In Overlanding through the Boardroom, Johan de Villiers turns bush lessons into business ones. In this edited excerpt from the book’s ninth chapter, he books a two-week survival expedition he finds advertised on the internet, spends it walking with blood-sucking leeches in the Laos-Cambodian rainforest, and comes home certain that the most quoted strategy book in business is also the least read — especially the part that nobody wants to hear.
The advertisement
Cape Town, 2014, in the lounge at home. Kim and I were looking for the next trip when we found an advert online. An adventure company in Cambodia was selling an authentic tribal experience in the Laos-Cambodian rainforest, one of the last lowland evergreen rainforests left on the Southeast Asian mainland. Two weeks trekking with local tribespeople, who would teach us to survive the way they do.
From a sofa, in a warm house, it sounded quite lekker. We booked without hesitation.
What we did not do was ask a single question about what teaching us to survive would involve. I plan things for a living. I have spent decades explaining to clients that the failures are always in the preparation, and I bought a fortnight in an indigenous rainforest the way you buy a flight to Durban.
We did the tourist half first, because you do not fly to Cambodia and skip Angkor Wat. We hired mountain bikes and rode to the temple complex outside Siem Reap, more than 72 temples and close to 1,000 buildings, with centuries-old trees growing straight through the ruins. It is one of the most extraordinary places I have stood in, and it is also, I would discover shortly, the version of Cambodia that has been arranged for people like me.
Then a taxi to the last missionary station in the Mekong Delta, the rice bowl of the region, where the transport got a great deal more rustic. Ours was best described as half a tree with a Yamaha motor strapped to the back. The engine caught, we turned upriver, and the last of anything recognisable went behind us.
Nobody on earth knew where we were. That was not a risk we had failed to price. That was the product.
The teeth
Our guide came with the dugout, a game ranger fluent in Khmer, the local tribal dialect and English, who would be translating for the fortnight. He mentioned in passing that only Kim and I had signed up.
That was information, and I did not treat it as any.
The dugout pulled in at a riverbank where a group of Kuy tribespeople were waiting for us. Our excitement at seeing other human beings lasted until several of them smiled, showing teeth filed to points like a crocodile’s. It felt like being stared down by a pack of snarling Rottweilers.
I nudged Kim. “Whose idea was this again?” I whispered.
Once it was established that we were not dinner, we left. The party was four: the guide, one tribesman with the pointed teeth, and the two of us. We had no way of contacting anybody. We had our backpacks, a wok, and one large, folded sheet of blue plastic each.
Nobody explained the plastic. Nobody explained the wok either, and I stood there working out that it was one wok, for four people, for 14 days, and that somebody in this group clearly knew exactly what they were doing. It was not going to be me. Everything I had brought had been chosen by a man in a shop in Cape Town who had never been here.
Several hours later we reached the first overnight stop, which turned out to be a clearing. No tents. No crockery. No cutlery. Nothing man-made in any direction.
“Where are we going to sleep?” Kim asked.
“You’ll be building your own shelter every night,” the guide said, pointing at the bamboo and handing us each a hammock.
We had walked several hours through a forest with no path in it, behind two men, one of whom could speak to us. I did the sum on that later than I should have. Every instruction, every warning, every negotiation and every question for the next fortnight would pass through one throat. If the guide turned an ankle, we would still have the tribesman, who knew everything worth knowing and could tell us none of it.
I had bought a product without reading what was in it, and the reading was going to happen at speed, in the dark, in the rain.
Everything comes out of the bamboo
The bamboo in that forest is thick enough and tall enough to be mistaken for trees. The tribesman took out a knife like a short machete and showed us what it is for.
Cups, from the sealed end at the base of a stem. Knives and forks, by splitting a length down its grain. Then a table: leave 60cm standing, splice the rest into eight strips, splay them out and down, and you have a thing like a tarantula holding up your dinner. Then the shelter. Bamboo for the frame, palm fronds woven into rope to lash it, hammock slung inside, and when it takes your weight without complaint you throw the blue sheet over the top of it.
At 6pm the monsoon arrived and rained for 12 straight hours. It did that every night we were there. The lightning came 10 and sometimes 20 flashes at once, and the whole forest went white. All I remember thinking was, please don’t hit me. What you do not want is your own shelter folding into flooded ground, given the company down there: leeches, vipers, and tarantulas the size of a side plate.
Dinner came out of the same plant. Young bamboo shoots for carbohydrate, which taste like fresh asparagus and need 90 minutes of boiling before they can be eaten at all. Small fish netted from the river, too small to be worth cleaning, fried in garlic and oil. Tarantula, boiled soft and then fried the same way, tasting of pork crackling crossed with overcooked octopus. With enough garlic, enough oil and a little chilli, almost anything on earth can be got down.
Water came out of vines. Choose the right one, cut it, and it gives up close to a cup of the previous night’s rain.
The forest is not hostile. She is indifferent, and she has been feeding, housing and equipping people out of that bamboo for longer than my industry has had a name. She had simply never been asked to do it for me.
