Thousands of tiny yellow fruits lay moldering on the jungle floor around me. The sickly sweet smell of fermentation hung heavily in the musty air, and thick clouds of tiny fruit flies hung over everything in a low mist, swirling like dust in the shafts of early morning sunlight.
The smell was almost intoxicating. It reminded me of my failed attempts at home brew, bubbling in barrels under the stairs back home. Bending down for a closer look, I realized these must be the wild figs I was looking for. Some were hard, about the size and shape of a marble. Others had clearly been there a while and lay ruptured and rotting. They didn’t look very much like figs to me, but this was a wild, tropical rainforest species bearing little resemblance to anything stacked in supermarkets back home.
They didn’t look very palatable either, but judging from the amount that had been knocked down by animals foraging in the canopy two hundred feet above me, my opinion was in the minority. The ground was absolutely littered. Taking out my knife, I cut one open. The skin was tough, but the spongy flesh inside yielded to the blade and was filled with dozens of tiny powdery buds. Its center was hollow, home to a couple of squirming grubs.
So here were the figs, but where was the tree that had produced them? I peered through the thick vegetation around me.
Everything about the Borneo rainforest was so exciting, alien, and wild to me. The sheer diversity of life here was staggering. Everything I saw demanded closer inspection, and the deeper I peered, the more complex it became. Like looking through binoculars at the night sky for the first time and seeing rank upon rank of new stars appear in the former emptiness beyond familiar constellations. This was a living world of infinite depth and bewildering beauty. To enter it was to be transported to another time and place, to tumble down the rabbit hole into an ancient world totally dominated by trees. Here more than anywhere else I’d been, the trees were in control. An entire ecosystem molded around them.
The jungle seemed perfectly balanced and in tune with itself, infinitely subtle and intricate. Yet there was also something wild and dangerous about it. I had no doubt that its beauty and wonder would fade pretty quickly in the event of an accident. Even a twisted ankle would become a big issue, while getting bitten by a snake didn’t bear thinking about. I would have to keep my wits about me and not get distracted. But it was hard, as I was still on a massive high from simply being here.
I’d arrived in the Danum Valley Conservation Area a few days ago with John, the cameraman, and Gen, the assistant producer. A small team working for a Bristol-based company, we would spend the next six weeks filming in this 43,000-hectare region of pristine rainforest. My role was to camera-assist John, but also to get him safely up into the canopy to film orangutans feeding in a fruiting tree. John and Gen were currently scouting a different part of the forest with Dennis, our local Dyak guide, which left me to search the jungle on my own for a suitable fruiting tree to film. I was in heaven. But that’s not to say I wasn’t finding the rainforest a challenging environment to work in. The few days since I’d arrived had been a steep learning curve.
My first challenge had been acclimatizing to the incredible heat and humidity. The jungle was locked in a perpetual cycle of rain, mist, and sweltering heat. As soon as the nightly rainfall stopped, humidity levels rocketed, and the trees exhaled to fill our river valley with thick mist. The morning sun would rise over the nearby ridge to set the scene ablaze, and the swirling fog would lift to evaporate into the sky. By late afternoon the clouds would be building. These towering thunderheads of moisture sucked up from the forest would bubble for thousands of feet and teeter ominously before collapsing in an avalanche of rain in the evening.
Walking into the jungle was like entering a steam room. Within minutes my shirt was soaked with sweat that had nowhere to go. The surrounding air was so full of moisture that perspiration couldn’t evaporate. Clothes stayed damp and moldy for days on end. I understood why indigenous tribes still dressed so minimally in the jungle. European clothes become a grungy breeding ground for bacteria and quickly fall apart.
Then there was the challenge of covering long distances on foot through the forest without getting lost. The trees had an uncanny ability to play with your head and confound any innate sense of direction. To walk in a straight line was almost impossible. This was not a linear world, and the weaving web of animal trails and tracks seemed to shift constantly. The rainforest was living up to its mysterious and secretive reputation.
This was the world that had waited beyond the New Forest’s horizon. What would it be like to climb up into the canopy? How would the animals I met there react? What would it be like to be in a tree so massive that its lowest branch was the full height of Goliath above-ground, and the size of an entire oak tree? I couldn’t wait to find out.
Letting the fruit drop through my fingers, I looked around me. Dense foliage was punctuated by the massive vertical trunks of tropical hardwoods, each one the size of a cathedral pillar. Their bases were completely hidden by thick vegetation so that they seemed to float disembodied in the space between understory and canopy. But these weren’t the trees I was looking for this morning—none of them were responsible for the bounty of figs spoiling at my feet. In many respects the tree I was seeking was the very antithesis of all the others in the forest. It was a social outcast, a pariah of the tree world, with a dark and sinister reputation. I couldn’t wait to meet it.
