If I told you things I did before

It’s funny what our first thoughts are in tragedy.

The cameras! Don’t let the cameras fall out of our boat! — these were mine some weeks ago, halfway across the world in the middle of a river where our perahu had stalled after hitting a bunch of rocks.

About ten thousand bucks worth of equipment, threatening to tip out of our skinny wooden perahu. Six in the morning, it’s pouring, and we’re in the middle of the Skrang river in Western Borneo.

We’re not even halfway through our journey.

While raincoats may make sense elsewhere, in this part of the world, on this morning — they’re just hapless sheets of yellow plastic breaking the visual monotony of mist and forest. I turn around to the girl behind me; she’s grinning and shovelling water out of the boat. I want to high-five her but she’s too far away.

Our two boatmen, still barely sober, have climbed out and by now are standing waist deep in the river. In between shouting at each other in Iban, they’re trying to force the perahu (all ten-feet-long, two-feet-wide of it) off the rocks and back into the Skrang’s downstream current.

It’s one of those moments where you stop and think: isn’t life supposed to be somewhere else?

The seven days before hadn’t been any less of a gamble. Like any good idea, this one began with one of those mindless late night chats. I’d told the Asia-lover about the Gawai festival in Sarawak. Spirit worship, paganism, headhunters, tattoos. A part of my country I’d never been to; the part of my country she hadn’t seen since she was six and on a bumpy bus ride, trying to keep her tooth from falling out.

(We had to go, of course).

And we did. We planned a trip that had no way of working out. Where we were going, who we’d meet, and what any of it would be about were imaginary details we’d sorted out in our heads.

Reality, as it happened, took to the plans we never really made. Two hours by plane, four by road, and three down the Skrang river. Lazy mornings that began at 8AM with a plate of rice and a shot of (warm) home-brewed alcohol. Hot afternoons where we drank some more, and got talked into running races with the village boys (crushing loss there). Nights in a longhouse with 27 other families, with baths in the river and animal slaughters in between.

When the week was up, I’d just about gotten used to the idea of barmy booze and public nudity. That I would go back to this other soulless, rush-hour existence suddenly seemed a terribly depressing prospect. The placid ride down the Skrang that morning wouldn’t convince me otherwise.

Until we hit those rocks. Until I found myself clenching the sides of the perahu so hard that my knuckles turned white. Until we finally reached the riverbank in one piece, where I lit a victory cigarette and handed it to the laughing boatman, who took a long, relieved drag while the soggy stick of nicotine trembled violently between his fingers.

Some days life is elsewhere. That quiet, throbbing morning on the Skrang, it was right there, and then.

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