As I lay sweating on a matrass, with unseen bugs dropping on me or crawling over me, and confused roosters crowing loudly at random hours of the night, while less confused dogs kept howling and barking at intruders only they could see, I asked myself why I had thought it was a good idea to pay top dollar for this particular experience? Here I was in a semi-traditional longhouse, on a river close to Batang Ai National Park; with me were two Australians who were clearly just as delusional as me, since they too would, by the end of it, be paying a lot of money for what can only be described as self-inflicted torture. I had met Sarah and Tom in Kuching, where we had hatched this strange plan which involved, what we all silently
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