Never upset a leech
Leeches make vipers and tarantulas look like paperwork. Stand still for two minutes and you hear the leaf litter begin to move. Look down and they are coming in their thousands, heat sensors locked onto your body heat, a sucker at each end, tumbling end over end towards you. However careful you are, a few always get up a trouser leg or into a sock.
If they could speak, they would be courteous about it. “Nothing personal,” they would say. “You are the warmest thing in this part of the forest, and we have all afternoon.”
They ran from thumb-sized to as long as a middle finger. Their saliva carries an anaesthetic, so you never feel the bite, and an anticoagulant, so once they start the blood keeps coming.
There is a golden rule in that forest: never upset a leech. Squeeze one or burn one off and it vomits back into you, and now you have a blood poisoning problem 40km from the nearest person who could do anything about it. You slide a knife blade between its head and your skin and lever it away. The bite then leaks for half an hour. If it was on your foot your sock fills up, and eventually you stop at a stream and wring it out.
Somebody had told us to slather our legs in Tabard. African insects skrik for the stuff. To a Cambodian leech it is a double espresso.
Day one it was shocking. Day two it was irritating. By day three we had accepted walking around streaked in our own blood.
The man we could not have done without
Near the end we asked how we were getting back.
“The only way out of the rainforest is to build your own raft and white-water raft 40km downstream,” the guide said.
So, we built one. The tribesman taught us to cut bamboo into thin strips, twist them into rope, and lash the thick lengths together with it. We were proud of that raft, right down to the raised platform we built to keep the backpacks clear of the rapids.
We stopped at his village for the last night, and the raft was taken apart for its materials before we had finished congratulating ourselves on it. Dinner was served on a slatted bamboo floor. Afterwards they offered us their own version of witblits, distilled for six weeks in wax-sealed pots and drunk straight from the pot through long bamboo straws. It tasted like brake fluid. We told them it was delicious.
On the dugout going out, I did the arithmetic. For two weeks, every single thing that kept the two of us alive had come from a man with filed teeth, no education I would have recognised, no income I would have recognised, and no equipment beyond a knife. My qualifications were worth nothing out there. My company was worth nothing. The contents of my backpack were worth slightly less than nothing, because I had to carry them.
That gave me a rule I have not broken since. In any room, work out whose skill the situation actually calls for, and go and stand next to that person. It is almost never the one with the best title, and it is very often somebody nobody has thought to ask.
What I got wrong about Sun Tzu
I had read The Art of War long before Cambodia and I thought I had understood it. What I had actually done was memorise the half that flatters you.
Know your enemy is the half everybody quotes. Know yourself is the other half, and it is much harder, because nobody has ever enjoyed the answer. In that forest the enemy was not the leeches, the lightning or the vipers. It was my own confidence, and my confidence had been assembled entirely on ground I chose, against problems I picked, using tools I already owned. Take all three away and there is not much of a man left. There is a South African in wet boots waiting for someone with pointed teeth to tell him which vine to cut.
Now the part that costs me something. I have spent 30 years selling myself, to clients and to myself, as the man who works out the way through on his own. It is the whole reason solo overlanding appeals to me. In that forest I did not make a single decision that mattered. I was told where to walk, what to cut, what to boil and what to leave alone, and every one of those instructions was correct. I was not a member of that expedition. I was luggage that could carry itself.
The other thing I got wrong is the way I had been using the book, and I have been as guilty of this as anyone in a boardroom. It is not read, it is worn. A price cut becomes a flanking manoeuvre. Losing a client becomes a strategic withdrawal. The vocabulary makes an ordinary quarter feel like a campaign, and it costs nothing, which is exactly why it is popular.
One more concession, and it is about the trip rather than the book. I went home. Two weeks, then a dugout, then a flight, then my own bed. To the tribesman it was not an expedition, it was the middle of the year. Treating a fortnight of discomfort as hard-won wisdom is tourism with a lesson bolted onto it, and I should be the one to say so.
Who should read him, and who shouldn’t bother
Read Sun Tzu if you are about to compete on ground somebody else chose. Everything in there about terrain is really about the fact that most fights are lost before anyone turns up, in the decision about where to have them.
Read him if you are the stronger party in a negotiation, for the golden bridge alone. Leave the other side a way out. A competitor with nothing left to lose will do things to your market that cost you far more than the win was ever worth.
And read him if you have a strategy and no tactics, or a diary full of tactics and no strategy. The first is a plan nobody is executing. The second is motion you have mistaken for progress.
Do not bother if what you want is language for a decision you have already taken. That is not strategy, that is decoration.
Do not bother if you intend to quote him in a meeting. In my experience anybody who opens with Sun Tzu across a boardroom table is about to justify something. And check the line before you use it, which is advice I am now uniquely qualified to give.
The advert is probably still out there somewhere, or one very like it, selling two weeks of authentic tribal life to somebody on a sofa in a warm house. It says nothing about the leeches. It should not, because the leeches are the entire product. Buy the fortnight that shows you what you do not know. It is a great deal cheaper than finding out at work.
Johan de Villiers is the leader of First Technology Western Cape, an award-winning IT provider in South Africa. His book, ‘Overlanding Through the Boardroom: Using Adventure Principles for Success in Business’, is published by Rockhopper Books.
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