Kapit to Belaga, Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo (June 27, 2010)
The boat left Kapit at 9:30 a.m. and made it safely up the Pelagus rapids by about 10:30 a.m. I had no problem imagining one of those movies set in pioneer times when people traversed the rapids on wooden rafts and invariably everything and everyone ended up tossed into the river.
As I stood by the main hatch observing the rapids, a man of reasonable English fluency introduced himself as Phillip, a school teacher and part-time life insurance salesman. He lamented the muddy state of the river. As a boy, he said, the river ran clear, but now it ran so muddy from logging (much it illegal) that even the fish were dying, their gills clogged by the silt and mud. The communities that fish the river were suffering severely. Phillip wasn’t thrilled with the Bakun Dam either. The dam was just recently completed and resulted in the resettlement of 11,000 people. But Phillip was proud of the Malaysian educational system, which taught certain subjects, like math and science, in English.
Phillip told us to contact Daniel when we reached Belaga. After numerous stops at various longhouse settlements to unload and load people and cargo, we arrived at Belaga at about 3 p.m. Belaga was miniscule town, stretching perhaps three blocks along the river and two blocks back. It had no wi-fi signal anywhere (I walked the entire town with my laptop open, looking).
We checked out all four hotels in town and settled on Hotel Sing Soon Hing, where a very basic air-conditioned room with two beds and a bathroom cost MYR 27 (about $8) per night. At 3 p.m., food was downright difficult to find. Lunch was no longer being served anywhere in town and it was too early for dinner.
Dinner eventually included chicken skewers with a chili peanut sauce for the amazingly low price of one ringgit per three skewers (about 10 cents a skewer). We then arranged our next day’s activities with Daniel (conveniently located at Daniel’s Corner) and a night at a Kayan longhouse. The town had no nightlife to speak of.
Belaga Area and Barawan Longhouse, Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo (June 28-29, 2010)
The next day, Daniel sent us out for our first activity: hunting. Sharon and I and a tiny, chain-smoking boatman and his two dogs set off in a skinny, unstable-feeling canoe to pick up the hunter at his cabin. I had no idea what to expect and was hoping we’d all have guns and head into the jungle shooting. Instead, the hunter emerged from his cabin with four dogs and a single combination spear/blowgun – basically a spear with a hollow barrel for blowing poison darts. So the ten of us, mostly affection-seeking dogs covered in mud from the river, set off in the canoe for another spot along the river where we then headed into the jungle to “hunt.”
The hunter didn’t speak English and didn’t wait for us in the dense jungle. He also refused to speak even to Sharon who spoke his language, Iban. I had wished for a genuine experience and I got one: the hunter went off hunting as he always did, and the fact that he had tourists in tow didn’t faze him in the least. He disappeared with his dogs into the jungle and was not seen again until we all met back at the boat, he empty-handed, more than an hour later.
By then I was a sweaty muddy mess from the hike, plus I’d taken a sliding fall on one of the muddy frictionless slopes into a gully. The sliding fall left me with a foot-long gash in my shorts and mud in places that had never seen mud before. Fortunately we found a waterfall nearby where I was able to wash up.
Beside not speaking and not sticking with us, the hunter was pretty mean to his dogs, for example, grabbing them by their loose skin and throwing them yelping and screaming from the boat. (If you are feeling at all disgusted, I can tell you that I’ve seen pigs on the way to slaughter treated worse, and they are just as intelligent as dogs. I gave up pork shortly thereafter.) Bottom line: neither Sharon nor I liked the hunter much.
That afternoon we took another boat to another longhouse settlement, the Kayan and Sekapan longhouses at Long Dungan. A good portion of the 180 students who lived or boarded in the village seemed to greet us. “What is your name?” “Where are you from?” and “Do you play football [soccer]?” were some of the more popular questions tossed my way. The government runs the boarding school at Long Dungan so children from even more remote villages can access education; they return home weekends. After their questions, the kids went off to dinner courtesy of the government: fish, stew of some sort, soup and rice.
Once again, aside from friendly waves, the adults seemed to take little notice of us. The older ones sat around chewing their betel nuts and leaves mixed with red tobacco, their teeth and lips a bloody red, and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes. The women over 50 had large loops in their elongated earlobes and tattoos all down their forearms and on their feet. When we asked why the younger women didn’t have these, we were told it simply went out of style, like the bouffant hairdo I suppose. One lady told us she got her tattoos when she was 18 years old and they hurt like a son of bitch, to paraphrase, apparently a prerequisite to marriage at that time.
