I is in her late 40s, early 50s, and, after a week or more of the Cairo streets, I don’t immediately read her as Egyptian, despite the fact she’s speaking Arabic. It’s because of what she’s wearing, you see.

“You know,” she says to Z. “They have ducks and rabbits in the orchard?”

We talk for a while.

“May I ask you something?” I say. She assents. “You’re Egyptian, right? Would you wear what you are wearing in Cairo?”

I’s outfit is hardly risque by Western standards. She’s wearing a white camisole with a white sleeveless waistcoat over the top, and a white skirt, fitted and flared, that comes down to mid-calf.

But hers are the first female Egyptian upper arms or calves that I have seen, and there is a glimpse of shoulder too.

“I have a car,” I says, which, coming from a woman who has the money to stay in a 60-euro a night hotel, means she also has a driver. “I don’t walk on the streets or use public transport. But, you know, this is something since the revolution. Cairo has always been…”

“I know in the 70s women could wear miniskirts in Cairo,” I say, recalling a conversation with an educated, liberal Cairene in his early 20s, retrospectively amazed by the flesh on display in family photos from before he was born. “And bikinis on the Red Sea Coast…”

In the 1950s, in fact, Cairo was considered one of the world’s stylish cities, a liberal, sophisticated capital of elegance and beauty, up there with Rome and Paris. “Yes,” she says. “But you… Now, I’m a Muslim. But for a moment I thought you were one, or married to one. You don’t need to wear all that here.”

“Yeah,” I say, losing the headscarf I have unwillingly adopted. I’ve been wearing trousers, a loose long-sleeved top layered over a shorter one and a scarf around my neck and shoulders throughout our time in Cairo.

But since covering hair for modesty has not been part of our culture for more than a century, I find the headscarf a difficult thing to wear and, further, a political act. I don’t like to wear a headscarf unless I’m in a country, such as Mauritania, where every single woman wears one.

My last ditch reserve for coping with the dual onslaught of tourist harassment and sexual harassment one faces as a visibly foreign woman in Egypt was to don a correctly-tied headscarf and invest in a wedding ring, with the aim of looking exactly what I initially read me as, a Western convert with a Muslim husband.

“You see, there was this man on the bus…” I say.

Now, I’m a big fan of public transport as a way to get around a country while seeing more of it than you would from the inside of a backpacker bus or private car, and, in fact, from the intelligent, sparky and fully covered women I met on the ferry in Aswan through to the nice chap who helped us out on the bus from Dahab, this has generally worked pretty well in Egypt.

Not in this instance, however.

He’s a rat-like little man in his 30s, I would guess, who begins his harassment by leaning across his seat to stare concentratedly across the aisle, straight into my face. I cope by putting down the large sunglasses which, like most uncovered women in Egypt, I wear more for protection against stares than against the sun.

Then he begins to look at me and suck his finger obscenely. “WHAT?” I say, loudly. This deters him for a while and I return to my book. Then there’s a tugging motion on my peripheral vision.

I sit, for a bit, my son asleep besides me, endeavouring to ignore this and focus on my book, until I’m too cross to concentrate.

F*ck this, I think. I’m b*ggered if I’m spending three hours on a bus trying to ignore the masturbator across the aisle.

I get up, and begin to storm down the bus, before realising I don’t speak enough Arabic to complain to the driver. There is one other woman on the bus, with her husband, down the far end, but I’ve identified a man in front of me as a potential defender should things turn nasty.

I turn to the masturbator. He zips up.

“You are a DISGUSTING man,” I say in my best headteacher voice. Everyone on the bus starts awake and begins to stare.

He puts his hands up defensively.

“You call yourself a Muslim? Is this ISLAM?” I say, getting into my stride. “How would you feel if someone did that to your MOTHER? To your SISTER?”

He begins to slink down the bus. “You are a DISGUSTING man,” I say, again. “No Muslim!”

“What’s the matter?” says the guy in front of me.

“Oh,” I say, and mime the offending sequence of activities, then start to grin with relief. “No problem. All sorted.”

He shrugs, sympathetic but, it appears, unsurprised, and goes back to sleep.

“What was that, Mum?” says Z.

“Oh, just some disgusting man masturbating,” I say. “Go back to sleep.”

“He looked really scared, Mum,” says Z. “I think he thought you were going to hit him.”

