…
The Heart Of Green Darkness
where its
Two Legs Bad
Twenty-Eight Wheels Better
...
...
i got a story...
of how i woke up to find myself in green hell
to see, from roads shown on no maps, an eco-dystopia
where the rain-forest has been annihilated
where the jungle is just plain gone
shorn, torn, burnt
ripped away
is erased and replaced
...
where the parallaxes of palm trunks run far into blackness
...
where verges are ash
...
where black brown trees are skeletal
...
where the road’s horizon is clouds of dust
...
where the wayside greens are all muted by grey
...
where beauty is obliterated
...
maps where the roads aren’t
...
so this is the tale of
my inadvertent voyage into
the heart of a darkness
where
the green has turned grey and brown and black
and the white of ash
...
...
where the Twenty-Eight Wheelers are the top of this battered ecosystem
are rulers of this depleted biosphere
where two legs is bad
four wheels is bad
six wheels is bad
but twenty-eight wheels is good good good
...
...
for its
the Palm Tree plantations of Kalimantan
Indonesian Borneo
where, dozing in the backseat of my friendly lift
i expected to wake into frustration
from the low speed, again
on the terrible roads, again
on the long journey, again
from Melak to Samarinda
...
so i was surprised to open bleary eyes
and see something else entirely
an extreme of environmental devastation
was bewildered at finding myself in
what i immediately knew to be
a major node of our global ecological ruination
...
...
where all this is
deep in the apparent jungle
...
yet its not jungle
its ex-jungle
and what i can see is
groves and groves of palms
planted in ordered rows
and rows
and rows
in groves
and groves
for miles
and miles
...
breaking into open landscapes of shorn brown earth
planted with young palm
stretching over ravaged vistas
...
...
a paradise, denuded
an infinite, reduced to squares
a numberless, numbered
an uncountable, accounted
a rainbow, drabbed
a forever, finished
...
...
one of the world’s greatest manmade eco-horrors
before my half-woken eyes
on a wholly different road to the
expected
...
so i get out my iffy tablet to check on maps.me
and...
we’ve gone an entirely different way
have, while i slept
somehow crossed the Mahakam
by bridge not ferry
somewhere near Melak
and are in it
the agro-industrial lands
of coal and palm...
...
where i’ve awoken
crick-necked in the back seat
to find myself not on the Melak-Samarinda road
but somewhere east of Melak
and north-west of Pela and Kota Bangun
on roads not shown on Maps.me
nor, quickly cross-checking, by GoogleMaps
...
so i’m in a vast plantation forest
east of a village called Abit on the map
a place which might or not be actually be there
....
while this is a zone which
i suspect
is rarely if ever seen by outside eyes
as there’s virtually no foreigners in Kalimantan anyhow
tourists or ex-pats
though there are a few NGOs
yet i have not seen one single other tourist-kind-of-tourist
in a whole month
...
while, today, me, i seem to have happened into this unknown region
by an accident which is still unexplained
as i don’t believe this is or was the optimum route from
Melak to Samarinda
...
a region where the wilds aren’t wild
where the diverse roadside greens are now a single shade of greyed-green
where the curves are squared
the many is one
and the monoculture is very
...
where, through my window
i’m struck by the colossal scale of the human effort there has been and is
to enact all this destruction and change
to industrialise this wilderness
...
for this isn’t Industrial Scale
this is the scale of an Economy
where the monetisation is supreme
...
…
where
it is clear
that change and destruction is of great local
national
regional
and global significance
...
i’ve read about it
and now
here i am
in it
...
...
while
outside this area of destruction
this zone whose scale i can barely even guess at
outside all this
to the North?
will be jungle
still
proper rain forest
as lush as lush gets
cooled by vegetal breath
unwalkably thick
hugely diverse
very 360
...
...
yet here, through the car window
its ex
is that vast wild primal beauty when its
tamed
shrunk
uglied
for here
its dead
its gone
its obliterated, annihilated and completely devastated
...
to become immense plantations of palm trees
...
