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Outside Magazine's 2002 Family Travel Guide

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Roam School
A five-month round-the-world journey beats geography class any day
By Daniel Glick


	Grada-A global classrooms: temples in Bali (Digitial Stock)

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, after my daughter, Zoe, woke me up for the third time because she was afraid of the snakes, I wondered if maybe this trip wasn't such a good idea after all. Earlier, Zoe had been complaining about leeches, and before that about mosquitoes, and it dawned on me that unless you were raised in the rainforest, accustomed to strangler figs and spiders the size of gerbils, Borneo was a pretty forbidding environment. For a nine-year-old girl reared in suburban Colorado, it was downright menacing. Zoe's 13-year-old brother, Kolya, didn't help things when he authoritatively informed his sister that, as the smallest mammal among us, any predator obviously would attack her first.

I shot Kolya a fierce look that silenced his sibling cruelty, and reassured Zoe that it was unlikely snakes could board our 55-foot houseboat (called a klotok), moored on the banks of the Sekonyer River. Her fears weren't assuaged. Zoe knew the serpents were lurking. Heading upriver that afternoon, past suffocatingly green jungle crawling from the riverbanks and proboscis monkeys hanging in the trees like misshapen, mischievous fruit, a sudden movement in the water had caught our eyes. We were certain it was a crocodile. We were wrong. The animal's head, although almost as big as a crocodile's, belonged to a 25-foot-long python with a body circumference only slightly smaller than my thigh. Within minutes, we saw another serpentine motion in the river, and took in the sight of a bright-green reptile with a triangular head: a pit viper, one of the world's most poisonous snakes.

After Zoe had been coaxed back to sleep, I wondered about the kids' ability to cope with the stress of such an unfamiliar place. We had come to Borneo to see the orangutans of Tanjung Puting National Park two months into our five-month odyssey to visit some of the planet's great ecological wonders. So far the three of us had done a five-day "walkabout" on an Australian rainforest island, snorkeled off the Great Barrier Reef, surfed in Byron Bay, and climbed the highest mountain in Bali. But there were months more to go, and I questioned whether I had pushed the kids too far. My fears abated the next day, when the volunteers at the orangutan research station began bathing in the river, and Zoe and Kolya began to see the water not as a haven for monstrous beasts but as a jungle swimming pool. (Apparently the human activity ensured that this stretch of river was snake-free.) In no time the kids were doing cannonballs off the boat deck. I felt the glee and relief of having nailed the crux move of a difficult climb.

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