Honey hunting

This is it.

This is what I travelled a third of the way around the world for.

The tents are set on the banks of the river and the road to the honeycliffs peters out here to a path which, in one place, disappears. The monsoons have washed this part away and the cliff is accessible only over some large pieces of bamboo that are somehow held together tightly against the cliff edge over the roar of river below.

Smoke billows from just out of sight round the corner.

Whoops and shouts announce the collection. Along this part of the path bees, drowsy from the smoke, litter the ground. I am getting closer. Then suddenly I am here. Apis laboriosa, the wild cliff bee. More than 50 combs of wild bees hang from the cliff face, each comb covered in a mass of brown-black bodies driven upwards by the smoke. Like rolling up a blind, the single large comb beneath each colony becomes visible as the bees rise en masse. The combs are creamy-beige and sweep down in a curved arch from the cliff above them. Some of the combs are as huge as the man harvesting them, the Honey Hunter.

The Honey Hunter hangs from a rope ladder secured at one end to a tree at the top of the cliff and secured at the other to something at the base of the cliff. I can't see what it is at the base as the large smoky fire has obscured my view. He hangs on, this god amongst beekeepers, some 90 rungs up the ladder. Dressed in a white beekeeping suit, his arms and legs are bare and covered in bees. Apis laboriosa is much bigger than our domestic honey bee in Europe and about the size of a hornet.

Two bamboo poles, each twenty feet long, hang from his hands, secured to his body so that they don't fall. One cuts the comb from the cliff, the other moves a basket into position under the comb. The basket is also on a rope to the top of the cliff here another man lowers it into position. I watch him manoeuvre the bamboos into position. He shouts at the team on the ground and the man at the top of the cliff. With a few stabs and cuts one comb is cut loose from the cliff. It falls into the basket, but some breaks off and crashes one hundred feet to the ground just feet away from a man standing there. The basket is lowered, the comb collected and taken away to get the honey out.

The Honey Hunter comes down from the ladder, rung by rung sliding his body down to the ground. He talks confidently to the gathered crowd, complaining about the team, about the honey, about the tourists.

'He is a moaner' says Major Ram, the tour organiser.

This is a man's world. In some honey hunting areas women are not allowed to the site but here I am. I lie back against a boulder on a dry part of the river bed and look up at the golden combs hanging there. This is what I travelled a third of the way around the world for.

Was it worth it?

It sure was.