Happy New Year!

It's a winter wonderland in Nasu where I am working. Wishing you all
the best in 2011!

"Just lynching"

I read an article about Japanese girl gangs that engaged in lynching. The article, about the world’s five most bizarre gangs, said that sukeban, or Japanese girl gangsters, modified their school uniforms, used yo-yos as weapons, and sometimes engaged in lynching.



I asked Itsumi about sukeban. She said that when she was in high school in the 80s the sukeban were the girls who drank and smoke and maybe shoplifted, but they weren’t really so bad. They were well-liked, and sometimes stood up for other kids against the school authorities.

I asked Itsumi if the sukeban ever did anything violent, and she said not really, by today’s standards. But sometimes there was conflict between different groups of sukeban or within the group, and they burned each other with cigarettes. I asked if there was anything else, and she said not really, just lynching.

“JUST lynching?” I said. Occasionally, she said, but it wasn’t too serious.
Japanese borrows many words from English, and sometimes uses them in novel ways. For example, in Japanese, a “mansion” is an apartment building with more than four floors. And “lynching,” it turns out, means several people beating one person up, and it’s usually not a very serious beating.

In English, unfortunately, lynching means “to put to death, especially by hanging, by mob action and without legal authority.”

Machine demolishes landmines, as more are installed

Hitachi Construction Machinery Company has built a machine that can hammer its way across the countryside, smashing landmines to pieces.

The machine is so sturdy that exploding landmines seldom damage it. Larger mines, the type designed to destroy tanks, cause minor but reparable damage to Hitachi’s machine.

I recently had a chance to see and climb into this machine at a Universal Design exposition that Itsumi attended for her work. I saw a display of some common landmines, including mines produced by the U.S. (below photo, third from left).This photo shows landmines produced by the U.S., Russia, Iran and China. The large ones on the right are designed to destroy tanks.

There are more than 200 types of landmines. While some are designed to injure or kill adult civilians, others are specifically designed to target children. Today, there are hundreds of millions of land mines waiting to explode in some 120 countries. In Cambodia and Angola, for example, there are two landmines for every child, and forty percent of the victims of landmine explosions are children.

Detonating mines by hand is very slow and very dangerous, causing many deaths every year. Hitachi’s machine uses flailing hammers to detonate mines while the operator is safely inside a sturdy cab. On the back of the machine, a tiller prepares the de-mined area for farming.

So far, seventy of Hitachi’s machines have been delivered to Angola, Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Colombia and Nicaragua. The focus has been on demining fields that surround schools and housing areas.

It takes only about $5 to install a landmine, but removing it is incredibly expensive. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be just to transport and maintain demining machines in countries that have few roads. When I visited Laos, I learned that per capita Laos is the most heavily bombed country in the world. More than 1.3 million tons of ordnance were dropped on Laos between 1964 and 1973, mostly cluster bombs of which 30% did not detonate. Ten of the 18 Lao provinces are severely contaminated with land mines and many other types of UXOs.

The U.S., responsible for this contamination, has still not signed the Ottawa Treaty against landmines. Parties to the Ottawa Treaty agree to destroy landmines within their possession, clear their territory of mined areas, provide assistance to mine-affected persons in their own country and provide assistance to other countries in meeting these treaty obligations.

The U.S. should sign the Ottawa Treat, and take action to stop the production of landmines.

I can see clearly now...

The morning before my intra lasik surgery, I read and signed the doctor's informed consent form, which made it explicitly clear that by undergoing this elective surgery I could become permanantly unable to drive, or even go blind. Contemplating this, I took what potentially could have been my last look at some photos of my family before taking the 40-minute train ride to the clinic.

The surgery was quick. Throughout the process I was supposed to look up at a light. I continued to do so but for a few minutes when my corneal flap was open I was not able to see much but gray, even though my eyes were open. The other disconcerting thing during surgery was that I could smell my eyeballs vaporizing, which smelled like burning flesh, and I have to admit that, thinking about that informed consent form, I was pretty terrified. But the doctor continually talked to me in English during the surgery, encouraging me, and I was glad that I could only hear his words and couldn't understand what was said among the technicians and assistants in the room. I didn't really feel pain during surgery, since my eyes were numbed by drops.

The hours immediately after surgery were uncomfortable, so I went to bed as soon as possible, wearing goggles to prevent me from rubbing my eyes.

