Thursday 29 March 2012

Rebuilding.

If there's one thing this project is not, it's smooth sailing. As Willie Smits so rightly pointed out on the first few days of the project:

"The only thing you can be certain of in Indonesia is that nothing is certain"

The last 10 days (since I met up with the other Eco Warriors, the film crew and Dr. Willie Smits) have, just like the roads, been bumpy, uncertain and covered in pot-holes. It has been a great disappointment to us all that no large companies have stepped up to give the financial foundations that this project really needs. On top of this, we have not yet received the laptops we were promised from Samsung, which has left us with only 5 computers between us all, limiting our ability to communicate with our networks and work on fundraising. We have lost 4 of our Eco Warriors to personal issues, including the 2 competent Bahasa Indonesia speakers, which has left some communication problems! On the plus side, my Bahasa is improving exponentially!

Nevertheless, I love being back.

On the journey to a town in the centre of Pontianak, we spotted this guy precariously driving his top-heavy van on the windy, bumpy roads. At one point the wheels on one side lifted off the road.

The most exciting part of returning - the bit that we had all been curling our toes in anticipation for - was meeting up with baby orangutan JoJo and her new playmate Juvi. Whilst we have to respect a 20 day quarantine period before we can go close to them, it was so great to see them play. Click Here is a video that Eco Warrior Paul Daley made of them playing with their care-worker.

Setting up for the first early morning webinar with thousands of kids from around the world (including schools from Pakistan, Brazil, America, Australia, India, Canada, Croatia and the UK). We spoke about ourselves, our plans, our aims, and our new campaign, orangutaNation, which involves young people from around the globe in rescuing and rehabilitating orphaned orangutans. It was so amazing to engage with these stake-holders, and to answer their questions. One girl asked Willie Smits if he, like her, had already decided at the tender age of 6 to spend his life saving orangutans.

Shadrack's Throne - Eco Warrior Shadrack Kalasa napping on his huge bed whilst the final midnight webinar is recorded behind him.

An exciting new toy for the EarthWatchers programme. Earthwatchers is a ground breaking new software tool to enable young people across the planet to monitor the forests and provide usable intelligence to stop deforestation. It provides a new approach for education by actually involving the students directly in the conservation effort by allowing them to monitor real data. This photo was taken from a GoPro camera which will be attached to a drone - a 6 foot remote controlled plane (bottom centre of the picture) - in order to take photos from a birds eye view of illegal deforestation.

With a small budget, we have managed to rejuvenate the enclosures within and security surrounding the Orangutan Centre which houses Juvi and JoJo, and which will soon house dozens more rescued orangutans. Click Here to see a video of this process by Paul Daley.

Bugs, bugs, everywhere. On your face and in your hair.
This little dude needed a paracetamol after crashing head first into a spinning ceiling fan. We healed his wound with a cotton bud, and he was soon ready to be re-released.
Sunset on the red bark. It's great to be back in the Beating Heart of Borneo.

A few days in Jakarta is always enough...

The few days leading up to my departure for the next trip to Borneo were filled with nerves, sad goodbyes, excitement, a sprinkle of fear. 11 days ago, I stepped off English land and into a plane heading for Indonesia.

"Beep Beep Beep" - I left my keys in my pocket at airport security.

"Would you like a drink Sir?" - asks the air hostess.

"Khoooooaaar" - snores the dribbling man in the seat next to me.

"Flomp" - the heat and smell of tropical Jakarta presses onto my shoulders as I step off the plane, and I know I'm back.

I had to wait in Jakarta for a few days before I caught a flight to Pontianak, Borneo. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with the big J - it was great to have some time to wander round, take some photos, and acclimatise to the culture shock. On the other hand, the smell of sweet, rotting fruit, sweat and burning plastic stings the nostrils, and after 2 days I was ready to leave for the fresh rainforest air.

Arriving on the first day in Jakarta, these guys were sat outside my hotel all day. Life is at such a different pace.


Even the trees lining the pavements remind me of how far I've come in 24 hours.
A car park; you get the feeling in Indonesia that no-one really maintains anything. They build it and leave it till it crumbles. As we found out in the last trip, this is certainly true for bridges.

Wednesday 14 March 2012

20 days in Borneo

Turn off the lights, and close the curtains.

Now I want you to get comfortable, take a few deep breaths, sit up and ease yourself out of your body, away from where you are sitting, away from what you’ve been doing today, out of day-to-day tantrums and frustrations. I want you to feel to feel totally comfortable and relaxed.
I want you to feel this blog, not just read it.

Ready?

It’s a humid, hot day in the beating heart of Borneo: the sort of day where moisture clings to your face like honey and air reluctantly slides down your throat. The sun is naked, slumped overhead like a drunk, too heavy to shift.

Imagine a single butterfly, twisting in the clear sky like a fallen leaf. Its wings constantly change from blue to green, depending on how the sunlight caresses them. Picture its flight as it swoops down towards a raging river, landing gracefully on a bobbing log. The water is a muddy brown, the surface smooth like cream. The butterfly tentatively makes its way down to the edge of the log, dipping its proboscis into the cool water to drink, and closes its wings.

