How Hot is Borneo in the Summer? How a T-Shirt Nearly Killed Me

Sweating with the bugs in Borneo

Sitting. Now in the cool air conditioning of my Air Asia flight, looking back it all seems so distant to me.

I sat quietly under the main eating shelter in our jungle camp on the Kinabatangan River. I tried not to move, to hold perfectly still. I breathed as little as possible. I ignored people who spoke to me. I am pretty sure an elephant waltzed out of the forest, did a Christopher Walken impression, took a bow, and melted back into the forest.

I am pretty sure that happened, but I can’t be certain. You see, it was way too hot to turn my head to look.

Perfectly still.

I did my best to not even think. Surely thinking burns calories, which would then generate heat, which would cause me to ooze even more sweat. So I did my best not to think. But it was hard not to dwell on the sad fate of the person destined to sit next to me on the flight home later the next day. Surely they would not be too hard on me once I explained to them that I needed to cut down on my carry-on baggage weight to make Air Asia’s 7 kilo limit, and that was why I had only brought two t-shirts from Kuala Lumpur to Borneo for my five days romping through the jungle looking for orangutans and proboscis monkeys.

Two t-shirts. One of which was mildly smelly. The other was a verifiable natural disaster.

If I got only one word to describe the jungle, it would probably be (much to my surprise) loud. The cicadas, other insects, macaques, birds. Sometimes you had to shout to be heard.

But if I got a second word to describe the jungle, it would be "wet."

It never rained while we were there, but it was wet nonetheless. I thought I had been in humid climates before.

I was wrong.

I didn’t know air could hold so much water. I was constantly waiting for one of our party to spontaneously drown in the humidity, gasping and choking in what was supposed to be oxygen-rich air, but was instead a cruel trick of the water gods.

Everything was wet.

Sitting there in the shelter not moving, I was soaked. My forearms glistened. I am not kidding you, they actually glistened! The hair on my legs was matted down, plastered to my leg in a disgusting pattern of swirls and sweat.

And my shirt. Let me tell you about my shirt. My favorite shirt is a Rip Curl t-shirt. It is my favorite because it is soft, lightweight cotton. It is cool. It breathes. It dries quickly, and I can wash the stink of a hot day out of it in a snap.

But on the chest of the shirt is a large, circular logo. And guess what. That logo does not breathe well. My whole body was moist (and I use that word knowing full well that it gives many people the heebie-jeebies . . . You should have the heebie-jeebies right now). But my chest under that logo was simply slick. Slick with sweat. And not in a sexy, "his manly chest glistened with the sweat of a warm summer night" type of deal. This was more, "his unwashed chest reeked and dripped with something that could have been wrung out of Sylvester Stalone's used sweat socks" type of thing.

That poor shirt took a beating.

I had washed it in the shower before coming out to the jungle camp, but I didn’t have time to wash it again before leaving Borneo and flying back to KL. Had I tried, it never would have dried in the humid air, and it would have just hung on a line, gently molding. So instead, I laid it out overnight to get as dry as it possible (which is to say it was just a little bit wetter the next morning than it was when I laid it out the night before), rolled it up, and shoved it in a dry bag and put it in the bottom of my pack.

And that is where it is right now. Along with the pants, socks, and underwear that also took a beating in the jungle.

I am currently on the plane in the cleanest t-shirt I have (which is not clean!), and my board shorts.

I am a little chilly, but to tell you the truth, I am taking pleasure in that right now.Because travel, I have learned the true meaning of "saturated."