Tour 2003 - Bloody Borneo & Bong, James Bong

Dear family and friends,

There were five of the little buggers on my leg when I looked down.  About an inch long, brown, skinny as a matchstick, and flipping themselves up my leg to find the juiciest spot to hook themselves on and fatten themselves up on my blood, filling themselves to more than ten times their original size.  Leeches.  Ugh.  In their search for fresh blood, these leeches can squeeze through a shoelace eyelet or the fabric of your sock.  All you have to do is brush a small branch and they can drop on you and they are quickly heading up your leg or down your neck.  I thought to myself "Merv, you are wearing shorts and sandals, you have only walked 20 meters into the jungle and you already have five leeches on your legs.  Don't you think you should at least consider the possibility that you may not be properly outfitted for this?" With that thought I pretty much stamped as paid my interest in jungle trekking, and scurried back to the boat which I had just left.  I was on the Menangul River, a tributary of the Kinabatangan River, at 560 km long, the largest in Sabah, the northern state of Malaysia Borneo.

Malaysia consists of peninsular Malaya and two Borneo states, Sabah and Sarawak.  (The south-eastern half of Borneo is the Indonesian State of Kalimantan.)  Earliest human remains in Malaysia, found in Sabah, can be dated back 40,000 years.  The earliest people are thought to have migrated here from China.  In more recent history, 14th Century AD Chinese traders established a presence in the area, and this was followed, in turn, by conqueror/traders from Portugal (1511), Holland (1641), and lastly, England (1795).

The recent history of Sarawak (and to a lesser extent, Sabah) is steeped in melodrama.  James Brooke, a British adventurer arrived in Borneo in 1838, just in time to assist the Sultan of Brunei in putting down a rebellion by local inland tribes.  For his efforts he was awarded control over a large piece of what is now Sarawak and thus established 100 years of rule by what has been called the "White Rajah".  Over the next few decades, Brooke, and his nephew Charles who became the Rajah on James death, extended their control over all of what is now the state of Sarawak.  It was not until 1948 that control passed to the British Government.  In 1957 Sabah, which had been controlled by the British North Borneo Company, and Sarawak gained their independence.  In 1963 they joined with Malaya and Singapore to form the Malaysian Federation.  (Singapore left the federation two years later.)  Today Sabah and Sarawak still exercise considerable independence, and one must clear customs and immigration to pass from one state to the other, or to Peninsular Malaysia.  In fact, even Malaysians from the peninsula require a visa to visit these two states.  And they can only stay 90 days, just like you and me.

I left Vancouver on January 11th for S.E. Asia, a last minute decision as, until ten days before I left, I was planning on going to South America.  Indecisive as always, I couldn't quite make up my mind on what to do and where to go in South America, so here I am.

On January 13th I arrived in Kota Kinabalu, in the state of Sabah, (called the Land Beneath the Wind, apparently because it is under the prevailing monsoons and therefore misses the worst of them).  I had forgotten how noisy Asia can be, but even though KK is a relatively small city (200,000 to 300,000), blaring music, shouting people, and traffic noise all brought it immediately back to me.  KK is a bit of a charmless city, sometimes called Api Api, meaning 'fire fire' due to the many times it was burnt down by pirates who used to frequent the area.  It was also completely destroyed in WW II so little of historical interest exists.

The day after I arrived, possibly suffering from jet-lag, I decided to catch a plane to Sandakan on the northern tip of Borneo, a place I had never heard of before.  There I connected with a guide to take me on a three day, two night tour of the Kinabatangan River.  The lower part of the Kinabatangan River floods regularly, producing several distinct habitats, and providing homes for several endangered species including Orang Utan, Asian Elephant, Sumatra Rhino and the increasingly rare Proboscis Monkey.  And thus it was that I found myself in the jungle with leeches stuck on my leg lining up for a buffet.

I was very lucky in the selection of my guide, Robert Chong.  Robert is a six foot tall Chinese Malaysian, born in the area but he spent 8 years in Calgary in the 1980's.  He was great.  His English was excellent.  And apart from his extensive knowledge of local wildlife, it was funny/weird to have him break into "Oh Canada", or start talking about Trudeau, Ralph Klein, or the Grey Cup.  An added bonus was having a Brit/Israeli birder, Mark Gilson, along with us.  He seemed about 40 and spends much of his time travelling the world to out of the way places to bird watch.  He has recorded over 2,000 species, but his father recorded over 7,000 putting him in the Guinness 'Book of Records for a time.  (There are only 10,000 species in total in the world.)