At the edge of the river, an ant is working hard. He works alongside his 100000 brothers on an ancient fruit tree. His aim, consistent for the last few weeks, has been to collect the precious sugar from plump fruits which dangle in clumps at the end of heavy branches. He scuttles along a limb over the river, clambering past his burdened friends heading back to the nest. He reaches his goal, a reddish round object, covered in his black, inch long brothers. He heaves himself down onto the fruit and pushes his jaw deep into the flesh of the fruit, squeezing a drop of juice out which slides down and falls unnoticed into the coursing water below.

A few hundred metres away, deep under the canopy, a green viper waits motionless in a branch. Her scaly skin, fractured like a honey comb, is bright fluorescent green at the head, dirty-brown at the tail. She dangles her tail from the branch and wiggles it to lure in unsuspecting prey. Her mouth hangs open, fangs exposed, brimming with deadly poison. Her eye, piercing yet delicate, scans the lush forest for any sign of movement.

The constant buzz of insects fills the dense air, outcompeted only by the occasional cry of a howler monkey in a distant place. Trees grow on trees and vines dangle down like piano-teachers’ fingers, clinging to branches far out of sight. Not a single ray of sunlight squeezes through the thick canopy and the ground is damp, softened by thousands of leaves from thousands of trees for thousands of years. The viper waits patiently.

Out of the blue, a branch cracks, and a scruffy Tom slips into the scene, knee deep in the boggy peat. He mutters to himself, frustrated, sweaty, unwashed. He is followed by a 6 foot 4 Dutch man with a booming voice, a local Indonesian Dayak, 14 enthusiastic 20-something Eco-Warriors, a camera team clutching £800000 cameras and a movie director.

The viper watches - intrigued - as the Dutch man walks up to a hanging vine and slices it with his sharpened machete, turns the vine upside down and holds it over Tom’s mouth. Fresh, cold rainwater, collected in the veins of the plant, pours out in an unbroken flow, and Tom gulps it down.

“ONE!”

Suddenly, one of the 20-somethings screams.

“TWO!” mutters another.

“THREE!”

The Eco-Warriors, one by one, break the dull sounds of the forest as they count off, checking for straddlers. The viper freaks out and slides off into the tree, unseen.

This time 5 months ago, I was there. This time 5 months ago, I could taste the sweet nectar of a wild rainforest fruit, run my hand along the rough skin of a two-thousand-year-old tree, spot cicadas the size of bats swoop precariously through interwoven vegetation, talk to indigenous people who welcomed me with open arms and kind eyes into their traditions, cultures, and homes. And this time next week ago, I’ll be there again; in the beating heart of Borneo. Right now I am sitting at a desk in Bristol, tired and nervous, staring at a bunch of pixelated lights and trying my hardest to string the letters, words and sentences together to do justice to that beautiful place.

It all began with an email in February which invited youth around the world to upload a two minute video of themselves answering broad questions on why they should be invited on the trip of a lifetime.

A gruelling application process then began, and the specifics of the project began to unfold. 16 international youth, named “Eco-Warriors” were to join a film team called “Virgo Productions”, and an acclaimed conservationist called Dr. Willie Smits, deep in the rainforests of Borneo. They were to see the destruction caused by monoculture of palm oil plants which supply us with cheap vegetable oil. They were to hear first-hand the painful stories told by local villagers who had lost their land, livelihoods and freedom in battles with international companies. They were to stare into the eyes of an orang-utan who had spent all its life treading in its own excrement in a dingy, rusty cage. But they were also going to be part of a hopeful project, with big aims and ambition, intricate solutions and a lot of passion. The 16 Eco-Warriors were to be connected to amazing networks of ambitious and devoted youth who could pass on the stories and the knowledge extracted from Borneo, and start up incredible projects which will change the face of rainforest and orang-utan conservation.

I poured my heart into the application, and so did my friends. I want to say now how amazing it was to be supported by so many people that I’ve known in my life. I really hope there’s something I can do for you all in the future. Anyway, my exams started to consume my time, and I backed off the application, watching my Borneo adventure slip through my fingers. I was told about a week after my finals that unfortunately I wasn’t going to be one of the 16, and my heart dropped. I had missed it, and I bent down to pick up the pieces.

2 months later, I was replanning, applying for jobs, and visiting my girlfriend in her home town of Gdansk in Poland. It was a clear night, so we decided to head down to the pier on the sea (the longest wooden pier in the world, don’t you know) to watch a film on the open-top cinema. Half way through the film, I checked my emails on my phone, and spotted a new one from Cathy Henkel, the film producer from Virgo Productions. I opened it:

“Hi Tom, Just to let you know, one of the Eco-Warriors had dropped out, so we were wondering if you’d like to join us in Borneo in 3 weeks time?”.