The next morning, I could see at a distance but everything, near and far, was blurry. This worried me, but when I went back for my next day checkup Dr. Aoyama assured me that the blurriness is caused by dryness, because the layer of tears is gone from my eyes, and that it is normal and temporary.

Something that surprised me was that, after surgery, ordinary things like beverage cans and letter-sized paper and magazines seem much bigger than before, so much so that I have to read the labels in order to know what size things are. This is because I am suddenly free from glasses, and glasses cause things to appear smaller.

I need to take good care of my eyes in the coming months so that they heal properly, but I am looking forward to

1. buying my first pair of fashionable sunglasses
2. going scuba diving for the first time, and
3. seeing the inside of showers.

This morning, two days after surgery, I have already done two of those things, and I woke up singing "I can see clearly now ..." Everything looks clear and wonderful!

Orlando

I just learned that my good friend Orlando Martinez passed away.

Orlando, then around 70, kept me company through law school, informing me at great length about communism, capitalism and all sorts of topics, and reminding me of things other than the narrow world of law school. Orlando often brought me a bowl of homemade chicken soup and a welcome break from my studies.

At that time Orlando was my neighbor, an artist and writer, writing for leftist publications like the Montelibre Monthly and trying valiantly to get his books published. He sometimes took care of my kitty Elfi when I was out of town, and he even painted a portrait of her as a gift for me. I treasure it. Orlando gave our apartment building a sense of community.

Once, Orlando agreed to visit my law school class as a volunteer juror for jury selection practice. He dominated the event and gave the law students some real world jury selection practice of a kind they couldn’t get from the standard law student volunteers. I don’t think anyone else got a word in, and I think Orlando enjoyed the disruption he created! I enjoyed it too, as I think law school students should be disrupted and made to think outside the textbooks a little more often.

One winter Orlando rescued a kitten and its mother who were in danger of freezing on the back porch of our apartment building. Together Orlando and I caught the mother kitty, which wasn’t easy because she was wild, and the pair lived in Orlando’s closet until the kitten, who Orlando named Bucky Linn, was old enough to adopt out. We found a home for her with a law student.

Orlando moved to Albuquerque, but we kept in touch and I visited him one year at Christmas time. We had Christmas dinner at a youth hostel in Albuquerque, and I enjoyed watching Orlando entertain the other guests.

In his later years Orlando became an advocate for the rights of medical patients, and he was a generous donor to the scholarship fund for Lidia, a young woman who I met in Bolivia. Thanks to the donations of Orlando and many of my friends and family, Lidia has completed more than half of her five-year nursing course.

Orlando was a regular reader of my blog, and he often chided me when its contents were not political enough.

Orlando delighted in making people think, and in helping others. I will miss him dearly.

Lying fallow in Anhui

The morning after hiking Huang Shan my legs and knees ached so much that I could barely descend from my third-floor hostel room, so I decided to take a quiet trip to a village. The villages around Tunxi are known as Huizhou style. Absent any kind of economy beyond subsistence farming, the locals traditionally sent their sons away at the age of 13 to work as merchants. Many did well, and sent money back to their villages, where their families built mansions. Today the village lanes ramble among crumbling Ming and Qing era black and white tile-roofed structures, while farmers continue to harvest rice in the same way they have done for centuries.

I chose to visit Chengkan, dating from the Han Dynasty, because farmers rather than tourists continue to walk along its narrow winding alleys. The fact that it takes a series of four buses to get from Tunxi to Chenkan may be what keeps the tourists away. On the fourth bus, a man deposited a huge bag of Purina feed, paying the driver to deliver it somewhere, and another man boarded with some kind of motor that he and his friend were barely able to heave up the bus steps.

The sign at the entrance of Chengkan said “Welcome to Chengkan for tourism, visit, research, making holiday, lie fallow and sketching.” My aching legs told me that my plan in Chengkan was to lie fallow as much as possible.

Outside the city gates I paused to watch the rice farmers tending their paddies. In several inches of water one man in waders uprooted the densely planted seedlings and stacked them in a basket. Another man, barefoot, re-planted the seedlings, one by one, in the next water-filled paddy while a third man, also barefoot, used a hoe to shore up the clay wall of the paddy. In another paddy, an ox chewed its cud while waiting, hitched to a wooden plow.

