Into the heart of Borneo

I left you last time after the two months in Indonesia, just having arrived in Miri, on the Malaysian part of the island of Borneo. Here I met my friends Derek and Katelien, who have been living in Miri for 3 years now. I had always said I would surely be in the region at some point during Derek's tenure there and then I would come and visit them. Now was the time to live up to that promise.

I had already had a few days of rest in a better than usual hotel in Kuala Lumpur as I noticed a lingering fatigue within me after my busy Indonesian adventures not going away after a good night's sleep. Nothing would prove to be a better recuperation place, however, than Derek and Katelien's lovely house on the Shell compound at Piasau Camp where I was welcome to stay for as long as I wished. It was extremely relaxing, really nice to see them and their kids (two of whom were actually born in Miri), talk about what we all had been doing lately, going to the 'boat club' for dinner or drinks, making a trip to nearby Brunei for a day, etc. And for a week I indulged in the things you miss as a traveler / backpacker in Asia, but which of course are made available to an expat community living in 'the Orient': real fresh wheat bread, good cheese, wine, peanut butter, 'hagelslag', wonderful!

D&K would leave for a visit to Holland one week after I arrived, so that became a logical end to my stay as well. I had not planned to stay for a long time in Malaysian Borneo afterwards, as I had already made plans to meet other friends in the Philippines in April and I wanted to spend more time in the Philippines anyway (Malaysia as a country still not beckoning me; my Malaysian peninsula itinerary earlier in the trip had not changed that, really). In particular Sabah province though has some deservedly popular tourist spots: various jungle reserves, the highest mountain of Southeast Asia (Mount Kinabalu), and a superb diving site (Sipadan) to name a few. After my week in Miri I was struggling what I would do. I didn't want to rush through it, 'ticking the sights off' basically. Also, all places there are quite touristic. One would not expect that in Borneo, but e.g. Sipadan needs prior notice of weeks in advance I heard, Kinabalu needs reservations as well, and I was just taken aback by it a bit.

I asked D&K for suggestions, them having traveled to quite some places in Borneo over the past 3 years. The response was actually unexpectedly quick and unanimous. They thought for a minute, looked at me, seeing I had been traveling long enough already to be fit for a multi-day trek and said 'you have to go to Bario'. And that was it. They had done day walks through the jungle there themselves and had always wanted to do a longer trek as well, but it's just difficult with kids and a job to find the time.

The Kelabit Highlands, in the heart of Borneo, straddling the border between Malaysia and Indonesia, are surrounded by jungle. Not primary rainforest, but secondary forest, parts of it having been logged, some logging roads running through it, which is pretty common in most contemporary rainforests not protected by a natural park. It not being a protected national park however would mean I would see not only jungle, but the real life there as well: there would be migrating jungle tribes, a scattering of small villages in the Highlands, active trails through the jungle for trade between villages, in short, a combination of unforgiving nature and very local village life in a region still little visited by tourists (I had never heard of it before). It was just the perfect alternative to all the Sabah sights. It would be the only thing I would do in Borneo.

Bario is about a 50-minute flight in a small propellor plane over the vast dark-green tapestry below that is the jungle interior of Borneo, which starts soon after the plane leaves the city of Miri and the stretch of palm oil plantations behind. A wide muddy meandering river and a few small logging roads dissect the green at some points; at other times it is just green as far as the eye can see, a majestic sight. At the horizon the Tamabo mountains are already looming up and there, behind those mountains is the fertile valley of the Kelabit Highlands, lying at about 1500m altitude. Bario is the main village of the Highlands, with one of the smallest airports I have seen. I stayed at a guesthouse recommended by D&K, which is about 2 km from the village along a dirt track where even big Nissan SUVs and Toyota Landcruisers got stuck in the thick mud. Yes, that's right, it was also still the rainy season.

The guesthouse was right next to where the jungle began, in a very peaceful and quiet location. I expressed my interest in a longer trek and discussed the options with the guesthouse owner, Jeman, a thin and unusally tall man for a Malay. Quiet and very friendly, he was obviously very knowledgeable of the area. He recommended the Kalimantan loop, a six or seven-day trek through jungle and then some villages on the Indonesian side of the border (I did not even know I could cross into Indonesia here). The villages would be in the open plains again, so it would be a few days of walking through the jungle and a few days walking from village to village. I could take a sleeping bag and mat from him for one or two overnights in jungle shelters; the rest I would be sleeping in homestays in the villages. This sounded like a plan. He would try to arrange a guide for me next day on the weekly market in the village.

