The average temperature during the Borneo shoot was 35 degrees centigrade, although on two days it got as high as 40 degrees and the hottest day was 41 degrees. I know this, because I had a thermometer with me in my survival kit.

Poisonous scorpions and centipedes are a part of life in Borneo and one of the reasons, other than the ever-present risk of flooding during the rainy season, that the Iban longhouses are built on stilts above the ground. One afternoon during the shoot as the crew was lounging about the longhouse after lunch, a black scorpion the size of a small lobster tumbled out of the rafters and fell just a few feet from the crew. Danah, one of our Iban guides killed it quickly, but it took several whacks on an inch thick pole to finish it off. Danah said they killed all the scorpions around the longhouse as their stings were very dangerous to the children and old people.

One day while out hiking up to a series of waterfalls I brushed up against a log and was instantly covered with hundreds and hundreds of red fire ants. I stripped off my clothes as quickly as possible, leaping up and down like a cat on a hot tin roof. Fortunately I was close enough to the stream to jump in. I ended up with hundreds of bites that quickly turned into a rash of hives that covered all of my right arm, upper body and back. Our Iban guides quickly headed me the 10 kilometres back to the longhouse at Emperan as my right arm went completely numb and I began to feel the effects, getting progressively more woozy. The old women at Emperan knew exactly what to do. They stripped off my shirt and washed me done with tuak, the potent local rice wine. Then they rubbed some kind of oil on me, which I had no idea what it was. But within minutes I began to feel better and within hours the hives and rash were gone.

Every longhouse that Thomas Lockhart and I travelled to along the Skrang was convinced that we must be WWF wrestlers. Watching wrestling on satellite TV is one of the favorite pastimes of the Iban and the whole longhouse will crowd together around the television set that gets it's electricity from a generator. The Iban will cheer wildly for their favorite wrestlers and boo and hiss at the villains! -- In fact, no matter how vociferously Thomas and I denied it, the Iban were convinced, in part because of our immense size in comparison to the average Iban, long hair and tattoos, that we must be wrestlers. They were quite disappointed when they finally accepted that Tom and I were not wrestlers. But they were even MORE disappointed to learn that wrestling was more entertainment than anything else. They wanted it to be fact and not fiction!

Because we were so much larger than most of the Iban, some of our hosts were reluctant to let us sit on their furniture because they were afraid we would break it!

On one of our days of shooting on the Skrang River, our Iban boat guides told us that no white men had been this far upriver in at least fifty years, which reminded just how remote our location was.

The Iban love their hunting dogs, but the dogs are left largely to fend for themselves. Once a day the dogs scramble madly to get their share of the leftover rice that the Iban dish out to them!

Some of the youngest children, under the age of six, who were not yet old enough to have travelled to the city, had to be told by their parents that the white men who had come to visit the longhouse were not ghosts or spirits who had come to eat them! But it explained why some of the children burst into tears and ran away crying when they saw us. As Eddie explained, "You're a very scary looking man, Vince!"

One night at three in the morning I had to answer the call of nature. The Longhouse at Lalang has indoor and out door plumbing. Wanting to be a good guest I elected to venture outside in the pitch black of night. Despite a full moon and the flickering light of glow-flies, I couldn't see my hand in front of my face. I of course forgot that the longhouse was sitting on stilts at least eight feet off the ground. When one foot ventured out into space and found nothing there, I made like a Romanian gymnast and did a one and a half gainer to the ground. Amazingly I actually landed on my feet, which sounds great until you realize they were covered with blisters and sun burnt from the day before. I bit down on the knuckles of one hand to keep from screaming like a school-girl and waking the entire longhouse.

I clambered back up the stairs, which is a whimsical description of a long log with notches cut into it. Of course it was slick with dew. My next fear was that once I assumed the position, ie, the longhouse squat, I'd never be able to get out of it and I'd be discovered in the morning by the grandmother who was worried about whether or not I was going to crush her house. She had nothing to worry about yet. So far it was the House 2, Vince 0. Fortunately I made it back to bed, or more accurately, my allocated spot on the floor. I could see that my bruises would soon have bruises.

The Iban will go to great lengths not to offend anyone or anything. If something bad happens to you, it must be because of something you have said or done. Their culture is full of elaborate rituals to appease and placate the spirits that surround them. Everything that happens in their world, happens for a reason. For example, the night before I had asked Ed where it was acceptable to commune with nature. He looked around and then asked what my belief system was. When in Rome... So Ed told me I could commune anywhere I wanted as long as I asked the forest first. I said I would be happy to, and would a tree be ok? An aghast Ed said that was the last place I should go. Intrigued I asked why? Ed patiently explained that the jungle was filled with spirits, many of them invisible to us. You asked the forest permission to pee in order to give the spirits an opportunity to move. Otherwise you might pee on a spirit that was invisible and sitting right in front of you and that was pretty much tantamount to the ultimate insult.

The torrential rains in Borneo can play havoc with the water levels of the rivers, causing them rise by many meters and surge over their banks within an astonishingly short period of time. As we struggled our way through one rapid, the stern of the long boat comes out of the water and the prop has no bite. We lose all forward thrust in the swift current. In an instant we are turned sideways and going backwards through the rapids. Sideways, I hasten to add. We only had six inches of freeboard to begin with and as the boat begins to tip over, the force of the water hitting it full on the side begins to drive it under and water pours over the down-current side. The boat driver is shouting orders in Iban. Thomas and I do not speak Iban. But we understand water pouring over the side. We scramble to the other side of the boat. Suddenly, the prop is back in the water and screaming at full throttle. We get pointed back up river and on our way.

The trip down river was somehow anti-climatic. I felt saddened that we were leaving. Riding with the current we moved at nearly twice the speed we had come up river. As we neared the spot where we had nearly capsized before, the boat driver called out loudly. "Bad Omen!" "Keep Silent!" Thomas looked around in bewilderment and called out loudly, "Where, where?" Edward David shushed Tom and we ran the spot in silence. Later Tom, who has competed around the world as a top pistol shot and as a result is slightly hard of hearing in one ear, confessed that he hadn't heard what the boat driver was saying. Tom thought he was saying, "Old Man, Beside Us!" Tom looked around in vain for an old man on the bank of the river to photograph... It turned out that the spot where we had nearly capsized had already claimed three boats and drowned two people already that year... 

Vince Hemingson
The Vanishing Tattoo
February, 2003