In the distance, other farmers performed the same tasks, and one man stood on his wooden plow while a water buffalo pulled it around and around in the paddy.

The farmer who had been pulling the seedlings finished this task and stopped to take a drink. I greeted him with ni hao and offered him a package of Oreos. He refused it but said something to me in Chinese which sounded friendly enough.

The man who had been hoeing put a board over his shoulder and, balancing two huge baskets of wet seedlings, staggered to carry them to the next paddy.
All of the tools, including the plow, hoe, ox yoke, baskets and trays to hold the baskets appeared to be hand made, of wood and reed.

I paid 80 RMB (US $11) to enter the city gate of Chengkan. Villages in China charge a steep entrance fee, double the price of a night in a hostel. Chengkan is a quiet village consisting of a maze of narrow winding lanes between high walls concealing I don’t know what. I spent a morning wandering among the picturesque lanes and avoiding dogs as best I could, since China has a big rabies problem, and a traveler from Ireland told me that he had nearly been bitten in a village.
When I saw a woman washing her clothes in the river, beating them with a stick, I felt silly for having been disappointed that the spin cycle on my hostel’s washing machine hadn’t worked the day before, and I had had to wring my clothes dry by hand before hanging them to dry on the bamboo pole.
I had lunch at the village’s only restaurant. The waitress spoke a little English, and asked me if I wanted rice, noodles or dumplings. After I chose rice, she asked me to step into the kitchen and choose a vegetable. Since vegetables are not cooked together, I could only choose one. So I got a huge bowl of plain rice and a plate of cabbage fried with garlic and bother. Together with a beer for the hot day, it was a pretty good lunch. On the way back to Tunxi, two of the four bus drivers remembered me and gleefully helped me get on the right series of buses.

The next day I took a bus to Hongcun, a more touristed but still beautiful village, famous for its Moon Pond. In Hongcun, I rented a bicycle to ride out of town to the Mukeng Bamboo Forest, where parts of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon were filmed.

I rented the bike solely using gestures and drawings, and amazingly the shopkeeper and I correctly communicated the price, rental period and deposit which would be returned to me.

Anhui is a peaceful respite in bustling China.

Anhui: The New Mexico of China

I took the maglev train travelling 301 km/hr (187 mph) from the airport to downtown Shanghai. Maglev is short for magnetic levitation, because the train doesn’t actually touch the tracks. Magnets provide lift and propulsion, so the train hovers just above the tracks, eliminating all but air friction and electro-magnetic drag. Maglev trains are quieter, faster and smoother than wheeled mass transit systems. China’s is the world’s most well-known commercial high-speed maglev. Its top speed is 381 km/hr (268 mph). By bus the trip would take 45 minutes, but we made it in 7 minutes 20 seconds, just slightly slower than an airplane could, and I found myself wondering why we don’t have a better public transportation system in the U.S.

At a youth hostel on East Nanjing Road I dined on take-out pizza and beer. For some reason the multitude of Pizza Huts in Shanghai had caught my eye, and I didn’t yet know that a meal of pizza cost about six times the price of a much tastier Chinese meal.

In the hostel I met backpackers from South Korea, Canada, China and the U.S. A man from Tennessee who had lived in Japan gave me his three-day pass to the Shanghai World Expo, with two days unused. He said that it was disappointing, and one day was enough for him.
In the morning I had spicy sour ramen noodles (8 RMB) while reading the China Daily. Drawn by the sound of drumming, I headed to a little park sandwiched between high rises and glittering shopping malls. A group of women was busily drumming and marching in formations. Further down, the tree-lined pedestrian lane was crowded with small groups of senior citizens doing tai chi and other exercises. One group of particularly energetic middle aged women was performing an aerobic dance to Chinese pop music using pink rubber balls as props.

I had read that because only two percent of Chinese smile at strangers, the government hired professional smilers to encourage smiling among the population before the Expo, so that visitors would feel more welcomed. Either it worked, or the original statistic was wrong, because in the bustling city of Shanghai, strangers greeted me with “ni hao,” smiled at me, waved, and generally tried to communicate with me in a friendly way. Shanghai felt vibrant and warm, brimming with talking and laughing and cheerful activity.

