The jungle survival course -- part 3

Day 3

Thushan and I are up early and eat our only orange. We sniff around at the sardines and I eat them too. They tasted great -- but only because we were starving!!! I also ate some of the bamboo rice which was so hard that I had to scrape it out of its bamboo container with my parang. The instructors invite us over to their campfire to dry out our boots and clothes. They of course casually tell us to go cut down another tree to get a log that we can sit on -- it's just their way of getting us to practise but also to physically stretch us a bit. So ok, we go and cut down a tree and it becomes our log and also fuel for the fire. We have a coffee with the instructors -- a very very welcome treat for me, coffee-addict that I am!! And our chief instructor tells us a bit about his adventures. Apparently, he was of the generation that fought the communists in Malaysia and it was interesting to hear about this episode in our local history. Some of it was macabre; how the soldiers were asked to either snip off a finger or a head as proof that they had actually "cleaned out" the tunnels. He tells us all this without pride or sentimentality or guilt. It was one of those messes that had to be cleaned up and he did an essential job. He has left that life behind now and uses those skills to bring jobs to the indigenous population, to protect elephants and to introduce people to nature. He is an interesting man.

Levinas wrote that war is the greatest challenge to morality because it suspends morality; makes it seem naive, the thing that betrays us and stops us from surviving. This was the text I opened with when I taught Totality and Infinity. I think some of the thought experiments I did with my students made them uncomfortable or at least a little less sanguine about what war means. I think it gave them the realisation that they too were prepared to give up morality in the name of survival, or at least that they were tempted. And then it becomes difficult after that to pretend that what you are reading is one of those things that does not touch you, that does not require a response.

I very often get irritated with those people who think they know something about Levinas and then give me the objection that his morality is "over-demanding" and "utopian". Were it not for the "over-demandingness" of the moral command felt by some sensitive individuals in the world, can we count how many more would have died in the many genocides and lynchings and in the everyday crimes of the world? Were it not for the extraordinary courage of some of my friends who are wonderful and moral people, I would have been dead. None of them look like the moral saints that Susan Wolf describes; some of them are the most colourful and humorous and resourceful people around.

I resent it when people say that Levinas is "unrealistic" and that he has underestimated what people are capable of in the world -- both in terms of good and evil. This is such a bizarre critique coming from punks who live in the comfort of academic positions in the first world; who have never felt hunger and who have never felt deprivation and who have never smelled fear or have had to face the choiceless choices of having to learn how to kill in order to live. They would not understand evil and neither would they understand friendship or morality if it struck them in the face. Some days I wanted to just punch my supervisor in the face when he spoke with such casualness about these things, when he talks about needing to move beyond the mistakes/weaknesses of Levinas' work. I don't doubt that there are problems in Levinas, but it was something to do with the levity, the disrespect that I hated. Because we were not just dealing with a conceptual problem that had nothing to do with the world and nothing to do with life. We were talking about the things that made our lives possible. Some days I wanted to tell him to "show some respect you young punk".

I'm not sure that some of the things we "naturally" think of as weaknesses in particular philosophies are actually flaws in the philosophy or whether they are insights that proceed from a life shattered from its illusory moorings. We take for granted everyday an entire system of things, norms, structures that make our life possible; food and the systems of agriculture and distribution that make it possible; water and the catchment, irrigation and purification systems that makes it possible; friendship and love and cooperation and the communication and shared normative expectations that make them possible; law and the systems of governance and enforcement that give it force; the everyday acts of kindnesses and the grace that makes them possible. If we are a society of copy-cats, we are also a society of systematic amnesiacs. That is a blessing in ways because the disruption of those moorings of life does things to us that leave us marked, changed, different. It is not necessarily a bad thing, this change: you find a remarkable amount to be grateful for in life and it brings friendship that is hard to come by. But it brings also its own sense of frustration at the carelessness and lightness which which the majority of us regard the "under-fabric" of our lives.

Philosophers like clarity and cleanness in systems of argumentation; they want things to be tidy, to be coherent; for things to fit together and make sense. But life doesn't always fit this way; the greatest power and the greatest flaw in analytic philosophy has been the obsession with the exclusive sense of "or" because it forces choices sometimes where what is required instead is the holding of both sides because each side contains an essential dimension of the truth. Are we revisiting Greek tragedy here in its richest sense; the idea that the seed of greatness is exactly what dooms the hero? I listen a lot to stories of lives that are tangled and where there are so many mixed motives that feed into a single action and then I try and philosophise about it and there is something unreal about what I say because out of plurality and multivocality and contradiction, I try to distil some theme or themes that somehow "fit". I "fit" things to the best of my ability but always always, I know there is something missing. Funnily enough, what is missing is present in my writing when I am not philosophising in the classic academic medium but when I am telling a story in a letter for a friend or to B or J.... Anyway, enough philosophy. Back to the jungle.

