I’ve always wanted to sleep in a hammock on my own in the rainforest—it looks so cool in that “Filmmaker Diaries” bit at the end of nature documentaries. Last night I came the closest I’ve ever come to fulfilling that dream. But then it all went wrong.
The day before, and seventy metres up an old rusty pylon in the middle of the forest, a guy called Robin told me he had a hammock. This thing had all the bells and whistles, coming with an integrated mosquito net and a waterproof tarpaulin. I leapt at the opportunity of borrowing it for the night and hours later was hooking it between two trunks deep along a jungle nature trail.
Danum Valley is the jewel in the crown of Southeast Asia, home to some of the few large tracts of pristine rainforest left in the region. Just behind my hammock, a giant dipterocarp towered overhead, its trunk easily wide enough to fit a family saloon. This is the sort of tree that’s all too rare now on Borneo, a legacy of the historically intensive logging that has ravaged the island.
All in all, it was a beautiful place to set up base and after digging into my peanut butter sandwiches and reading a book by torchlight I was ready to sleep. The forest comes alive by night and in the pitch black I could hear the cicadas thrumming and the occasional croaking of a nearby frog.
Then I heard a very unjungley vibration coming from inside the hammock. My phone. Amazingly, I had signal in the forest. And I’d received a message.
At this point, it’s worth saying that there’s only one thing I was scared of when deciding to spend the night in the forest. The snakes, fire ants, leeches and centipedes weren’t going to bother me much thanks to the net—I was worried about something much bigger. I was worried about the elephants.
Borneo is home to a unique subspecies of elephants which crossed over from the mainland along a now vanished land bridge around 20,000 years ago. Called Pygmy elephants, they’re really not all that small and can travel around in sizable herds.
I’ve asked a few locals before what they do if they come across elephants in the forest. The answer is always the same… “you run”. Some have had their Land Rovers crumpled by lone males. Most have stories of close encounters.
A few weeks back, and further along the trail in a bit of forest aptly called Elephant Ridge, I’d seen a Malaise trap (a curiously hammock-like contraption used to sample invertebrates) torn to shreds and tugged a hundred metres away—again, elephants.
But you can usually smell or hear them long before you see them and besides there’d be no reports of any sightings along the section of trail where I was for a while now. So I wasn’t overly concerned.
At least until I got this message.
To be honest, I strongly considered staying in the forest anyway. This was my last chance to borrow the hammock because early the next day we were leaving Danum and heading to a new camp in Malua. I wanted to live out a childhood dream.
In the end, two things made up my mind.
- I didn’t have a fire, so there was nothing keeping a couple of curious elephants from wondering what that unnatural-big-swaying-cocoon-thing in their forest was and deciding to take a closer look.
- It wasn’t my hammock. If I got a whiff of elephants in the night and had to make a quick getaway, I wouldn’t have time to take it down and it might end up getting the same treatment as the Malaise trap—which would take some explaining to Robin.
I packed up the hammock and started trudging back to camp, gutted. I’d really wanted to do this and didn’t like the thought of spending the last night in Danum on a mattress. Mattresses are boring. Hammocks are cool.
That’s when I realised, maybe I couldn’t sleep in the forest…but I knew somewhere else just as beautiful. Somewhere the elephants didn’t go.
So, for the second time that night—this time by the lights of the moon and my crappy head torch—I hung up the hammock. Before long, I was fast sleep, waking up once to find a Bearded pig pressing its snout against my arm.
I got up at dawn with the birds to watch the sunrise over the river and to try and spy some otters whose pawprints I could see on the opposite bank. I found a muffin which I’d forgotten I’d packed in the rush the night before and had that for breakfast
It might not have been the adventure I’d set out for but it was still an adventure worth having.
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