INTO THE HEART OF BORNEO

From the crowded riverbank in Pontianak, I watched tattooed Iban deckhands loading a rainbow assortment of plastic buckets and tableware into narrow vessels designed for penetrating the inland communities of West Kalimantan, a vast Indonesian province on the island of Borneo. Farther along the dock, I came across gangs of dusty laborers, balancing like tightrope walkers on sagging gangplanks as they offloaded sacks of rice and sheets of raw rubber from hulking timber cargo boats known as bandung. While this offloading interested me, it was the boats that were being loaded that I focused on. For I had a particular reason to be here: I was scouting for potential transport to Putussibau, a jungle frontier town located 700 kilometers up the Kapuas River. It was safe to assume that at least one of these boats would be heading there within the next day or so.

Back in 1996, when I first visited Putussibau, the town was still