Craning my neck, I could see the branches the fruit had fallen from, but it was impossible to tell which trunk they belonged to. So I followed the trail of figs off the path into a small glade. The fallen fruit was even thicker here, and the vinegar-tang of fermenting sugar was tainted with the earthy smell of pigs that had been here during the night. Fruit, soil, and leaf litter were churned into one.
In the center of this small clearing I found it: a strangler fig. And what a strange, twisted creature it was. A tortured skeleton of a tree, unlike anything I’d ever seen before.
In place of a single trunk it had several intertwined stems that untwisted fifty feet above me to descend in a thicket of stilts. Dozens of long, thin roots hung down to the ground like tendons. Several of the larger stems were enmeshed within a creeping lattice of sinews. In fact, the whole tree appeared to be entirely trapped within a web of its own making, struggling to break free from the sticky strands threatening to throttle it.
Stepping forward into the space between the stilts, I looked up to see a huge section of dead trunk suspended in a tangle of roots ten feet above me. These were the rotting remains of the strangler’s victim—its host tree. Its dark-brown surface was pitted with decay and encrusted with fungi. Large holes gaped like a ghoulish mask. It had been there a long time and the fig’s roots had pierced it again and again. Once upon a time it had been full of life. A giant tropical-hardwood tree several centuries old, standing 250 feet tall.
Having germinated from a seed dropped by an animal in the giant’s canopy, the fig had sent its roots down to girdle its host’s enormous trunk. Ever-tightening roots became a living cage that slowly engulfed the trapped tree. Decades later, by the time the strangler was big enough to stand alone, the last vestiges of life had been squeezed from the giant now imprisoned within it.
There was something forlorn about the husk of the host hanging there like that. Cocooned and sucked dry like the meal of a giant spider. Soon it would turn to dust and crumble away to leave nothing but a macabre vault of roots.
The trees of Borneo are among the tallest anywhere on Earth, which means the strangler figs here are also some of the tallest of their kind. There was a dark side to the giant killer in front of me, and yet the life it had so brutally stolen had been channeled straight back into the forest via the strangler’s fruit. It is the way of things in the jungle: energy seems to cycle through nature so much faster than it does anywhere else.
The figs were almost ripe, and the dislodged fruit all around me on the floor was testament to the fact that for some animals the banquet had already begun. As if to confirm this, a splash of leaves from high above was followed by the soft patter of falling figs. Something was moving around up there, feeding. Peering up through the dense understory, I thought I saw branches moving, but it was hard to be sure.
Sliding my rucksack off my shoulders, I unpacked my climbing gear. My plan was to climb the fig and use it as a lookout from which to choose a suitable neighboring tree for our filming platform. John the cameraman could then use this base to film what was going on in the fig’s canopy from a discreet distance. It’s no exaggeration to say that all the jungle’s fruit-eating animals go crazy for figs. And those that don’t eat fruit are lured in to hunt those that do. So the chances of John getting some amazing footage of animals were good—as long as I got a move on.
I intended to climb one of the stilt-like stems, using the latticework of wood as a natural ladder. The tree in front of me was the ultimate climbing frame, and although a climbing rope trailed from the back of my harness to be used if necessary, it seemed more fitting and more fun to do it the old-fashioned way—to free-climb up as far as possible.
Besides, this was the first tropical tree I had ever climbed, and I felt the need to earn the experience in the most hands-on way I could.
Before I’d entered the forest that morning, Dennis had told me that figs—especially stranglers—were very special trees in native Dyak culture. The home of powerful forest spirits, both benign and malevolent. These needed to be appeased and placated by asking their permission to climb the tree before intruding upon them. He had looked into my eyes with such an earnest expression that I didn’t question him and vowed to do as he suggested.
“And one more thing,” he’d said as I turned to go: “Don’t urinate anywhere near the fig. You’ll annoy the spirits and bring bad luck. This is their forest, just remember that. Respect them and the tree at all times.”
Various Dyak tribes had lived in these forests for thousands of years, and I had to assume they knew a thing or two about how to behave. They certainly knew more than an Englishman, so who was I to question the way things were done? I wasn’t going to dismiss Dennis’s concerns when I was about to climb twenty stories up into the tropical canopy for the first time.
So, dutifully I leaned forward and touched my forehead against the strangler. Who knows? Maybe something inside the fig tree was placated and soothed by my deference. Besides, Dennis’s words had resonated deep within me, and it felt like the most natural thing in the world to do.
