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"Across the Water, Below the Wind" by Sam Hyman

The blurb / synopsis:

“Sam! Sam! Kenapa?!!” Half the chief’s family ran into my dimly lit room. They were asking me what was wrong after they heard me falling off the bed and writhing in pain. I couldn’t speak. I could only clasp my leg and try to cope with the increasing pain. I could feel poison travel slowly up my leg, inside, reaching other parts of my body. Masulio’s face hardened with determination as she quickly rubbed a silver chain on my foot, where the core of the pain had started, whilst mumbling to herself words I did not recognise. My heart beat started to increase, I felt hot. My vision started to blur. Voices around me were panicking. I couldn’t see anyone anymore. “Stay calm!” I thought to myself. “If you’re going to die, just stay calm!”.

This true story is the amazing journey one man took across South East Asia . After finishing an expedition with other like-minded westerners, Sam Hyman ventured out on his own and found himself in a remote part of Borneo , a place that he instinctively knew about from his dreams as a small boy. There, he lived with an indigenous tribe that took him in as one of their own. Once overcoming language and vastly different cultural barriers, the lessons that were learned and the life-changing experiences that took place from being with these amazing people could never be forgotten. Let alone be put in a book. Well, here is his attempt at it anyway....

********************Preface*************************

Salty air. That now familiar smell entered my lungs in the stifling heat, as the crude wooden floorboards creaked and groaned underneath the weight of my feet. Copious amounts of sweat were dripping down my burnt red face and off the end of my nose, made worse by my ridiculous state of overdress. My feet were clenched tight by ill-fitting unpolished black leather shoes, given to me by my father (thinking about it, it was my mother who gave me the shoes – my father probably never noticed them missing). Upon my head rested a segal – a thick, heavy, colourful woven cloth wrapped round my forehead like a huge turban with no top. I wore a tight, thick and sickly green polyester suit two sizes too small for me, accompanied by two tinggol – beaded straps across my chest - that tell two stories in the form of beautifully woven images.

I stopped for a moment as I reached halfway across the bridge, now swinging slightly in a welcomed breeze that swept across the estuary before me. My eyes fell upon the mangrove swamps, slowly being overcome by the gently swelling river below me, teeming with life and noises that were now a part of my everyday soundtrack. I squinted up at the clear blue sky in defiance of the intense brightness around me. I smiled. Forces that had been at work since I was a child were now coming together, ringing in my ears and permeating my very soul. I had reached a major point in my life. I was on the right path, and everything I could see around me was telling me just that.

“You know what?!”

Pawai turned round to look at me and gave me that grin he always does when he has an idea of his.

“You are standing here on the bridge that you built only five months ago,” he went on, with that knowing twinkle in his eyes, “and all of the things that have happened to you here must seem strange, you know? You should write a book about this – you have an amazing story to tell!”

I looked at him and grinned back. He was right. Here I was, sweltering in the intense heat, in a polyester suit wrapped in amazingly coloured eastern garments, standing across the water, below the wind, and like my tinggol that criss-crossed my chest, I had my story to tell. Thanks, Pawai.

 

*************** CHAPTER ONE*****************

The Laws Of Physics

My knackered VW Transporter van trundled past the brightly coloured field of corn. No matter how I willed the damn thing to go faster, the stubborn rattling diesel engine was already working flat out. I was pressing the accelerator so hard I was sure that at any moment my foot would go through the van’s rusting underside, and several inches beneath the road surface itself. Nope. No faster. Ah well, Physics is a bummer. I had told My A Level teacher Mr. Whiteoak this, but he wouldn’t listen. The bastard gave me an insulting grade ‘N’, only barely enough to get me admitted to the University of Bradford on an Electronic Engineering course (which I didn’t want to do anyway, but that’s another long winded story).

However, back to the van and the corn, and the knowledge that I wouldn’t reach my destination – good old John’s Organic Farm – any quicker, didn’t bother me today. I was ecstatic. It had happened. I wasn’t expecting it but the seed had been planted and this baby was growing fast. It was like I received a wake-up call that my whole being had been waiting for for years. As I overtook a red Escort with glee, I entered the sleepy town of Ackworth , and cast my mind back to that morning….....

The door burst open and in came my estranged looking friend Sebastian, wielding a blue file and a grubby socket set that no sane DIY mechanic would touch if they valued their pitiful existence. The conversation between myself and Sebastian’s younger brother, Bro, came to an abrupt end (that is, as opposed to petering off into a forgotten realm of Bro’s alternative parallel reality program).

“Guys! Check this out!”

Grinning, he placed his socket set down by the kitchen cupboard and pulled out some sheets of paper from his file, waving them about in the air. I have in my hand a piece of paper… If Neville Chamberlain was a skinny, milky-white, oil-stained, ginger geg-wearing hippie, then this would have been a classic Kodak moment. My camera would have to wait. I put that thought away and filed it somewhere, eager to concentrate on the moment.