On my first day Robert took me to the Sepilok Orang Utan Rehabilitation Centre, the world's largest orang utan sanctuary, to watch the morning feeding.  Sepilok has been set up to deal with orphaned and injured animals but most of its work is with capturing and relocating orang utans at risk, i.e., often those found in the oil palm plantations.  (Plantation owners are now required by law to report any orang utans on their plantations.)  The centre does not try to make things too comfortable for the animals.  They do not want them to prefer living at or near the centre over living in the wild which they can access simply by heading out into the jungle.  Consequently, the animals are only fed bananas, a diet which apparently does not satisfy orang utans.

Orang utans, which means Man of the Forest in the local language, are very shy in nature and seldom spend time on the ground.  It is increasingly unusual to spot one in the wild, even in Borneo.  They are man's closest relatives after the chimpanzee.  We share 96.4% of our genes with the orang utan.  (One major difference is that mankind has about twice the percentage of body weight in brains as compared to an orang utan.)  That sounds very impressive, I know, but I believe I read we share about 80% of our genes with a turnip.  (A turnip has the same percentage of its weight in brains as does a cat.)  The morning I was at Sepilok we had a good viewing of six orang utans along with a large number of pig-tail macaques, a common local monkey which sticks around for the scraps.  The viewing platform is very close to the feeding platform so animals can be observed up close.  In fact, on the catwalk leading to the platform a juvenile orang utan climbed up on the rail within five or six feet of me.  And the look in their eyes as they gaze at you can be quite disconcerting; they seem to know exactly what is going on.

After leaving the Sepilok Centre, Mark the birder, Julia, Robert's cousin and fellow guide, and I climbed into Robert's Isuzu 4X4 and the four of us headed towards the small town of Sukau and the Proboscis Lodge, a two hour drive and short boat trip away.  Much of the jungle has been cut down in Sabah (over 2,000,000 acres are in oil palm plantations alone) and we drove for 110 km (the last 40 km being rough gravel) almost never seeing any tree other than oil palm trees.  But fortunately, the area around our base at the Proboscis Lodge (a group of about ten chalets and reception/dining hall, set right on the banks of the Kinabatangan in heavy Borneo jungle) is a protected area and is considered one of the best places in all Borneo to see wildlife.  Mark Gilston and I were the only guests at the Lodge.  I don't think the lodge is on the main tourist trail so I suspect it is seldom full.  

At 6:30AM and 3:30PM each day, the four of us would get into a small launch and head out along the Kinabatangan, or more usually, the Menangul, for a three hour wildlife search.  The jungle is dank, damp, steamy, rank, and warm, with the sun streaking through the jungle canopy onto the river that seems to barely move.  Fish are jumping.  The stillness is only broken by the constant twittering, chirping, hooting, clucking, whistling, warbling, and cheeping of all the birds and by the putt putt of our Yamaha outboard (but we often just drift with the motor off).  Strangely, for all the noise the birds made, it seemed so quiet.  It was wonderful.  

In the three short days I spent there, I recorded forty five separate bird species including eagles, kingfishers, owls, kites, pigeons, darters, bulbuls, babblers, flycatchers, herons, hornbills, swifts and more, several of which are endemic to Borneo.  I only recorded those birds that I had a definite look at close up or through binoculars.  Robert and Mark logged many, many more birds but I had considerable difficulty spotting the smaller birds.  In four separate sightings we did spot five Storm Storks.  I am told this fact alone will make any birder friend I have fall over in envy as people come from all over the world in hopes of spotting this very rare bird.

We also had a sighting of an orang utan in the wild, solitary, sitting up in a tree quietly eating fruit.  We also saw countless pig-tail and long tail macaques and nearly as many proboscis monkeys.  There are only an estimated 4,000 of these big nose guys left in the world, 1,000 in Sabah.  They are called 'Dutch Monkeys' by the locals.  I am not sure why, but I'm reasonably certain it is not a compliment.  These monkeys are in harem groupings, the dominant male unmistakable by his huge nose, great long tail, and apparently requisite and obvious erection.

