Borneo Notebook

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After a week in the jungle, it is perfectly clear to me that in any contest for creepy-crawly capital of the world, Borneo would be right up there with no questions asked. They tell you about the mosquitoes. What they don’t tell you about are the leeches, which are everywhere. The ordinary brown kind lie in wait on the path, rearing up like two-inch mini-Godzillas full of gangster attitude and the will to win. Used to chomping through boar and mouse-deer hide, they made short work of my hiking socks. They pump up from matchstick to chipolata size in a few minutes if you don’t catch them quickly, and inject an anticoagulant so you end up bleeding for hours after the bite. But worse are the tiger leeches: nasty little blighters with go-faster stripes, which shimmy up into the trees and drop down on to you. I haven’t yet had one down the back of my neck, but it’s only a matter of time. Still, you’ve got to admire the aspiration.

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The jungle has other delights: pit vipers, spiders, termites, poisonous thorns, itching leaves and tendrils sticky enough to take the hat off your head when you pass. The local Dusun tribesmen hunt rabbits, deer and boar by blowpipe, using bamboo darts tipped with venom from the nipoh tree. To get the right strength of venom, they boil the bark in water: two hours for a rabbit, seven for a boar. In the old days, once they had killed a boar, the hunters would build a fire, roast the animal and feed the entrails to the dogs — now they just get on the mobile phone to their mates. Needless to say, the mobile coverage is better, a lot better, in the jungle than in my constituency in Herefordshire. It’s about time the telephone companies and the regulator started to treat our rural areas with the same energy and focus that one finds everywhere in the so-called developing countries.