Sebastian continued, full of gusto.

“Man, check this out. We have got to apply for this. There’s this local organization or charity or something, and they’re doing a trip to Malaysia – but get this – it’s just for young people from Leeds . We only have to raise ₤575. It’s normally over two grand!”

“ Malaysia ? Where’s that?” I found myself asking. The fact that I later became Geography co-ordinator of a primary school for a short time was beside the point.

So Bro, Seb and I read the information on these pieces of paper that Seb was so enthusiastic about. I knew Seb well, and when something inspired him like this it would usually catch on to me aswell. Bro was getting the bug too. That was it. We were applying for this thing, primary rainforest, 33°C, rural communities, jungle trekking – the thought of the expedition, and Seb, had sold it to me. I had had no experience of anything like this, but something inside was forcing me to go head first into it and get the ball rolling.

***************Chapter Two**************

Porridge & Bile

“Urrrrggggghhhh!”

My eyelids were heavy and did not want to open. Not now. Please. They had only been closed for two hours and the sound I had just heard was not what I wanted to hear. The rancid smell of stomach bile mixed with packet noodles added to this unpleasant scenario. Then my worst fears. I felt the warm touch of something wet on my hand, which had somehow found its way out of my pathetic wafer thin sleeping bag. For a moment, the warmth was quite welcoming on this cold February night, but then I came to my senses. My mate Crazy Chris once taught me a valuable lesson on how to wake up immediately, “gather your wits, and grab the world by its balls”. He had after all been through hell fighting in Iraq in Desert Storm missions, and his sense of urgency was second to none. So, a wizened master in the ways of getting up, I shot out of my sleeping bag, forgot there was a tarpaulin only 3 feet above me to keep the rain off, slipped and fell right into the lovely vomit puddle that my new team mate Pascal had just brought forth into the world.

“Ahh…Sorry, man,” Pascal groaned, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. We heard some shouts in the distance. I recognised them belonging to one of our assessors, another ex-army guy with a nasty wound from his tour of Northern Ireland .

“We gotta go, man, come on!” Pascal urged.

I looked around and saw the rest of my team already putting on their water logged boots. As I joined them in the stress of getting myself ready for fear of failing the assessment if I was last up, I glanced at my watch. 3 AM. The other teams by now were already running round the field like gormless zombies doing star jumps, hops and running on the spot. I had no choice but to join them. Despite all this, I was loving the head-on challenge that we were being put through, in a freezing cold forest near Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire . I was at this time an absolute exercise health-freak, brought on by my on-going training in Taoist Arts classes. The Arts had given me a high level of fitness, and a mental attitude that was hard to break. So, I gleefully jumped and bounced around this field, wiping Pascal’s bile off my cheeks. Our assessor was shouting at us;

“Come on you lot! There’s enough time to sleep when you’re dead!”

I and many others with me came to hate this expression he so often used. Still, maybe he had a point. After getting warmed up, we were told by Bob, our ‘facilator’ that our breakfast had been dropped by helicopter in the local area. He smiled an unforgiving smile and gave us a map, a torch, and some co-ordinates.

“If you don’t find your breakfast, you go hungry. You only have until 6AM ”

Food was the last thing on my mind, but I knew I would need that bag of porridge, whether it had landed on a haystack or in a cow pat. A gruelling day ahead meant I needed the energy. It was just an exercise, but even if there was no helicopter, the rest of it was real enough.

* * *

Luke warm oats mixed with water had never tasted so good. Although I didn’t know it, this bland dripping slop that congealed before you could get it to your mouth was to become a regular breakfast – sometimes even lunch and dinner – once on the expedition. On a good day. I looked around our group as we eagerly tucked in before the sun rose that morning. We were a real mixed bag. There was me – a registered unemployed (unregistered employed…), a paramedic named John from Leeds General Infirmary, a student, Julie, from Leeds University, a couple of young kids from Chapeltown, a couple of others whose names I no longer remember, and oh yes, there was Pascal, the chunder champion. Bob was watching us from the side, looking at us tucking into this slop, as if it was a top notch meal. He started to tell us that we should hurry.

“If you’re in Malaysia , stuck in the jungle, and you have to get to the nearest clearing for a helicopter landing area, you’ve got no time to eat. Get used to dropping your breakfast and grabbing your bags!”

The rest of the day consisted of bridge building, problem solving and getting cold, wet and hungry. Bob was good at making it real for us, and although our assessment weekend was controlled, safe and tame compared to the real thing, it was a challenge for those not used it. We all bonded as a team really well – I noticed Seb and Bro had a similar experience. And, after that gruelling weekend, we even got a “you’ve passed an Assessment Weekend” certificate. Whoopee-do.

The next few weeks were a waiting game. I willed my application form to the top of the pile, to be chosen to go. I knew the expedition was well over-subscribed, but I had this gut feeling I was going to be on that plane in September.

* * *

 

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