We also had a most amazing sight.  We were quietly drifting down the Menangul when a harem of proboscis monkeys started making considerable noise while leaping from branch to branch, tree to tree.  We then spotted a group of silver-leaf monkeys, similarly rare, which seemed to be a threat to the proboscis monkeys.  Suddenly, one of the proboscis monkeys that had climbed out to the very end of a branch hanging over the river leapt into the river, made a few swim strokes and bounced out the other side and up a tree.  Virtually by the time the first one was out on the other side, the rest of the harem, including a female with a tiny baby clinging to her chest, had queued up on the same branch and, one by one, leapt into the river and swam across.  Last to go was the dominant male.  He almost managed to leap fully across the river, but with one swimming stroke, he too was out and up a tree.  It was all very dramatic and it happened right in front of us, not more than 25 feet away.  I was so transfixed I totally forgot to take a picture, and worse, stepped on my glasses which I had taken off to better view through the binoculars (they're okay, just scratched).  Even Robert was impressed.  He had never seen anything quite like that before.

On another occasion we pulled into a little back eddy, really just a 10 meter indentation in the shore.  Robert and Mark got out to tramp into the jungle a bit in hopes of spotting a particular bird we had seen fly into the trees.  When Mark was trying to get back into the boat he slipped and his small recorder which he uses to record bird calls fell into the water.  He was going to abandon it without even trying to find it.  I jumped up and said, "Hell, I'll fish it out".  Both Julia and the boatman called me back and the boatman then went, a bit reluctantly I thought, to try and recover the recorder.  He dug around with his paddle, found it, and reached in to retrieve it.  It was then that Julia informed us that this was a well known crocodile nesting area, and only recently she had seen a croc drag in a wild pig at this very spot.  So much for my wanting to be a hero.

On our last evening we went into one of the many oxbow lakes created by the Kinabatangan.  While there we were hit with a fabulous tropical rain storm.  The sky went black and the rain pounded down on us, bouncing off us, the boat, and back up off the lake.

When we first arrived at Sukau we had learned that a large elephant herd, some 70 to 80 in all, was in the area.  We had gone looking for the herd the first night with no luck.  After leaving the oxbow lake, and just as it was getting dark, we again headed to the area where the elephants had last been seen.  A few other boats with tourists like us were also in the area in hopes of seeing the animals.  But as it got darker, they left.  At one point I went ashore to look for the animals, and while I couldn't see them, I could sure smell elephant shit.  Lots of it, and fresh too.  For those of you who doubt my ability to identify elephant shit I remind you I have a nose trained smelling some of the finest wines in the world.  Moreover, it was less than a year ago I was with Kushan at an elephant orphanage in Sri Lanka.  In any event, Robert would not give up.  Just before it got fully dark a number of the animals ambled down to the river and we had a good view.  Robert had brought a large flashlight, and they were like deer in the headlights.  We were very close and well able to spot their extra long tails for which these animals are known.  We had a beautiful trip back up the river to the Lodge with the full moon and the stars lighting up a black night sky.  Seeing the elephants was the capper of a great tour for me.

I truly enjoyed my unexpected bird watching.  When I booked to go to the Kinabatangan I was thinking more of orang utans and proboscis monkeys than birds and I really had no idea how many birds were there.  I'm not sure I will become a birder though.  I think it takes a lot of patience, something I'm not known to have in large supply.  I can lose interest after pushing a pull doorway once.  But who knows.

On the way back to Sandakan from Sukau we stopped at the Gomantong Caves, the largest source of edible bird's nests in the world.  The cave we visited was about 90 meters high and seemed to be 200 to 300 meters deep.  (And incidentally, on the road leading in to the cave we had a magnificent viewing of a huge orang utan.  It was a full grown, very healthy looking male that Robert thought to be about 20 years old.  He was in a majestically tall, very large, tree right beside the road, so we had a completely unobstructed view of him.)

I had never had occasion to wonder where bird's nests for soup came from, always just assuming they were found in China.  In fact, I am told none are harvested in China, and the main source is Borneo.  The Gomantong Caves are home to four species of swiftlets, some three or four million in all.  (In addition the caves are home to nearly the same number of bats, and no one could ever estimate the number of cockroaches, but certainly there are millions.  I saw thousands; many were one and one-half inches long.)

Of the four species of swiftlets, two produce nests that are harvested, the white-nest swiftlet and the black-nest swiftlet. You can guess why they are called that.  Actually, I'll tell you.  The white-nest swiftlet makes its nest entirely of saliva and therefore it is white, whereas the black-nest swiftlet uses one-half saliva and one-half feathers which are black.  The white-nest swiftlet nests sell for $4,000 US per kilo.  Three times a year, licensed harvesters scale long flimsy bamboo ladders and scaffolding to pick the nests.  Unfortunately, they had just finished a harvest when I was there, so I was not able to watch them at work.

