It’s not the first time I’ve peed in a forest, but it is the first time I’ve
had to aim over the edge of a hammock, 180ft up. Then again, suspended
between two branches, lying in darkness at the top of the tallest rainforest
on earth, this is no ordinary holiday.
I’ve come to the Danum Valley in Sabah, northern Borneo, to test a trip so new
— or probably just so staggeringly implausible — that no journalist has ever
attempted it before. I’m going to spend the night at the top of a tree
that’s more than 50ft higher than Nelson’s Column. I’m told leaf monkeys
sometimes swing by to see what the hell’s going on. Gibbons howl from the
neighbouring trees. “And if an orang-utan climbs up to say hello?” I jest.
“You come down,” the climbing guide James Aldred tells me with ominous
gravity. “Fast.”
It’s comforting to know that James has handled cargo considerably more
precious than me. Formerly an industrial climber, now the director of a
company training scientists, television crews — and tourists — to access
forest canopies, James has helped David Attenborough to get within
camera-shot of gibbons, honeybees and howler monkeys. And when I say helped,
I mean hauled. If he can get an 80-year-old up into the canopy, I reckon he
can do the same for me.
The problem is, it’s not as easy as television makes it look. We start off
with what James describes as a little “practice climb”: 100ft up to a
viewing platform on a tree just next to the one with the hammocks on it.
I’ve climbed sea stacks in Scotland, frozen waterfalls in France: I’m
already disappointed with how easy this is going to be. Still, at least
James will be impressed.
Three minutes later, I am slumped against the trunk, a cocktail of sweat and
Boots Repel extra-strength bug spray busily bathing my eyeballs. A blister
has formed on my palm. I am utterly, shockingly, spent. James hangs silently
just above, determinedly checking his ropes, karabiners — anything that
stops him having to look me in the eye. It’s hard to tell if he’s impressed.
I’m guessing not.
Technically, it’s a cakewalk: slide the ascender — or grippy handle thing to
anyone who doesn’t earn a living cleaning skyscrapers — up the fixed rope
attached to a branch at the top of the tree, step up on the footloop, and
slowly inch your way up. Okay, it’s a big old cake — 220ft of vine-covered
dipterocarp, to be precise — but it doesn’t take a Tenzing to master the
theory.
It’s not the theory that’s the problem. It’s the practice. More specifically,
it’s the belly — my belly. In the gym, my belly is a thing of modest beauty.
It’s no Brad Pitt, but it doesn’t mind a sit-up or 20. It’s a Robbie
Williams of a belly, circa 2005. Padded but firm. A three-pack, perhaps. Out
here, though, in this sauna heat, faced with 180ft of obdurate, rain-soaked
rope that refuses to slide through the teeth of my safety device without a
violent, strength-sapping tug, my belly isn’t so much Robbie Williams as
Robbie Coltrane. Flaccid, fleshy, it fancies a cold beer and a lie-down.
Eventually — and by “eventually”, I mean stopping literally every three feet
of the way to gasp and wonder why I’m not on a beach holiday in the
Caribbean — I reach the platform and flop on. Rainwater is pooled in one
corner. A film of damp, slimy mud covers everywhere else. I lie down and
stretch out as if it’s a deckchair at Sandy Lane.
Sound like £3,050 worth of holiday fun to you? Believe me, by the time you’ve
got your breath back, it will. Sitting up, looking out over the canopy, I
have never felt so utterly drenched in life before. The view isn’t huge —
maybe just 15 miles to a forested ridge to the west — but it is dizzyingly
dense, uninterruptedly green, an ocean of leaves and branches, trunks and
orchids as far as the eye can see. And this goes on for nearly 4,000 square
miles. James frets for a bit that we’re not seeing more flying squirrels and
gibbons, orang-utans and hornbills, but, honestly, I don’t care. There are
125 types of mammal in this forest, 275 kinds of bird. Elephants, leopards,
possibly even rhinos. But 100ft up, cut adrift on this ocean of green, it’s
not about the animals, it’s about the place — it’s about the sheer thrilling
lunacy of climbing a 220ft tree in Borneo, and sitting in the branches as
the sun goes down.
“You up for the hammocks tonight, then?” James asks, craning his neck and
wincing towards the sky. My thighs feel drained. My hands feel as if someone
has been at them with a bicycle pump. “Can’t wait,” I say, and if my quads
are begging me to shut up, my elated heart is cartwheeling with joy.
