GEORGE TOWN, Malaysia -- In his book "Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy" (2000), American travel writer Eric Hansen gave a vivid account of the complex and often intersecting worlds of obsessive flower collectors, fearless hunters and greedy plant smugglers.
Hansen's book opens in the jungles of Borneo, one of the world's largest orchid breeding grounds, where he and members of the seminomadic Penan tribe are guiding two American orchid growers who want to photograph the rare Paphiopedilum sanderianum, a rare species endemic to the island. It is, writes Hansen, "the holy grail of orchids [which] only a dozen botanists on earth have seen ... in the wild."
