A Greenhorn Naturalist in Borneo is about natural history, travel in the tropics, life sciences, and adventure, with the environment always in mind. It chronicles the nine years the author spent with his family on that equatorial island. The book’s humorous style never detracts from the focus on the science, the island of Borneo, and its natural wonders.

Extract taken from A Greenhorn Naturalist in Borneo
By Hans Breuer
Published by Whittles Publishing

The Beat poet Allen Ginsberg advised, ‘Follow your inner moonlight. Don’t hide the madness.’ The seed for my personal brand of moonlit madness sown by my first pitcher plant had germinated, and now it was pushing its way through to the surface. Like a blade of grass growing through tarmac, it had already opened a tiny fissure. In time, aided by other events, this hairline crack would widen into a great cleft and split off the entire promontory I stood on, sending me into the unknown.

But for the moment, the concept of relocating to Borneo was just what it would sound like to any sane person: an impossible escapist fantasy that would surely, once I calmed down, retreat into the dimension of the irrational. Even in the realm of the speculative, the very thought of moving your entire family to a rainforest island for no better reason than the frivolous enjoyment of things that could hardly be considered essential for one’s material well-being was beyond decadent. The idea ranked right up amongst other perennially popular sky-pies born from the existential frustration frequently experienced by overworked middle-agers. Like quitting your 30-year job as a tollbooth operator to cruise the world on a catamaran for a decade or two, then retire on some sunny island where the climate agrees with your arthritis, and where the only problem left in life is whether to eat the crabs or the oysters first. Even if you did afford the idea some closer inspection, there would be social hell to pay. We all have the occasional weak moment and hallucinate about getting away from it all—but woe betide those who dare and do it. Their friends and family will immediately condemn them to pariah status for committing the ultimate sin: helping themselves to happiness.

I was neither man nor mad enough for such a tectonic life change. Hypothetically, I could live anywhere I wanted, earning my rice online as I did. As long as I had access to broadband and a power outlet I could live in a tree in New Guinea. But nobody in their right mind would live in a tree in New Guinea. Or move to Borneo, for that matter. Did they even have broadband in Borneo? Besides, what would my family do down there, anyway? Did they have schools in the jungle? Even if, how would the kids get there? They would probably need to leave the house three hours before sunrise to paddle raging whitewater streams and bushwhack through dense jungles full of tigers, snakes, and yellow fever, just to be on time for class.

Or would they?

I didn’t know. In fact, there was a whole lot I didn’t know about the world’s third largest island, and what I did know was grievously selective. Sure, I knew about Nepenthes. Of roughly 180 species worldwide, the largest contingent grew in Borneo, among them outlandish creatures straight from the set of Avatar: Revenge of the Shrubbery. Many of those species are endemic to the island (i.e., not found anywhere else in the world), with Mount Kinabalu, at 13,435 feet3 the highest mountain in the region, particularly renowned for its peerless flora. I also knew a few other random factoids about Borneo. It’s twice the size of Germany, and bigger than Texas. The equator bisects the island. The nations of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei share the territory, with Indonesia ruling the lower two thirds, Malaysia’s two states of Sarawak and Sabah clinging to the north coast, and Brunei sitting like a tiny oyster pearl right on the border between the two Malaysian states. Apart from this basic information—stuff any moderately attentive high school student could tell you—I knew next to nothing about Borneo.

What I perceived about it, though, was its mysteriousness. Borneo’s near-mythical status in Western minds has long obsessed nonlocals for a multitude of reasons. For me specifically, the island was the near-prehistoric homeland of my little meat-eating friends, a place that ran off the edge of my imagination. Just looking at these bizarre plants, even as they stood in the artificial setting of my greenhouse manacled to their polyethylene pots, gave rise to romantic musings about their mystical home. What sort of alien place would produce such unreal life forms that defied all conventional understanding? It was a fantasy world, yet it existed.

A Greenhorn Naturalist in Borneo by Hans Breuer published by Whittles Publishing, priced £18.99.