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Published: August 31st 2007
It was cheaper to fly from Malaysia than Singapore, so I needed to cross the border back to the Malaysian side in order to catch a flight to Borneo, my next destination and the third largest island in the world. I had been fascinated about Borneo ever since were read about it in the geography on the fourth class (aged 10). Why I had been so interested in the place I couldn’t remember, but it probably had something to do with the hard-to-reach rainforests, head-hunters, orang utangs and wild tigers.
The island has been divided between three countries: Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei. I decided to stay on the Malaysian side, mainly because I had heard that the Indonesian side is pretty similar to it and small Sultanate of Brunei is simply boring. In East Malaysia (i.e. the Malaysian side of Borneo) there are two states: Sarawak and Sabah. After bringing my home flight forward with a week I had precisely three weeks left to explore them. I started from Sarawak that lies in the North-Western corner of the island and its capital Kuching.
I was pretty excited when I saw the first glimpse of Borneo from the window of
the plane. It looked as I have imagined: deep green forests, costs covered with mangrove swamps and brown rivers snaking around. According to the travel guides Kuching was supposed to be an atmospheric little city (or actually more on the big side in the terms of the sizes of the cities in Borneo). The weather, however, wasn’t that great and neither was my hostel and subsequently my mood. I had a western food for dinner which usually helps for this kind of unhappiness. By the time I reached Borneo I had totally lost the hope with the Malaysian food: being it either Chinese or Malay, I just hated it. Greasy noodles, thick brown sauce, no flavour and very suspicious chicken or meat were usually the main ingredients. A bit embarrassing to admit but in the places I couldn’t find a decent Indian or night market, I was relying on McDonalds to provide me with a cheap meal. It’s only now when I realise why the chain is so popular: in some conditions the restaurants that can guarantee you a standard quality meal are priceless!
On the following morning I had two options really: either try to find and participate
in a day trip to see some crocodiles, orang utangs and a longhouse or use the day in exploring the city of Kuching. I was feeling lazy and figured out I could see at least orang utangs and longhouses elsewhere so I decided to stay in the city. I spent the whole morning trying to find another hotel and eventually moving my belongings. The rest of the day was spent in a pretty good museum where I learnt a lot about the life in Borneo and just wondering around.
On the following morning I continued to the next town, Sibu. It was a five hour speedboat trip - in Sarawak you mostly travel with a boat as there aren’t that many good roads. I was a bit shocked about the entertainment on the boat though: the first video was Spiderman 3 - a movie that had been premiered only a few days earlier. No worries about the copyright laws on these routes then. The second DVD was far worse, however, as it was some extremely violent American kick boxing show. I don’t believe that they show something like that in a public place with numerous kids in the audience.
My target was to finally visit a longhouse from Sibu. I found a trip organiser and despite the high price decided to go for an overnight trip, which would allow me to get to know the people and participate in their daily activities properly. Unfortunately, in the morning when my guide was driving me to the house we noticed that there had been some heavy flooding overnight and we couldn’t reach the house even with a jeep. I needed to downgrade the visit for a daytrip to a house more used to tourists and easier to reach.
The longhouses are traditional buildings where the original tribe people live. The houses are built raised off the ground on stilts. The houses consist of a very long row of private little flats. Every family has their own flat and if the daughter marries, she and her husband will build a new flat in the end of the house. The sons will move to the house of their bride. This way the house may become hundreds of metres or even a kilometre long. There is the public area, terrace, in front of the flats and that is where most of the
house work and spare time activities take place.
These days many young people have jobs in the town and have consequently moved to live there. However, they often go to see their families over the weekend and as the day of my visit was Sunday, there were lots of young men sitting at the terrace drinking rice wine. They of course wanted to offer some to my guide and me too and we sat with them for a while. Only a few of them could speak English so the discussion wasn’t exactly flowing…. Another compulsory part of the visit is meeting the chief of the house. There I was offered more rice wine, but also some juice and pastries made by his wife. It was quite a nice little visit but hardly as interesting as the original visit would have been. I had also prepared to visit a few neighbouring houses so I had far too many presents for the kids.
There are many different tribes among the people who were the original inhabitants of Borneo. The tribe that I visited in the longhouse was Iban, the descendants of the infamous headhunters. My guide told me some facts
of this terrifying practice, which was made illegal in 1920’s (if I remember correctly). Killing enemies is hardly new or different from one place to another, but why these people wanted to collect the skulls and thus show macabre pride over it? “There can be many reasons”, said my guide, “But one for sure was that there used to be an ongoing battle for the land space and the tribes wanted to look scary in the eyes of the competing tribes. The more skulls there were hanging on the porch, less likely was the attack from the other tribes.” I was a bit disappointed when there wasn’t any skulls hanging in the house I visited, neither were any men’s throats tattooed as a mark of the taken head, also an old custom of the headhunters.
Anyhow, this obligatory part of the trip to Borneo completed, I was ready to move forward. I wanted to travel as far to the remotest jungle as possible. This was supposed to take two days: on the first day I could travel the 640 km long River Rejang until the town of Kapit only, as I needed to get permission from there to go
any further. Belaga would be the furthest point I could reach.
