reading of Jack's time as a railroad brake man (he too prides himself on improvised meals on the cheap) I become the latest victim of the jungles thievingest bastard - the macaque. I chase him down, retrieving my foodsack of noodles, beans, sardines and crackers whilst yelling specist insults I hope the scumbag understands

I sit back down and get through less than three pages of Mexican opium adventures before the skies opt for a recreation of the emotional climax of every Hollywood film - Crack-Boom! (thunder) followed my instantaneous sheets of tropical downpour. I run full-tilt back to the campground leaping tarp strings to get to my vulnerable mesh-bare tent under aqua-assault. Awkwardly, I fling the nylon fly over; desperately searching for what clips where,  which way's up etc. I am quickly rescued from this pickle by two guys who abandon the shelter of the concrete bathhouse and come to my aid.

Now under the concrete, tin roofed shelter, dripping like mad, I thank my two heroes. I learn they are here on a reprieve from Uni study in Kuching, with about thirty of their classmates. This will be their last night and I am invited to their concluding shindig - under the big blue tarp - taking place later that night.

The cats and dogs don't seem to have any intention of stopping anytime soon, the place is flooding. The students however seem unphased and their relaxed attitude towards this torrential assault leaves me mutually unfretting - if the water rises a few more feet, swimming to and fro may be a welcome change of pace.

In typical Malaysian fashion I am told to serve myself first and to take "more, more!" of everything. There are many dishes of chicken, fish, hotdogs, rice and so on. It is all very scrumptious, a welcome break from noodles, sardines and beans. While I finnish the best meal I've had in a while, thanking all of my new friends repeatedly, I am told the evening is not over. These are the aristocrats of the jungle and a multicourse meal can only be followed by one thing: theater.

My friends have broken into groups and written short plays for the evening. I am very humbled when I learn that between meeting them earlier in the day and now they have all translated their plays into English, just for my benefit - this stinky disheveled bum is their quest of honour! All the plays where hilarious start to finnish but there was one play that will always (graphicly) remain ingrained in my mind - the story of the circumcision of a proboscis monkey (why do plays written by young people invariably end up being phallic-centric?). After the skits have concluded I feel responsible to put myself up on the stage (the stage being standing in the ankle deep water, under the communal tarp area) and give a performance of my own. I make an attempt  of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah with my cheap, battered ukulele. I struggle to be heard over the ratatatat of the incessant rain and thoroughly butcher Leo's classic but the enthusiastic applause at the end tells me they atleast appreciate the effort.

This is an expertly engineered string and tarp structure (oh, Canada) but is nevertheless thoroughly inundated, we abandon her for the more reliable shelter of the bathhouse. Here we sit down, guitars materialize, someone comes with a big jug of coffee, chocolate cookies - this party clearly isn't over. Almost everyone here is of a different ethnicity and religion. Folk songs are sung perfectly with much gusto from the different indigenous cultures of the state (Kayan, Kenyah, Iban) alongside more familiar acoustic-guitar-camping songs. The evening draws to a close, I reluctantly tredge through the swamp to my tent.

My friends pack up and depart the next day and I am left with no companions but the critters. I have many more standoffs with the macaques, rather pleasant snort-conversations with the wild boars, staring competitions with the proboscis monkeys (also contemplating their outrageously goofy appearance) and perplexing a monitor lizard with some beatboxing (my first ever win in a rap battle).

I sit down amongst a cloud of a few billion blowflies communally making the sound of a large open grave and reopen my book. Jack is on a boat for Morocco and I am about to pack up my bog of a tent and embark a boat of my own - onward.

I am 3 and a half months into my trip, 111 days to be exact. In this time I have managed to lose socks, shirt, nail clippers, flashlight, battery charger, an iPod and a cellphone, among other things. Yeah, I'm hopeless. But now I find myself commiting what many would consider travelling heresy: I am travelling sans-camera. Why you ask? Well I was careless and left it on a boat.

It has been nearly two months since I last uploaded photos to Facebook. Since that time I have taken many pictures that I'm sure would inspire envy amongst facebook browsers. Pictures of myself with arms around the many Malaysian friends I've made,  pictures of heart-wrenchingly gorgeous sunsets over the ocean, over the jungle, taken from boats and buildings, and rivers....lots of goddamn pretty sunsets, pictures of animals in the wild (oran utans, civits, crocodiles, many kinds of monkeys, monitor lizards.....) and so on. These pictures will never make it to facebook, you won't see them. Further, I do not plan on replacing my camera, so you will not see the places I will go in the coming months.

Travelling without a camera may sound like going fishing without a rod or net, why go out to sea and come back without anything tangible? Because some people like the waves, the quiet. Travelling is in and of itself an intangible act. It goes against my utilitarian minded culture and trying to capture the reality of an environment within 8 megapixels is really a laughable waste of time. I could be using that time talking to people, eating food or just properly appreciating a sunset instead of fiddeling with the shutter settings. Even if I went out and bought the most expensive SLR that sunset, that moment will always be incommunicable. You do not smell the fish market a few metres away, you do not feel the humid evening air you are not here and no camera can bring you.

So I am wrapping up my time in Malaysian Borneo and will be crossing down into the Indonesian state of Kalimantan in a week or two. From there I am, as always, completely unsure of where I will go although I do wish to eventually get to the recently seperated nation of East Timor. I have started this Blog as a means to compensate for no longer having pictures. I hope to update here with the odd entry, nothing too regular and certainly not any award winning writing. Just trying to capture a little bit of the essence of my chosen environment.

For now I am going to go investigate the prospects of getting a night bus to the town of Kuching. Which in Malay directly translates to Cat. Yup, a town called cat.