Avet Vagari: A Jungle Walk

Over the last few weeks, members of the Ampangan Woh community have been traveling back and forth to their farm houses, which are located deep in the jungle. I’ve mentioned before that most of the villagers here are (relatively) new arrivals, who moved here in the last ten to fifteen years to give their children better access to the school in the town below. The farms are further away, and it’s there that most of the food is grown. While the jungle that surrounds us provides us with enough for dinner each night, the farms were described to me as sprawling plots of land where food was grown large scale. My impression was that they were all somewhat near each other; the sense of community here gave me the idea that to grow food separately would be ludicrous. Unfortunately, reaching the farms requires quite a hike from the village, and generally at least one night’s stop there, so the trekking to the farms has been met with quite a drop in my attendance (as low as 3 out of 17 students on some days).

I was thrilled when Amek and Apak – my hosts in Ampangan Woh – invited me to spend a weekend with them at their farm, and I was warned that it would take about an hour to reach the other house on foot, and a rather strenuous hour at that. So I donned my good walking shoes, and Elma – the Malaysian teacher in training who is staying with me – and the family put on their flip flops and we set out.

We walked through the short row of houses, with students hanging out their windows, beside themselves to see their two teachers heading off to the jungle, and soon turned into the trees. The path (for lack of a better word; merely branches and plants trampled down into the dirt by last week’s pilgrimage to the farm, and the occasional cigarette pack perched atop a stick, which I can only presume marked the way) almost immediately turned upwards, so that I was at times using all four limbs to scramble up, and even the more seasoned jungle travellers lost their footing at times. By the time we were fifteen minutes out, we were all sweating and panting, and took a moment to rest and admire this view:

Whenever I remembered to look up and around me rather than directly at my feet, I was amazed by the surroundings. When the path curved around the hill so that the trees cleared, we could look out and see the endless mountains of Perak, and when it veered back into the jungle we were engulfed by bamboo and banana trees, shading us from all angles so that everything was bathed in slightly green light. Every so often we came to a place where a stream flowed, and we dipped our feet and hands and faces into the water to cool off. One of the boys caught a shrimp and inexplicably put it in his breast pocket. Unfortunately, the shrimp did not survive the trip to the house.

Eventually we were not on a path at all, but just walking through knee-high brush. The path suddenly became even steeper – almost a vertical climb – and from in front of me the twins called back, “Teacher! Sudah sampai” (“we’ve arrived!”). Encouraged by the nearness, I scrambled with increased vigor and finally found myself in front of a single house – nothing else in sight but jungle. The house was set a bit above the lower trees, so that in front the view of Perak was clear and incredible:

The house itself was even more basic than it’s partner in Ampangan Woh. It’s floor and walls and ceiling were also made of bamboo and bamboo leaves, but not being part of a village meant less cleared land around, as well as no electricity. It was also much smaller than our house in the village. While to say that the house in Ampangan Woh has four rooms is a bit excessive, there are definitely four distinct spaces, a sort of counter in the classroom (also bamboo) where the computers sit, and against the far wall where kitchen supplies are kept. The farm house is only one small space, with no embellishments at all except one small round table in the center for keeping food out of the reach of rats. The windows were wide – the full width of the walls from corner to corner, so that when the bamboo leaf shades were opened the walls only stood about two feet high, and above them only gaping space below the sloping roof. Perfect for sitting and gazing out at the mountains, which was about the only thing we could think to do.

We bathed and washed dishes and clothes at the stream that flowed a short walk down from the house, and spent the evening cooking cassava leaves gathered just outside, with rice that the strongest of our group had lugged up from below. When the sun went down at 7:30, we ate by candlelight and flashlight light and played as many games as we could in the dark, then went to bed at 8:30. It was cold up in the hills, and I didn’t sleep well, shivering under a thin blanket laid out on a bamboo mat. The next day, we woke up early and lit a fire to make tea and warm up. Around midday, we set out for the farm itself. The farm is about a half hour walk from the house, again an uphill trek through the jungle. When we finally arrived, sweating and panting, we could barely catch our breath to look around. We were standing in a graveyard of torched banana and trees and bamboo – black stumps rose out of the ground and as we clambered over the fallen trunks our hands and clothes turned black with ash, but tiny green cassava plants rising out of the ground dotted the field, so many that to avoid stepping on them required constant concentration. Surrounding the field on four sides was green, green jungle, and in the distance, more beautiful mountains. We split up, planting various seeds – the family had requested that I bring along the rest of the pumpkin seeds that another teacher had given to me, so I focused on those, and eventually got five to ten seeds each of three varieties in the ground. We’ll see how they fare at the farm (I’m still watching our last remaining pumpkin here in the village – it’s got a nice big yellow flower now, and a handful of buds, so I’m optimistic).

When we’d finished our work for the day, we headed back to the house, where we cooked ferns that we’d gathered on the walk back, and passed the afternoon and evening much in the same way as the day before. The following morning, we washed the dishes we’d used (not many, as we’d been eating in the Orang Asli fashion, from banana leaves to save plates) and then headed back down to the village. The walk back was much quicker and easier than the trip out (although more slippery… trade off of walking downhill). We reached home around 1:00, and spent the afternoon napping and reading and drinking tea, and the following day it was back to the routine.