As you may know, bird's nest soup is widely regarded by the Chinese as almost a panacea for all kinds of ailments, but at the very least regular consumption guarantees nice skin, improved digestion, and generally a longer life.  To make the soup, the nest must be slow cooked for about five hours by which time it will have turned into a soft gelatinous glob.  The 'soup' is sweetened to taste with rock sugar and voila!

After these adventures I caught the bus back to Kota Kinabalu and then flew to Kuching, the capital of Sarawak, the other Malaysian Borneo State.  Kuching is simply the prettiest little city I have visited in Asia.  It has a population of 500,000 people, the ethnic mix reflecting the state overall; native Iban people 30%, Chinese 29%, Malay 21%, the remaining 20% are Indians and representatives from the other 20 odd tribal groups.  Both the Chinese and Indians were introduced by the British during their time here.

Kuching is situated on the Sarawak River and the riverfront is one of the most pleasant places to walk.  The city is filled with parks (with real grass), lots of flowers, and a great mixture of architecture, much reflecting the White Rajah period.  There are lots of craft and antique shops, as well as a couple of great markets, and lots of very upscale shopping centres.  The people are genuinely friendly and helpful, and several times people went out of their way to lead me to where I was going.  And strangely, Kuching is not noisy.  It is quite genteel in fact.  English is widely spoken, so travel here is as easy as it gets in Asia.

Most of the locals, particularly the Chinese, have taken English first names, so people are Helen, or Donald, or Sonia, or Grace.  My personal favourite was Mr. Bong, James Bong.  It's pretty hard to beat that.

After a couple of days in Kuching I decided to head up the Rejang River, the longest river in Malaysia (at 640 km.) to visit an Iban Longhouse.  So, a flight to the city of Sibu and a three hour express boat ride up the Rejang took me to the small city of Kapit.  (As Yogi Berra would have said, the boat trip was deja vu all over again.  The boat was a twin to the one Carole Holmes and I took on the Tonle Sap River in Cambodia last spring.  The difference being, thankfully, this one was not overloaded, did not go so fast, and consequently seemed much more stable.)

For travel beyond Kapit a permit is generally required.  But as I was only heading to the Pelagus Resort, about one hour beyond Kapit by smaller launch, this was waived.  At Kapit I was met by Yousof, manager for the Pelagus Resort and in two minutes we were heading on up the last leg into the heart of the Iban territory.

Similar to the Proboscis Lodge, there were only two other guests besides me registered, a pair of professors from Switzerland, both real interesting guys.  The three of us arranged with Nyaring, the resident guide, to take us for a tour of a nearby longhouse the next morning.

So, 8:00AM found us in a small boat, the Swiss, a boatman, Nyaring, his wife Munah, and me.  We headed up the small Pelagus River which joins the Rejang very near the lodge.  This area is regarded as the oldest tropical rainforest in the world.  The river was very shallow in spots and many times we only made it through by Munah poling, very hard work against the current.  We were headed to the George Longhouse.  Longhouses are named after their headman, and the current guy is George.  When they elect a new headman, they all get a new address; it's very much like renaming a city.

Many Ibans were converted to Christianity but the majority remain as Animists, worshipping a panoply of anthropomorphic deities (animals and birds with god-like powers).  (Muslims were quite unsuccessful in converting Iban's given that pig is a major staple of the Iban).

I would think that our main fascination with the Iban and other Borneo tribes was their practice of ritualistic killing (pangayu in Iban speak) and the taking of heads as trophies to be displayed in their longhouse.  Slaves were also often taken, and, in turn, were often sacrificed to Iban gods.  The origins of headhunting are both territorial and ritualistic.  Heads are a symbol of prowess and an homage to supernatural spirits.  The White Rajah regime tried to eliminate the practice by extending control into the remote areas.  In a bloody battle in 1916 at Nanga Pila, 200 Iban head-hunters were killed.  The practice was not finally ended until after the Second World War.

Just as we were arriving at George Longhouse, we learned that it was Nyaring's home, he and Munah live there.  And, I mentioned the battle at Nanga Pila because Nyaring's grandfather, a head-hunter, was a survivor of that battle.  George Long-house has been located in this spot for about 60 years, situated just above the high water mark and built on stilts.  The current building is 20 years old, about the average length of time a longhouse lasts.  This longhouse is slated to be rebuilt nearby in the next year or two.

