Glenda Larke

We head out from a town called Kota Belud to the western slopes of Mt Kinabalu (we’re on our way back to return the stolen sheets, remember?) pass by an army camp called Camp Paradise (someone had a sense of humour) and on to a bone jangling road heading for Sayap village.

Towards the Park, the mountains become steeper – “pointy hat” peaks like those in fantasy maps done by artistically-challenged authors. They are often cleared for agriculture — and pineapples and hill padi are now planted all over the burned 60° slopes (this all part of the burning that Malaysia refuses to acknowledge responsibility for, let alone consider contributes to the annual haze-hell of the region).

The hill-top village of Sayap has a maze-like conglomeration of houses, a church/community hall and village shops. It is prosperous, now enjoying both the high price of the rubber they tap, and the income expatriate villagers send back from working in oil-rich Brunei.

Strung over a bridge and through a fruit plantation, there is a hundred metres of mist net on bamboo poles. Seems the bat-catchers there have been busy, though, with no concerns for the legality or otherwise of their catch – it all tastes the same, I suppose. There are signs up at parts of the river, however, forbidding fishing – enforcement is done by the villagers and the fine is a buffalo or a 1,000 ringgit. They recognise the value of fish conservation for their own future benefit. It’s a start.

We press on to the ranger post at Kinabalu-Sayap, the place they call “the other side of the mountain”. When we hit the park boundary, the contrast is startling. It is so easy to recognise the difference between unprotected forest and protected primary forest – and you don’t have to be familiar with a rainforest to see which is healthier.

Inside the forest, the first thing I see is a Bornean Bristlehead flying across the road, one of the region’s rarest and most mysterious endemics, an avifaunal clown that no one knows where to place in the taxonomy, so strange is its anotomy and habits. I wish I’d had a better look. Had I been driving, I would have braked so hard we would all have gone through the windscreen. I’m told by one of the Park folk with us that it is the first record for Sayap.

We are close to 1000m high. Cold water in the bathroom, straight off the mountain. Electricity for a few hours at night by way of a generator. No frig. No phone, not even mobile lines. No internet. No shops. No people but us. And the place is gorgeous with views from the verandah to die for. A river just below us, chattering endlessly over stones, a background sound to whatever we do for the next five days.

Sunrise starts at the top of the hills and sneaks downwards. The mornings are cloudless and hazeless, the afternoons misty or wet as the mountain creates its own weather and then dumps it on us. The evenings are cold as the sunlight creeps upwards to turn Mt Kinabalu red, leaving us below in the valley in the dark, already tucked away for the night.

I go birdwatching. I write. I read. I walk in the forest.
I am rejuvenated.

When I was kid I lived in a farmhouse that had no connection to a water scheme. We had a huge tank sitting on a base just outside the kitchen, which collected run-off from the galvanised corrugated iron roof. And we had a pump down on the Canning riverbank, which my father used to pump up river water to another tank. The river water was used – untreated – for everything except drinking and cooking. Yes, we bathed in riverwater, and drank untreated roof water, which probably explains why I have a cast iron immune system.

Anyway, I can remember many times climbing the old Cape-lilac tree and then carefully edging my way around the outside edge of the covered tank (remember, this was at roof height) so that I could get on to the roof, all while I was under eight years old. My older sister taught me how. Why we didn’t fall and break our necks I have no idea. In fact, growing up on a farm was just one adventure after another. My mother found me playing with a poisonous snake when I was less than a year old. A rat crawled in the tank overflow pipe one year, and we drank the water for ages before we found out what that funny smell was, and had to empty and scrub out the tank. And cart water until the summer was over and the dry broke.

Yet somehow nothing much seemed to go wrong with us kids … a cut foot, a splinter here, a grazed knee there – a dab of some hectic-coloured liquid, or a bit of Bates’ salve warmed over a candle and applied at night, and we were off again.

And over at an elementary school south of Boston, as reported in today’s news, a school is forbidding kids from playing catch or touch football and similar games for fear someone might sue them if a kid gets hurt.

Isn’t it time law-makers put an end to this kind of idiocy?

[Yep, they were the good old days. After all, I wasn’t the one who had to go pump the water up.]

Last weekend I stayed at home and worked. I couldn’t even go out because of the smoke particles in the air, which people here euphemistically call “haze”. Perhaps because “Haze” sounds better than”Smoke”. You can kid your subconscious that haze is a natural phenomenon.

Smoke from burning forest – our most valuable renewable natural resource – is a result of eco-terrorism, and we can’t pretend it is natural. Smoke kills. Go ask the hospitals’ admission desks for this week’s admissions. Ask the asthmatic kids how they feel this week.

The paper today says the satellite pix show 400 hot spots spread between Kalimantan and Sumatra, Indonesia. It didn’t mention what the satellite showed for Malaysia. Malaysia, of course doesn’t burn anything. Ever. We are as innocent as the haze.

And if you’ll believe that, I’ll sell you the Petronas Towers for a deposit into my bank account, and you can go to my July 17th archives and look at the pix I took of burning in Sabah PRIOR to the burning “season”. For ten years our politicians have mouthed words on this issue. Words mean nothing. I want to be able to go for a brisk walk outside my house again without choking.

Anyway, I stayed at home last weekend and tried to meet a deadline, while my husband went to the place pictured here.

Tell me why I write again?

From a reader’s point of view, surely the worst thing must be buying Book 1 and realising that you can’t get Book 2 right away, and that the finale is not going to available for as long as a year or two. You have to pause one third of the way through, and again before the end. You forget what happened earlier. You curse and wait, sometimes longer than normal, as a writer struggles with the ending.

If you buy them as they come out but don’t read them until you have Book 3, well you may find you hate Book 1 and have bought two more books you will never read!

Even if you don’t come across Book 1 until years after it was published and decide to try it then, you have to be careful. You may never find Books 2 & 3 – they are out of print.

For the trilogy writer, the problem is more profound.

The recent Man-Booker prize winner is supposed to have taken eight years to write the winning novel. Look at any mainstream book of real calibre, and you will probably find the author spent at least 2-3 years writing it. They took their time. They crafted every sentence with care. They paused and took time out to stand back, to let things gel before proceeding to the next rewrite.

Most of us trilogy writers don’t get that chance. The public wants the next one NOW. The publisher wants it as soon as you can deliver. We have a much more complex story to write and we have to do it one third the time. Because we write fantasy, we often get told our work is inferior by people who haven’t even read it. Possibly they are sometimes right – but on quite different grounds. We are obliged to write much quicker, with less time to craft.

It’s a wonder we aren’t all on Prozac.

Let’s be clear about one thing first – I have just about every filter, anti-viral medication, anti ad-ware/spyware, firewall and patch known to humankind and alien invaders.

But someone is using my email address (at least the @glendalarke.com part of my email address – they seem to be able to put odd letters in front of the @ and still have it delivered to my box) to send out spam. Most of this spam seems to be just plain gibberish.

How do I know this? Because I keep getting it bounced back from mailboxes that were full or defunct.

Is there any solution to this?