One month after my last visit, I arrived on Mantanani and was delighted to see the site strewn with impeccable driftwood logs. Albi and his team had scoured the coast and dragged their choice finds through the sea back to the camp site.

Some of the logs still lay tethered at the high water line while others where being diligently planed smooth to resemble nothing like driftwood.

My romantic dreams of water weathered, silvered and twisted timbers would have to be adjusted, another casualty of the cultural conditioning that dictates that anything wild, vernacular and peasant is not compatible with a modern developed nation.

It also took a long while to get around this problem at Borneo Rainforest Lodge. On that job I now have an understanding with the contractor to specify ‘moy liang’ – literally meaning ‘not nice’ in Cantonese.

The success in the use of drifwood logs however, is not in their appearance, but in that we have managed to avoid using posts made out of wonderful and scarce belian wood (see my earlier post).

Belian does not drift, it sinks – and so we can be sure that any timber washed up on the beach will not be belian and therefore would not last as long as belian when stuck in the ground.

To get around this I proposed keeping the post above ground level by bolting it to a steel bracket on a concrete pad. The villagers liked this so much that they wanted to do the rest of the buildings with them.

This would have been great, except that I had plans for the other buildings to use whopping chunks of driftwood instead of foundations.

Albi objected to this on the grounds that all the nice bits of driftwood were earmarked by people and that we’d used up his personal supply on the posts.

I explained that it didn’t matter what they look like as long as they’re heavy and not too badly munched by borers.
“The villagers will laugh at us for using that wood” Albi protested.
I told him to blame it on the white people and then he too could laugh.

The point of trying to use driftwood is that we reduce the transportation of concrete supplies to the island. This is a formiddable headache when all aggregate must be bagged and lugged by hand on and off a small boat. It’s dangerous too if the boatman is tempted to overload with the low volume but heavy cargo.

Whether our builders will find this convenience to be worth the sacrifice of having people laughing at your buildings remains to be seen!

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