Monkey for Breakfast

Chapter 12
Monkey for Breakfast

If one wanted to be quite precise, we would be staying not in the jungle but in the tropical rainforest. The word jungle, derived from the Sanskrit word jangala, refers to thick, impenetrable vegetation. Virgin rainforest isn’t really like that. With only about ten percent of the available sunlight penetrating the canopy, the forest floor takes on the ambiance of a softly lit room. One can usually walk through such a forest relatively easily with only occasional use of the parang necessary. Along its edges or in a spot where a massive emergent tree has fallen, and created a so-called light-gap, the plant growth can be incredibly dense and difficult however. Thus it was that the early explorers, often traveling upon a river and viewing the forest along its edges, perceived the woodland as dense and impassable.
We left Dohdong’s village in late morning. The group included Doug, myself, Dohdong, and his friends Oha and Selopang. Our Temuan companions carried scant supplies for an overnight. The indispensable parang, blowpipe, and dart quiver constituted their gear. Their village sat in a broad clearing at the foot of the mountains bordering the Malaysian states of Selangor and Negri Sembilan. In such a cleared area, the intensity of the sun this close to the equator must be experienced to be believed. Lying in the sun to get a nice tan isn’t an option here. One might as well climb into an oven and shut the door. Luckily, we were soon within the fringes of the forest and its shade provided some relief. Nevertheless, the temperature hovered around 95o F and the humidity approached one hundred percent as we moved farther into the forest. In the tropical rainforest, one becomes accustomed to being wet all the time. Given the high humidity, there just isn’t any place for the sweat to go. It simply soaks one’s clothes and then continues to reside upon every square inch of skin surface.
There are other factors which, we learned, make a trek in the tropical rainforest a little more challenging than a stroll through the temperate forests of home. For example, before I arrived in Malaysia, I had not been aware that there were leeches which lived on land. In SE Asia, they are abundant. Just as a summer walk in the Midwestern United States brings the surety of mosquitoes, a hike in the Malaysian rainforest means you will have terrestrial leeches somewhere on your anatomy. I recall once, while on a snake-collecting hunt, pausing for a rest and glancing down to see leeches simultaneously climbing up each pant leg and another making a beeline for my hand via the shaft of my snake-stick. Spencer Chapman, a colonel in the British army during WWII, spent three years living in the Malayan jungle while waging guerilla warfare against the Japanese. He, of course, also had his run-ins with the infamous terrestrial leech. In his book, The Jungle is Neutral, Chapman describes undressing to bath in a stream after a long march. He found that he had been bitten repeatedly around his waist and neck. With his trousers tucked into his boots, the leeches had simply climbed until they found the first available flesh. So subtle is the bite of these little annelids, he didn’t even realize he had been attacked.
An Australian friend once regaled us with the story of a camping experience in northern Queensland. He awoke to find his lower lip feeling a bit puffy. Unhappily, during the night, a leech had crawled into his mouth and attached itself to his gum. Charming little creatures they are.