I’m in Borneo, right now, and I keep having to pinch myself to make sure it’s real.

It takes two days of travel to get here, including a six hour flight from Sydney, a two hour flight from Bali, then another hour in the air to get from Jakarta to Pangkalan Bun, which is where I am as I’m typing this. I’m currently curled up in the hotel’s air conditioning, so tired I’m not sure I can move again, ever.

Bali is hot and chaotic and the humidity hits like a wall as you disembark the plane, forcing moisture-rich air into lungs sucked dry by the planes air conditioning. Bali airport looks as though it’s been decorated in mid-Seventies laminex brown. The people are endlessly friendly, polite and smiling; and I’m glad I learnt the very basics of speaking Bahasa Indonesia before I came- being able to say “Permissi, terimah kasih!” for “Excuse me, thank you!” just makes me feel polite.

Everything here is richly decorated. Baseboards, lampshades, counter-tops and stairwells are ornate and carved, decorated with bright colour and gold leaf. The air smells of clove cigarettes and sweat, incense and satay. People whiz past our taxi on motorbikes and scooters, weaving in and out of traffic, whole families on mopeds. A tiny girl-child smiles at me from the back of one- she’s sitting between her mother, on the back of the scooter, and her father, who’s driving. Her mother is cradling a tiny baby wrapped in a pink blanket.

It’s alarmingly clean here. There seem to be a hundred people employed to do each job, especially cleaning. I no sooner butt out a cigarette (and you can smoke everywhere here… smoking inside is weird) when its gone again, the table wiped clean, ashtray emptied, cleaner smiling and nodding at me.

A brightly colored ‘floating toilet’

The flight into Pangkalan Bun- Borneo itself- was slightly terrifying. The plane is the oldest I’ve ever seen, and it rattles and creaks in the air. We are served lunchboxes with sticky rice wrapped in a banana leaf. I see the woman behind us laughing, watching these strange white women grimace as they bite into the banana leaf itself, not knowing to unwrap it.

Pangkalan Bun airport is tiny, crowded, not much more than a few small rooms. It’s pumping with people. This city seems to have established itself in the very center of the jungle. The heat. The greenery. The way the local foliage appears to be trying to eat everything in it’s path- thick green vines and tropical plants spill over onto cleared land, rise and snake between dwellings. Pangkalan Bun is relatively spread out, and from the hotel window we can see a smattering of blue roofed houses that concede themselves entirely to the jungle green growth beyond.

Borneo is a Muslim country. Alcohol is forbidden. I’m glad my mum reminded me to pack shirts with sleeves , rather than the spaghetti-strapped singlet tops I normally would have filled my bag with.

It’s a strange feeling. Unveiled. Anglo. In the minority. Out of my depth in both language and local customs.

***

The river that dissects Pangkalan Bun is teeming with humanity. Houses are built on the banks, hanging over the water, serviced by floating toilets that are really just a small wooden hut with no floor. There are floating fish farms. Men washing themselves off, brushing their teeth with the murky brown water. Women wash clothes. Longboats and the occasional speedboat leave the wake of the water behind them.

And the children, they play. They run from tiny houses to wave at us, this boat full of white woman on their river. They blow us kisses and bomb into the water, giggling as we give them a round of applause from our longboat.

It’s eye-poppingly colourful. If a surface is painted, painted bright- powder blues, neon orange, candy pinks.

The sun begins to drop in the sky, and the hauntingly beautiful Muslim call to prayer goes out through speakers strung across the city. On the very top of the biggest hill sits the Palace, where the Sultan, the Prince and his Princess live. From here, you can see for miles, the jungles beyond the city itself bathed in sunlight.

That is why they built here, our guide tells us. From the top of the hill, they can see all their people, all their land, all at once. All bathed in the golden light of the setting sun.

The view from the Palace.

***

Tomorrow, we board a klotok (named for the noise the diesel engines they once ran on made- klot-ok, klot-ok, klot-ok) and head up the Senoyer River. That’s when the orangutan spotting officially begins.

So far, it’s all amazingly awesome. I keep looking at the world map, tracing the distance between Sydney and here.

I never thought I’d have the courage to do this. I’m so glad I did.

The post The Sunset in Borneo. appeared first on RRSAHM.

I leave for Borneo in less than 48 hours.

To be honest, I’m trying to be excited… right now, I’m just exhausted. My kids are, of course, punishing me in the subtlest of ways in anticipation of the coming separation.  (Screaming at me, whinging at me, the eldest hitting the youngest and then screaming at me… generally showing me that they love me).

Obviously, I won’t be blogging directly from the Borneo, due to a total lack of internet access. I’ve got a guest poster for later this week. And I’ll be back just as soon as I have a (blessed) Wifi connection.

In the meantime, I’m sharing with my itinerary with you, so you can see where I’m going and follow along with the journey.