“So,” I say to I, by way of summary. “I’d been wearing a scarf around my neck and shoulders for Cairo, and at this point I decided I’d put it over my hair. Because Nubia is conservative.”

“You see,” I says. “This is what they want you to do. They want you to be afraid so that you cover.”

“I wouldn’t say ‘afraid’,” I say.

Because I’m not afraid. I am just sick of the constant low-level harassment and occasional higher-level incident, and I don’t particularly want to explain another one to my tween boy. “But I see your point.”

“Since the Revolution, it has been really bad,” I states. “The Brotherhood, the Islamists, they are behind all this. They encourage it. The harassment of women on Tahrir Square. The easiest way to keep women covered and at home is to harass them on the streets, so this is what they do. But here, you don’t need to be afraid.”

It’s noticeable, to me, although I have only visited the Sinai before, how very much more conservative Egypt is than it was 10 years ago, when I last visited, or 15 years ago. A conservatism that, sadly, does not extend to perverts on the bus.

Because, here’s the thing… In the “permissive” West, I could march down the bus to the driver and insist that he call police and have the man arrested. In Egypt, he moves, but stays on the bus.

As it happens, I did once report a masturbator to the tourist police, in Lombok, Indonesia: he was in his teens, and I suggested to the policeman that he speak to the parents. The policeman’s opening question? “Where is your husband?”

“You know,” I says. “There is nothing about this in Islam? Nothing that says that women should be repressed.”

“Yes,” I say, citing the classic example of Mohammed’s first wife, an older woman who ran camel trains across Arabia and hired the young future Prophet as her manager before marrying him. “Khadija was a businesswoman. But we did this in Christianity, too. Jesus had Mary Magdalene among his disciples. We wrote her out of history, said only men could be priests. The patriarchy…”

Now, “patriarchy” is not a word that I have used in a while. But Egypt does this to you.

In Cairo, an academic in his 60s, a delightful, liberal man, married to a feminist academic, asked me whether I was a feminist. This gave me pause for thought. Because I am, of course, but, most of the time, in England, I don’t need to think about whether I am or not. Our battles are, largely, already won.

“The problem,” I says. “Is that we in Egypt are where you guys were in the Middle Ages when it comes to religion.”

We wander off to meet the ducks and baby rabbits, and I shows us the organic tomatoes and aubergines growing in the shade of the orchard.

On I’s insistence, I change into a short-sleeved top. “There!” says I. “You can actually wear what you like here. You can wear shorts, if you want.”

Short sleeves, frankly, is enough for me at the moment, given that all the women I see on the streets are fully covered, a few even including their eyes, and I am trying to navigate the difficult zone between feminist values and respect for local culture.

“Are there many feminists in Egypt?” I ask, tentatively.

Egyptian feminists have been hugely visible in the Western media since the revolution, but women of any persuasion are a tiny minority on the streets, even on public transport, except for the Friday nights when you see them out with their families.

“Yes,” says I, definitively. Her daughter, who works for an NGO, nods assertively.

“I thought that there was a problem for feminism in Egypt, since the revolution,” I say. “I thought it was all very associated with Suzanne Mubarak.”

I’s daughter shakes her head more firmly. She’s a beautiful girl, wearing a full-length, loose T-shirt dress with a loose long-sleeved white cardigan over the top. “It wasn’t her,” she says. “She took credit for many, many people’s work. She did nothing.”

“What about outside the elite?” I ask, thinking of the Bedouin girl I met in Sinai, but then, also of our taxi driver’s ex-wife.

Among Egypt’s elite, the wealthy minority of educated, English-speaking intellectuals and businesspeople, feminism is relatively strong, although a two-career family remains unusual.

I want to find out about the working class.

“There is a woman who works for me. She comes to clean the house. She’s in her 20s, can’t read or write,” I says. In 2007, over 40% of Egyptian women were functionally illiterate.

“And she goes out to work while her husband stays at home, smoking.” I makes a gesture of intense disgust. “She pays him some money to look after their two children while she goes out to work.”

“Right,” I say.

“Now, she’s a feminist,” I says. “Because if the Muslim Brotherhood get their way, she won’t be able to work. And the family will have nothing to live on. And, even though she cannot read or write, she knows this.”

“So…” I am about to ask how she voted in the last election, but I forestalls me.