THE GOOD NEWS, if you’re planning to follow in my footloops, is that this trip
normally allows four days of low-level tree-climbing training and
sinew-strengthening hikes before you get to the hammock. Knocking it off on
the first night is an option for time-strapped travel writers alone.
When you’re not aloft, your home for the week is Danum Valley Research Centre.
Pampering addicts might want to look away now. Seven-star this is not — in
fact, rooms don’t even have hot water, let alone spa baths and widescreen
plasma televisions. However, if they were handing out gongs for hotel
clientele, Danum Valley Field Centre would win “Most Inspiring” every time.
Otherwise off-limits to tourists, the centre — a Crusoe-esque
stilts-and-timber outpost that only my cruellest self might say had a hint
of a forest Pontins about it — is crawling with pleasingly mad professors
and bandana’d university research students locked in earnest debate about
aspleniums and atlas moths.
And, frankly, a bit of inspiration won’t go amiss. Knowing you’ll be heading
out at 1am to climb a 200ft tree is exhilarating, all right, but it’s not
without menace.
“Ready?” asks James. “As I’ll ever be,” I reply.
Amazingly, climbing this time is almost disappointingly easy. The ropes on
this tree are newer, drier, friendlier — altogether less hellbent on making
me want to cry than the snag-happy torturers from earlier on. “Nearly
there,” announces James after only about 15 painless minutes. I reach the
hammock and slide in. I almost want to have another go.
Ten minutes later, I’m beginning to wish it had taken us slightly longer.
“Some people take a couple of hours to get up,” James tells me from his
hammock, 20-odd feet above. Staring out into the darkness, certain that no
amount of Mogadon could coax me to sleep in the four damp, sunless hours
until dawn, I’m beginning to wonder if taking a couple of hours to get up
might have been a better option. I look at my watch: 2.11am. I fidget about,
try to get comfy, let a little rope out from my anchor above, peer down by
head torch into the black, inscrutable chasm below. Lily Allen’s Smile pops
naggingly into my head. The phrase “long, dark night of the soul” trails in
its wake. I look at my watch: 2.13am.
Slowly though, inexorably, I tune out of myself and into the rainforest. An
argus pheasant wails to the west, a twig snaps under the weight of something
close by, and everywhere, as if from every leaf and branch in the forest,
frogs croak, squeak and pipe like dripping, chiming rain. It’s a Sounds of
the Rainforest CD, only I’m in the middle of it, peering with my ears,
grinning in the darkness, silently, deafeningly alive. Forget the Mogadon;
you wouldn’t want to sleep through this even if you could.
Or, should I say, even if your bladder weren’t screaming for help. I’m not
sure exactly what time it is when I eventually yield to its pleading —
readers of a tender disposition should note that special containers are
normally provided, I just forgot mine — but I do remember the chuckles it garners
from James’s hammock. I even remember feeling quite grateful: frogs and
pheasants are weird, wonderful company for a night, but a bit of small-hours
banter makes for some welcome fun. It is good, too, to know that James is
awake. This much magic just cannot be borne alone.
In fact, it is only dawn that shuts us both up. As darkness lifts, clouds of
mist hang in the valley below and gibbons whoop like lonely whales on the
sea of trees. Hornbills cry nearby, cicadas fire up all around. It’s an
awesome, overwhelming end to the night, tempered only by an almost
unbearable yearning for my family to be here alongside me. At least we
haven’t seen any primates, I think. And then, as the veil of mist lifts,
something stirs from its nest in the top of a nearby tree. It is an
orang-utan. There are one or two other places I’m certain I’ll take the kids
once they’re older, but sitting there, 180ft up in the tallest rainforest on
earth, watching an orang-utan roll out of bed, I can’t think of anywhere
better than this.
Getting there: Discovery Initiatives (01285 643333, www.discoveryinitiatives.co.uk
) has nine nights, full-board, for £3,050, including flights with Malaysian
Airlines from Heathrow to Lahad Datu, via Kuala Lumpur and Kota Kinabalu,
all transfers, guiding and activities. A portion of that price funds a
Malaysian scientist at Danum. For more information, visit www.tourism.gov.my
.
Jeremy Lazell was a guest of Discovery Initiatives, Canopy Access and Tourism
Malaysia