Our hosts served us biscuits and tea and then planted themselves firmly in front of the television. No tours, no activities, little explanation – we were simply plunked down in the middle of longhouse life, and it was up to us to explore, meet people, pretty much do as we pleased. That evening they also served us dinner. Again we brought the food and they cooked it. Afterward, they watched the World Cup on their generator-powered satellite television. They also offered me betel nut and red tobacco rolled in betel leaf smeared with limestone. You chew it and spit it out. It turns your mouth red. I accepted without doing the proper due diligence, and soon discovered I had absorbed a stimulant that left my heart racing, my mouth numb, and my head spinning. Some of these old folks do betel all day; for me, once was enough.
The generator went off at about 10 and was replaced by a thunderstorm. It was still raining the next morning when we visited the local school named for the nearby airport, SRK Airport. The airport has been built by Japanese occupiers during World War II and afterward had been used by locals until just a few years ago. I found it a strange place after which to name a school.
Mr. Daniel, the former school superintendant, led us around the school. We visited two classes where the students were made to stand up and introduce themselves to us in English. Sharon and I then led the classes in impromptu English lessons, culminating in a request that we sing a song in English. The best way out of this situation was to involve the class, and so Sharon and I divided up the class into competing, overlapping verses of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”
Mr. Daniel would not survive long in the U.S. educational system; at least I hoped he wouldn’t. I occasionally felt sorry for the students he would pick on to stand up and speak to us in English, after which he would give them a cookie. At one point, he picked on a rather rotund girl and asked in English – apparently to test her knowledge of adjectives relating to girth – “Are you fat or are you skinny?” I turned to him and said in my sidebar voice, “I don’t like that question.” He rephrased it. “Are you a fat girl or are you a skinny girl.” “I don’t like that question either,” I said. “Ok, ok, ok,” he retreated.
The children at the school were lovely and we had a great time engaging them in English. Despite Mr. Daniel, it appeared the children were cared for in a way many of the poorest in my own country are not. They are entirely rural poor children, but the government pays for their transportation from the countryside to the school plus five days of room and board at the school. Malaysia’s policy and purse seem to be coordinated to ensure that poor rural children are not stuck working the fields when they should be in school. The parents receive money to send their children to school. If the parents fail in that obligation, according to Mr. Daniel, the parents get prosecuted.
Belaga to Niah Cave, Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo (June 29-30, 2010)
We returned to Belaga by longboat, had lunch, and then caught the express boat to the Bakun Dam, where Mr. Daniel had arranged a ride with his friend David to the Bakun Resort. The ride was smooth, and I was impressed how these express boats clamor up the rapids, devouring everything in their path, at quite a decent clip too – perhaps 50 km/hr estimated by map and watch.
We reached Bakun Dam in the late afternoon. The still-not-operational dam evoked a fair bit of controversy, as some 11,000 local tribespeople were removed from their riverside wooden longhouses to concrete structures quite a distance from their ancestral homeland. The older people could not longer live off the land by hunting, fishing and cultivating as they had for generations, but neither could they just go out and get jobs. Apparently the younger people were heading to larger towns for work and pleasure. Whether these communities can survive is in serious doubt.
The “3-star resort” Daniel had told us existed at Bakun Dam was a bad joke. It was basically a camp for dam workers, lucky to earn zero stars. The lobby had the low ceilings and molding rugs of a very old work trailer in the middle of the jungle, which is what the “resort” was. The rest of the “resort” seemed of a similar ilk. So we continued north with Daniel’s friend another 45 minutes along a beaten-up highway (that had seen too many heavy construction vehicles and logging trucks) to the Highway Café, which also had a guesthouse.
Our room in a rattan and bamboo shack had a simple bed, a toilet, and a hose and bucket for a shower. There was no fan and the electricity ceased when they shut down the generator. After quite a tasty dinner (which included grilled catfish scooped from the nearby catfish pond), Sharon and I sacked down and tried to sleep. At about 2 a.m., the rain arrived and pattered down so hard on the “roof” that it became impossible to sleep. Moreover, it fell so hard that it beat its way through the roof and began to drip onto the bed. The bed was wet, I was wet, sleep was not in the cards.
In the morning, we tried to hitchhike north to the main Bintulu-Miri highway. Few vehicles came down this stretch of lonely road. Those that did seemed to be logging and other trucks with too much momentum to stop. Finally, for a price, David drove us to the highway and dropped us off at the T-intersection where there were some shacks selling food. All the shacks sold exactly the same items, fish balls and chicken on skewers. I ordered some chicken. It was so dirt cheap, I questioned (as I often do) how anyone profited from the transaction.
Then the skewers came, three of them, each with four pieces of chicken. To my disappointed surprise, all the pieces of chicken were chicken butts. I had ordered twelve chicken butts without closely examining the skewers. Upon further examination, it seemed the only part of the chicken you could buy at this lonely highway intersection was the butt. I grimaced and dug right into my butt lunch. We then caught a bus east to Niah National Park.
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