“She called me, during the election, because she can’t read, so she wanted to know which symbols, which pictures, she should put her mark by, so I told her,” I says. “And then, after, when she came to my house, she said, ‘Doctor I! I know that you can only vote twice, but I voted three times, because I did not want my vote to go to one of them.’ She spoiled her ballot paper, you see. As a protest…”

I’m not sure how functional a protest this is, nor whether, as a life goal, working to support a no-good husband rather than removing him from her life, is exactly feminist. But, I guess, by Egyptian standards, it is.

“Things will change for women now, after the revolution,” I says. “I’m optimistic. I believe we are coming to a new world. It has to change!”

“But,” I say. “75% of the population voted for the Islamists at the last election.”

“The Sunnis, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafis, this is not Egypt!” I says. “This is coming out of Saudi Arabia! It is not Egyptian! It is not what Egypt is!”

I have talked in-depth with two Islamist men, neither of them the bearded, hatchet-faced stereotype, who consider Egypt the true heirs to the true Islam, and Saudi Arabia corrupt and decadent (you can read these conversations here and here).

This was in the Sinai, close to Saudi, within the sphere of influence of the powers who, Vanity Fair and others have argued, sponsored 9/11, but… Egypt is the birthplace of the Muslim Brotherhood, the home of radical Islam.

“And look what they have done!” I continues. “In three months of government they have done more damage to themselves than we could have done to them in years! Look at the gas crisis…”

There is a serious petrol crisis in Egypt at the moment, with queues stretching over a mile in each direction from every gas station. No one quite understands the roots of it, particularly since the nation continues to export fossil fuels.

I’ve heard explanations that run all the way from Mubarak-era loyalists dumping tankers of gasoline in the desert through to desperation for hard currency, through to interference by Israel/US/Saudi Arabia (delete according to political allegiance), through to a strategic move by the military junta, SCAF, to discredit the Muslim Brotherhood.

The result, in a very Egyptian fashion, is a vibrant black market in petrol, taxi drivers who open negotiations with Italian hand gestures and operatic wails of “MADAME! No benzine!” and, of course, yet more strain on a tanking economy with a government that cannot agree hard currency loans.

“And look at their candidate! Now, his mother is an American citizen, and he cannot stand.” (This birther controversy, after investigation, will prove to be untrue.) “They lie! They lie! They said they wouldn’t run a candidate for president. And now they do. Egyptians can SEE how much they lie.”

“But they dominate the Assembly,” I say. “And, not just that, they dominate the body that is writing the Constitution. Do you think the position of women will improve?”

“It has to,” says I. “It just has to. Because otherwise, we will need another revolution in three years time. And we will have wave, after wave, after wave of revolution until we’re free.”

“I hope so,” I say. “I really hope it does.”

More in this series:
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 1: The Coder
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 2: The Bedouin Girl
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 3: The Future Soldier
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 4: The Guide
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 5: The Businessman
Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 6: The Taxi Driver

The post Voices from Post-Revolutionary Egypt 7: The Working Mother appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

And the beach, Selong Belanak, 20km or so west of Kuta, is beautiful.

A vast sweep of bay with white and gold sands, curling surf breaks out at sea, green headlands, pyramid islands and fishing boats rocking on the waves.

Learning to surf?

Wayull…

Let’s just say it’s not a one-day process.

We first tried surfing in Seminyak, Bali, a week ago, on a 9 foot longboard made of soft, rounded, foam rubber. The ultimate beginner’s board, these things are slow, stable, buoyant, as easy to mount as they are hard to fall off.

Here in less touristed Kuta, Lombok, Sandi and Aris have dug up longboards for us to learn on. But they’re six foot, fibreglass, angled.

At first, I struggle even to get on the thing and paddle it without capsizing. Let alone sit astride it backwards, facing out to the ocean, as Sandi wants me to.

We started late, 9.30am, and Lombok’s famous surf is not in a giving mood.

It seems to drop rather than curl or barrel.

And it’s unpredictable. Enough to make one long for the more reliable breaks of, say, Mexico’s Pacific coast.

For minutes at a time, the waves are tiny, bare ripples rising a couple of feet and breaking far closer into shore than we are.

Then all of a sudden there’s a cluster of behemoths, substantial things which, in chest high water, rise so high you have to jump straight through them and even at a jump you are still in the middle of them.

