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

by Tracy Johnston

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.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, Memoir, Adventure, Nature, Biography, Book Club

256 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1992

Reviews

[W · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is a bit crazy,a middle aged woman is going through menopause and she is pretty unhappy about it.

So,what does she do ? She decides to go on a potentially life threatening trip with a bunch of strangers,white water rafting down the wildest river in Borneo.

The trip can't actually have been too much fun to be on. Aside from the perils of white water rafting,there are leeches and insects,rain and hard surfaces to sleep on.That,plus the limitations of an ageing body.

It's an offbeat adventure,or rather a misadventure.Fairly interesting and fun to read about.

[Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance · Rating 5 out of 5]

...Gimme a second here (pant, pant)...
Let me...ugh...rip this leech off my leg...
Ouch!...Jeez...another beesting!...And...what?...
What the heck is that GROWING ON MY FEET???...

Well, I've definitely decided to cross the Boh
off my short list for our 25th wedding anniversary
trip.

Great story. Leaves me asking the question,
"Why would someone choose to raft down the
wildest river in Borneo?"

Side note: Of all the horrors Johnston described,
the most terrifying to me was the onset of menopause.

[Mitch · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had seen this book around at various times for years and at last I picked up a copy and dove in.

So- this: I am not the right audience for this book.

Yes, I like adventure and travel to exotic places, particularly the rain forest.

No, I do not like life-threatening adventures that somehow appeal to certain types of people. I don't like constantly wet clothes, foot rot, leeches, swarms of salt-hungry stinging bees, bouncing downstream off boulders, excessive humidity, mosquitoes, hard surfaces to sleep on, malaria, etc.

This trip seemed unnecessary and about 97% miserable. For some reason, the author seemed to cherish it afterwards, so I suppose any kind of intense experience will impress a person no matter how disgusting and miserable it is.

Basically, the book chronicled a terrible ten-day trip.

It was told from the perspective of a middle-aged woman traveling through menopause and questioning her fading beauty and abilities. Included was a boatload of her feelings.

As I said, I am not the proper audience for her book.

[Chana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book in a way; it is so interesting and out of the ordinary. What we have here is a group of adventurers, mostly unaware of the real circumstances of what they are getting into, who join a river rafting trip down the Boh River in Borneo. It is through the adventure company of Sobek and supposedly has been run or at least mapped before. It is billed as Class 3 white water (hahahahaha). Supposed to be a 3 day trip (a 3 hour tour, a 3 hour tour). Yes, it is a bit Gilligan Islandish, only with a lot more bugs and foot rot and impassable waterfalls. They are bedeviled by bees, sucked on by leeches, and covered by ants. They sleep on rocks in the rain, they get terrible foot rot, everything is mildewed. And of course they have near drowning experiences. It is also hot as h*ll because it is the rain forest.
A great thing about this book is that she includes excerpts from earlier travelers to Borneo. They are fascinating. And I haven't even mentioned the natives yet; these are the people who were headhunting until, like the 1940's.
I'm so very very very glad that I was not on this trip, but it was great reading about it.
Only thing I didn't like is the author's discussion about menopause and getting older. Ho Hum.

[Mads · Rating 5 out of 5]

I saw a copy of this book in the second-hand shelf and was instantly mesmerized by the cover photo. I don't know if its a composite but it shows a long, narrow boat overfilled with various characters whose clothes and expressions are so different from one another--and oh, the boat is in the middle of wicked whitewater between menacing boulders. I love the fact that their clothes don't seem to match the situation (one has a cowboy hat!) it gives the impression that they're amateurs utterly unprepared to tackle whitewater (much less the "Wildest River in Borneo" as the cover text cheerfully promises) and this party looks like a disaster just waiting to happen. The book opens with a quote from Thomas Hardy about the "sort of shuddering" that one feels at middle-age, the next page says "Shooting the Boh," then it opens to a map of Borneo with those mysterious, lovely names that reek of high adventure for those bold enough: Sarawak, Kalimantan, Samarinda, Banjarmasin. Wonderful, masterful book. Nothing escapes Tracy Johnston.

[Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I felt such a kinship with the author as the originally lower rated rapids turn out to be a stretch of unrecorded river, two of the other women on the trip turn out to be french models, and she starts to go through menopause in a tent in a tropical jungle. No, I've never endured such hardships as on this trip, but life's curveballs that sometimes hit the batter were totally familiar.