I began making my way slowly up one of the stems, with hands and feet groping for holds among its twisted roots. The bark felt smooth yet rough, like a fine grade of sandpaper, and I was surprised by how strong even the thinnest strands were. It was still early and cool, but within minutes of starting I was drenched with sweat. Reaching the top of the stem, I began climbing the structure above, hand over hand. I was now around fifty feet up and level with the surrounding forest’s understory. A fall from this height would be bad, so I used my rope as a safety to catch me in the event of a slip. It was nice not to have to rely on the rope completely though—there were still plenty of handholds to choose from, and I made quick progress.
The trunk was full of holes, sometimes deep enough to swallow my entire arm. Who knew what was living within that musty hollow darkness? Spiders, centipedes, scorpions, even snakes perhaps. I was having fun, but I reminded myself not to get complacent.
By the time I was 150 feet up I was filthy and in need of a rest. Clipping into the tree, I sat back in my harness to take a look around.
The fruit-laden canopy above was hidden by dense curtains of creepers, but I could see the next twenty feet of trunk well enough, and it didn’t look encouraging. It was totally smooth and offered no handholds at all. The first large branches were growing directly above this sheer face. If I could lasso one with my rope I would be fine, but it was a long throw from an awkward angle.
Bundling up a short length of rope, I lobbed it up as hard as I could. Five times it fell short, falling back down to land in a tangled heap around my head and shoulders. My right arm felt like I’d wrenched it out of its socket. It was full of lactic acid and heavy. But I kept plugging away until I got the bundle over the branch, then wiggled the rope gently to coax the end back down to me. The branch was much farther out from the trunk than I had realized, and the rope dangled in space way beyond reach. Using my lanyards to hook it back in, I attached myself to the rope, breathed out slowly, then let go of the tree and swung out into space.
Relinquishing life and soul to a thin strand of nylon is something I’ve never gotten used to. It’s one thing to climb a rope, to feel its tension hold you firmly in position and support your weight while ascending. But it’s quite another to let go of a perfectly good handhold and rely on a rope’s ability to catch you 150 feet aboveground. There is a sudden drop as the nylon stretches, followed by a rush of air and a tightening in the stomach as you accelerate out into the void. This is followed by a split second of weightlessness at the top of the arc as the effects of gravity reverse and propel you back in toward the tree.
The rope gradually slowed, to leave me spinning gently. After the initial rush, the tension in my muscles subsided and the adrenaline seeped away to leave me feeling calm. I traced the thin line into the branches above, where a flock of tiny electric-green birds flitted between the leaves. Looking down, I watched in amazement as a Draco flying lizard glided below me with wings opened flat and thin tail trailing. One hundred and fifty feet seemed pretty high to me, but what must it look like through the eyes of such a tiny base-jumping reptile? This forest was full of surprises.
Content to hang there for a while, I leaned back in my harness and closed my eyes to enjoy the sensation of swinging on the rope. Without the distraction of sight, I tuned in to what I could hear.
The song of the rainforest was incredible. Millions of animals and insects; rank upon rank of unseen voices rising up in a wave of sound. The distant call of a gibbon, the ragged rush of air through a hornbill’s wings. The constant swirl of singing insects and the high-pitched piping of tree frogs. I was immersed in a natural symphony—the sheer complexity of life here was overwhelming. Opening my eyes, I felt as if I was seeing the rainforest for the first time. It rushed in from every direction, as if a veil had been lifted. The jungle was so much greater than the sum of its parts, and I was nothing more than an atom adrift within this overwhelming tide of energy. It was a truly humbling experience, and with it came a feeling of acceptance and belonging—not just to the forest, but to nature itself—and as the emotion rolled over me in a wave, I burst into tears of joy.
It’s almost impossible to appreciate just how complex a tree is from the ground. You have to get up into it. From 150 feet I could now see what could only be described as the strangler’s “waist,” the place where its long stems fused together into a short torso of solid trunk before expanding out again into branches. Another few meters and I would enter its canopy, and the surrounding forest would be smothered from view. So I spun around to take a look at our filming options.
What I needed was a tall tree growing close by in which I could place John’s platform. There were plenty of options. Massive trees rose up all around. Some were draped with dense vines. Others were clean-limbed, naked and beautiful. But all were far and away the tallest, most impressive trees I had ever seen. Several towered head and shoulders above the strangler, which meant they were approaching 270 feet high.