I figure they’re probably all of four feet high. Which is, to be honest, more than big enough for me.

This is beginner’s surf for Kuta. But there’s heavy duty current to contend with, too.

Whenever I look over at Z, he seems to be cruising effortlessly into shore in the cobra position, serenely ignoring Aris’ yells of “Stand up, now! Now! Now!”

One of my son’s better qualities, from a self-preservation context, and more irritating, when it comes to trying to teach him anything, is his unwillingness to attempt anything unless he thinks he will do it well.

(By that stage, also, he has generally worked out his own method of doing it, which is — but of course! — infinitely better than any method anyone else might suggest.)

It dates back, I think, to his first steps, aged ten months. He managed four for the childminder.

Back home, I knelt on the floor, held out my arms and encouraged him to “Walk to Mummy!”

On step three, he toppled.

And I, err, well, I, umm, missed him.

Anywise. Junior is in no hurry to stand up on a surfboard. He wants to stand up on the board in the sea before he attempts to stand on a wave.

“It’s easier to stand up on a wave,” I say, as Aris has been attempting to communicate for some time.

“I don’t care,” he says. “I need to be able to stand up before I try to do it on a wave.”

Me?

I figure I’m going to be wiping out a lot anyway, so why not wipe out at least trying to stand up?

If you’re even less initiated into surfing than us, you may or may not know how it works.

You attach yourself to your board by a lead from your ankle. You paddle out into the sea, through or over the breaking waves depending on their stage, find a good spot, turn your board around and wait.

Then you pick a wave of the right size at the right time and paddle madly ahead of it, continuing to paddle once you’re in it until you feel it catch you.

Then, once you have the momentum and (weirdly) stability that the surge provides, you grip the edges of the board with both hands, extend your body, push up into a kind of crouch, then ascend to standing.

Sound like hard work?

It is.

As pathologically under-used back, stomach and thigh muscles whinge in creaky protest only an hour or so into our first surfing lesson, I realise quite how unfit our sojourn in Bali has left me.

I’ve gone so native with the motorbike that I’ll hop on it to make the 100 yard trip to the shop.

I also realise that Z, who about a year ago passed the stage where he feels less fear than me on theme park rides and waterslides, is now at the stage where he acquires new physical skills faster.

I’m still bigger than him –- should be so for a while.

And faster than him –- for a couple of years, I guess.

But we are definitely past the point of no return.

There’s an undeniable pleasure to waiting for the wave.

Lolling on your board, feeling the rhythms of the ocean, letting one wave or another tilt you and release you, waiting for the right one to arrive.

It’s pretty zen.

I’ve always liked sitting by the sea, trying to predict when the next big wave will come. And this is doing that but on the ocean, with the prospect of some adrenaline when the right one comes along.

But even with little waves like these, watching a swell appear on the horizon, and build behind you towards a peak, is scary.

When you miss one, it’s beyond frustrating.

You paddle like hell, upper arms aching, feel the big peak build under you, tug and then –- oh anticlimax of anticlimaxes! –- wash past, leaving you stranded in absolutely the wrong position for the next one.

But when the wave catches you, the surge pushes you forward and upwards, you stabilize and you’re riding the water into shore with the surf roaring in your ears –- it’s a rush.

I’m a sucker for bodyboarding. Learning to surf is harder, there’s no two ways about it.

But, just as when I was learning to ski I could feel the potential of future grace, even as I snowploughed bandy-kneed down the nursery slope, there’s the beginning of a sense of just how good surfing could be when you get it even vaguely right.

It gets later. The swell is bigger, choppier, the water murky as the receding tide sucks detritus out to sea.

I go for a big fella, which feels five or six feet tall.

My board gives that tell-tale lurch, engages with the wave, but it’s not catching me and pushing me forward, it’s tipping me from the horizontal to the vertical amid a roar of breaking surf.

As my head heads towards the invisible sand and my board and I part company for the twentieth time I clasp my arms around my head for protection.

It is, as the cliché has it, like being in a washing machine. I am submerged, tumbled over and over, water up my nose and in my mouth, awestruck by the power of the ocean and wondering when the board will hit me.

It doesn’t.

I surface in the shallows, coughing ocean.