You can check out the Google Map and have a click around to see what I’m doing each day…

View #BloggersToBorneo #LoriGoneWild in a larger map

And, for those who are on smartphones or just plain lazy, here’s a brief wrap-up.

Day One (May 20th): Fly out of Sydney and arrive in Bali at 4ish in the afternoon. Spend the night in Kuta.

Day Two (21st): Flying into Pangkalan Bun. A river cruise in the afternoon, spending the night at the Swiss-Belinn Hotel

Day Three (22nd): Up early to travel in a klotok boat up the Sekonyer River to Camp Leakey, the oldest camp set up for the orphaned orangutans. We’ll take a tour of the camp and the surrounding areas to watch the afternoon orangutan feeding. We moor in the klotok overnight at a place named Crocodile Lake (awesome).

Day Four (23rd): Today we get to see both the morning and afternoon orangutan feedings, and we spend the night in the Rimba Eco-Lodge (which sounds pretty amazing).

Day Five (24th):Back up the river, and we’re planting trees to assist the Pesalat Reforestation program- I’ll let you know the exact GPS co-ordinates of the tree I plant when I arrive home. In the afternoon, we take a tour of the local area and hopefully see more orangutans at an afternoon feeding. Tonight we take another trip downriver to witness what promises to be a spectacular sight- millions of fireflies floating above the water.

Day Six (25th): Today we return to Pangkalan Bun and visit the Orangutan Orphanage to see the amazing work they do there.

Day Seven (26th): The local coastal area is the revised destination for Day Seven (replacing the 20km jungle trek previously planned… I wasn’t going to bail. But I’m shamefully glad the plans have been changed…). We’re touring Keluang and Bogam Bay, and visiting the local turtle conservation program.

Day Eight (27th): It’s almost all over- we begin the journey back to Bali via a town called Surubaya. Tonight we stay in Bali- theoretically- I actually hop on a plane at 11pm…

Day Nine (28th):… and land in Sydney at 6am this morning.

I’ll have a stack of photos, videos and stories to blog when I get back. I’ll miss you guys. Behave yourselves. 

I’ll see you soon.

***

Please, remember to donate to OrangUtan Odysseys. A huge thanks to them for having me, and a huge thanks to Digital Parents Collective- especially Mel- for organising this trip.

The post Lori, Gone Wild. #BloggersToBorneo appeared first on RRSAHM.

Most days, I am just in awe of my mother. I think she may be the most wholesome, perfected person I know.

When I look back at my childhood, that’s how I picture her- perfect. Consistent. Fair. Wholly dependable. Accomplished and confident and so strong- stoic without becoming martyred.

My mum has always been right there, never more than a phone call away. I’ve witnessed friends with mothers who are not like that- parents who turn their back on their adult children, argue with them, never help them out. I can’t imagine what that would be like, what a difference it would have made in my personality had that been the case with my mum.

She has never let me down.

***

My mum used to draw me teddy bears to colour in when I was tiny. Happy stuffed toys wearing vests and smiles.

***

We always seemed to be short of money. That never mattered, and we rarely noticed it.

“Let’s go for a drive”, my mum would say on weekends. My brother and I, sometimes my grandmother as well, would pile into our huge red Toyota van, leaving my father at home to smoke cigarettes and watch the cricket.

“I’ve always wondered what was down this road…” My mother would murmur as she navigated dirt tracks and fire trails around the vicinity of Paradise.

“Let’s go check it out. It will be an adventure!” And it always was. We’d arrive in a hundred different places, surrounded by scrub or sand or trickling, noisy creeks. Once we parked the car and walked, turned the corner on a bush track only to find ourselves at the very top of a momentously tall, rushing waterfall. We stood and gazed over the rolling valleys of million year old hills as the sun dropped lower in the sky.

***

Discovering your mother is a person in her own right is breath taking.

When I was about eight or nine, my mum came home late from work one night, held up by meetings and other teacher-like responsibilities  My younger brother and I had already been fed, and we’re clean and snug, the smell of fresh showers on our hair.

I witnessed my mum making herself dinner in our small, well-lit kitchen.

Making herself dinner.

I don’t think I’d ever seen that happening before, my mother submitting to her own need for sustenance without catering to ours as well.

“What are you making?”

“An omelette.”

“What’s an omelette?”

“Look,” says my mum, lifting me up onto the kitchen cupboard to observe, “It’s eggs, beaten, and you add other things to it, too.”

I remember my amazement. “But I’ve never seen you make that before!”

And my mum seemed surprised by that.

“I used to make them all the time, when your father and I first got married. Before you kids came along…”

And I held that, like a whisper, like an errant thought. My mother was a person before I was here. She had a whole life that she had lived before I existed. 

***

My mum has never been one for self-pity. Emotional support and empathy was given where it was needed. But wallowing was not allowed.

I remember having my heart broken for the first time, by my first real boyfriend- the dim blue lights of the school disco illuminating him embraced in a kiss with a girl I couldn’t ever get on with. I remember waking up the morning after it happened, crying in the way only a devastated teenage girl can- sobbing and weeping, heart shattered, life over.