I jumped up, screamed, started to cry with joy, interrupting hundreds of people’s cinematic experience or whatever, and hugged my girlfriend, Nina. It was one of the greatest moments of my life, one of those scenes I will remember when I’m wrinkly and bored. I emailed Cathy immediately to say I appreciate the offer, but it is too late to cancel my ticket to the music festival I was going to in a month. Only joking.

3 weeks later, I arrived at Jakarta Airport in Indonesia, nervous and exhausted. There was no sign of my backpack. I was told that my backpack should arrive in 3 days time, by which point I would be in the middle of nowhere. I had a rucksack on my back, no change of clothes, no mosquito repellent, no net, no chance. I lasted 10 days in the Borneo Rainforest without a backpack – travelling light, one might say. I met with the other eco-warriors and we got to chin-chatting.

The first 20 days were quite incredible, and feel so far from my desk right now. I would love to describe every second of it to every one of you, but I feel that’s better done in person. Instead, perhaps I could write down and show you the most beautiful, powerful and heartbreaking moments.


The first time I see an orang-utan in my life, and I see 2, in a rusty cage at a “tourist amusement park”, filthy with excrement. They cling to each other, like 2 children with nothing left but the other. There are hundreds of orang-utans in situations like this, all over Borneo. This is not a rarity.



The Dayak traditional longhouse is like no other. Hundreds of metres long, it can take 5 minutes to walk from one end of it to the other. We stayed here for 3 weeks, getting to know the locals, playing games with the kids, bathing in the river. Communities like this are being destroyed every day by palm oil companies, and the residents are forced to move to the dirty cities, where they are treated like animals.




My first visit to a virgin rainforest- the trees overhang the water, fresh fruit dangling ripe from their branches. We visited a raging waterfall one afternoon, cocooned by steep, tree-clogged cliffs, 8 hours up river from any civilisation beyond a few settlements with a dozen or so families.


A ride up river on a long, slow-chugging boat. We picked fruit off the trees above, played a local man’s homemade instrument, and watched the world become more and more remote and wild as we crawled closer and closer to the heart of Borneo.




Ben Dessen, our honourary Dr. Dolittle, caught this handsome fellow on a biodiversity survey – one of the most poisonous snakes on the planet, this guy sits in trees, dangling his brown tail off the side of the branch, waiting for a bird to mistake it for a worm, then snaps around and kills them with a single bite. Paul Daley’s photo brings out the breath-taking intricacy of this deadly killer.


 Colourful Eco-warrior Kodi Twiner standing in front of a truck full to the brim with palm oil. Palm oil is found in the majority of the products in our supermarkets, and monocultures of the palms that it grows on are replacing Borneo’s rainforests at a startling and desperate rate. We need to find an alternative to palm oil, and we will be working on a possible alternative called sugar palm during our 80 days.



The children of Ensaid Panjang Long House. These critters always had a smile on their faces, and they had a reason to have one. Their life consists of playing in the river with the rest of the village, lying in the sun, they have no distractions from television, and lead a wonderfully simple life. Their village is under threat from palm oil companies, and they may become refugees within the next few years. This was one of the hardest things on the trip. To get to know them was such a joy. "If we ae to teach real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children." Gandhi


Logs, logs, logs, logs. All the way up the river. The size of the trunks is getting smaller and smaller, as illegal loggers start to scrape the barrel.



 Taking the speedboats up the river. Squeezing in with my long legs was quite a mission, and so standing up was the more comfortable, if risky, option. The drivers would jump out onto the front of the boat without warning, steering with their toes, often to do nothing more than fiddle with their front light.


Drinking fresh rain water out of the veins of the roots. We were so thirsty, and finding out about this treat was an unexpected experience.



 Jojo - the baby orang-utan that we rescued from a wooden cage in a village. She’s 3 years old, sucks her toe and has beautiful long eyelashes.

In 2 days time, I will be heading back to Borneo, and I’m sick with nerves and excitement. We have already achieved a massive amount, but this is when the real work starts. We have thousands upon thousands of school kids from around the world watching us, we have a movie to finish, we have 80 days in Borneo to do what we came to do – expose as many human souls as possible to the massacre that is unfolding in our planet’s most diverse, intricate and vital ecosystem, and build a project to channel the energy that comes from those people.

So what can you do to help me? Well you can keep up with my blog at http://crackandsqueeze.blogspot.com/. I’ll be updating regularly, with photos and stories.
Please also think about donating to the project – I’m covering the money for my own flights and food/accommodation with my own savings, but setting up the projects and looking after rescued animals is going to be costly, and any donation, from a penny to a pound coin will help us build this into something great. 

Finally, on March 28th, you, and anyone you know, business school or individual, can join us for an exciting DeforestACTION live event! We will take you deep into the heart the Borneo jungle to connect with orangutans, hear from Dr. Willie Smits and the Eco Warriors about the work they are doing with the Masarang Foundation, and speak with other youth and schools around the world taking action to stop deforestation. Register now at www.tigurl.org/march2012.