[Autumn Warren · Rating 4 out of 5]

A story of grand adventure happening alongside the dynamic thoughts and feelings that come along with womanhood. It brought me back to some of my own grand adventures and the growth that came from them. I am excited for my next one and for the books that I read during it.

[Kaion · Rating 1 out of 5]

The thing is, I don't think Tracy Johnston is a bad writer. I think she's a good writer buried under a ton of bad writing habits. And the source material for her travel memoir is fantastic: a nightmare rafting trip down a stretch of the Boh river never before traversed, organized poorly and with little preparation by a company who mistakenly advertised it as only a medium-difficulty three-day sojourn. (It turned to 11.)

Johnston's bad writing habits:
1. She uses zippy magazine-y cliches to describe everything, the end result being not only banal but also often puzzlingly unclear. "The men wore sunglasses and pressed white shirts, like mobsters"- has she met mobsters? Or is she referring to her movie-inspired mental image of mobsters? Are pressed white shirts and sunglasses that uncommon in her experience? Is she referring to their uniformity? Their well-fed look? Their aggressiveness?
2. She pays lip service to socio-political ideas (environmentalism, globalization of capitalism, etc.) she has no particular interest in actually backing up, examining, or in general, having any original thoughts about whatsoever. As a result, she often sounds like she's parroting stuff back read in a newspaper.
3. She has an unclear sense of chronology in telling a story. First, the year references that date the story are contradictory (this trip is either before 1982 or after 1986). Of greater annoyance, she often switches between in-moment narrative and post-narrative in telling her story. Johnston frequently refers to some information she learned later in the trip and then repeats it when she gets to that point in the story as if she'd forgotten it was already covered, and furthermore confuses the chronology of knowledge when it comes to learning about her fellow rafters.
4. She's obsessed with all her fellow rafters' bodies, to the point you wish she'd just proposition one or all of them already. "She was big-thighed and big-breasted, muscular and strong. Olatz was a kitten; Sylvie a racehorse." (Yes, again with the nonsensical metaphors.)
5. She restates the incredibly obvious frequently and with great aplomb. After obsessing the whole trip about the onset of her menopause, she plops this gem on the antepenultimate page: "As for me, in hindsight I see that my own journey did not end with the Boh: the river was in some ways a metaphor for my voyage into middle age."
6. She's incapable of describing nature without resorting quickly to quoting or paraphrasing other travel writers on their much more interesting and culturally-exploratory travels to Borneo.
7. She's incapable of describing philosophical thoughts about nature without resorting quickly to quoting or paraphrasing novelists or other writers: "In some ways, of course, I never did reach the darkness: not the Conradian darkness, the unknowable darkness, the dark knowledge that has always fascinated me." See, not only is that poorly deployed (she also didn't find a circus at the bottom of the rapids, or the Queen of Sheba), hackneyed ('cause all rainforests are alike, yo), trite (it's a fiction book, one that is notoriously inaccurate and racist vs. her real-life nonfiction experience), and repetitive (three "dark"s)... it's also completely illogical ("knowledge" vs. "unknowable").

... And did I mention the magazine-y melodramatics about becoming middle-aged?

There is an interesting story under all this terrible writing. A classic one, sure, about the white people who ignore the natives' stories of the river that hits a huge mountain, flows under the earth, and has a fearsome three-headed spirit. About adventure seeking and changing your lifestyle, maybe. Rating: 1 star

[Jeannie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amy Tan's review "I loved this book. Johnston is a dream of a writer --funny, intelligent, and hilariously observant." set the tone for me.
I knew when I read that I would love this book and I did.

I was consumed by the story. I lived it while reading it, I thought about it as I moved about my day and it even invaded my dreams at night. What a horrific trip this turned into, a trip the author was totally unprepared for. Her sense of humor kept the story light enough to be enjoyed and her odd mixing her story with her own fears of aging made it real and not a slick adventure story that you easily forget.

I highly recommend it, but pick a time you are free to read well into the night as you won't want to put it down.

[Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A planned 3-day raft expedition through the Boh River in the Borneo rain forest turns into a 9-day ordeal. When they reach their destination they look more dead than alive. Except for the French super model (one of 11 voyagers). She was just as clean, just as healthy, and just as beautiful as the day the trip began. "She wore a blue shirt unbuttoned down to her bra, which was white and lace-trimmed. Next to her tan skin it looked like some kind of hypercolor. Next to our mildewed, dirty T-shirts, it seemed as if the whiteness had somehow been beamed down from outer space."

[Garry Walton · Rating 4 out of 5]

written in summer 1995

This one would work well as a companion text to The Odyssey, since the two share several traits: an epic journey, a central female character, episodes of self-discovery. It helps that there are important differences as well: on Johnston’s journey there is a crew that reacts differently than she, this narrator is less self-assured than the epic-hero Odysseus, and there is a long-suffering, oft-remembered husband waiting at home for her. But most of all though her journey seems epic enough in scope and danger, it is “true” – not featuring a fictional everywoman but a real one.

Johnston’s account is of a falsely advertised, 12-person, 10-day run down a previously untraveled river through the virtually uninhabited (by humans) rain forest of Borneo. Along the way she fights off epic insects and diseases, experiences the onset of menopause and the total transformation of her body-image, reads Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and other literature of quests into “primitive” unknowns, discovers her perhaps misplaced faith in the superiority of modernity, and survives, all the while trying to remember or discover exactly why she is on this trip. Because Johnston is woefully unprepared for the journey – both her luggage and her typically vibrant health have been lost along the way – she is more dependent, more an observer than is typical for her. It is as if homer’ Odyssey is narrated not by the great Odysseus but by some Oarsman Third Class (Elpinor’s benchmate, perhaps), whose perspective on Circe and Polyphemus is quite different.

Johnston’s narrative unintentionally invites her readers to consider national stereotypes (of Australia and France as well as the US) and gender stereotypes, for her reports of her crewmates certainly fit these patterns. Other readers may be tempted as I was to try to match the book’s verbal descriptions of the travelers to the dazed survivors captured in the photograph on the cover. Surely others will want to search out old encyclopedias for more information on this part of the world.

This book lacks the climactic ending of Homer’s tale, but perhaps therein lies yet another tale. Its short chapters and endless string of hardships along the way keep the reader swept along down the rapids with Johnston until white knuckles and white water end.

[Patricia]

I first read this book, years ago, long before I was a participant on Goodreads. I kept it on my shelf for years even during a big culling of books about 15 years ago. I decided to read it again as part of my plan to re-read books in 2025 and also because I read a lovely pre-obituary for Tracy written by her husband, Jon Carrol. She currently has stage IV metastatic breast cancer.

Of course reading the book almost 30 years later, I had quite a different response. If I remember rightly, I was inspired during my first read to be braver, to try hard things, especially hard physical activities for this book describes fortitude, perseverance, and ingenuity in pushing through very dangerous situations.

This time I was taken more with the psychological journey Tracy describes. I didn't remember her discussion of being pre-menopausal, even though I was definitely there myself when I first read the book. I must have paid attention to that part, though her thoughts on the change were not the ones I recall having, i.e. about loosing one's attractiveness and status as a becoming female or as being someone who was old among young people. Tracy made a lot of comparisons between herself and a youthful model who was also on the trip. At the same time, she was able to report some of what she learned from this woman about self-care, and that was something I appreciated.

I also don't remember some of the more mysterious parts of the story, where Tracy took on the superstitions and/or customs of the indigenous people as omens or signs during the trip. I didn't remember the bees which tortured the travelers throughout the trip. And I definitely didn't recall all the ways Tracy described her fellow travelers and their responses and contributions to the trip.

I read the book more as a writer this time than as inspiration for my own life. I can't wait to give the book to my grandson, who is a rafting guide, and see what he thinks of it. Love to talk books with young adults.

[Kim Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are reasons why I should identify with this memoir and author- I am aging, losing any beauty I had and becoming less physically capable just like Johnston. Yet, I just couldn’t connect. Perhaps I need to revisit this book in 10 years....