My mum sat next to my bed, rubbed my back while I cried.

“I don’t know what to do…” I whimpered.

“You get up,” my mum replied. “You get dressed. And you get on with it.”

And I did.

And I do.

***

My mum is still an adventurer, and even now, well into here fifties, she is doing all the things she has always wanted to do. Her and my step-father take extended driving holidays, exploring every back-road in New South Wales. She takes her class of school children to a nearby bush camp and struggles with them through the ropes course, zooms along the zip-line of the flying fox.

She’s always wanted to go to Broome, and to Tasmania. To parasail behind a boat.

She’s always wanted to climb the Harbour Bridge.

It’s not something I probably ever would have thought to buy for her- her practicality has been passed onto my brother and I, and gifts are always relatively small, useful, well thought out. Had I not been offered the chance to take my mum on a Mother’s Day Climb by BridgeClimb themselves, it may have never happened.

And that would have been such a pity. Because it was so intensely lovely to see my mother happy, childlike. So excited she was nearly bouncing out of her skin.

It was the most beautifully perfect day- the sun shining, not even the tiniest breeze to flutter the flags at the top of the bridge’s arch. My mum was expecting to be scared, and she wasn’t- the safety protocols are so thorough, the instructor so amazingly friendly, that all my mum felt was glorious exhilaration.

The view is amazing. From the top of the Bridge, you can see for miles. From one side there’s The Opera House, the green water of the Harbour, the deep blue of the ocean past the Heads. The Blue Mountains, the Parramatatta River, the sprawling suburbs stretch from the other.

A fleet of green Army choppers fly in formation directly above our heads, just fifty feet away. They’re close enough that I can see the olive-green gloved hand of the man who waves to us from the cockpit, and my mum and I laugh as we return the greeting.

As we pose for a photo, my mum remarks that we don’t have many pictures of the two of us together, and sadly, she’s right; and I know from painful experience that one day in the future I may regret that.

She’s done so much for me- this is nothing.  A few hours compared to a lifetime. A drop of salt into the teal green waters of Sydney Harbour beneath us.

But to give her something back- something like this, something she’ll remember… Selfishly, Ill admit, this was as much thrill for me as it was for her.

I turn to check on her, my blonde mother in her tinted glasses- she always seems to look the same, has done so for as long as I can remember. The look on her face is one of awe, of wonder.

The view from up here, it’s amazing.

The expression on my mum’s face is even better.

***
A huge thanks to BridgeClimb for having my mum and myself climb for Mother’s Day. No cash was exchanged for this post, but the Climb and photographs from the day were complimentary.

My mum and I. On top of the world.

The post The View From Here. appeared first on RRSAHM.

‘I think, therefore I am’ is the biggest, most destructive lie you’ve ever been told. You are not your thoughts, nor your emotions. You are the being behind them, the one that witnesses and experiences and watches them.

You are not what you think. Your head is stupid, and your thoughts lie.

You are the entity that experiences this.

You are the Universe, experiencing itself for the first time

***

I bounced around for the first twenty five years of my life absolutely festering with anxiety.

I never knew that was what it was, though. I thought I understood the term ‘anxiety’, but only in regards to acute panic attacks; where you can’t breathe and can’t do anything but you can’t sit still, the terror you feel clawing at the insides of your chest to get out and escaping in heaving, wretched sobs.

But panic attacks are the extreme end of the anxiety scale. It took me twenty five years, a bad bout of postnatal depression and an awesome shrink to finally identify that the frazzled, constant tightness in my chest wasn’t a sensation felt by everyone, all the time. It wasn’t even ‘just me’, just how I functioned. It was something separate to me, making me feel that way.

The constant gnawing worry that never left my side, the feeling that things were never quite right… that was anxiety. The obsessive compulsive tendencies- cleaning things, straightening them, adding up numbers and reducing them back down to single digits… that was all anxiety, too. The epic dread that prefaced meeting new people, walking into situations I’ve never encountered before? That was the anxiety, too.

And that annoying chronic procrastination I indulge in; it’s rooted deep in the burning, fluttering, sizzling core of anxiety as well.

I think of it like uranium  like x-rays- it looks harmless, so nondescript and defeatable. But it’s insidious and sly and it burns away at you from the inside out- silently and slowly, causing such violent damage.

Knowledge is power, and power is not control but acceptance. There’s all kinds of treatment for anxiety. The first and most useful and basic is simply knowing it’s there. Being aware of it. Not internalising it.

All that anxiety isn’t me. It affects my life… but I know it’s there, and that gives me an advantage, a one-up.

Misery loves company. Anxiety loves silence and denial.

***
This blog post is written to raiser awareness for Beyond Blue’s ‘Get To Know Anxiety’ campaign.
It’s not sponsored. Just important.

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