...
where the road we are driving beside
but aren’t on
is like no other i have ever seen
because it is
exclusively
for the giant coal trucks
...
yet its the best road i have seen in Kalimantan
but it is solely for the hulking great twenty-eight wheelers
which have ABSOLUTE PRIORITY over anything else
...
for some roads in Indonesia are good
while many many roads in this country are plain terrible
have, for instance, five K of decent flatness
then half a K of stony holey bouncy bumpy unfinishedness
then repeat
and repeat
and are worse than India-was or Nepal-now
...
yet we are travelling next a well-made wide road
kept solely for the use of these huge double-trucks
bigger than any road vehicle in Europe or North America
28-wheelers
the only traffic on the best-finished road i have seen in this country
where none of this features on GoogleMaps or Maps.Me
...
while, next to that good road
is our stony unfinished road, untarmacked
which, like us, everything but the coal-trucks drives on
while, at the occasional crossings of the big road
there are men in uniforms
with flags
who let drivers of other vehicles know
when there is a gap between trucks
yet who never slow, or impede, for any reason
the juggernauts
which, with their own road, their own staff
thunder back and forth on their route
on a road smooth like a conveyor belt
where, clearly
in a way i have never come across anywhere else
these mining trucks are the primary being
...
while, in over an hour at 40 to 50 kmh
i saw a pick-up and an emergency vehicle on that road
yet, except those two
there was nothing but the Apex colossi
...
...
while its
tankers cabins ditches diggers
trucks lorries
lamp-posts, road markers
...
its
low walls made from huge old truck tyres
...
its
a plastic shack on a truck
...
its
signs in Bahasa
which i cannot read
except those which say OBJEK VITAL NASIONAL
which i can understand
...
with occasional signs with lines of numbers on
which are, i guess, landmarkers
for the agro-industrial foresters
...
and its
a park with hundreds of empty trucks
...
its
more groves of young foot-high green bushes
stretching for miles
on shorn brown ground
...
its
an alternative reality
economy
ecology
i happenstanced into
because the driver chose this way back to Samarinda
...
...
and so
i had awoken into the greyed green
the parallaxes of planted forest
the rent wrenched and wretched earth of
annihilated jungle
...
the land of palm and coal
...
where palm oil is a big product here
and, controversial internationally
for its the reason why so much rain forest is destroyed
why so much land is burnt
and why there is so much smog
often very very thick
...
where i’m thinking how
...
...
it takes an effort of great sophistication
a colossal and multi-faceted enterprise
a product of many years
to transform this far-off land into
income
...
to build these huge roads far from any city
...
to cut down these enormous old forests
...
to transform an entire old forest into piles of trunks
...
and to get those piles to the river banks,
then to the coast
...
to tame a jungle into planks
......
to burn off these lands
...
and plant tens of thousands of lines of palms
...
to create the coal mines
...
to dig mines
...
to extract the coal
...
to build the roads to transport this coal to the Mahakam
...
to pile that coal on the huge hulks
...
to own the tugs
which stealthily, ominously,
haul those hulks down the Mahakam
and which, with the more sourceless smog
are the most visible part of all this operation
chiefly hidden in the vast unvisited remoteness
...
...
it also takes a commitment of no-small will
to dismissively poohpooh
other countries’ complaints
at the life-lessening ghastliness
the health-threat
of their annual seasons of
thick
heavy
overhanging
smog
...
like they have here
...
like when i was first in Mela and Inta Lingun
and the smoke was absurdly thick
can’t see-anything-across-a-two-hundred-metre-river
kind of thick
a sunrise-with-no-sun
kind of thick
...
and all caused by the burning
of the Indonesian jungles
to create this land i am now in
...
...
