In the land of the head hunters....

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Headhunting was undertaken by a number of indigenous Borneo tribes, particularly those from the interior of the island..... but is thankfully now an illegal activity ;0) Why heads were taken is a point of conjecture....sometimes it was during war, sometimes as part of a ritual ceremony... the head was revered and perhaps believed to contain the soul-like matter of the deceased, maybe it was a trophy to show courage.... The Singapore Museum has an example of an engraved skull from headhunters... but no-one knows why it was engraved. Hair from the severed head was used to decorate the shield of the warrior... I guess it looked rather more intimidating in battle!

Bario is a small village in the Kelabit Highlands, home of the Kelabit people - a tribe of headhunters that lived isolated in the jungle until being 'discovered' at start of the 20th century. Today there an estimated 6000 Kelabit people, only a third of which still live in the highlands. The only feasible way of getting to Bario is on the daily (19 seater.. so no big tour groups) 55 min flight from Miri. There are no roads to settlements outside of the Kelabit territory and the nearest 'town' is a good 12 days walk through jungle. The locals regularly come to the airport just to have a nosey at who's leaving and who's arriving and the highlight of a saturday morning is hanging around the village green eating from the market stall and catching up with friends. There's no public transport, its either foot power or try and get a lift in one of the few 4WD or scooters along the 'road'... aka a muddy potholed track. There's no mains electricity supply... a generator came on between 6pm and 9pm so we could see what we were eating. There's no hot water. Food is generally what can be found that day... wild boar had been on the menu that week as someone had had a successful hunt. If the hunt is unsuccessfull then greens will do - the lack of roads means everything either has to be sourced from the local area or flown in which makes it expensive. We met a guy who was building decking at the back of his place... the first task was to put an order in for some wood... you work out how much you want and someone heads off into the forest to chop down an appropriately sized tree. Newspapers, albeit several days out of date, are available. You might be having coffee with the pilot at the coffee shop at the airport whilst you wait for the flight to leave... and it won't leave till the pilot has had his coffee.... there's no tight air traffic control schedules to adhere to here. There are only 4 phones in the village, mostly public payphones. There is however an Internet cafe!!!!

There's a school for primary aged children that has some 300 attendees, mostly boarders. It's to far for many of the children to come from outlying villages to school each day so they mostly board during the week and then go home at the weekend. In the case of the Penan children, nomadic people that hunt with the traditional deadly blowpipe, the parents follow the children, setting up a temporary camp near the village during term time and moving elsewhere during holidays. One of the biggest problems faced by the Kelabit people today is migration of the younger generation. The children are only educated to primary level in the village, after which they have to go to Miri to continue their education. For those coming from Bario itself it's possible, if the families can afford it of course, for the children to return at weekends. For those with families that live a 2, 3 or more days trek from Bario such trips home aren't feasible. More young people are taking jobs and living away from the highlands meaning that particularly when it comes to rice harvesting and tending the fields there is a labour shortage which is filled by Indonesians from across the boarder.
The younger Kelabits also no-longer tend to have the piercings and tattoo's of their ancestors. We did see some older female Kelabits who had earlobes that were soo elongated with heavy piercings that the piercing hole was huge and the bottom of the ear lobe sat nicely on their shoulders.

Bario is famous for its rice, at least the Japanese rave about it. And it was good - I've consumed far too much rice over the last month (not quite breakfast, lunch and dinner yet but almost...) and that was by far the best! It's exported out by plane... in fact on the way back to Miri there were almost as many rice bags occupying seats as there were people!

We didn't have enough time to do a multi day trek, although if I ever went back this would be a great place to do it. Being in the highlands its a little bit cooler and you could easily enjoy doing a 3 or 4 day hike between villages... with a guide of course! As we found out the hard way what goes for a 'track' around here is severely open to interpretation!!! We managed to pass a good few days just doing the local walks around the village on tracks that apparently don't require a guide... according to the locals at least! On our first day we got half way along the trail to the view point before the path seemingly disappeared. We spent the morning of the second day loitering around the village green watching the kids do battle on the sea-saw and slurping on luminous orange ice popsicles. After lunch we set off on a 3 hour walk - an hour to the village of Pa Ukat, another hour across to the village of Pa Umor and then an hour back to Bario. Well, we followed the road to Pa Ukat easily enough, feeling quite chuffed that we managed to avoid the downpour threatened by the black clouds overhead and approaching sound of thunder. We'd met an Aussie guy who'd done the walk and recommended approaching it in this direction as the path from Pa Ukat towards Pa Umor was signposted, but coming in the other direction it was easy to miss..... should this have been a warning sign??!! We followed the path and were going quite well, until it started to branch, again, and again, and again.. at each fork we took what looked like the 'main' path but sometimes flipping a coin would have done just as well for all the difference there was. There'd been a fair bit of rain lately so what started out as a nice wee path increasingly tended towards a mud bog... with nice thick jungle either side so there was no chance of skirting round it. One thing that kept us going forward was the fact that whenever it got really boggy there were branches that someone had put down to balance across (it was about this time that we discovered we had no balance!!) whilst trying not to grab onto the evil plants for assistance (I've never seen so many plants with nasty spiky or hooky bits just waiting to draw some blood). Each time we'd successfully walked another plank it was a case of 'well we really can't go back now cause I'm not doing that again'! With hindsight it probably would have been faster to have sunk through the mud.... the worst case scenario being a lost boot and some lost blood to our friend the leeches... but at the time fighting off the skin ripping plants was enough to contend with. So we'd been going for over an hour, it was 4pm, we had no food between us, no torch, it was at least 2 hours back to Bario the way we'd come, there was no sign of the road to Pa Umor and we were beginning to wonder at which one of the many forks we'd taken the wrong turn... oh and what it would be like spending the night lost in the forest. We were having maybe out 3rd 'should we turn back' conversation when we decided that we'd give ourselves 10 more minutes before turning round and starting back the way we'd come... as luck would have it less than 5 mins later we hit a 'road'!! We never made it to Pa Umor... it was in the opposite direction from Bario and by that point the will to see it had been overtaken by the need to collapse back at the hostel. At that point the rain finally started and accompanied us all the way back. I did manage to spy some pitcher plants on the way back.... but I'm not sure Sam shared my enthusiasm in the pouring rain! We recuperated with a rather large Bacardi and coke in the 'bar' next to the hostel... they had their opening night just for us...! Steven, one of the local Kelabits, serenaded us on the Sape and I did a rather bad job of trying to copy him ;0)

Next up, Bako, Kuching, Singapore, HK and a dodgy visa...

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