I spent a day at the expo which involved lots of waiting in lines to finally walk through mediocre exhibits consisting mostly of videos and a few products from each country while throngs of Chinese people rushed to get their Expo passports stamped but didn’t seem to look much at the exhibits. I realized that I’m pretty fortunate to be able to collect stamps in my real passport. Below is Britain's Seed Pavilion.

The two highlights of the day were the stuffed grape leaves I ate at a Bulgarian restaurant, and the African Pavilion in which countries which could not afford their own pavilion created smaller exhibits in a shared building. Their lower tech exhibits were actually more interesting, and had fewer lines. But overall I tend to agree with the man from Tennessee who gave me the three-day pass. The Expo is a huge waste of money and resources, and since all the buildings but two are built with temporary building materials and will be torn down in six months, it is an environmental outrage.

When Expos began in the mid 1800s, they were a place to showcase new technology and inventions like the ice cream cone which made its debut at an expo in the early 1900s. But today the expo seems to be a reluctant exercise in foreign relations. The U.S. nearly didn’t participate this year due to a lack of funds, but not participating would have been such an affront to foreign relations with China that the U.S. eventually raised the funds and built a large pavilion.

After a night in the hostel dorm room with four Chinese women who came to Shanghai to see the expo, I got up early to take a morning bus to Tunxi, a small town in the beautiful but impoverished Anhui province.

So far I had not seen the famed Chinese ni hao toilets “hello toilets” where everyone reportedly squats together with no privacy walls. The expo and other places I had been in Shanghai had great toilets, often even with paper. I hoped to see a ni hao toilet at the long distance bus station, but instead I found individual stalls with a shared trough running through. No need to flush, as water automatically flushes through the trough regularly. It’s a pretty good system, but the only strange part is that one can see other people’s business floating by in the trough.

Before the bus took off, the driver handed each passenger a plastic bag. “Bag” he said to me in English, passing me mine. I wondered if it was for vomiting in, as I had done years ago on a mountainous bus ride in Mexico. But I decided hopefully that it must be for garbage. Later I saw a man spitting in his, employing that less than endearing Chinese practice of loudly hacking and spitting, usually done on the street. Apparently people are not able to refrain from doing it during a bus ride.

Chinese people seem to readily talk to strangers on buses and in public places. The man sitting next to me on the bus to Tunxi tried valiantly to have a conversation with me. Unable to understand anything he said, I handed him my phrasebook which gave him and his friends some good chuckles but didn’t help us communicate much.

At my hostel in Tunxi I met a young Russian couple at the beginning of a two-year world traipse. They thought it was funny that I am from Minnesota, since earlier in China they had bought T-shirts that said “Minnesota” and “Iowa,” and people from those places kept approaching them.

To me, Anhui is the New Mexico of China. Frequent floods and mountains keep its agricultural ability marginal, and it has no other industry, but the atmosphere is laid back and the mountains and ancient villages are absolutely stunning. Anhui’s top draw is Huang Shan, a mountain comprised of a collection of granite cliffs laced with trails on the side of sheer cliffs flanked by odd and beautifully shaped trees and shrouded in misty clouds. Huang Shan’s beauty inspired a whole school of ink painting during past centuries, which even extended to Japan, and more recently it inspired the set of the movie Avatar.

I spent a day in Tunxi, absorbing the beauty of the Ming Dynasty (1600s-1800s) architecture that surrounded Ancient Town Youth Hostel, getting a foot reflexology treatment and stocking up on supplies for the two-day trek on Huang Shan. Seeking trail food among the aisles of unfamiliar food at Tunxi’s supermarket left me with a couple of duds (black hard boiled eggs – eeew – and dried fruit meant for cooking, not eating raw) but mostly hits (jerkey of unknown meat, canned tuna, cookies, chocolate) and I found an especially good bonanza at a local bakery (cheese and herb bread - yum!).
On the bus to Huang Shan a collection of solo backpackers from Holland, England, China and Ireland befriended me. Together we took the cable car part way and then hiked up the east slope, through packs of package tourists in matching hats swarming around megaphone-wielding guides. Still we managed to take some pictures of the beautiful Huang Shan pine trees for which Huang Shan is famous.
After 2 ½ hours we left the hordes behind and entered the loop, which consists of cement paths precariously built hanging from the sides of sheer cliffs. I can’t imagine how many people must have died building them. The loop hike took about six hours up and down cement steps, and is not for those afraid of heights or without sturdy knees.
We staggered to our hostel, the Baiyun, located near one of Huang Shan’s summits, where we watched the sunset from a peak and then limped to our beds in an 11-person dorm for 140 RMB per night.