The evening before I would embark on the trek, as I was sitting at the open fire in the kitchen warming myself in the somewhat chilly highland evening, Jeman came sitting next to me with a beer (to my utter surprise they all drink Oranjeboom around Bario). "Be prepared", he said, "it will be wet and it can be very muddy. Be prepared, mentally." I nodded understandingly, confident I would be ok both physically and mentally as well after traveling for a couple of months, but for a moment I thought: mmm what am I getting into actually? Nobody else was going.

It turned out to be fine, mostly. We usually walked for about 4 to 5 hours a day, including eating (packed) lunch. I had left all unnecessary luggage at D&K's house in Miri, in which I could return and rest for a while (and wash clothes!) after the trek, even though they themselves would be in Holland. Still, with sleeping bag, mat, some warm clothes, some food, a heavy book Katelien recommended, which I doubted to take at first because of its substantial weight, but proved to be a page-turner story about this very region and indispensable to spending the non-walking parts of the day with very little else to do, and 2 kg of water, I was carrying about 11-12 kg I think, which was the same as I took relatively comfortable around Annapurna in Nepal, but in the extreme mud the backpack tilting your balance constantly (even with walking stick) would prove quite strenuous.

The first day I walked a couple of hours to a small village with one guide, where a second guide would guide me for the rest of the trek. The entire second and third day we walked through the jungle. There were few animals (some wild boars, many birds, some monkeys very far away), but the vegetation was still such that visibility was just about 20-30m. If I would stop for a photo and my guide walked on in the mean time, I could often not see him anymore. Though it was secondary jungle, which means the trees are generally smaller (there were only a few areas with real huge trees left), the lower vegetation would sometimes completely overgrow the trail and my guide had to take his 'parang' and cut it open again. And it was hilly: a continuous uphill/downhill trail most of the time. At the bottom of a hill there would invariably be a shallow stream that we would have to cross, mostly a bit more than ankle-deep. Any illusion of keeping my shoes dry was soon lost. I would have wet feet during the entire week. At one time we even had to wade through a swamp higher than knee-deep (!), searching for stable ground that we could stand on. Sometimes there would be very simple bamboo bridges over wider/deeper rivers, though, which my guide always crossed easily, but I really had to do step-by-step. And then there was the mud, which was not too bad in the forest itself, although there was sufficient water and mud on the trail amidst the dense vegetation that I regularly imagined myself in a Tour of Duty (tv series about the Vietnam war) scene. And leeches of course, but this time I was fortunate enough to have leech socks from Derek, which proved invaluable: I did not have a single leech bite the whole week, while at the end of the day the socks were teeming of them.

As we would not make the village on the second day, there was a wooden jungle shelter in which we would spend the night. In the shelter that evening (the only other foreigners I would see on the trail) there happened to be a group of teachers from Brunei doing an overlapping trek, so it was actually quite crowded, but it was fun. The guides had brought food, cooked it all together over a fire and I tried (quite unsuccessfully) to sleep on the hard wooden floor (the thin mat not providing any comfort really). The next day we continued walking for some 2 hours through the jungle before we hit the Indonesian border and crossed into Kalimantan. Just a border stone at the top of the hill in the midst of jungle. Nothing else in sight. I made a mental note to use this as a smuggling route between Malaysia and Indonesia if I would ever need it. It was a nice illustration of how porous borders can be.

In Kalimantan the jungle gave way to a valley again, with several really small villages (not to be found on Google Maps) a few hours walking apart (there are motorcycles here, a few cars sometimes, but most cars could not handle the now extremely muddy tracks). My guide's wife was actually from Kalimantan (this is not surprising, as increasingly many Malaysian Kelabit girls are moving to the city; the men stay behind and many are now marrying wives from a Kalimantan village), so we stayed both in the house of his wife's family in one village and in the house of his best friend in another village. All houses were very basic: wooden, with just bamboo mats to sleep on for the owners, but a mattress for the guests in a separate room. Always open fires in the kitchen (albeit below a vent to the outside) to cook water and to prepare food (rice, jungle spinach that we would gather during our trip and bring with us to the hosts, some other vegetables and often, special for the guest, some fatty wild boar). I got offered so much food at all the houses that we visited (sometimes just to say hello) that my stomach was continually full for the entire week, and so much coffee (which, though Indonesian coffee is really good normally, here is served very watery with lots and lots of sugar, that I had to tell my guide at some point I just couldn't handle any more food and/or coffee and how I could politely refuse any more.

