The boat ride begins with a warning from the guide: you will get wet.
At AsiaCamp Resort, on the edge of Malaysia’s Taman Negara National Park, travelers bundle up in rubber sandals and quick-dry clothes before boarding narrow wooden boats that glide across the muddy Tembeling River. This trip is called “quick shot,” which is a tourist-friendly term for jumping through the small river at high speed.
The trip costs 119 Malaysian ringgit (about $30) and comes as part of a package, which includes round-trip transportation from Kuala Lumpur, a high-speed boat ride through shallow rapids, and a canopy walk suspended above the rainforest. Included in the itinerary is something more unusual than waterfalls and a canopy walk: a stop in the village of Batek, deep in one of the oldest rainforests in the world.
Taman Negara, a large protected area covering three Malaysian states, is estimated to be about 130 million years old, before the Himalayas. The park is home to Malaysian tigers, Asian elephants and sun bears, as well as a dense forest ecosystem of amazing ages. But it is also home to people who have lived in these forests for thousands of years. Among them are the Batek, who are part of the Orang Asli, a Malay word for “first people,” which includes 18 different indigenous groups in Peninsular Malaysia.
I had come to Taman Negara to meet them. A guide on a food tour in Kuala Lumpur talked about the Aboriginal people who live deep in the national park. I booked a trip soon after.
As a Black British woman of Nigerian descent, I had long been interested in certain Indigenous peoples throughout Southeast Asia and parts of Oceania. These are communities whose tightly curled hair, dark skin tone and facial features have drawn comparisons to sub-Saharan Africans for centuries. However, that comparison is misleading. Genetic research asserts that similar physical characteristics arose through adaptive evolution—similar adaptations in similar rainforest environments rather than through shared ancestry. I Batek language it belongs to the Aslian branch of the Austroasiatic family, a linguistic line that is completely separate from the major African language families. Still, the visual resemblance intrigued me, and I wondered what it might feel like to stand inside it.
When the boat slowed down and the engine cut out, the forest suddenly felt vast and quiet. Our driver was Batek, a young man from the area we were going to enter. He cut the engine and waited in silence as we pulled out onto the muddy shore, then followed our guide down a narrow path into the trees.
The confrontation lasted about 30 minutes. What stayed with me is not what happened, but what didn’t happen.
Before I left, I had thought that the meeting might be emotionally charged. I’m not sure what I was expecting—a flicker of curiosity, perhaps, a distant sighting. Instead, that moment felt familiar. The villagers looked at us politely, but not interested. Demonstrations followed: hunting with pipes, making fire with mice, hand-crafted objects being passed between hands. With no shared language and no interpreter, we communicated through gestures, nods, and translating part of the guide.
Any curiosity I had was not reflected back. I half expected that our shared appearance might register even a small part of my subtlety and that I might appear to be something different from another guest, that one of them might stay in my face a little longer than the others. That didn’t happen. The villagers saw us all as having the same gang.
The women and children were gathered away from the group, making their own thatched houses at the edge of the plain. I went to them. A woman stood with a girl beside her. I wanted, so badly, to ask him something, not about the way or the culture, but about what this daily stream of tourists felt like where he was standing. Whether it was fitting, or just plain boring. Have you ever gotten tired of being adopted by someone else? That he once looked at a visitor and saw something in him looking back.
I didn’t ask anything.
I gestured to him, asking for permission to photograph him, and he agreed, without much interest. He glared at me as I took the gun, accepting it or not. His indifference was not unkindness. It was simply accurate. I was a stranger who had crossed paths with him, and the fact that we might share certain characteristics—whatever they might or might not mean—was entirely my business, not his.
As we returned to the river, I realized that the encounter had quietly dispelled one of my thoughts. The physical resemblance made me think of some kind of instant kinship. Kinship, of course, doesn’t work like that. The great, special distance between any two people’s lives that do not connect through language, history, or reason for reaching each other cannot be solved by mere similarities.
The contrast became clearer months later when I visited the Aeta people near Angeles in the Philippines, another indigenous community often grouped within the broader Negrito class. Most of the people in the village I visited were of mixed origins, speaking Tagalog and some English. Conversations flowed easily. I even met a young boy of half-Nigerian, half-Aeta heritage. That meeting felt warm, very agreeable—but it didn’t satisfy my earlier curiosity so much that I rescheduled it. What made that encounter feel like a real connection was not an appearance. It was a language and a simple way to communicate.
Back in Taman Negara, the Batek man who guided the boat upriver greeted us on our journey back to the mainland, shaking the handle of the engine with familiar ease. He smiled when I caught his eye. They work like this—boat rides, selling handicrafts to tourists, tip shows—represent the community’s main income from tourism, although how much of the tourism money paid by the co-workers goes directly to them is unclear. Like most Native commercial encounters, the economics are bleak.
The exchange was, in many ways, anticlimactic. I wasn’t greeted with immediate hugs like long-lost family, and I wasn’t singled out as a significant other. However, something has changed. The lack of recognition I expected forced many uncomfortable questions: what had I really been looking for? And what did it say about me that I expected to find it here? I left without answers, but I left thinking the same, which turned out to be more than I intended.
