Popagandhi

5 am, this morning. I don’t know how, but I’m in Amsterdam. Stepping out of a KLM plane at Schipol to be exact, half an hour ahead of schedule. If I feel dead, I have good reason to be.

5 am, yesterday. I’m leaving a longhouse called Entalau, where I’ve been for the past couple of days as a guest of the respected Iban chief, Penghulu Legan. His son is pretty drunk and also pretty responsible for taking us out of the jungle and back into civilization. I’m walking down a little hill to the river — the same river where I’ve photographed a pig slaughter, and washed my hair in, not two hours after — with my backpack and my gear bag. I step over three boats to get to ours. At the last one, as I’m putting my right foot into our boat, my left foot and most of me nearly doesn’t make it: the boat holding the rest of me starts drifting apart. For a second there I had to make some snap decisions. The logical process: can I do a split? No. Do I want to? Not really. What do I have to lose, other than my life, and my ass? All my gear, to the bottom of the river Skrang. An El Bulli reservation halfway across the world to get to. Proceed to next step: grab the person to my right, and the anak penghulu to my left.

I make it.

5.45 am, yesterday. I have a borrowed windbreaker on, and we’re going at the nautical equivalent of 200 km/h, or what feels like it. I have a car waiting for me 3 hours downstream, at Murat, to take me to the Kuching airport where I have a flight to jump on. Hujan (Malay for rain), I’ve learned recently, isn’t only the name of a good up-and-coming Malaysian rock band, but also a word you don’t want to hear when you’re sitting one-in-a-file on a narrow sampan, cutting through the river Skrang like a speed maniac with 2 hours to go.

6.15 am, yesterday. I am sitting at the back of said narrow sampan, my feet in a feet of water. Holding on furiously to my raincoat.

There are two kinds of people in the world: water people, and people who don’t get water. I belong to the latter. In school, the first group were the people who went for swimming practice everyday; I watched them thinking they belonged to some parallel universe, that the moment they dipped their heads underwater they ceased to belong to the same plane of existence as mine. At 22 and in the midst of a fledgling career in the backwaters of Asia, I’m grabbing my knees in a tiny sampan in the middle of nowhere, thinking every time I see these waves cutting towards us furiously, I might die — or worse, lose my cameras.

But Liman was the sort of man who gets water, since he probably grew up with it. As he’s cutting through the river Skrang, navigating our little boat like a champ (wearing only a singlet too, in the crazy rain), I decide it’s time I do something to help, or at least try to.

6.30 am, yesterday. I find myself grabbing my knees, in a windbreaker AND a raincoat. My left hand is holding on to my raincoat to make sure the cheap yellow cloth pretending to be a raincoat does its job instead of flying off — and my right? I’m holding what was once a jerry can containing Monsanto fertilizers, now chopped off in parts to form a clever device with a shovelling component. I spend the next hour like that: in a windbreaker, a raincoat, holding on to my pants, bailing water out of a sampan, while it’s raining dogs and probably pigs and chickens too.

Langah batu. Predictably, we had to hit some rocks. I continue shovelling water out of the sampan to take my mind off the idea of impending death.

When we finally make it off the rocks, without capsizing or losing anything or any of its occupants, I only have two thoughts: I don’t have travel insurance, and the crazy woman in front of me lighting a cigarette under a raincoat while we’re going at these speeds downstream, so reads my mind. That this should so be an ad for an insurance company, and the B-rolls could be an ad for Dunhill.

7.20 am, yesterday. I’m in Murat, behind a little shack (maggi + telur for RM 2.20), peeing and changing in the open, with my love. I have never peed so much in the open before, up until now. I never knew it could be a social activity either.

7 pm, yesterday. “Home”, in Kuala Lumpur. My clothes are in the dryer, and I still have to pack my Europe backpack. At dinner I wanted nothing more than fish (I’ve had sup babi and fried babi from the same pig for the week), and a cold beer. I’ve had more warm, cheap beer this week than I have had say, grapefruit juice in my entire life. And fallen asleep to more Indonesian dramas in a room with more than 10 people three nights more than I thought should be the norm.

What a wonderful, wonderful week. Some of it weird, but mostly wonderful. Kuching was a blast; I loved everyone we met there; Lalang was a shithole of a village, and Betong was a creepy little town. Entalau, I think, grew on me; a small part of me got used to the idea of living in a longhouse, sleeping on a tilam in front of a TV broadcasting Astro Aruna endlessly, and taking my showers in the river with you and half the village (and a dead pig). We were there for the Gawai festival, which only means we finally saw through a random conversation from some months ago (”I want to go to East Malaysia.” “Let’s go to Gawai!”), and also that too much alcohol was shed in the process. A free flow of free warm beer, tuak (a locally brewed rice wine), langkau (possibly lethal moonshine) from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to sleep. I never thought I’d live to see the day when I would cry from misery in being made to drink alcohol, but I found it.

9 am, this morning. I’m in Barcelona finally, after a mad Entalau- Murat- Kuching- Kuala Lumpur- Amsterdam- Barcelona connection in two days. I’m about to drop dead, but there’s work that needs to be done, pictures that need to be edited, stories to write, and a dinner to make.