Yet it was all very hospitable and welcoming, and I must say a very special experience to see village life in these small, such remote villages, where it takes hours walking through the jungle just to get your sugar, go to school, or any other very basic needs. It was also a traditional and simple way of life that I could not imagine living in. Although every village had generators that would be running between about 7pm and 11pm and everyone has satellite TV nowadays (and watches the same soaps every night), it is in these remote places that you feel time stands still somehow and however meditative hours of walking can be (and it was, in particular the hours walking between the villages over the plains), and however friendly the people are (although almost nobody spoke English, which made conversation very difficult), I knew it would not be for me to spend any longer time in such a small village.

The last stretch, from Kalimantan back into Malaysia and subsequently back to Bario crossing a couple of jungle-clad hills again that I could see looming up from the last village we were in, could be done in either one or two days. I thought we'd just try to do it in one day, making one additional jungle shelter stop unnecessary. This day was the day Jeman would probably have meant: to be 'mentally prepared'. There was an actual border post here as we left the last Indonesian village (so I made a mental note to use the other trail, not this one, for smuggling if I would ever need it) but this was because it was also a major trading trail. Actually this proved to be terrible. Trading trails are used by buffaloes and buffalo carts, a kind of sleigh with goods on top of it that buffalos (accompanied by a buffalo 'driver' ) transfer between villages. This causes major erosion of the path, however, meaning the entire trail has become just plain, brown, ankle-deep mud. One can try to walk on the sides of the trail, bringing some relief from being sucked into the mud with every step you take. Yet the mud has hardened and completely filled any profile in your shoe soles and every non-straight inclination of the terrain, be it the sides of the trail or round bamboo bridges, therefore become extremely slippery. Adjusting one's balance constantly to not slip away proves to be very difficult with a backpack on your shoulder swinging your gravity point around.

While my guide and some porters we encountered and walked with for a while would still try to avoid the mud, at some point I just preferred the mud path, taking big steps with my long legs to amusement of the men walking with me :) Then, as we needed to climb up the hills towards the border, it became really strenuous. There was hardly any way to walk and not slip away constantly. It was hot; insects were zooming around my head, and continuously there was the promise we would now almost be at the top. Yet there seemed to be no end to the climbing steep mud path. When we finally reached the top of the hill and the border, it was 4 hours more to Bario. The day total was 9 hours. This had been a bit too much. I was exhausted. At the end I could barely continue as my legs hurt everywhere. On the other hand, as soon as we had arrived and I sat with a coffee at the fire, I quickly felt quite fine again. The tiring effects of it all would manifest itself only later. The next day I would fly back to Miri where I could rest in D&K's house.

Even though the above might give the impression of a hell of a trek (to some of you), it was wonderful and I enjoyed it a lot. Doing treks of these kinds (as in the Himalaya) is always meditative in a way and the encounter with such remote village life in the middle of nowhere combined with the strenuous jungle walk, was very enjoyable. In reality only the last day was physically, and mentally, exhausting, but another jungle shelter stop and an extra day could have prevented this. The other days, with 4 or 5 hour walks, were perfectly manageable. And though it could be warm and humid, the 1500m altitude actually makes for a much cooler climate than Borneo's fiercely hot lower-lying jungle.

One thing about jungle that I noticed, though, is that I find that it closes in on me after some time. I want to get out of it at some point, have more visibility around me, see the open again. Therefore I think I'd prefer mountain trekking over jungle trekking next time. Maybe time for the Himalayas again!

Then, on an ending note: it was my intention to combine this Malasyian intermezzo with a Philippines update, but in my enthusiasm recollecting the trek while typing, I guess it merits its own :) The Philippines update is therefore next to come, but it will be much less dense with activities: it was time for some vacation! Tomorrow I'm leaving the Philippines after six weeks to fly to Hong Kong.

All the best,

Arnoud.