Customer Reviews

Shooting the Boh: A Woman's Voyage Down the Wildest River in Borneo

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I had intended to read a chapter or two of this book and ended up reading it in one sitting. It really was an interesting trip, and the descriptions of life in the rain forest are just amazing. The author slips in a fair amount of history of the earlier explorers and travel writers in the area but mostly manages to interleave things enough to keep the pace up.

I almost didn't buy the book after reading some of the earlier reviews so I think I'd better address some of their points. There are maybe two pages about the hot flashes (out of 256) and a few mentions -- basically along the line of mentioning her spider bites, bee bites, foot rot, hot flashes, bad back, etc. It's really no big deal, and this is coming from a 30 year old "basic guy".

I do think a responsible tour company would have stopped her from going on the trip after the airline lost her luggage instead of assuming she could borrow everything, but then again I think a responsible tour company would have brought a radio (duh) and had some plans as to what would have happened if, say, somebody had broken a leg. This trip could have turned into a real disaster. And while the author was often wasting resources, so was the whole group. They really didn't realize what a mess they were in until they were in deep over their heads.

The whole interaction between the tour company (operating without a clue) the guides (competent but following the company line because they need the money) and the tourists (didn't ask the right questions before leaving or during the trip) is pretty fascinating. It's a real argument for independent travel. . . but not to the rain forest!

A band of adventure lovers tries to be the first to raft down the Boh River in Borneo. You'd think it would be a ripping good adventure story: they're out in the middle of nowhere with no rescue radios to call for help, on an uncharted river without good maps, riding in rafts that flip over when they hit the rocks wrong. They barely miss going over a waterfall, the three-day trip is on day nine, they're running out of food, and foot rot is making it really tough to walk.

But incredibly, the author downplays all these dangers and instead gives us a book-length musing on her fading youth and beauty.

She's endlessly fascinated with co-tourist Sylvie, a twenty-something fashion model whose reason for being on the trip is never adequately explained. She carefully documents Sylvie's laughing comments in French, the way she sleeps, her videotaped snapshots of the beautiful people on the trip, and her every mini-bikini and clean, dry shirt. With Sylvie around, says the author, "I could see that men were ignoring me and I didn't like it."

She gives us every nuance of Sylvie's jungle romance with Mike the hunky boatman, from his initial attentions to their every disappearance later on. The pair could have been used to good advantage, giving the author a chance to reflect on her own marriage to a man who doesn't accompany her on adventures. Kelly Winters is frank about her personal life in WALKING HOME, because her personal life has everything to do with why she's on the trip.

But not Johnston. Not even the onset of hot flashes crack her. Proof that her childbearing days are over (even if she does survive the trip) provoke no thoughts on the choices she's made. We are given no information as to whether she has kids or not, or whether her career has worked out the way she'd expected. Menopause hits and she never once thinks about what might have been. She never once wonders if she's made the right choices.

Indeed, her major annoyance is not her hot flashes (or the bees, leeches, or poisonous snakes) but the fact that Sylvie is consistently failing to loan her an air mattress. Of all the nerve, can you believe it? An air mattress, the one thing she cannot live without.

And why doesn't Johnston have an air mattress? Well, her luggage never made it to Jakarta. She went out shopping for replacement supplies, but was apparently too jetlagged to remember anything that she'd spent months acquiring back at home. She only manages to buy tennis shoes ("too large"), a flashlight ("too powerful"), a towel ("the size of a doily"), a pair of shorts, and unsatisfactory flowered bedsheets.

But sirrah! The intrepid adventurer doesn't turn back, she goes anyway...and spends the entire trip begging foot powder and flashlight batteries from everyone there, even the river guides who need them. She makes no attempt to adequately explain her problem to anyone, and when they react badly, she wants us to pity her.

Oh, and she'd injured her back a month before the trip and can't do any heavy lifting.

She was no more revealing about anyone else on the trip, either. Not once is anyone shown to be, for example, *afraid*. No one is described in any revealing detail. Her big revelation has nothing to do with death or life, but rather that Sylvie's constant body checking for blemishes, and her huge wardrobe packed in double plastic bags is a good set of living skills for the rain forest.

Meanwhile, all the real dangers are waved away; they're the guides' problem. It's all too clear that this tourist has paid her money and will sit in the raft and be one with the rain forest and write in her journal until it's time to beg for stuff.

An unsatisfactory adventure all around.

I have to give Johnston credit for being able to record and recount this arduous trip with such clarity. When one is exhausted, hounded by sweat-sucking bees, fearing that she may not survive, it takes a lot of persistence to keep a thorough journal. She's done this and written competently about the adventure, but this book ultimately is a let-down. Here's why:

Johnston is too self-absorbed and often expects others to take care of her needs. Her luggage is lost and even after another member of the trip lends her a sleeping bag, she's miffed that no one would loan her an air mattress. She feels that because she has a back problem every one should accommodate her needs. It's classic lack of self-responsibility - you often see this on river trips and other risky expeditions. Just as Jon Krakauer discovers on his "assault" on Everest in "Into Thin Air," people on guided trips expect all their needs to be met. Rather than thinking what she could do, despite her physical limits, to help the group, she castigates the others for not helping her enough.