Many of them were members of the Dipterocarpaceae family, a large group of tropical hardwoods found throughout Southeast Asia. But it wasn’t just the size of these trees that was so impressive; it was their shape. They had a graceful symmetry that belied their bulk: tall, vertical trunks 10 feet in diameter, rising 160 feet into the air before spreading their limbs in all directions, like a giant three-dimensional ladder. Many of the branches stretched out horizontally—a feature that immediately spoke of strong timber. The leverage on a tree at the base of those huge limbs would be insane, and I noticed how the trees had distributed and balanced these forces across the scaffold of their canopies with effortless grace. Each tree was a master class in structural engineering, and their enormous canopies of thick foliage seemed to float above the forest like islands. Unexplored worlds brimming with tantalizing secrets.
Directly opposite the strangler was one dipterocarp that looked perfect for our filming platform. It was close enough for John to film animals visiting the figs, but far enough away not to disturb them. The place I had in mind for our platform lay fifty feet above the dipterocarp’s lowest branch. Around two hundred feet up, I reckoned. Although the location of the huge tree looked obvious from here, I knew it would be tricky to find once I was back on the jungle floor. So I used my compass to fix a quick bearing before turning my attention back to the strangler.
Continuing up my rope, I was soon engulfed by thick, dark foliage. The leaves were long and shiny, with a pale-green rib running down the middle. The end of each sprig was crowned with a tiara of bright-yellow fruit. Against this dark background the figs shone out to all passing animals and birds. All around me were hundreds of kilos of food hanging for the taking. With no other fig trees growing nearby, all eyes would be fixed on this one as its remaining fruit slowly ripened over the next week. It promised to be quite a feast, so I needed to get the platform up as soon as possible.
The thin twilight of dawn was seeping through the cracks of my cabin walls when I awoke the next morning. It was half past five and I lay listening to the distant calls of gibbons from the top of their tree somewhere deep in the jungle. The thought of them swinging around in those high branches galvanized me. Impatient to get climbing, I wolfed down breakfast, grabbed my gear, and headed into the misty forest.
The ghostly shadows of huge trees loomed up through the fog as I moved swiftly along the ridge. Enormous columns of timber, standing like silent sentinels, watching me pass. Some were no more than shifting blurs and shadows, while others closer to the path seemed to step forward to reveal themselves, only to slink back into the gloom and disappear entirely as I passed.
The first rays of sun were soon piercing the mist in oblique shafts of gold, like light from a cinema projector, the leaves scattering each beam into a spectrum of smaller ones that gently merged and divided as the sun rose higher. The forest began to give up its moisture to the sun’s heat, and vapor twisted in tendrils from the surface of leaves. Airborne droplets of water drifted gently through beams of light.
I was keen to climb the dipterocarp, but had to take time out to appreciate the ephemeral beauty around me. Dropping my rucksack, I sat down in the leaf litter to watch in silence. For a few glorious moments the air was alive with vibrancy and color, and I was surrounded by a shimmering rainbow of drifting moisture.
Within a few minutes the last of the mist had evaporated through the forest canopy to reveal a thin veil of blue sky beyond. The coolness of morning wouldn’t last for long; it promised to be a very hot day. So I checked my compass and headed farther up the ridge to find the tree in which I was to rig the platform.
Before long I was standing at its base. Huge buttresses flared out in every direction, and long serpentine roots followed the contours of the ground before plunging below the leaf litter in search of whatever grip they could secure in the forest’s thin soil. The trunk itself was ten feet in diameter and over sixteen stories tall. Similar in size and shape to Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. The canopy it supported above was an immense dome that rose into the sky, a living vault of leaves braced by enormous beams of timber. The last of the morning’s mist drifted through this distant foliage, making it look remote and inaccessible. This was a seriously big tree, and looking up at the faint outlines of its branches, I felt the first flutters of nervousness.
Lowering my gaze, I ran my hand across its corrugated bark. I felt enormous strength in the timber, the steadfastness of a healthy tropical hardwood in its prime. Long vertical lines ran up the trunk to converge at the edge of sight. The tree’s skin was a mottled patchwork of silver and deep tannin browns, a beautiful pillar of living wood that would be a joy to climb.
The immediate issue was how to get a rope up there in the first place. Everything else rested on this. I had come prepared with catapult, fishing line, and lead weights, but had never tested my homemade system on a tree this big. Shooting lines into the English canopy was one thing, but this was a different scale entirely. I had no idea if my small catapult was even powerful enough to get high enough.
What would I do if Plan A failed? It wasn’t as if I could free-climb this monster from the ground, as I had the strangler. There were absolutely no handholds for the first 160 feet, and the trunk itself was far too wide for me to wrap arms or lanyards around it.
