Assaults on the senses
I find relying on senses other than sight quite challenging! But being embroiled in the rainforest is better experienced using every sense available
I’m a visual person.... I was brought up immersed in natural history and inherited an innate ability to dedicate time out to observe. As far as I can remember, it was a fascination, almost frustration, for what I couldn’t see which led me wherever to water: to spend as much time on it, in it... and trying to haul its denizens out of it. That film of reflection was a challenge to me. Now I work with it.... I piece together my science interests often stemming from an observation in the field or in the lab. I’m not sure what I would do without the sense of sight and cannot imagine a worse non-life threatening injury than to damage my eyes.
A pre-dawn mist and a dense canopy of a million leaves, coupled to the fact that it was 0430 and hence not many right-minded souls were contemplating opening their eyelids (let alone using the contents) meant I was effectively blind. To turn on a headtorch would have helped of course. But that would have attracted hordes of harmless dancing mayflies which were so focussed on sex en masse in the ‘sun’ that they clouded the vision and coated the throat. Or worse, the ire of a large, nocturnal wasp with a rapier sting, so quick and vicious that one could draw blood and be gone before you could slap.
I’d sloshed my way along the edge of the river in darkness then, oblivious to other sounds. The water was surprisingly cool and clinging, running down my legs after the pools.... a clean and fresh smell reminding me I was awake.
Clambering up the first ten steps into the forest however, every sense told me I was in a different, claustrophobic place. The mist oppressively held close by enormous trunks carried the mustiness of dank decomposition.... mouldy leaves, and an occasional whiff of something sweet, something fruity. All around, drops of condensation from the canopy way above plopped deadened onto the already dampened leaf litter. Amorous katydids stridulated an incessant song, filling the gaps in my head.
I tried to swing into a rhythm, guessing where the next step might be of the six hundred and ninety-odd wooden planks still above me. Of course, they were not regular.... I was in a rainforest ascending treacherous terrain after all and this was the only nod to the needs of modern tourism. Hence, my feet slipped and shuffled on the slimy surfaces, and my shins took the brunt occasionally. Plus I was never alone. Three centimetre-long wood ants were fiercely protective of the handrail that they used as a superhighway, and were quick to remind me I was a visitor by nipping and scurrying away. Damp already from the river, I was soon sweating heavily.
On topping the ridge some 300m above the river, I felt my way into the aluminium frame, relieved briefly by the coolness of the metal and a tang transferred by the humidity to the back of my throat. It was as if I had licked it... I can assure you I hadn’t! Rung after rung, at least regular now. My senses succumbed to the sound of my feet tramping across aluminium ladders and plates, unable to prevent the clatter of ascending inside a scaffolding tower to emerge with the emergents at the canopy crown. The film of sweat and grime on my face alerted me to air movement, and the mustiness of the forest floor was gone.
There was nothing around me in the void: I knew it yet I could not see. A slight breeze was fresh and cool and fragrant and tugged at leaves somewhere out there and played across my skin telling me that it had come from afar. My hearing opened up.... no drips, no ringing in my ears.... but somewhere was the bubbling wup-whooping of a gibbon troop.... and another.... and another.
I spun around trying to get my bearings as the dull buzzing of uncountable insects began to rise and swell toward me.... but not for me, for the dawn, for the sun. I could just pick out a mercurial strip against an undulating horizon of blackened silhouette trees. A bat fluttered past and hornbills cranked up a croaking greeting; leafbirds and broadbills twittered and rustled the foliage. Then a pink glow.... then a roaring forge of a furnace in orange and gold, and my sight was dominant again.
The view from a canopy walkway is breathtaking wherever, I imagine, and relatively easy to convey, but don’t overlook your other senses in getting you up there.
For more pics of Bruneian beasties check out some of my galleries from former trips
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