As a raft guide, journalist, and author ("A Sense of Place"), I'm aware of the challenges Johnston faced, but I wish she'd painted a better picture of the other people on the trip. We hear about the guides' daring rescues and Sylvie's preening, but we don't get more than a two-dimensional view of the other guests on the trip.

And I notice that though Johnston often talks about the jungle spirits, she doesn't revere the life of the jungle. She goes out of her way to toss a centipede in the river, smear a leach to death even though it wasn't on her, and chortles over drowned bees. Of course I can understand this reaction to pests but it shows a lack of reverence for the place.

A couple of quibbles: she often uses "oar" as a verb, as in the guide was "oaring" the boat. You don't oar a boat - you row it. And the cover isn't a real image - it's two pictures, one of a longboat superimposed on the rapids. I don't blame Johnston for the cover - doubtless she had little or nothing to do with it - but it seems somehow symbolic of the book's lack of authenticity.

Despite all these faults, once I started reading I wanted to keep going to the end.

I just finished reading the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society. prior to reading Shooting the Boh so my review may be colored by the drastic difference in these two books. I found this author to be very whiny. Nearly every chapter is filled with some new angst that she experiences, from back pain to losing her luggage, on and on and on. The descriptions in the book were less than emotional, I never felt connected to the characters and frankly I wasn't interested.

Actually, I was beginning to wonder if this story is even true. Some of it was rather unbelievable and I don't mean the parts about Borneo or the various bugs and other creatures. Here is a woman who has no soap, no shampoo, a teeny weeny washcloth sized towel and she is wearing contact lenses??? No mention of lens solution, no mention of how she wears them when she is upside down underwater... does that make sense? She can't live without her air mattress because of her terrible hips and back but she ends up scaling rock walls and sleeping on rocks. I'm sorry but it was all a bit preposterous to me.

Overall, I wouldn't waste my time, only read it because it was chosen for our book club. There are too many other adventurous books out there, I would highly recommend reading one of those.

Unlike Redmond O'Hanlon's book on the same subject, which is hysterically funny, Shooting the Boh is midly funny and one that I think will appeal more to female readers (my husband found this to be quite dull) due to the self-confessed menopausal musings of the author on traveling down river with a boat full of men and a younger, svelte, pretty (French) woman whom Johnston claims seemed to be immune to sweating or even appearing the slightest bit wrinkled by their circumstances!

Unlike O'Hanlon's interactions with the locals or his constantt making fun of himself (and his effete poet traveling companion), at times Johnston seemed to turn her narrative too much to her own neuroses (and internal observations of herself & the other travelers) and thereby lose the experience of going down a river in Borneo for the reader... which is why I read the book in the first place.

Eric Hansen's STRANGER IN THE FOREST or O'Hanlon's book on Borneo are far superior.

Although it's been a few years since I read this book, I remember it well. I'm rather surprised by how harshly some reviewers have reacted to the author. I've read quite a few "pure" adventure accounts, and quite a few that are adventure plus deeply thoughtful meditations on life and self. It seems to me that the author's book isn't quite either---and on purpose. While some have found the author annoyingly self-absorbed, I think that's part of the book's point: she's making observations on growing older, on being middle-aged and realizing what she's lost---and perhaps gained---in that process. I'm probably about the same age she is, so maybe it's easier for me to relate to what she's feeling about these things.

Her tale apparently first appeared in "Cosmopolitan", not "Outside" or "Sports Illustrated", and that makes her focus on herself and other people like Sylvie and Mike quite understandable. Her description of the monstrously humid rain forest is enough to make me glad I'm reading about it rather than experiencing it first-hand. If you're looking for a straightforward, white-knuckled, "I can bravely cope with anything" book---or one with profound insights into someone's innermost life---"Shooting the Boh" might disappoint. As a personal account of one woman and her trip to Borneo, I enjoyed it.

I've bought this book as a gift for at least five other people and will probably buy more in the future.
Ms. Johnston uses the white-water rafting trip from hell as a metaphor for her voyage into menopause, lost youth, and self-discovery.
Don't miss it!

Her account of a wild trip down a river in Borneo was entertaining, and a light, pleasant read, but I found much to be annoyed by. The whole trip seemed like a disaster waiting to happen: inexperienced "clients" going down an unfamiliar, unknown river, with insufficient food and supplies. It's just pure luck that they didn't have any serious problems, injuries, or fatalities. I get tired of reading about modern people trying to "get back to nature" and find "adventure" when what they're really doing is risking their own and other's safety.

I was also really annoyed by the author's fixation on good looks, her own sense of being "over the hill" at age 40, and her dependence on the others in the outfit. I am only giving this book a 3 because it's fairly well-written, and it's a light entertaining read.

I really enjoyed this book! I think it was well written and the story was very compelling. I feel as if I got just about as close as I care to get to the real thing. I know that the bees and bugs and mildew would have made me go mad. Having been on organized adventure trips, I think that she dealt very well with the various personalities of her travel companions. I think that they all did remarkably well under the circumstances. I don't think that it was their fault that they were so unprepared. As this had not been attempted before, they had no way of knowing the troubles they would encounter. This is a great read for any adventure lover or armchair traveler!

Our book club selected and read this book. It received rave reviews from everyone. Most of us agreed that the bees would have been the end of us! (: It would be an especially good read during the summer.