Me and My Monkey

Back in JAPAAAAAAAAAAN from Malaysia...whoops, I guess I mean MALAAAYYYSIAAAAAA. It was a very different sort of trip from the Thailand experience, which if you haven't seen some evidence of, you should go check out the photo set over on flickr. That was a great god damn time. Why didn't we just go back to Thailand?

The trip had a lot of good things in it. We did have times. Once we were involved in a three way nature battle in the jungle: Josh & Al vs Pit Viper vs. Screaming Alpha-male Monkey. Another time, a ten-year-old Malaysian boy sang James Brown at the top of his lungs inside an ancient spirit cave as we danced to the summit in green light from a rent in the mountainside. This was after the bats attacked us, but before we found the pile of dust-dry butterfly wings, inches deep, the bats' compost heap. We spent three days in the jungles of Borneo, in the care of a tribe called the Iban who may have given up headhunting as far back as a hundred years or so. We stayed in their longhouse and went on treks through pepper plantations, rubber fields and wild, untamable rainforest, minded by a man called "Antelopes" (this was not his given name). My highlight of the trip was when swimming time in the river became bathing time in the river; there was this outrageously spunky, smart, wild and terrific nine-year-old girl named Melissa (mell-EEE-sah) who came down to bathe when I was swimming down with her little brother Monkey Boy. Well, I called him Monkey Boy because he wouldn't tell me his name and because he was a super rambunxious little dude. I'd made friends with him by chasing him around the longhouse on my knuckles like a gorilla, endearing myself to everyone in the tribe. To my surprise, he loved the name Monkey Boy and would go around shouting it to himself to try to make it stick. Wonderful kids. So I'm swimming with Monkey Boy when Melissa comes down to the river with some other girls to bathe. No need to skedaddle; river bathing here isn't nude but done saronged, and isn't a super private thing. Monkey Boy and I were playing on the thick branches of an old tree that had lodged in the river bottom, and I swam over to the shore when Melissa and co came down, and started to splash them. And then Melissa grabbed her bar of soap and handed it to me and held out her hair in both fists, and I got to shampoo her and soap her up; and then she started to do the same for me! It was unbelievably cute and special, that this little girl was sharing this simple intimacy with me after being so aloof for the few days prior to it. It was really endearing and wonderful.

So yes, times. It wasn't all terrific, though a lot of it was great. But thinking back to the little girl in the river makes me feel really happy about it all now, so we'll leave it at that for the evening.