An awful lot rested on the performance of the two thin strips of catapult elastic I’d brought with me from England.
Unpacking my rucksack, I selected a small fishing weight the size and shape of an almond and tied it to a thin cord. Placing it snugly in the pouch of the slingshot, I raised my arm to take aim and pulled the elastic back to my ear. The yellow rubber turned white with the strain. Aiming a few meters above the lowest branch, I released the tiny weight and immediately lost sight of it as it shot into the canopy. Loops of line whipped up silently, and an ant crawling along one of the coils was now taking the ride of its life. Within a few seconds, over a hundred meters of line had been paid out, and since it hadn’t fallen back down in loose coils, I presumed it had gone over something up there. Whether that something was the branch I wanted was hard to tell.
By gently tugging the line with my left hand while holding my binoculars with my right, I used the twitching movement of leaves high above to locate the weight. As I focused on the tiny dangling silhouette, a small bird darted out from the canopy to give it a jab with its beak, before flitting back to the end of its twig and chattering angrily.
The line wasn’t where I wanted it to be, but at least the catapult had the power to send it up there. Gently pulling it back down, I set about having another go. It took four attempts, but I eventually got it exactly where I wanted it: right at the base of the lowest enormous branch.
My rope was exactly 330 feet long, and by the time I’d hauled it over the branch and pulled it back down, there was nothing to spare. I’d guessed about right: the branch was 165 feet aboveground. Exactly the same height as Goliath, almost to the inch. But whereas Goliath had a thick ladder of branches ascending all the way to its top, the monster in front of me had none at all below its main canopy.
The climbing ropes were now anchored around the base of an adjacent tree, and I was ready to go. There was a daunting amount of stretch to be pulled out of the rope, but a few minutes later I was hanging in my harness ten feet off the ground, doing my final safety checks. The mountaineering-style climbing technique I was using was still new to me. I’d been trained how to do it only days before leaving the UK, so the repetitive rhythm of sliding clamps up rope still took a lot of concentration.
Focusing on the branch high above, I started moving toward it. Whereas the strangler had slowly revealed each section of the climb as I reached it, this tree was completely open and exposed. I could brace my feet against the trunk, but it offered scant security since there were no handholds. Slowing my pace, I made an effort to channel my energy and relax. It was shaping up to be a very hot day indeed, and I was already sweating freely.
Climbing on, I fell into the rhythm and bounce of the rope’s stretch. The furrows in the bark began to flatten out, and at sixty feet I emerged from the shady underworld to enter the sunlit space between understory and high canopy.
The sunlight was bright and stark. It’d taken me longer than I’d expected to get the ropes up, and it was now late morning. The heat from the sun was unbelievable. I wasn’t wearing a helmet so I felt its full force on my scalp. Sweat trickled into my squinting eyes, and I dried my face on my sopping T-shirt. Feeling dehydrated and in need of a drink, I realized I’d left my water bottle on the ground. Deciding not to waste time retrieving it, I carried on regardless, but within a few minutes I realized this was a big mistake. Water and salts were being wrung from every pore of my body, and even my copious sweating wasn’t helping to keep me cool. My core temperature started to rise unchecked.
Halfway up, I turned to look for the strangler. The air was simmering with UV, and I had to shade my eyes, but the strangler was right there, less than two hundred feet away, its drooping canopy looming over the forest with a dark, brooding intensity. Apart from one long, slender branch, which dipped down to touch the understory, its crown was totally isolated. But even from here I could see the bright specks of fruit sprinkled among dark leaves, and a low line of turquoise hills running along the horizon beyond. A wide valley swept away to the east, but I wouldn’t get a proper view of it until I climbed a bit higher.
Twenty minutes later, soaked with sweat, covered in grime, and panting like a dog, I arrived at the first branch. The vein on my forehead was about to pop, and my eyes were stinging from the sweat streaming down my face. I was struggling to think straight, and there were white rings of dried salt on the front of my T-shirt. The air felt thick and claustrophobic, and a distant peal of thunder drew my eyes skyward. Heavy gray clouds were already building on the other side of the valley. The shade of the canopy was gently cooling, and I searched for a way to get higher.
I was at the very top of my rope. The thin white strand passed over the branch in front of me before plummeting straight back down to its anchor, sixteen stories below. The place where I wanted to install the platform was another fifty feet higher, and I wouldn’t be able to reach it unless I rigged another rope. What I’d originally thought was a convenient ladder of branches turned out to be way too big to free-climb. I’d struggle to even get an arm round these limbs. I’d brought my lanyards with me, so I bundled up a few coils and lobbed them over the highest branch I could reach.