So we have coffee and conversation and then we have to go "shopping" as our instructor calls it. Essentially, we go around the forest looking for stuff that we need: resin (from trees) that functions as our firestarter, rattan that functions as a remarkably strong rope, plants that stop bleeding and which give us an energy boost. We learn how to split lianas in order to make very strong cordage. We learn also how to cut drinking vines which are alternative sources of water in the jungle. We learn how to do a ground air rescue and how to make sos signals using buttress roots. We also learn how to chose a good campsite and fortify it against intruders -- the instructor focused on wild animals but I had no doubt that it would work equally well against humans as well. This includes a system of stakes in the ground and early warning systems etc.

Then we go on to the toughest thing we had to do -- get food from the bertam palm. That was a NIGHTMARE!!! The bertam palm is a palm that can grow about 4 metres high in the tropics. It is a wonderful source of leaves and wood for shelter building because the wood is soft and very easy to cut. The leaves if woven can make an excellent thatch (although we didn't learn leaf weaving techniques). However, it is nightmarish to deal with because the lower sections of all the palm fronds (the first 2 meters or so) are full of long and very sharp thorns!! ... Did I mention long and very sharp??? Each thorn can grow to about 1 and a half inches long. And each 3 meter high frond of the palm is full of the thorns in lower regions. So there we are, having to look for the shoot of the palm which is normally buried in the inner third of the plant. We have to dig underneath the plant and pry and cut through the outer leaves so that we can reach the shoot. Once we reach the shoot, we have to separate it from the rest of the plant and then strip it so that we can eat it. It took us more than 2 hours working in groups of 3 to harvest 3 shoots and even then some of the shoots were rejected by our instructors because we failed to dig deep enough! It was a good exercise in that we understood something about the availability of food and also it reminded us of the value of food. But in a survival situation, I would NOT harvest from the bertam plant. The caloric output just would not be replaced by the nourishment from the plant. I'd rather fish, set traps or eat insects. Anyway, below, you can see pictures of Chongming digging away at the palm and my trying to pry some of the fronds apart. If you look carefully, you can see thin black things sticking out of the green fronds in the second photo -- those are the dreaded thorns I was telling you about.
















Anyway, after our adventures (or misadventures more accurately!!) with the bertam palm, it is already mid-afternoon. We have not had lunch (not going to be allowed that luxury). We pack to go to our next camp site. This time it is intensely uphill for much of the way. Imagine the stairmaster with a 15kg pack on and you more or less have a good picture of our trek. The going is ok on flat ground but when it got uphill, our variable levels of fitness caught up with us. Faisal and Chong Ming are marathon runners so they are happily traipsing along like it is a walk in the park. Mingde is pretty fit as well because he is in the infantry in the national reserves. That leaves me puffing away and Thushan struggling after me. Really important lesson #3: I need to lose 8 kilos and get fit again. I am a pathetic mess now compared to what I could accomplish in my twenties. I currently weigh about 66 kgs. According to published weight tables, I should be 61kgs. According to my own experience, I am ideal at 57-58kgs. So ok, going to start eating properly and exercise more regularly.

We make it up the mountain eventually -- we are about 1000m above sea level and the nights can get cold in situations like that. We reach the camp site around 5 pm in the evening. The instructors have left us to our own devices (with a walkie-talkie that was so weak on batteries that we were convinced it was going to die on us) as they were camping slightly further downhill. So we decide to have a communal fire but to build three shelters with two persons to a shelter around the communal fire.

As a result of the late hour, we decide to split our efforts. Mingde and Faisal go down to the waterfall to refill our water supplies. Chong Ming goes to lop sturdy branches to make the framework for the fire place. Thushan, Kevin and I take it upon ourselves to clear the camp area and to make a start building our shelters. Clearing is very hard going for such a large area. And of course our instructors left us in the middle of a bertam palm area -- more thorns! It's hard to clear the area with ease because we can't just pick up the stuff with our bare hands on account of the thorns. I thankfully have my trusty turban/sarong which I use as a glove to deal with some of the fronds I need to remove by hand but the rest of the time, we are using sticks to clear the debris. It is slow and painstaking work. Eventually we get it cleared and we start on our shelter.

By that time, Faisal and Mingde have returned with our water bottles filled. It was apparently a really difficult road down to the waterfall -- treacherous and very steep. It was amazing that they made it up with all 5 water bottles filled. We were very thankful for their work. Unfortunately, there was still a lot to do in terms of the shelter building. So everyone chipped in.