On the boat I sat next to the middle-aged man. He started a friendly chat as soon as he had made sure that I wasn’t from Greenpeace. It appeared he was a timber merchant, a tool for the destruction of the Borneo’s rainforests. I asked him how he feels about working for the industry which has ruined the landscape of the entire huge island, a big part of the earth’s lungs and caused one of the reasons for the global warming. He said that the situation is much worse in Indonesia. Well, that’s a responsible attitude. “Don’t you feel bad that there is no rain forest left for your children and their children?” I continued grilling him. He did admit he sometimes feels sad when he sees a particularly big, beautiful tree cut down and that he stills remembers that now so brown River Rejang was blue and clear 20 years ago when he started in business. But they pay well, and he needed money. He had nearly ended up in personal bankruptcy a few years back, due to his gambling addiction, which nearly led to a divorce
Arriving in Kapit
Here I needed to get permission to travel further away in the jungle. By signing the permit I agreed e.g. to be fully clothed at all times. and losing his family. I got tired of confronting him, he wasn’t clearly going to change his mind about his profession, and we were getting dangerously close about the ethics of me flying around the world and just holidaying instead of helping people in need during these five months.
I was so disappointed and terrified about the state of the East Malaysian rainforests though. I’m sure that there is some left, somewhere, but in the places so hard to reach that it has been impossible to cut them down. On the way to Kapit all the forests had been cut down, you could only see sawmill after sawmill, and a quite a few badly kept longhouses. Later on I also saw how unwisely the cutting had been done: everything had been cut down in one go, without leaving any vegetation whatsoever. Instead, in some places you could see seas of palm oil trees which had been grown to replace the former rainforest. Those trees might be productive for now, but in 20 years time they suck all the nutrition from the soil and the land can’t be used anymore. Another sad fact: about 50% of all mammals and 25%
of all bird species in Malaysia will become extinct by the year 2020 if the rainforest destruction continues.
I arrived around midday in Kapit, which is very small place but, again according to the guidebook, great for people watching. I had checked in at the hotel, had coffee, bought food from the market place, watched people, got the permit, walked in the surroundings of the town and watched some more people and still it wasn’t later than two pm. I started to wonder how I could I ever get the day go by in this place of no events. Luckily the internet has reached even these remote corners of the world….
Next morning I took the boat to Belaga. There were surprisingly many, i.e. six other westerners on the boat. I knew them all already, as Kapit is such a small town you can’t help bumping into the same people all the time. Our little group consisted of two Australian men on a work trip (luckily not timber people), a young Dutch-English couple and an Australian couple in their fifties who have been sailing around the world for seven years. Every now and then they leave their yacht
Rapids on the way to Belaga
On this route along the Rejang River I finally saw some more untouched jungle (at Langkawi this time) and go backpacking.
This part of the river trip was definitely the best. The jungle was hanging over the water, and there were fewer sawmills at the banks. There were quite a few rapids in the river - with a smaller boat it would have been quite exciting to shoot them. In Belaga we all checked in at the same hotel. I had read it wasn’t exactly first class: one former guest had found a dead rat from her room. Luckily I didn’t encounter any nasty surprises.
Finally I had found somewhere so remote that even internet wasn’t working. I went for a walk instead. There was only one way off from the village, an old road used for transporting logs. The scenery was hilly and foresty, and I saw some local boys swimming and fishing in the river. I was enjoying the quietness but pondering at the same time if it was worth travelling all this time to see just one small village and tiny bit of surrounding nature.
Back in the village, my fellow-travellers were all sitting at the terrace of the hotel and doing what people tend to do in
such remote conditions - drinking beer. I joined them, and that’s how we spent the rest of the evening, apart having a dinner at some stage and swapping beer to rice wine. It was good to have some company, as I had been alone so much lately. There was a price to pay, though, as one of the Ozzies drunkenly decided he liked me and I should move to Australia…
In the morning, our little group went separate ways. The men on a work trip took a boat back to Sibu, the young couple stayed behind for a longhouse visit and I joined the Australian couple for a jeep ride across the jungle to go to Miri. Needless to say, all the trees on the way had been cut down, as the road we took was this old log road. It was a very bumpy, and sad, journey. From the top of the hills you could see miles and miles bare ground knowing it had once been such a thick rainforest.
In Miri I managed to organise a trip to Mulu National Park. It is a place you can only visit by plane and I got lucky and
got the tickets there and further to Kota Kinabalu for the right dates. I also succeeded in booking the accommodation from the very restricted guest house and a place on a challenging trek to the Pinnacles, which are a collection of 45 metre high limestone needles. Excited about this programme for the next four days I went to bed.
I woke up feeling unwell. It was clear I had caught a flu that wouldn’t disappear in a day. To my great disappointment I needed to cancel the Twin Otter flights, accommodation and the trek. I didn’t feel like staying in Miri, and as I had a feeling I wouldn’t be able to travel for a while if I didn’t do it right away, I decided to fly directly to Kota Kinabalu in Sabah. It’s a bigger city and if I needed to be sick, I could as well do it in the place where McDonalds and other services are more at hand…
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