Exactly one month into a three-month long expedition in Borneo and we’ve still not started our fieldwork. And it’s all down to a collapsed bridge and an abandoned road.
The moment we landed into Lahad Datu town, our final stopover before reaching the world-famous jungles of Danum Valley, our local research assistant Amat told us the problem. Several days of very heavy rain had battered one of the bridges to our field site in Malua. It was virtually uncrossable. So, the next day, we went to see if we could cross it.
As our Toyota Hilux left the tarmac and entered the jungle we could hear the cicadas thrumming, the birds calling and the gibbons howling. Fresh heaps of forest elephant poo peppered the track, and the occasional mouse deer or bearded pig darted out in front us. We all kept our eyes peeled for more wildlife as we reached a fork in the road.
Follow to the left and you’d find the leaf-blown lawns of Borneo Rainforest Lodge—the exclusive getaway where bird watchers with camera lenses longer than their legs, and wallets thicker than their usually considerable bellies, can sleep in jacuzzi-fitted “Premium Chalets” overlooking the rainforest. This is where Kate and Wills stayed during their trip to Borneo. Needless to say, the road this way is very well maintained indeed.
We turned right to find a very different story. Several kilometres were enough to reveal the tell-tale signs of a road in ruin: fissures in the ground, overgrowing vegetation, fallen tree trunks. At one point, we had to drive through the river to avoid an especially precarious section of track. Nothing the 4 by 4 wasn’t up to. But then we reached the bridge.
It was what an engineer might call “really quite structurally unsound”. Made up of just a couple of softwood tree trunks resting over a perfectly Toyota Hilux-sized sized sink hole, it was a miracle it hadn’t collapsed already. A few of prods of the hole’s edges and large chunks of soil crumbled downwards.
A stone’s throw away was the enormous rotting skeleton of a former crossing. This one had been built with much sturdier hardwood round logs, which now jutted out of the ground like snapped bones. Bridges don’t last long in the tropics.
Paddy and I watched nervously from a safe distance as the pickup drove at a snail’s pace towards the bridge. The danger was either that the ground supporting the log bridge would give way or that the logs themselves, thin as they were, would just snap in the middle under the weight of the vehicle.
In the end the car made it over just fine. But we carried on certain of two things. Any day now, that bridge was coming down. And there’s no way insurance would pay out if the pickup (or any of us inside it) got damaged when it did.
For the remaining ~20 km of road to Malua we crossed several other bridges of questionable integrity and saw whole segments of road that looked as if their foundations had been eroded by underflowing rivers and rainfall, leaving us manoeuvring on eggshells.
Having been to Malua two years previously, it was amazing to see how quickly the road had fallen into disrepair. Apparently, forest department offices based at the camp had relocated a year or so back, meaning that few people still used the track. It was being reclaimed by the jungle.
That evening, we sat down at our base and discussed the future of our project.
In a previous post, I wrote about how this field season, we are setting up a thirty-year long project in collaboration with the Sabah Forestry Department, where forest teams will machete away vines in heavily logged forests to see if we can speed up forest recovery.
It’s a very exciting project that will yield plenty of useful data for improving the management of Borneo’s degraded forests. But since a long-term project needs long-term access, the state of the road was a worry.
Soon, the only way to reach our sites would be by helicopter. And there’s no way our shoestring budget would stretch to that.
So, a few days later we drove 5 hours north across Sabah to Sepilok, through thousands of hectares of oil palm plantations, past hundreds of lorries transporting palm oil across Borneo and beyond.
We were off to meet our colleagues at the Forestry Department to see if they could fix the road.
We arrived early at a guarded government complex and were ushered into an office with a large meeting table in the centre and maps covering the walls. We noticed that one of these was a detailed roadmap with tiny scribbles showing all the known and maintained infrastructure in Sabah. A quick scan found that our road was nowhere to be seen.
Over the last few months, Malaysia has undergone political upheaval. For the first time in 60 years, the ruling coalition has been replaced and a new prime minister elected. The former prime minister, Najib Razak, is being investigated for allegedly overseeing a $3.2 billion embezzlement scandal, which saw him transfer $681m of public money into his own bank account to fund lavish shopping sprees for his wife.
As with the election of any new government, government departments are in a busy state of flux. We therefore wanted to find out if/when road repair work could begin, and also whether the forest cutting teams would still be coming (because of the new government, all forest contracts are going through a revaluation period).
The upshot of the meeting was this.
The government officials were still very positive about our research and the practical management recommendations that would come out of it and were planning to fix the road when they could next get their machinery down to Malua.
As for the when the cutting teams would arrive, that was up to a tender committee and Sabah’s Chief Minister of Finance to decide.
And so, for the last two weeks, we have been waiting to hear from the Forestry Department about when the road will be fixed and so when we can relocate to Malua and start getting the project rolling. Hari raya, the huge public holiday that ends the month of Ramadan has added to delays.
It would be easy to get frustrated that we’ve not yet started on the project. But these are the realities of fieldwork, particularly in the tropics. Some things are just out of your hands, and when that’s the case, there’s no use worrying about it.
Anyway, it’s all provided some great opportunities to get out into the old-growth forests at Danum Valley as much as possible. I’ve used the time to get up at the crack of dawn to help catch birds with the mist netters, to climb an enormous radio-tower overlooking the rainforest and to record lots of footage for some short jungle videos I’ve got planned.
And as the saying goes, good things happen to those who wait.
Just yesterday, we got an email from a government official saying that work on the road starts tomorrow and that fixing the bridge is top of their priority list.
After weeks of delay, thunderbirds are go.
The diggers are on their way.
Time to sharpen our machetes.
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