We got the framework set up for Thushan's and my shelter. I then quickly gave Faisal and Kevin a sense of how we did ours so that they could proceed. And then I went looking for large leaves to harvest for our shelters. Bertam palm leaves are great if you have time to weave them but if you don't do the weaving, they are not the best leaves to keep the rain out. We had seen some of the large study leaves that we had sheltered beneath the other day growing nearby. So I took it upon myself to go find them and drag them back. The large ones are about 2 metres long so if you try and take a bunch of them, you will just have to drag them around rather than carry them. And they have these very fine thorns on their spine so you have to dethorn them before you carry them. I harvested whatever I could nearby and dragged them back. I left Thushan to thatch our shelter while I went to collect more. A couple of the plants nearby with usable leaves were unfortunately too tall so I couldn't harvest them. I then started scouting further afield for the plants. I eventually found a clump near the bottom of a slope. I wasn't looking forward to dragging them uphill but well, necessity forces you to do things you don't want! So anyway, after a couple of trips on my own, I realised that the light was failing and that if I didn't ask someone else to help, I'd run the risk of climbing the hill in the dark with the leaves. So I asked Faisal to make one or two last runs with me so that we could both harvest enough leaves for everyone. Anyway, we made it back with enough to go around for all.

The shelter frameworks were more or less all done and there was only the roofing to do which was quite simple. The next big task was the fire of course. And we all took turns mucking around trying to start one. We finally got one going but firewood was going to be a problem because we had nowhere near enough. And it was a bit of a problem because some of our team had not camped much and therefore didn't realise how much we would actually need through the night. Either that or that was a problem with the training that you get in the Singapore army -- that if you can't start a fire, just sleep it off. You can do that for a short period but you can't survive like that in the long term because pneumonia and infected toes etc. will catch up with you. Anyway, we just decided to improvise as we went along. It was great to finally get a fire going. It was the first time that we managed to get our boots and clothes dry!! And that was wonderful. We managed to dry out our feet as well although they still remained fairly wrinkled.

Oh I forgot the saga of the snake. While we were building our fire, Mingde and Chongming tried to make torches from the dried bertam leaves. Our instructors wanted us to make a few and use them to go down the hill to visit them at their campsite for coffee. However, ChongMing and Mingde spotted a snake while harvesting the bertam leaves and since we didn't know if it was dangerous, we decided not to proceed any further. I radioed our instructor and told him about the snake. He asked what colour the snake was. As luck with have it, Mingde [who is the only one who really got a good look at the snake] is colour-blind!! So there we were in the middle of the jungle with a snake nearby and we couldn't tell our instructor whether we were SURE that the snake was a green one. We just thought it was green!! The instructors informed us that the only green snake in that region is the Sumatran pit viper and and that it is "very dangerous". "Don't go anywhere near it!" We are of course not very comforted since the snake was spotted really near us!! Anyway, the instructors turned up later to inspect the area and came with some coffee power and a pan for us to brew it in. Slurp!!

We had instant noodles in our bags and so we decided that we were going to eat them raw and consume the salt/seasoning provided as well because we needed the carbo and also the salts. Unfortunately, of course, living in my house, eating instant noodles is something you do once in a year or something if at all. So sometime after eating the noodles, I promptly had a bad reaction and passed it all out. So much for carbohydrates! I know that instant noodles are dehydrated foods and therefore light to carry but really Asian campers have to get a better idea of nutrition in the wilderness! This is one thing we really need to learn from the US and Europe and Aust. I mean we could have carried the same weight if they issued us with eggs in a screw top container with the spaces between the eggs filled with a high-protein flour. That would give us the potential to mix the flour with water and make a bannock and the eggs could be either incorporated into the bannock or roasted. The nutritional value would have increased by leaps and bounds. Or if they wanted something local, they could have given us bah kwah -- a kind of local beef jerky -- or lap cheong -- a local dried salami type sausage thing. And of course, for Malay cuisine, there is tempeh, which is a type of dried fermented bean curd which is great. Asian camp food really pisses me off because it's like we left our imaginations back home and all we can think of is instant noodles and tinned food. This when we live in a region flooded with tapioca and coconut (tapioca leaf curry -- YUM!), yams, bananas as fresh produce. And all the dried Asian food -- salted fish, waxed duck, bee hoon and mi-sua (Asian vermicelli) and all the various types of dried beans we have is just stuff that we don't even think of as camp food. Why??? As if our ancestors never camped before the advent of tinning and commercial dehydration! Actually, it just goes to show how much we have lost touch with our own native cultures that we face this lack of imagination when it comes to food.

Anyway, we all had a good sleep that evening. Just had to wake up in the middle of the night to restart the fire because it had been put out by the rain. We eventually got a roof over the fire and it kept going after. We also got a bit more firewood after. The fire was important that night because it would be cold in the morning on account of the elevation.