“Are you alright?” asks Sandi, my teacher, a well-honed Sasak with a dramatic ginger bleach, who has muscles in places where I have back fat, and an impressive range of scars courtesy of coral reef, broken surfboards and a motorbike driving style so, erm, audacious that we drive ourselves to the beach next day.

Sandi’s been surfing since he was five, much to his mother’s displeasure. Aged 22, he’s been married, divorced and lost a child already.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Don’t take the big ones,” he says. “It’s dangerous. You go through them on the board, ya?”

“I’m going for a cigarette,” I say, heading for the beach shack where the ibu is watching my possessions.

Three hours in, and I still haven’t managed to even stand up.

I’m beginning to doubt whether I have the strength to do it on a board like this.

Even on this entry-level beach, I am aching.

We break for lunch.

The surf lesson goes better after a bowl of instant noodles. I catch a few waves and ride them in the cobra without wiping out.

I begin to push up.

I get as far as my knees and ride the board all the way in, kneeling, arms out in a wild hallelujah.

It’s a small triumph. But a big step for me.

Sure, I fall off a lot, but when you fall off once you’ve caught the wave the force is dissipated.

And then comes a big fella. “Go, go, go,” yells Sandi.

I go for it. I feel the lurch. And then I feel the board tip down to the vertical.

The wave churns and spins me, underwater. My head and face scrape along the bottom, my neck at an uncomfortable angle to the rest of me.

I didn’t get my arms up to protect my head, and there’s no chance of persuading any part of my body to do anything other than exactly what the ocean wants it to do, which is flail in spastic, tangled ellipses along the bottom.

My board pops along and says a brief, yet plangent, hello to my ribs.

My mouth and nostrils are full of sand and salt water, and I don’t have a cat’s chance in hell of surfacing until the wave has finished with me.

It lets me go in the shallows.

I surface, fully exfoliated and with a full head of sand, eye the oncoming surf beady as King Cnut, retrieve my board and head for shore.

Tomorrow is another day. But for today, I have had enough.

Z’s muscles don’t ache. He’s ten.

Mine do.

We’re back unschooling, so I suggest that for a learning project, he might want to use the internet to identify the names of the various muscle groups of mine that ache.

“The ones at the top of your shoulders, by your collarbone, the ones in your lower back and the top set of abdominals,” I say. “Oh, and that long one that goes down the side of your thighs.”

“Does your butt ache?” he asks.

“No,” I say. “Just the thighs.”

“I know that one!” he says.

“Really?” I say, impressed. “What is it?

“It’s called Thunderus Maximus,” he says, poker-faced.

Laugh?

I nearly cried.

*: We’ve been learning with Blue Sea surf shop, near the market in Kuta, Lombok. 300,000 rupiah ($33) buys a four hour lesson with two instructors for two people, including bike transport to Selong Belanak beach. You might reach them on +62 (0)819 0796 4618 or you might be better just stopping by.

The post We Learn to Surf… appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

The aim? To find six posts from your back catalogue, and one from someone else’s, in seven different categories, and expose to the light of day some of the good stuff that otherwise just lurks in your archives. Here goes…

Your first post?
Well, this one is easy. Having decided to travel the world with the nipper and blog about it, I sat down 48 hours before our flight, surrounded by binbags and, well, plastic crap, set up a blog and wrote: On Binbags and Plastic Crap.

A post you enjoyed writing the most?
This was a very simple story about a guy I met in a guesthouse in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. One of those posts that almost write themselves, with a clear beginning and an end, all hung around a phrase he used: “I arranged his tryst“.

A post which had a great discussion?
When Z’s father came out to travel with us in Vietnam, I wrote a funny, yet personal, piece, about the challenges of travelling with your son’s father when you’re not, in fact, a couple. It brought a few very surprising and personal responses which were great to have: Madam, Your Husband… I also love the contrasting responses I’ve had from women and men on this sort of observational piece about dating in Asia.

A post on someone else’s blog that you wish you’d written?
Not Drowning, Mothering is wet-your-knickers funny. And in this post she writes absolutely hilariously about, well, a broken deep freezer. From a travel perspective, Legal Nomads on Post-Asia Reverse Culture Shock really hit the nail on the head.

Your most helpful post?
I really do intend to do more helpful pieces. Having travelled with junior since he was a baby, and done it longterm for the big end of a year and counting, I am, honestly, a mine of information on travel with children. But my most actively helpful piece to date is ten tips on how to tell you’re about to be scammed in Thailand.

