ALIVE TO TELL THE TALES
THERE’S OFTEN A VERY FINE LINE BETWEEN ADVENTURE AND PERIL
For those who choose to travel beyond the familiar and pre-planned, the world provides, on occasion, glimpses of things so bizarre or so calamitous that the events are lodged in memory forever. You don’t forget — at least I don’t! — those days that you didn’t die.
The subtropical Churia Hills of Nepal’s Terai region drop down to near-impenetrable elephant grass along the Narayani River. It is here that three friends and I rented two elephants and a pair of mahout drivers and spotters for a day spent searching for wildlife, especially — we hoped — the near-extinct one-horned Asian rhinos. At that time, there were only 95 in the world.
Atop the elephant, the mahout sat astride the beast’s neck, issuing commands. Behind him, along with my British friend Andrew, I rode on some cargo netting. The spotter stood astern, maintaining his balance with a taut length of rope. Our two female companions rode the bigger, tusked male.
When, at last, we came upon a female rhino and its child in the sun-dappled forest bordering the river, their appearance came as an epiphany. For a moment, we were thrilled. So close. So rare. It didn’t occur to me to also think: so dangerous!
Without warning, the mother charged the elephant I was riding. The baby rhino followed.
In a second, the bucolic scene erupted into chaos. The mahout began shouting for help. The elephant began trumpeting in fright and took off, its speed increasing with each passing second, and me and my companions atop a 5,000-kilogram, three-metrehigh, out-of-control cannonball.
Small trees, bushes, low-hanging branches suddenly meant nothing to the elephant. I glanced behind. The rhino had nearly caught up, its thrusting horn five metres from a view most veterinarian proctologists might cherish.
I briefly allowed myself the thought that, as a way of dying, this would be unique, falling off a fleeing elephant into the path of an angry rhino.
Andrew shouted, “Branch!” and I turned just in time to see a low-hanging limb coming at my head. I clung, flattened to the cargo net as he announced the arrival of each new, low-hanging branch, and the elephant continued its bazooka trajectory through the forest with the rhinos close behind.
Then, the other elephant — having circled ahead — appeared, trumpeting, charging toward us and the pursuing rhinos. We veered right and the mother rhino caught its first glimpse of a massive male elephant with ears outspread and curving tusks lowered, threatening to impale the animal. It veered left, followed by its baby. My epitaph, I reluctantly realized, would be mundane. No death-by-rhino. For that, I was not unhappy.
JAGA! JAGA!
The Borneo jungle is as enigmatic as quantum physics. Arboreal ferns and celadon-coloured bromeliads crowd the branches of 60 metre-high hardwoods, some with buttresses like gothic cathedrals.
Beneath the trees, the humidity is oppressive; the feeling claustrophobic. Anything is possible. It is at the end of an hour’s hike into Sarawak’s remote Gunung Mulu National Park that I reach the massive caves I’d heard rumours about decades before as a young Peace Corps volunteer in Borneo.
It is at the entrance to humungous Deer Cave that the words spoken by an exiting park ranger to my erstwhile guide James gives pause.
“Big snake in there,” the ranger says. “Jaga! Jaga!”
My aging brain has forgotten many local words, but not these: Jaga! Jaga! It means “Be careful!” I look at James and he looks reassuringly at me, but I notice his flashlight sweeps the cave’s dim path with increased enthusiasm.
“What kind of snake?” I ask. He tells me it would likely be a cave racer. To comfort me, he tells me it is small, only two metres. To doubly comfort me, he adds it is slow-moving and its bite produces cramps and paralysis, but certainly not death. I am not comforted.
I know the droppings from the millions of bats above my head have collected neck-deep on the cave floor and, were I forced to flee a snake, I’d have to consider the pudding-like consistency of the guano and the millions of cockroaches that swarm the droppings’ surface at either edge of the raised path.
The cave’s scorpions, James had said earlier, were poisonous, but not deadly. Ditto the cave’s centipedes. The cave’s earwigs, which lick sweat off the bats suspended far above, are merely an annoyance when they fall on visitors’ heads.
Millions of bats, thousands of years of guano, earwigs, cockroaches, scorpions, centipedes, and poisonous black snakes, all amid the cave’s slimy, funereal darkness: Welcome to my nightmare!