I shared my room with nine Chinese tourists and one Columbian doctor who practices medicine in Miami but is working in Beijing for four months.

After the first day’s strenuous and knee-killing hike, Floor from Holland and I just managed to limp down to the eastern cable car. Back in Tunxi, our new Chinese backpacker friend, a pilot who had studied aviation in Phoenix, guided us to an excellent restaurant where I broadened my regular menu beyond the boiled dumplings on which I had been subsisting.

A Batek Village

In Malaysia, I visited a village of hunting and gathering people called the Batek. The Batek live in the rain forest and hunt only with blow darts and spears, moving from place to place following their food sources. The village I visited, within Taman Negara National Park, consisted of six families living in temporary open shelters.

I had never before visited a nomadic village, and I didn't know what to expect when I signed up for the river tour that included a visit to the village. Without giving us any kind of orientation, our guide secured his motorized canoe against the river bank, and told me and the seven others in the group to walk up the path into the village. We did so, and found, amid the collection of huts, a group of Batek children who were pausing in their play and waiting to be photographed by us. They were waiting to be photographed because every day canoe loads of tourists stop by their village to photograph them. The village leader has an agreement with the tour agency, which provides a small sum to the Batek people.

In Malaysia nearly everyone I had encountered spoke English well, so unfortunately I had not learned even the most basic words in Malay. The Batek, of course, speak their own language but also speak Malay as a second language. Completely unable to communicate with the residents of the village, I awkwardly wondered what to do and felt sorry I had joined this tour which I felt treated the village like a zoo. But since the kids were waiting for me to do so, I took out my camera and snapped a few pictures.

The village consisted of 10 or 12 shelters. Most were made of bamboo rattan, but a few were made of blue plastic tarps. In addition to the 4 or 5 children playing in the center of the village, a couple of men passed by, but I didn't see any women. A young Batek man, the son of the village leader, demonstrated how to start a fire using only a piece of wood and a piece of bamboo rattan, and how to make a blow dart. He then demonstrated how to shoot a dart using a blow pipe, and gave us each a turn at blow pipe target practice. I was surprised that just a light blow was able to send the dart into the target with a great deal of force.

Our guide, who was not Batek but rather Malay, which is the dominant culture in Malaysia, gave a little talk about the Batek.

He told us that the Batek men hunt only with blowpipes equipped with poisoned darts, and with spears. They hunt small animals, such as monkeys, and they also fish. Although I didn't see any souvenirs for sale or in fact anything for sale in the village, our guide said that the women make wooden carvings which are sold to tourists. In addition, the Batek gather roots. During the dry season they get their water from the river, but when the river is muddy during the rainy season they get their water from streams or vines. They are nomadic, moving periodically in order to obtain food. They have been in their current village for five months.

They don't do any farming, but they sometimes do some work for cash, such as selling firewood to non-Batek people. They sometimes keep wild pheasants to be used for food.

Our guide said that in the last twenty years there have been changes in the Batek way of life. In the past, they had only bamboo rafts, which could move them down river, but when they wanted to move up river they had to walk. Nowadays the people have a boat which they can use to travel. And nowadays the Batek people eat rice which they buy from the outside.

Our guide said that the Batek sometimes leave the village in order to do some business in the outside world, but that they never stay away from their home for longer than two or three days. The Batek look markedly different from other Malaysians, and it is true that I never saw any outside of the rain forest. I wonder how they are received in the outside world.

When I asked about the Malaysian government's policy toward the Batek, it became clear that our guide knew little about the Batek other than the uninformed rumors that people in a dominant society tend to spread about their indigenous neighbors. His statements reminded me of the type of racist comments that one can hear in any predominantly white American town located just outside an Indian reservation.

Our guide said that the Malaysian government provides schooling and encourages the Batek to assimilate to the outside world, and that the government tries to provide health care for the Batek but that they won't accept these services. When I asked if there was any conflict over land, our guide said that there was none.