A post with a title that you are proud of?
Putting the Graphic into Ethnographic. About, among other things, some very, well, graphic displays at the Ethnographic Museum in Hanoi.

A post that you wish more people had read?
Tree, Not Try. This is a heartrending story of the Cambodian genocide, as told to me and the nine-year-old by the guy who lived it. One of the reasons we travel is to learn from others and we learnt a great deal from his story of loss, survival and redemption.

If you feel up for the 7 Link Challenge — or have taken it already — please drop me a link in the comments section. It’s a great meme.

The post The 7 Link Challenge appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

30-ish kilometres outside Kuching, Sarawak, Semanggoh is, technically, am Orang Utan Rehabilitation Center. Not some kind of, erm, “rest facility” for the Lindsay Lohans of the primate world. But a place where illegal pets or babies orphaned by loggings are enabled to live in the forest, semi-wild.

They swing elegantly through the canopy and vines on long, strong, slender limbs, like trapeze artists, gymnasts, ballerina. On the ground, they seem a little stranded: lumbering, hirsute yeti, tailored for the forest by evolution.

Although humans split off from orang utans six million years ago, or thereabouts, watching this young mother cradle her year-old baby and help him begin to climb brought home our common heritage.

Like human babies, orang utan babies are born utterly helpless. For the first couple of years of life they do not leave their mother for an instant. They travel through the trees and across the ground clinging to her luxuriant back and (ouch!) underarm hair.

This baby, very much like a human baby learning to toddle by holding his mother’s hands, was practicing using his limbs to swing between his mother and the rope. She encouraged him to let go. But he always had at least one limb clinging desperately to her fur.

Even once he’s fully mobile, he’ll stay within three metres of his mother until the age of eight or nine, when he’ll make his own way out into the world. And live, quite possibly, to the ripe old age of fifty.

Though, because he’s in a sanctuary, rather than the wild, it’s unlikely he’ll have the chance to go out and build his own harem of women.

We took a short trail through the forest ahead of feeding time. The sanctuary doesn’t have the acreage required to support its population (orang utans need roughly half a square mile of forest each to survive on foraging alone), so the animals come and collect bananas, sweet potatos and watermelon twice a day.

Here we saw another mother, a lizard, resting nervously by the path where she had just that instant laid two bright white eggs which seemed far too large for her delicate frame.

We could hear the orang utans calling in the distance. See their movement in the treetops. We caught a glimpse of a giant squirrel. Saw wild ginger, edible rattan, trees with roots far taller than an adult man. It was, in fact, rather magical.

At least until the leech…

Now, when it comes to wildlife, Borneo is famous for orang utans (which are native to here and the Indonesian island of Sumatra). And, err, leeches.

During the rainy season, these evil little parasites hang, curled up, from leaves above the path waiting to drop on an unsuspecting host, or lurk in puddles ready to crawl through the eye of a shoe, release their local anaesthetic and anticoagulant, then feed until dislodged.

We hadn’t come to the centre to trek. So we were not, to put it mildly, appropriately clad. And, sadly, it was the nine-year-old whose sandaled foot got the leech treatment first.

Now, Z is pretty damn resilient most of the time. I can confirm, however, that leeches are some way outside his comfort zone.

By the time he met the inch-long ants, he was not a happy bunny.

Not at all.

Mercifully, Borneo is rich in pitcher plants. Those amazing carnivorous flora, in gaudy shades of scarlet, pink and green, trap insects in their cups before slowly digesting them in the pool of acid at the base.

Sir has been wanting to feed an ant to one for several months now. And, after capturing a little ant, placing it on the pitcher plant, and watching its all-too predictable fate, his humour was fully restored.

As my ma said, “You’ll never make a Buddhist of him, you know.”

Anywise…

We are heading upriver tomorrow morning — a word which always makes me think of Michael Sheen in Apocalypse Now, explaining his mission to some tripped-out guard — along the Batang Rejang, AKA the Amazon of Borneo.

We’re aiming for Kapit, a trading town deep in the forested interior of Sarawak, where we’ll spend a few days exploring the tributaries and longhouses, and getting to know some of the indigenous tribes, before shooting the Pelagus Rapids and looping back towards civilisation.

I’ll let you know how we get on. But it may be a few days before I do…

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