Tracy Johnston - Shooting the Boh: A Womans Voyage Down the Wildest River in Borneo

ACCLAIM FOR Tracy Johnstons

Johnston vividly conveys the mixture of frustration, discomfort, terror and flat-out exhilaration that makes adventure travel adventurous. Shooting the Boh turns out to be a genuine travel book, and a gripping one at that.

The New York Times Book Review

Shooting the Boh is dead bang honest; its insightful and hilarious, as well as physically and emotionally exciting. This one goes up on the modern travel classics shelf along with Joe Kane, Redmond OHanlon and very few others.

Tim Cahill

I loved this book. I gave it to a dozen friends, all of them wannabe thrill seekers. Tracy Johnston is a dream of a writerfunny, intelligent, and as hilariously observant of her own tics and wrinkles as she is of the flora, fauna, and leeches of the jungle. The prefect cautionary tale to those in search of the road (and river) not taken.

Amy Tan

Admirable Johnston is an engaging storyteller [and] a gifted descriptive writer.

The Wall Street Journal

An entertaining and absorbing adventure. [Johnston] keeps the story moving by turning her mishaps into comedy delightful.

San Francisco Chronicle

Taking the mid-life crisis to the limitas mail-order adventure/travel fantasies meet reality head-on in a tale of lost luggage, frayed nerves, rainforest slime, leeches, female trouble, wounded warriors and thundering rapids. The book is a poignant and entertaining memoir of a womans wild ride into the uncharted realms of middle age while descending the Boh River of central Borneo. A captivating and truly off-beat rite of passage.

Eric Hansen

I read Shooting the Boh with admiration and enjoyment. Its a wonderful, scary book [that] should be read by every middle-aged woman as a great boost to the morale. A great accomplishment. Im sure it will become a classic travel book with a long life.

Diane Johnson

Tracy Johnston

Shooting the Boh

Tracy Johnston grew up in Southern California, graduated from UC-Berkeley, and has worked as a high school teacher, ceramic sculptor, free-lance writer, and magazine editor. Her most recent job was as Northern California editor of California magazine. She has written for New West, The New York Times Magazine, Playboy, and The Village Voice. She lives with her husband, Jon Carroll, in Oakland.

A VINTAGE DEPARTURES ORIGINAL, SEPTEMBER 1992

Copyright 1992 by Tracy Johnston
Map copyright 1992 by Jaye Zimet

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Johnston, Tracy.
Shooting the Boh: a womans voyage down the wildest river in
Borneo / Tracy Johnston.
p. cm. (Vintage departures)
eISBN: 978-0-307-76625-0
1. Boh River (Indonesia)Description and travel. 2. Johnston,
TracyJourneysIndonesiaBoh Sungai. 3. Women
adventurersUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
DS646.34.B64J64 1992
959.83dc20 92-53825

Author photograph copyright Ken Probst

v3.1

To my parents, Bob and Ruth Joos

T his book would not have been possible without my eleven companions on the Boh River. Since we were together for only a short time, under trying circumstances, my portraits of them are incomplete. Nevertheless, everything on these pages is as true as I have been able to make it.

I also wish to thank several friends who helped me on the second part of my journey, the writing of the book: Patrick Finley, Drury Pifer, Patrick Daugherty, B.K. Moran, and my mother, who is not only a joyful traveler but a creative literary critic. They read and commented on the manuscript, and their advice, along with the enthusiasm of my agent Suzanne Gluck and the intelligent editing of Robin Desser at Vintage Books, made the experience of writing and publishing my first book more pleasurable than I had a right to expect.

For the stories about Borneos early explorers, I am indebted to the library of the University of California, at Berkeley.

My debt to my husband, Jon Carroll, is overwhelming. He was my editor throughout all stages of the writing. I thank him for his skill and his patience; I am grateful for his love.

As you got older and felt yourself to be at the center of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering.

Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

L ooking around me that morning as I stood at the edge of the river, about to head into the unknown, I was reminded of the photographs Id seen of the European explorers who came to Borneo in the nineteenth century. They were upper-class men, most of them amateur scientists, who traveled with teams of native guides and porters carrying guns, notebooks, boxes for mounting specimens, and cloth and glass beads for barter. We were three American river guides and nine thrill-seeking tourists who had flown into a village that would have taken them months to reach, and we were taking our gear in rafts instead of hiring someone to carry it. But, like those men, we stood a full head taller than the native Dayaks who had come down to the river to say good-bye to us. Like them, we had a certain smugness, as though our superior height and our modern equipment granted us special powers.

We had come to Long Lebusan, a remote village in Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo, because wed signed up for a white water rafting trip with Sobek, an adventure travel company. Sobek hoped to open up the Boh River to commercial rafting, including an eighteen-mile section where it funneled through a steep, narrow gorge. But it needed someone to finance the exploratory run. That was us. No experience was necessary, just cash.

Sobek had planned to hire some local Dayak boatmen to accompany us, so wed be able to hike out of the gorge if we got stuck. But now it looked as if wed be making the trip alone. We hadnt been able to convince a single Dayak to come with us. The rapids in the gorge were unrunnable, they said. They were big, and they were dangerous. Even after we showed them our sturdy, high-tech rafts they said no, and then no again. They kept shaking their heads. Finally they told us about the river spirit, the evil, three-headed river spirit. It was in the gorge, they said, and they were afraid of it.

Although we couldnt take their warnings about the evil spirit seriously, what did concern us was the predicament their fear of it had put us in. Without a guide who knew the rain forest, we couldnt travel through it. There were no villages in the area, and no trails. That meant that once we were in the gorge, there was no turning back.