...
its a long and tricky journey
from Long Bagoen
a Dayak village way up the Mahakam River
…
getting up there ttook three days
yet i got back in one
...
a day i began with four hours in a speedboat, or “spid”
a quite wonderful four-hour ride down the jungle river
though the spid is too fast
to allow you to properly savour
the passing green
the cliffs
and the passing green
but, in the absence of perfect
it’ll certainly do
...
and so, after three crossings of the Equator
yes the Equator
i would arrive in Tering
where i spent a nice night on my way upstream
...
to then, somehow, make the hour’s journey to Melak
where i spent three drab nights
...
and where i would take the kapal biasa
the much preferable slowboat
from Melak
a boat which, unfortunately
doesn’t currently run all the way up to Long Bagun
because its late dry-season
and the river is too low
while a kapal biasa from Melak to Samarinda would be
twenty-one-or-so low-rent easy hours
on a mattress
on a deck of one hundred
...
so when we reach the dock in Tering
its stop, finish, terminus
and everyone gets off our boat while me
dozy
i need to get to Melak
while a bunch of taxi drivers are touting themselves
all denying that i can get an ojek
a cheaper motorbike taxi
for the hour’s drive / ride
...
while a guy who just got off the same spid
and who was also in the Penginapan Polewari
the lodge in Long Bagun
he passes by in the throng saying
“Car? Samarinda? Have car”
offering me, i think, a lift
while another guy
the one who asked me if i was OK
after i dozed off for ten minutes at Long Wai
in the unusual pose of
sitting up
head in hands
thumbs under jaw
fingers splayed across face
an unsettling pose, apparently
so that second guy, he also says
“Samarinda? Car?”
...
so, with the option of
either
battling a low price to Melak and then
crucially
waiting ill-slept for four or five long afternoon hours on the dock there
a dock i know well
and glamorous it ain’t
well, i can do that if i have to
and then get the good-option twenty-one hour slow-boat overnight
or...
i can get this lift with them
down, i assume, the same awful road the bus took
...
yet that bus had a very timid driver
while these two have a car
which should be much faster
so, blurry-headed on the dock, i say yes
and get in with them and their driver
where it turns out the two guys are engineers
and their boss is the “president of Indonesia”
...
...
so we drive a while
stop for lunch
Jelawat, or catfish
decent
after which i sleep
badly
for i always have trouble sitting up
though there is, unusually here, a head-rest for my oversized neck
until i wake into
what?
...
the land of palm and coal
...
...
while the journey takes nine hours
for the driver never goes over 60 kmh
yet i still can’t see...
why this route?
i’m pretty sure it took longer...?
yet who am i to ...?
...
...
and so
for three or four hours
its the ceaseless monoculture
...
while
as i said
the other route
the route most people will take from Melak to Samarinda
has very poor roads
where this one eventually features a notably well-made flyover of the wetlands
because hey, the President and his Jakarta mates
they own a piece of these companies
...
…
while
if anyone read my post from Pela
my favourite place in Borneo so far
well, oddly, Pela is just a few miles from that flyover
...
...
while
we’re at the equator
so
at 6
the light lessens quickly
and its night
yet we still have nearly four more hours
until we arrive in Samarinda
while my tablet and laptop have no power
so i am
writing this in my head
...
how i inadvertently went to
the heart of green darkness
an eco-dysto
where the green goes grey
and the green goes black
where Twenty-Eight wheels is Apex
where, sat in the backseat
watching the darkness go by
i can only think of an absence
a not-seen
of
THE IRRETRIEVABLY LOST UNKNOWNS
...
...
...
...
unsatisfactorily
i took no photos
due to low charge in my tablet
...
yet
yesterday morning
my friend Rendra takes me to Tenggarong
old royal seat
where
in the museum
my first museum this year
they have dioramas of the industrialisation
which is where these photos are from
…
so there are display cabinets
featuring models of
coal mines
and coal trucks
and coal ships
and logging
and tankers
and...
?
with toys for trucks and boats
so ...
that explains the lack of actual photos
and the weird images of an idealised reality
which are, in actual reality
an acute ecological disaster happening right now
while, for no particular reason, here’s a Dayak caping
a flat conical hat worn by many way up the Mahakam
So the driver wanted you to see this devastation?