My favorite passage: “the moments of greatest intensity in life- whether they come from facing danger or falling in love or being carried away with some kind of work- seem almost surreal when they are happening; they take place in slow motion and seem to crowd our ordinary reality. But then, when they’re over, they seem to have happened to someone else. Even on the Mahakam, when I thought back on the last ten days, I had only a dim sensual memory of what they’d felt like. Mostly I had a bunch of stories, a trace memory of dreamlike images, a feeling in my bones. What seemed like another lifetime was about to become just another ten days in the discourse of ordinary life.”

What I found truly most interesting about the book came from a tiny personal connection: I grew up in a small town across the water (New Melones reservoir from around the time I was born to present; formerly the Stanislaus River canyon) from Sobek Expeditions headquarters in Angels Camp. A quick internet search led me to OARS, a company I was familiar with growing up in the area. It seems these companies merged...
https://www.oars.com/about-oars/story/

[River James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read 3 river adventure books this week and feel my thoughts about them are best contextualized in relationship to eachother.
4 Stars.
The Lost River by Richard Bangs: he is the one who thunk it, did it and wrote about it making his book the best of the three capturing the out of the box thinking, insane logistics and spirit of adventure.
3 Stars.
Shooting the Boh by Tracy Johnston: a journalist on the river trip in exchange for promoting it really captures the feeling of a trip that doesn't go as planned. Solid, worthwhile.
2 Stars.
The Last River by Todd Balf: a sincere attempt by an author to get into the reasons why individuals lay it out there on adventures. The problem is, that is pretty much the whole book, as the adventure barely starts before it is over and is written by someone who wasn't there.

[Gina · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a weird book. I’m not sure if three stars is right, actually, but I’m giving them because of the author’s ability to communicate the feelings and sensations of being in the rainforest better than I’ve read elsewhere. However, her focus on being middle aged is absolutely insane. She’s fortysomething and clearly convinced that that means she is valueless and has one foot in the grave. She compares herself to literal garbage at one point??? Also she has early onset menopause but presents it as normal for someone as horrifyingly decrepit as a forty-year-old. It was all truly bizarre and very nearly ruined the book. I’m glad we’ve advanced in our perceptions of women since 1992, because this was maddening. But like I said, she nailed the mind-bending experience of traveling in truly untamed wilderness. Worth reading if that’s what you’re mostly after and can ignore her odd ageism.

[Phyllis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked this book ,but I will think long and hard about ever going on a white water rafting trip. And I never want to visit the rainforest. If the rapids and waterfalls don't get you, the insects will. This was a true story about a 30+ woman, an experienced rafter, who goes on a maiden voyage down the Boh river in Borneo. ( there is a map in the book) She chronicles the event along with the unique people who are on the trip.
From the first things go wrong - she loses her luggage in the Philippines - and has to borrow equipment and buy cheap substitutes. So much goes wrong because of the river. They were warned by the natives and did not listen. I will tell you that no one dies.
The writing was such that you experience the ride with them, thus why I never want to go.

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

For some reason I kept turning the pages... but the book felt fragmented and thrown together like a last minute Halloween costume... so close .. but not quite there.

I'm not a fan of writers going on adventures just so they have something to write about. At times I was angry and annoyed with the author for her novice status in the river, potentially risking the lives of others. Of course, we know she survived.... (Sometimes when I read books like this I wonder if my anger is not more at myself for not being brave enough to take chances like she did.)

This book was loaned to me by a good friend and overall, I'm glad she shared it and I'm glad I read it.

[MBG · Rating 3 out of 5]

Light read. Harrowing trip with life threatening challenges. But it was a ridiculous trip that carried such risks for death illness and disaster, that I never got over the group stupidity of trying it. I read this just a after River of Doubt about Teddy Roosevelt’s equally poorly planned trip thru a rainforest. His was the Amazon. Similarities in rainforest description. Equally ill planned. But the writing simply captured me better. Personal preference I think, the historic rather than the personal point of view.

[Carol Wakefield · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read it years ago. Remembered enjoying it. Read it again. Sure enough. A fine true adventure by a travel writer. An adventure where things go wrong. Often but people rally, get through inaccurate information about the route, missing equipment, bees, more bees, foot rot, rain, and leeches. The white water rafting tribulations are what the professionals are trained to get through. So all is well. Sort of. Mostly.

[Chelsey Trout · Rating 5 out of 5]

A woman's trip down the wildest river in Borneo. They we're not kidding. This trip was crazy intense and exciting. The stuff they endured and went through was crazy. This book was honest and funny. Definitely will reread this another day.

