Today's photo is the last I'll post of the jungle in Brunei for a while. Most of my photos from this time were prints and I've not scanned them yet.
I find it curious that the word ‘jungle' arrived in the English language in 1776 from the Hindi ‘jangal' – desert, forest, wasteland, uncultivated ground and the Sanskrit ‘jangala' – arid, sparsely grown with trees.
When we think of ‘jungle' today what usually springs to mind is wet, dense, impenetrable, over-grown with trees. It seems almost the opposite of the original words in their original language – particularly ‘desert', ‘arid' and ‘sparsely grown with trees'.
But then there's a distinction between jungle and rainforest. The canopy of the rainforest is so dense that very little sunlight reaches the ground so there is very little ground cover and navigation is relatively easy. Jungles usually occur on the edge of the rainforest or where there are clearings in the rainforest as the sunlight allows prolific growth of ground cover that makes navigation particularly difficult.
As my canopy photos have shown (here and here) the canopy in the survey area in Brunei was not particularly dense hence the proliferation of ground cover and hence the term, jungle.
When I look at Google Earth images of the survey area in Brunei today, not much has changed, really. These lakes are still there, the jungle doesn't look to have died back much, if at all. There are no obviously new drill rig sites. The Seria bypass has been extended with a bridge over the Sungai Belait. It now runs behind the site of the Rasau 17 blow-out and connects with the old coast road to the border crossing with Malaysia. There the road continues on to Miri across the Batang Baram. Both of those river crossings could only be made by ferry back in 1989!
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