Any view of the surrounding forest was again obscured by thick canopy, but the branches gradually got smaller the higher I went. They were still big, but at least I could now hook an arm round them easily, and my pace of climbing quickened. I was two hundred feet aboveground and making good progress but in desperate need of water. My tongue felt like leather, and my head was pounding. I’d already had to stop to massage cramp out of my left forearm, and now my calf muscles were beginning to follow suit. This wasn’t the irritating cramp of sitting in an awkward position, but a deep stabbing pain that spread through my tissues like fire. Ignoring the warning signals, I carried on climbing.
Arriving level with where I intended to strap the filming platform to the trunk, I took a closer look to ensure it would work. The stem had narrowed to a couple of feet in diameter, and I added up the rope lengths to estimate that I was now 210 feet aboveground. The location afforded a cracking view down onto the strangler. Anything feeding on the fruit in its branches would be in plain sight from here, the perfect camera position.
The view beyond the figs was simply stunning. Endless canopy rolling away to merge with the distant hills at the end of the valley, some twenty miles away. This undulating sea of foliage was punctuated by thousands of huge emergent trees, their upper crowns standing proudly above everything else. I could see the unmistakable silhouettes of giant shaggy ferns growing in the forks between branches high up in their canopies. Several of them showed signs of weather damage: stumps and cavities where enormous limbs had been torn away by high winds. Raising its head above the shelter of the crowd was clearly a risky business for any tree here, and it looked as if many had dropped limbs to lighten the load or storms had violently ripped them off.
As if in answer to my thoughts, another peal of thunder came rolling up the valley toward me. A crescendo of kettle drums culminating in a resounding hollow boom that I felt in my chest. A dark smear of rain was lurking over the trees a few miles away. Long black streaks of watercolor obscured the horizon. A squall was on its way, but the sky directly above me was still clear. With only another 50 feet of tree to go, I couldn’t resist making a quick dash for the top before the squall arrived. Besides, a bit of rain never hurt anyone, and to get above 250 feet in a tree for the first time would be a big milestone for me.
So, grabbing hold of the next branch, I braced my foot against the stem and lunged upward with every bit of strength I could. Pulling myself up to swing my leg over, I kept the momentum going and propelled myself toward the top as fast as possible. I soon found myself completely above the surrounding forest canopy. The view was already mind-blowing and could only get better.
The thinner branches were now the perfect diameter for hands to grasp, and my boots found easy grip on the bark. It felt so good to be climbing the tree itself, rather than the rope, and I couldn’t stop grinning. I was exhausted but exhilarated. Experiences like this had to be earned to be enjoyed fully. My muscles were still wavering on the edge of cramp, but I felt the deeper strength in my bones and knew I had plenty more to give. I had already climbed past the top of the tree’s main stem and was now on a near-vertical branch that led straight to the summit of the crown. This final section of tree stood way above any other on the ridge. The strangler had long since merged into the green background of jungle far below, and I realized that by a fluke I had stumbled across one of the forest’s biggest trees, growing in one of the most prominent positions. The forest flowed away to the horizon in every direction, and I couldn’t wait to reach the top and revel in the epic view. I threw myself into the remaining thirty feet with every ounce of energy I had.
A few moments later I was stopped in my tracks by an explosive cannonade of thunder. It came from nowhere to tear the heavens apart right above me. Caught totally unawares, I instinctively threw my arms around the tree’s stem and cowered against the bark; everything was muffled, and my ears were ringing as my head spun. At that same moment, my left forearm cramped up again, but this time it was accompanied by a sharp stabbing pain that made me wince and groan out loud. The minerals I’d sweated out had caused the nerves in my muscles to lock up, and without any fluids or electrolytes, this situation was slowly getting worse. I’d totally underestimated the effects of chronic dehydration, and a few seconds later the same thing happened to my right arm. Feeling the panic rise within me, I watched in horror as my hands were twisted into useless claws by tendons that threatened to snap. Telling myself to calm down, I tried to prize my hands open by pushing them against the tree, but my fingers were locked in painful spasm. Cursing myself for ignoring the warning signs, I realized that it was now too late; the damage was done. There was no way I could carry on climbing, and as the reality of my predicament crashed in on me, the storm hit with brutal ferocity.
