The only crew members that actually got to hack their way through the jungle like explorers were the surveyors – actually their assistants. Back in 1989 they used theodolites to control the cutting of lines through the jungle on precise directions. A good crew would get perhaps a kilometer cut per day. In most cases it was simply clearing leaves and ground growth. Big trees were always left alone. If the line went through a big tree then the surveyor had to work his way around it. If I recall correctly our limit was nothing over six inches in diameter could be cut.
After the surveyor cut his line, a ‘bridging crew' would follow along behind and cut smaller trees to form a walkway, or bridge. Typically three poles wide and nailed together, it made walking the lines considerably easier for the rest of us and in most cases kept our feet dry also. It also meant that relatively few people were actually tromping across the jungle floor. That was good for most of us. I recall one of our surveyors falling over on a line before the bridging was laid. Instinctively he put his hands out to arrest his fall and plunged them into an ants nest. Within the space of minutes his hands were like footballs, swollen from all the venom in the myriad of ant bites he suffered. He got better relatively quickly (a few days), though.
Everything we needed we had to carry in and carry back out again along these bridges.
I have to admit that I spent most of my time as an office wallah, not actually out here. I do recall a few windy, rainy days out in the jungle though, where you'd here a sharp ‘crack'. Everyone would freeze and look around and up for the top half of a tree falling. Sometimes these snapping trees would be two or more feet in diameter but completely eaten out on the inside by bugs of one sort or another which is why a stiff breeze could snap them. I never actually saw any trees falling but on more than one occasion the way out was blocked by a fallen tree that hadn't been lying across the line when we'd trekked in a few hours earlier.
Of course, this being Brunei and the survey zone being close by the coast – spanning it in fact – we all slept in air-conditioned luxury in rented houses each night. The crews trekked in in the morning and out in the evening. There were plenty of other jungle surveys in other countries where the crews lived in the jungle in camps on the line. I didn't do any of those surveys. Outside of this year in Brunei, my career was deserts and farmland.
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