The other side of the river

I'd felt like a zoo animal on display. What did these 'men of the forest' think of us strange creatures? - naked like mole rats with fur sprouting from our heads. After being stared at by dark sad eyes, and promising them that I would never buy soap again, my heart felt wrenched. But it was time to leave the orangutang's to their chancy future.

A week earlier I'd hitched across the Java Sea on Solstice, a 30ft yacht; it beat flying and bumping butts on tourist buses to get to the orangutang river cruise. After four days at sea we plunged the anchor into the thick sludge of the river, inadvertently my eyes skipped away from the jungle and to the opposing port of Kumai. Through the bob of sleeping trawlers, confronting communist-style buildings cast ominous shadows along the foreshore. Scarlet flags defended them, their raging bulls flapped ferociously; playing hide-and-seek with the sun. I had to investigate.

The guide hadn't encouraged us to roam the town, but as the last tourist bus spluttered off I was free. The glistening of a glass-eye from a slumped boy welcomed me onto the river dock.

An orgy of fishing boats clacked against the wharf, guiding me into a maze of huts on rickety stilts. Ducking my head under an L.A. Lights billboard, the putrid stench of warming flesh walled up at me. Girls in pretty dresses played hopscotch among the cut-off hooves of cows and chickens' feet, narrowly saving their own toes from the dance of a machete. In the corner, pirates, unlike in appearance to 'Captain Johnny Depp', guzzled on a 25lt water container sloshing with homemade spirit. I felt deceived by my curiosity until a toothless betel-nut grin sold me the best fried chicken I'd ever had.

White powdered faces stared from their candy-stripped porches as I crossed the street. A sweaty man hung from his barn-door window yelling and waving away a plastic-bag kite attached to a tiny hand in a drain below. Twisting through the clothes-lined streets, I found the old man I had unknowingly been looking for. Cross-legged on his porch he straightened his crooked back; dark grey kaleidoscope eyes spoke of a thousand lifetimes. I was lost in them, when a vortex of swifts distort their reflection. I craned my neck. Towering behind me, one of the curious cement buildings painted blue with fluffy clouds; it vanished against the sky. Million dollar bird-nest factories – a secret to the architecture of Kumai.