Word: manser
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Manser's story is really the tale of the Penan, a people out of time, the last hunter-gatherers in Asia. Once masters of a seemingly endless rain forest that covers Borneo, almost all of the 9,000 Penan have given up the struggle against what must once have seemed a ludicrous impossibility: that loggers would sweep through all but a tiny fraction of Sarawak's forests, polluting rivers, driving animals away and bulldozing the trees and plants that for centuries have served as the Penan's medicine cabinet, toolbox and larder. There are barely 200 fully nomadic Penan left...
...Limbang and Adang rivers near Sarawak's eastern border with Indonesia. Along has remained in the same area for more than a year, an eon for a nomadic Penan, but stubbornly refuses to move into one of the new villages inhabited by his tribesmen. His hope is that Manser will appear: this is the rendezvous spot mentioned in one of the Swiss friend's last messages...
...Manser and a friend tried to enter Malaysia from Singapore as part of a plan to buzz the Commonwealth Games, held that year in Kuala Lumpur, with a motorized hang glider. He was recognized at the border and turned back. The two men considered trying to swim across the Johor Straits, says his companion Jacques Christinet, but abandoned the plan when they realized the journey would involve a 25-km swim and passage through a swamp. A subsequent attempt to get into Sarawak by rowing a dingy from an Indonesian island had to be abandoned when Manser's campaign office...
...Christinet was also central to one of Manser's most futile?and dangerous?"actions," the descent of the 2.7-km-long funicular cable in Zermatt in 1996. The two men reached speeds of 140 km/h while hanging onto homemade riders constructed out of steel wheels and ball bearings. There was no clear purpose other than lodging a vague protest against global warming and the melting of glaciers, says Roger Graf, who was administering the Bruno Manser Foundation at the time. And the only media present was a Luxembourg TV station, which showed footage of the attempt without any explanatory commentary...
...Zermatt action was an apt precursor to Manser's last stunt, a 1999 flight above the Sarawak capital of Kuching in a motorized hang glider. It was another desperate move by a man who was increasingly becoming irrelevant. His numerous letters to the Sarawak Chief Minister Taib Mahmud pleading reconciliation or offering to fund a mobile dental clinic for the Penan were ignored...