First of all came the wind, a fast-moving wall of solid air driven ahead of the rain to hammer the forest around me. The top section of my tree heeled to the gusts, and sprigs of leaves were snapped off and hurled spinning into space. Wrapping my useless arms around a branch, I hunkered down to ride it out, but the wind’s intensity increased, and soon the whole canopy was twisting violently around the tree’s main stem. Huge branches lower down were tugging the tree from side to side in a series of gut-wrenching lurches. Hugging tighter, I pressed my face hard against the bark and gritted my teeth.
The sky was dark and the tree was lashing around like a ship anchored in a storm. Wind howled like a banshee through its branches, and ominous bangs and thuds echoed up from deep inside the timber. Massive branches thudded into each other, and I fully expected to hear the terrifying sound of ripping timber any second. Time and time again the tree was hit on the recoil by a fresh gust of wind, the whole canopy locking up and shuddering to a halt as hundreds of tons of timber were stopped in their tracks and forced back in the other direction.
I was still tied into my rope, but this wouldn’t be much consolation if the whole top section of the tree snapped off. The thought of being attached to a five-ton lump of wood as it plummeted 250 feet to the forest floor was enough to make me screw up my eyes and grind my teeth. The storm continued to throw the tree around like a rat in the jaws of a terrier.
Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, I saw the flicker of lightning scudding toward me beneath the rolling black clouds. A blinding flash, and a jagged vein of electricity hit the forest half a mile away, with an explosion that made my ears ring. The top of an emergent tree standing on a ridge was not a clever place to get stranded in an electrical storm, and I thought my adrenaline glands were going to pop as strike after strike of forked lightning stalked on long legs toward me.
To stay where I was would be almost suicidal, but without the use of my arms I didn’t really have a choice. My dehydrated brain was floundering, unable to come to a decision, and still the lightning grew closer. Resigned to fate, I took a deep breath, loosened my grip on the bark, and sat back in my harness with feet braced against the trunk to ride it out. The thunder was now a continuous rolling broadside that made me dizzy. I had never felt so helpless in all my life, but there was nowhere to hide. Had I really traveled to the other side of the world only to get struck by lightning in the top of a tree? But just as I was about to take my chances and attempt a descent as best I could, there was one final explosion, and the storm front rolled over the ridge to crash down into the next valley like a tsunami.
The gusts of wind died as suddenly as they’d begun. Air pressure dropped like a stone, and steel-gray sheets of rain lashed in from the east. Water trickled down the bark’s furrows around me. I lapped it up straight from the tree, desperate to get fluid back into my cramped muscles as quickly as I could. Thimbles of water soon collected in the funneled leaves of a small plant growing on the branch next to me, so with crooked hands I bent the plant forward into my mouth. Water, ants, and dirt all went down together. Each time it refilled, I drained it until I felt the painful tension in my arms begin to yield.
Within a few minutes I was able to unbend my fingers and open my hands. Before long the excruciating fire in my muscles was subsiding. I opened my mouth to the sky to drink more. It was the freshest, most invigorating water I’d ever tasted, and my mind slowly unclenched as blood flowed freely through its capillaries once more.
Despite the rain, the forest was already steaming. Electricity still flickered over the next valley, but the forest around me had fallen eerily silent in the aftermath of the storm.
By now I was more than ready to get out of the tree, so, feeding my rope down through the branches, I clipped in and began to abseil. My rope wouldn’t reach the ground from here, but all I needed was a way back down to the original rope I’d used to get up onto that first branch. A few minutes later I was hanging next to it and clipped back on, ready for the final stage of descent to the ground 160 feet below.
Glancing back at the other rope I’d just left behind, I saw its end dangling in space no more than a foot below where I’d stopped abseiling. There wasn’t a knot in it. I stared in disbelief. There had been nothing at all to prevent me from slipping straight off its end. By blind luck I’d stopped barely a foot away from a sixteen-story plummet. A fresh spike of adrenaline passed through me, and my hands began to tremble. Forgetting to tie a knot in the end of my rope was the second basic error to almost cost me my life that day.
I’d had more than enough near misses, so with a feeling of extreme relief I got the hell out of there.
Dennis walked back into camp. It was late afternoon, the light was fading, and he had just returned from checking the strangler:
“There are plenty of ripe figs on the ground and a troop of macaques has been up there eating all day.” This was a very good sign. The banquet had begun.
“But that’s not all. A big male orang has nested nearby. Looks like he’s on his way to the figs, and there’s a chance he’ll be up there first thing tomorrow.”
It was now a week since I’d been caught in the storm. When I’d recounted the story to Dennis, he’d smiled and named the tree Tumparak. Thunder. It was a good name and it stuck.