Through a bit of quick research I later learned that, in fact, there has been a lot of conflict over land, and that the Batek have been forced from nearly all of their traditional land, and the only place they can live is within Taman Negara National Park.

In addition, I learned that the Malaysian government does not do such a good job of providing education to Orang Asli, or aboriginal, children. Recently it was reported that the government was seven months behind in paying the boat drivers who were supposed to transport the Orang Asli children to school. In protest, the drivers finally stopped transporting, and the children couldn't go to school.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to chat with any of the Batek people and learn anything about their way of life and their hopes for the future from their point of view. From an outsider's point of view, it seems truly astonishing that the Batek, living in a rain forest surrounded by Malaysian rubber tappers, loggers, hunters, tour operators and all sorts of entrepreneurs, have managed to preserve their traditional nomadic way of life, surviving on hunting and gathering, governing themselves, and seeking refuge in the national park in order to avoid being completely pushed from the land that has always sustained them.

They choose to accept some parts of the outside world, such as blue tarps, transistor radios, and sometimes even cell phones, which seem like they would be an extremely useful form of technology for nomads. The Batek in the village I visited didn't have cell phones, as there was no service there, but our guide told us that others, living in other places, do.

The Batek interact with the outside world when it benefits them, such as through occasional work, selling handicrafts, and inviting tourists to their village. Some of the travelers in my group seemed to find the Batek use of blue plastic tarps and radios to be somehow "inauthentic." But the Batek did not build their village in an attempt to create a modern living museum for the enjoyment of tourists. Rather, they have adopted some useful things from the outside in order to preserve their lifestyle. And if I were a nomad, I would most certainly want to have a blue plastic tarp, too.

Taman Negara Malaysia, one of the world's oldest rainforests

After a bus ride that made me wish I were wearing a sports bra, and three hours in a motorized wooden canoe traveling upriver past monkeys playing in the tree branches and water buffalo cooling themselves in the river, I arrived in Taman Negara, which, at over 130 million years of age, is said to be the world's oldest primary rain forest. Planning to do some hiking, I bought a cigarette lighter which I was told was necessary to remove leeches which are of the huge biting variety that can fall from trees and begin to suck blood on any part of one's body. I also bought some long socks and rented a pair of high topped leech resistant hiking boots. And a man in a camera store cleaned my smeared lens for no charge.

One might think it's lonely traveling alone, but actually I am seldom by myself. At least once a day I tend to be joined for a meal,either by a local or by another traveler. On the way to Taman Negara I was joined by Tom, an 18-year-old Englishman who I met on the bumpy bus ride. Tom has been traveling alone for the past six months, in New Zealand and Asia. We shared a delicious meal of roti canai, a flat bread dipped in tasty curry sauce, for U.S. $1.50.

In Melacca I ate dinner at an outdoor riverside table with the cafe owner, a Malaysian named Bert who had worked for JR Reynolds Tobacco Company in Borneo for many years before returning to Melacca to open a restaurant. I ate lunch with another Malaysian, who explained that he was the son of a Seek father and Indian mother, and had spent several years in Japan while training to be a Christian missionary. He lives in southern Malaysia but returned to Melacca for the Chinese New Year holiday.Above: Me with Ming Wei

On the boat ride to Taman Negara I met Ming Wei, a banker from Malaysia's capital, who, along with 20 friends, was visiting Taman Negara for the first time in her life. I mentioned to Ming Wei that years ago I had made my first backpacking trip with my good friend Eileen, who is Malaysian, and that in Mexico Eileen had tried to teach me to bargain (I wasn't at all good at it!), and had introduced me to my first mango. As we parted, Ming Wei gave me a wonderful fresh persimmon, one of my favorite fruits. Although persimmons are now grown primarily in Asia, the word persimmon comes from the Powhatan language, and persimmons were first cultivated by Native Americans. What a global world we live in!

In Taman Negara I shared several meals with Tim, an American investment banker who quit his job a couple of years ago and has been traveling ever since. He visit every country in South America before heading to Southeast Asia, and plans to travel for yet another year!

