A Catch-22 in the Urban Jungle
It’s late afternoon on the Kinabatangan River, I’m in a wooden boat gently motoring along the rim of the jungle, keenly searching out the infamous Promiscuous Monkey. A crocodile is basking on a sand bank, bugs and birds are screeching through the thicket, but still no sound of the horny primate. I imagine they’re off copulating somewhere, being promiscuous and all, and mention as such to my guide Zainal. He cracks a broad smile, which Borneo folk tend to do, and corrects me. For the last few days, I’ve heard much about this famous monkey, only found in Borneo, but it turns out I had misheard the name. “It’s the Proboscis Monkey, Mr Gonzo” he says, although his accent is pretty thick so he could have said pretty much anything. With their flared butts and my somewhat filthy mind, I heard promiscuous … honest mistake. Suddenly, a rumble in the jungle, trees shake, bushes rattle, and there they are! It’s as if nature played a joke on the poor Proboscis Monkey. Big, flat, noses, potbellies, slack jawed… they’re about as sexy as a Steve Buscemi and twice as funny-looking. But they are notorious for having 24-hour erections, so maybe I wasn’t too far off this monkey business.
Kinabatangan (quick, say that three times over) flows for about 560kms, alongside some impenetrable jungle, but mostly palm oil plantations. I’m staying in a wonderful lodge in a 260,000-hectare wildlife sanctuary near Sukau, where people come from around the world to gawk at jungle monkeys, gibbons, birds, bearded pigs, reptiles, and rare pygmy elephants. The elephants have migrated into nearby Indonesia, but I do see a pig, which, no joke, is the size of a cow. I was naturally excited to get to the riverside Promiscuous Lodge, only to find I was the only guest and it’s actually called the Proboscis Lodge. But they took great care of me, and I’ll always have fond memories of sitting around the outdoor bar at 2am, drinking Tiger beers with the staff, and watching England foible their penalties and crash out the World Cup. And Brazil? I just started telling people to call me “Robinho” and they bomb out to the French! You have to be sleep-deprived at 5am in the middle of the Borneon jungles to appreciate how crap is. Especially with the mosquitoes spreading butter on my calves before tucking in. Returning to the jungle, the monkeys come out to play and I watch them acrobatically swinging from tree to tree using “monkey transport”, ie. vines and branches. I see snakes, monitor lizards, and large butterflies with colorful fractals on their wings. I calculate that were I to get lost in this jungle, I would survive about as long as the fuse of Wayne Rooney’s temper (or, for the soccer illiterate, about as long as the career of last year’s American Idol). The jungle is beautiful and majestic, providing you’re not lost in it. Unlike the quiet forests of British Columbia, where you can hear nigh bird nor bug, these jungles scream LIFE in capital letters. Slowly driving back to the highway for two hours along a horrifically mangled dirt road, the jungle vanished into a landscape of palm oil plantations. Plantations may fuel the booming Malaysian economy, but seeing the extent of the vanishing wildlife left an unpleasant taste (like finding out a lover is really your third cousin).
No, I also have never wondered what a bird’s nest tastes like. And who would have thought that a white nest, made of 100% bird saliva, is worth more than gold. But here at Sabah’s Gomantong Caves, home to two million bats and thousands of birds, nests are harvested twice a year where they are sold for millions to the Chinese mainland. Edible birds nest, when cooked and turned into a jelly or tincture, are thought to cure just about everything, from impotency to heart disease. Subsequently, Gomantong is a major source of revenue for the region. Men use rope ladders and swings to scale the 90-metre high cave walls to collect the nests. It’s dangerous but incredibly lucrative, a collector can make as much as $8000 in just two weeks of harvest. Unfortunately, there was none about for me to taste. In a world of fois de gras and caviar, birds nests demand to be sampled.
And Now, A Short Discourse on Premier Hotels.
It is a rare but not unknown event for me to stay in a premier hotel, and I have a few serious issues that need to be voiced:
1. What the hell is with the phone in the bathroom?
Who uses it? If it’s there so that you don’t miss important calls when you’re “doing your business”, I wonder what percentage of business is done between the office and some executive taking a dump in a nice hotel. There must be a survey somewhere. Someone must know something. The only use I can think of is if you get up before your wake up call, and then, while using the toilet, the phone rings, and they think you’re sleeping, but in actual fact, you’re just, ahem, dispelling the Cosby Kids. Then you need the toilet phone. The one time that happened to me however, there wasn’t one. Maybe the toilet phone is worth a star, as you only see them in four and five star hotels.
2. Why is there always a shitty three-piece band in the bar named “Sparkle” or “Dazzle” or “Sparkle Dazzle”?
There’s always one guy, faded and jaded and wearing enough cologne to make the room feel like an ether jar. He’s typically got a slicked back ponytail, and is the genius behind the music, which is the audible equivalent of a colostomy bag. The two girls, just slightly attractive after nine beers, wear tight mini-skirts so that every guy after nine beers wonders if they’re performers or low-rent hookers. Both sing terrible, but are probably banging the guy with the ponytail, or at least that’s what everyone is thinking. At least 23% of each performance must be sung out of tune, and contain at least three Bette Midler/Whitney Houston classics. The volume should be at that point between too loud and harmful to your eardrums. Perhaps premier hotels have the dynamic trio because the only way anyone can survive a night in a hotel bar with them is to drink into unconsciousness, which is great for the bottom line.
3. Why the offensive music in the lobby and elevators?
Richard Clayderman, damn you to hell. Kenny G, may you roll over in your sleep and get strangled by your long, curly locks. It’s always the same songs too, muzak to slit your wrists to. Worse is when they take a good artist, like The Beatles, as performed by a half-deaf new-age Czech pianist with Parkinsons. Who are they catering to? If car commercials can become all hip with the music, why can’t hotels? Oh great, it’s Elton John as performed by a washed-up Pole on panpipes. It is crucial however for the muzak to kick in the moment Sparkle/Sizzle/Dazzle finish their set.