Longhouses can best be described as, well, as a long house.  George Longhouse is relatively large, housing 39 families, a total of 309 people.  I would guess it is about 300 meters long and approximately 25 meters deep.  They can best be understood as row housing.  Each 'house' consists of the living quarters (Bilek), covered veranda (Ruai), uncovered walkway (Tanju), and loft storage above the Bilek (Sadau).  There is no communal area as such, each family's unit spans right across including the veranda and walkway.  In practical terms the covered veranda and walkway are treated as communal and people wander along them.

Originally longhouses were made of hewn planks, split boards, bamboo etc.  Now, of course, sawn lumber is used extensively, but even now split rustic boards are used mainly for the walkway.  I would not try to suggest that people in this longhouse are living like they were one hundred years ago.  Running water is piped in from a nearby stream and many families have small generators.  But these people are outside the range of telephones and televisions, and tourists are not regulars for them.  And yet they are being integrated into the larger Sarawak society.  Many now have jobs with logging companies and the children are all taken to boarding schools.  (The Sarawak government has legislated an end to logging in this watershed and all logging is to cease in 2005 at which time it is hoped that eco-tourism will provide a sustainable economic base.)

We were shown through Nyaring's sister's home and invited in to his and Munah's home for a snack and a snort of the local rice wine called Tuak (not bad, and to me it seemed similar to sakes I have had).  Both homes were meticulous, and surprisingly large.  The main features in both seemed to be a row of very large crockery pots along the wall, large brass gongs, and a clay slab for cooking.  Both the pots (called Tajau), some quite old, and the gongs (called Tawak) are very highly valued family property.

We strolled the length of the Ruai and talked to a number of the people, most of whom were old men and women or young women with babies, and all of whom were most engaging.  We had some great laughs.  Two of the old men were sporting the near-total body tattoos that were common in years past and they both had very long, stretched, ear lobes with large holes in them from wearing heavy earrings.

Nyaring showed us his grandfather's 'duku ilang', a vicious knife about 14 inches long, which was used exclusively for taking heads.  Nyaring could not say for certain that his grandfather took heads, but as a survivor of Nanga Pila it seemed probable.  And the requisite skulls, ghoulish and fascinating, were hanging outside in the Ruai.

I must now report another part of Iban culture.  I am not sure men should read this.  Actually women shouldn't either.  So just you others read the following.

I asked Nyaring about 'palangs', a small device I had seen on display at the museum in Kuching.  The story as told to us by Nyaring is this.  If a young woman fancied a young man, she would wrap a palang with some tobacco and have it taken to the object of her affection by a child on an occasion when the young man was going away on a hunt or whatever.  She would never be so bold as to deliver it herself, rather sending it with her young emissary.  The palang itself was typically one of the wing bones of a naked bat, chosen because they come in various lengths.  In later years things such as nails were also used.

The message to the young man was clear.  And, if he was likewise interested he would enlist the assistance of a friend and the palang would be inserted through the head of his penis.  That's right, clean through.  A device was used to squeeze the tip of his appendage as thin as possible and then a form of a dart was shot through, and the palang inserted.  And there it stayed.   The bat wing would have been chosen to ensure the tips of the palang protruded out both sides.  Some men apparently could be seduced into inserting as many as four of these little beauties into their penis so that they had an eight pronger.

For his trouble the young man would get the girl, and the right to have a small flower tattooed on the inside of his right knee.  For some reason this practice has now died out.  Nyaring suggests it is because, although women initiated the procedure, too many of them died from having palangs fall out and lodging inside them.  As Forrest Gump would say, "And that's all I have to say about that".

With that, we were back in our launch and back to the resort.  The next day I made the reverse journey down the Rejang by boat and a flight back to Kuching.  And that was pretty much my Borneo adventure.  Even though my two treks barely dented into the edges of primal jungles, I have to say the two of them, one in Sabah and one in Sarawak, were once-in-a-lifetime experiences for me, absolutely fabulous.

As concluding thoughts I would urge anyone to visit Borneo.  It is exotic, it is easy to travel, it is inexpensive, it is modern.  The people are engaging and hospitable.  Kuching is as lovely as a small city can get.  I think I would have to acknowledge that the regime of the White Rajah had a positive impact on Sarawak, leaving a legacy of efficient administration and an egalitarian society.

So that is all for now.  I hope you are all keeping well.


Merv.