On my first night in Taman Negara I joined a guided night walk in the rain forest, during which I learned to spot spiders at night by aligning my flashlight with my eyes, which enabled me to see the spiders' eyes glowing. There were thousands of them on the trees and on the ground, and I saw several huge hunter spiders waiting for their prey. Rather than using a web, hunter spiders use the style of hunting dogs.The rain forest is alive and vibrant at night, and I saw stick insects, a cricket, a cockroach on a tree, giant ants, a huge millipede, scorpions hiding in nooks, sleeping birds (from the bottom), a wild pig, and deer. Best of all, I saw a slow loris slowly crossing a wire above my head. Although it seemed scared when everyone was looking it it, it continued to cross the wire, very slowly.Above: Slow loris

Upon returning to my bungalow, the Durian Chalet, I sat outside in the dark for 30 minutes listening to the beautiful medley of jungle sounds, which seemed to include crickets, cicadas, birds, frogs, and many more sounds that I couldn't identify. I chose the Durian Chalet in part because it's next to a durian field, and I really want to try that odorous fruit, but alas it was not in season. The other reason I chose the Durian Chalet is because it's a fifteen minute walk outside of town, which I detested when I was lugging my heavy backpacks in the humidity and heat but which I loved during the night when I heard all of the jungle noises through the open window of my room, including a wild screaming at two a.m., which I first thought was cats, and later thought was children, and hoped might be jungle wildlife.

Later during the night I heard an animal inside my room, jumping. I could hear it as it hit the floor, making a suction cup sound, and I immediately guessed that it was a frog. I turned on the light and removed a small and very scared frog from my room. And before dawn as I walked fifteen minutes in the dark past a rubber and durian field to town I heard a startled rustling and snorting in the brambles, most likely a wild boar.

Above: tapped rubber tree

Trying to get an early breakfast I walked to one of the floating restaurants on the edge of the river, but found the restaurant closed and the staff sleeping on the floor. Most of the workers in the village come from the surrounding area to work in the tourist industry. I had a nice chat with Aiyu, a 25-year-old Malay woman who works at one of the travel agencies in Taman Negara. She is from a village two hours away. Her parents work as rubber tappers in the rain forest, and care for Aiyu's five-year-old daughter while Aiyu and her husband work 12 or 13 hour days for the travel agency. Aiyu goes back to her village to visit her daughter a few times a year. She speaks English well, and told me that she completed one year of university but couldn't afford to continue.

Above: floating restaurants

When I walk through the rain forest, I can hear leaves falling from the canopy high above. I hear them as they reach the lower forest levels, like the sound of raindrops, and occasionally they tumble down further, finally reaching the jungle floor. Although I didn't see any leeches, my morning hike in the rain forest proved to be harder than I had expected, due to the heat and humidity, but I managed to reach the canopy walkway, a hanging rope bridge made of wooden planks and ladders which allowed me to see different levels of the rain forest up to 45 meters above the ground.

On the way back, I sat under a tree to eat my lunch and listen to the jungle sounds, some coming from high above in the canopy and others right around me.

I didn't see many of the larger animals that live in Taman Negara, such as the Asian elephant (endangered), the serow, the Malayan Tiger (endangered), the black panther, Malayan Tapir, civet, the wild cattle-like gaur (protected), yellow-throated marten, Asiatic golden cat, red dog or dhole, or the mouse deer. And of course I didn't see the Sumatran rhino, which is extinct.

Scientists believe that Taman Negara, now a national park, is the oldest rain forest in the world. Taman Negara is protected, but many of Malaysia's other rain forests, especially, those in Borneo, are threatened by logging, agriculture and urban encroachment. According to the United Nations, Malaysia's deforestation rate is accelerating faster than that of any other tropical country in the world. Malaysia's annual deforestation rate jumped almost 86 percent between the 1990-2000 period and 2000-2005. In total, Malaysia lost an average of 140,200 hectares—0.65 percent of its forest area—per year since 2000.

Sitting in the rain forest, a recurring thought that I first had while visiting the rain forests of the Pacific Northwest came to me. Life must have been more comfortable before humans built cities, which trap and reflect the heat and destroy the natural shade. In the rain forest there is no need for sunscreen or a hat, as only a few speckles of sunlight reach my skin. The rain is not really bothersome, since it is filtered by the trees, down to their roots. However, journal writing in the rain forest is definitely not easier. None of my pens worked in Taman Negara, whether due to the humidity of the pages in my journal or the stickiness of my hand I don't know. My notes consist of barely legible scribbles on my journal pages.

Children walking to school