I’d been back to rig the filming platform in Tumparak’s canopy without any issues. Since then we had checked the figs every day, waiting for them to come into full ripeness. Dennis’s news was very encouraging. We could assume that the tree had drawn the orangutan to the area, and that the feast would last a week or so—there was more than enough fruit to keep him hanging around for several days. So, getting up at half past two the following morning, I headed into the darkness to climb Tumparak before it grew light. If the orangutan put in an appearance, John would come with me the day after to start filming.
It was a spectral walk through the forest. The mist was thicker than I’d ever seen it, and visibility was barely ten feet in any direction. Tumparak’s stem loomed bigger than ever in the darkness, and the entire trunk was swallowed by fog twenty feet up. Clipping onto the rope, I turned my headlamp off to let my eyes adjust before climbing. The sweat on my body chilled in the clammy air as I inchwormed my way up into the canopy through the dark. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, but figured all I had to do was keep climbing until I reached the top of the rope. I’d then turn on my lamp to help me do the changeover onto the other (now safely knotted) rope, which would finally deliver me up to the platform.
By half past four in the morning I was sitting two hundred feet aboveground with my back to the trunk. Fireflies floated through the canopy in misty bubbles of neon green, and the air was thick with the calls of tree frogs and insects. The grayness of dawn was still an hour away, so I closed my eyes and drifted in and out of a relaxed doze. By 5 a.m. I heard the first gibbon calling. A descending arpeggio repeated over and over, followed by a slow crescendo that escalated into a series of high-pitched warbles. Each cadence grew faster and faster until the call bubbled over into a joyous tremolo as he swung through the canopy. Before long a female joined him in duet, and the burnt-orange sky was filled with their heart-lifting song. Orange turned to gold, and I heard the telltale rustle of a large animal moving through the understory far below. Definitely a primate, but the sound wasn’t the leaf splashes made by monkeys leaping through foliage. It was a continuous hiss of vegetation, of branches being methodically bent within reach of each other.
The orangutan’s deep-red hair blended surprisingly well with the green foliage, but I caught tantalizing glimpses of a large intelligent face looking up at the strangler as he climbed toward it with purpose.
As far as I could see, the strangler’s trunk was, for such a large animal, the only possible route upward. I presumed the orangutan would use this trunk to gain access to the canopy, as I had. Yet he was moving with purposeful grace toward that single long, slender limb hanging down from the rest of the fig’s branches to touch the understory far below. Arriving beneath it, he raised an arm to grasp the branch’s drooping end, his strong fingers gripping it tight to give a gentle pull. The foliage in the canopy high above slowly sagged under his weight. The branch was no more than four inches wide at its base, and I expected it to tear free. But it held. Having tested its strength, the animal raised a foot past his hand and brought the other arm up to haul himself completely out of the understory. His long red hair hung down in matted dreadlocks as he sat motionless for a few minutes, deep in thought on the end of the swaying branch.
Then very slowly he unfolded his long arms and began to ascend. Foot followed hand past foot, as he climbed smoothly, taking great care not to shock-load the thin branch. Moving with graceful intent, he pulled himself up the eighty feet into the canopy in one continuous fluid movement.
Here was a master at work. It was a remarkable piece of climbing, and with the whole tree to himself he settled comfortably on a fruit-covered limb and with infinite care began selecting the ripest figs to eat.
By now the sun had risen to flood the valley with light. Golden mist was lifting free of the trees, and the air was alive with birdsong. The storm was nothing more than a distant memory, and I took a sip from my water bottle before settling back to watch the orangutan show me how to really climb.
The rest of our time in Danum went well. John got the shots of the orangutans that he needed, plus great footage of gibbons doing their thing high up in the branches of the tallest trees. Theirs was a joyful, dynamic style of climbing that involved huge leaps and acrobatic swings. I’d been in the canopy the first time I’d seen them—a family of three moving through the branches at blistering speeds of up to forty miles per hour. Their sheer poise, swiftness, and unpredictability of movement were jaw-dropping, and it was obvious that the three of them were chasing one another. They were playing games and able to do pretty much anything they wanted, in any direction and at any speed. To watch a gibbon land on a branch, run four steps, launch itself into space at full pelt, and plummet seventy feet before catching a passing vine to swing across onto the next tree—and then do it all over again purely for fun—was to be rewarded with one of the most breathtaking spectacles in the whole natural world.
Certainly from a tree climber’s point of view, it didn’t get much better. But then, to me, this summed up my whole Borneo experience. I couldn’t imagine anything better. But then, it was my first visit to a jungle, and at that time I had no idea of what other wonders lay just around the corner in other rainforests around the world.