[Diana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helpful resource when considering purchasing a river-running expedition in a remote location.

[Ronnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I couldn't put this book down. It was exciting, intense and exhausting.

[Lou · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this fast paced adventure.

[Donna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this twice, about ten years apart. A favorite. Kalyn, I believe you and Jeanne would enjoy.

[Roberta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great read.

[David Knox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great account of a trip from Hell!

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book because it personified my own desires for adventure travel. I gave a copy to a friend for her birthday and she spurned it, saying that she doesn’t read non fiction. Dumb!

[Morgan A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was interesting, the trip sounded awful. I’m honestly surprised the author thought it would be good to begin with. It seems a bit harebrained. She struggled a lot with menopause throughout, which I hadn’t expected to be in the book.

I think overall it’s more of a story about getting through a tough and often ignored transition in a woman’s life than it is about a river trip.

[Wendi Buchanan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was lent to me. I had never heard of it. For sure- I would never take this trip. The foot rot would do me in.

[Rachel Jackson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Shooting the Boh, page 194:

Dave was going to write about the trip also, he said. He'd noticed that the only explorers anyone remembered were the ones who were writers. I agreed. Then I told him that when my article was published he would probably be disappointed.
'It will tell my story,' I said, 'and not yours. It will make you mad because I'll leave out your experience.'"

This quote is the single best example in this entire book of why I abhorred Tracy Johnston's story. Through these few sentences, you immediately learn that Johnston is 1) going to only write about herself, and 2) she is going to inflate her self-importance by calling herself an intrepid explorer. At face value, this all seems valid: she is a writer, and she did travel down the Boh in Borneo.

But the thing about Shooting the Boh is that it wasn't even an adventure book, written by an explorer, as Johnston seems to see herself here. It was a load of drivel about a menopausal woman too self-obsessed in her own aging and appearance struggling to go on an adventure that she and her team were woefully unprepared for in the first place — all the while attempting to be humorous and falling far short. It was too much to include in a single book. Part of it was an adventure tale, another was a sort of coming-of-age/growing-up story, and the last miniscule part was some history of Borneo, which, in my opinion, could have been the most interesting part, but Johnston barely developed it at all. Nothing in the book connected.

What is it about adventure writers and being stupidly, inadequately prepared? In the other adventuring books I've ever read by writers-cum-explorers (rather than the other way around), all of the narrators seem to be convinced that they are confident and able enough to embark on horribly grueling, dangerous journeys. They are all overly cocky and only look forward to being able to write a book upon the conclusion of their adventure, rather than focusing on the exploration itself. And sure, as a writer it's important to consider what the most important parts of a story will be, but when you have a swarm of deadly bees and a swelling river and foot rot all in your lap, plus you're traveling down a swirling river in a boat at the top of a waterfall with rocks at the bottom — well, you should probably just figure out how to survive that first, and develop your plot later.

Secondly, I felt like I should have been a menopausal woman myself to merely enjoy this book. It wasn't a story about the Boh at all; rather, it was a story about Johnston's sudden acceptance of old age and having her looks go. She constantly envied the other, younger people's bodies on the trip and tried (and failed) to incorporate the struggles of hot flashes into her story. She compared herself to Sylvie and Olatz way too much, as if she was self-conscious about being old and they being young. (Pretty sure that's just how time works.) In the end, she tries to clumsily sum up a moral of her story, and she says the river is a metaphor for her getting older. Which is fine, if she had substantiated that claim throughout the rest of the book. But she seemed to scramble at the last minute, like a high school English student who forgot to write a thesis on an essay. (And that's roughly the same level of similes and analogies she included, too. Gross.)

I barely got a sense from Johnston about her actual experience there, despite all this talk about writing it and living it, because she couldn't stay on a single topic long enough for me to get a good picture of it. What the river looked and felt like, how scared she was when she went under water, the fear of having foot rot and other legitimately dangerous health issues (rather than just being dirty)...none of that was described well.

The forests and rivers of Borneo are undoubtedly a fascinating subject to write about, especially with the fear and imminence of potential danger lurking around every bend, and having to be an expert boater to merely survive going down the river. But Tracy Johnston shouldn't have written about it. She should have left it to someone more capable.