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

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Manufacturer: Vintage
List Price: $12.00
Our Price: $1.35
You Save: $ 10.65 ( 89% )
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Average Customer Ratings:

A thrilling, touching, and densely instructive book, Shooting the Boh is also a frank self-portrait of a woman facing her most corrosive fears--and triumphing over them--with fortitude and unflagging wit. "A captivating and truly offbeat rite of passage."--Eric Hansen.


DESCRIPTION:

Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 959.83
EAN: 9780679740100
ISBN: 0679740104
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 272
Publication Date: 1992-09-01
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 1992-09-01
Studio: Vintage


SIMILAR ITEMS:

• Running the Amazon
• Into the Heart of Borneo
• The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer: Close Encounters with Strangers
• Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo
• All Elevations Unknown: An Adventure in the Heart of Borneo


CUSTOMER REVIEWS:

Customer Rating:
Summary: A can't-put-it-down kind of book
Comment: Tracey Johnston signed up with an adventure travel company for an exploratory rafting trip in Borneo and it turned out to be far longer and more dangerous than predicted. What a thrilling, true story! This is just the kind of book you want to read on a long, tedious airline flight to make the time fly. Believe me, you won't want to get off till you find out how it ends.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great book!
Comment: It's been a few years since I read this book but I loved it. Middle-aged adventure with a great sense of humor.
Customer Rating:
Summary: More than she bargained for
Comment: This book tells the story of a journalist who nearly got killed adventuring in the backwoods of Borneo. At a party in San Francisco, Tracy Johnston met the president of Sobek, an outdoor adventure company. Sobek planned to offer a new white water route down the Boh River in Borneo. They were looking for crew members for the test-run, and were delighted to find Johnston, a proven writer who had previous white water experience. They offered her a free ride in exchange for publicity materials about the trip. So one fateful summer day in the early 1990s, Johnston landed in Jakarta to join the trip. Unfortunately, her luggage didn't land with her, but that was only the first of many challenges to come. During the course of the next few weeks, Johnston would find herself hurtling down an uncharted river, scrambling down muddy boulders, and swimming to save her skin, all while living intimately with folks that had been perfect strangers just days before. If the river trip in itself hadn't been enough, Johnston was also faced with coming to terms with changes in her own body, which had begun to develop the aches and pains of middle age. She found herself constantly comparing her performance, condition, and appearance to those of the others in the group, all younger than her.

I almost put this book down after the first few chapters, where Johnston comes across as a bit whiny or petty, and a not-so-skilled traveler, despite her experience. For instance, she explains how vital her air mattress was to her, yet she packed this item in her checked bag. Meanwhile, in her carry-on, she somehow had room for 2 sun dresses. She had already been to Indonesia the year before, but somehow during that trip, she had missed the fact that sun dresses are entirely inappropriate for the culture. We get rather shocked when French women take off their bathing suit tops on American beaches, but that pales to how Indonesians feel when tourists walk around showing bare shoulders and knee caps. For heaven sakes, when traveling, either follow local rules about covering parts of your body, or just stay home! Besides, Indonesia is one place to go where you don't need to pack any clothes at all. For women of average size, all you need to take in your carry-on (and checked bags, too, for that matter) is possibly a single change of shirt and some underwear. As soon as you arrive in the country, head to the nearest market, and you can purchase an entire wardrobe of attractive, comfortable clothing for less than what you might pay for a single outfit here. Meanwhile, in your carry-on, since you don't need to take other clothes, you'll have room for essentials like a camera, medications (especially aspirin and antiseptics), and maybe even an air mattress if you think you're going to need one. (Basically, the same advice goes for men, although larger men may have to look longer and go to tourist markets in order to find clothing in their size.) As Johnston meets up with the other female members of the crew, she is blown away by their beauty, and treats us to some catty remarks on their behavior. Finally, as the trip progresses, Johnston finds that in order to survive, she must become more introspective, and at this point, the story finally takes off. This is not a story about Borneo or Indonesia-instead it is a survival tale of hurtling down a river out of control.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Compelling but too self-absorbed
Comment: 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.











Customer Rating:
Summary: There are better Borneo adventure books to read...
Comment: 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.

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