Beautiful Borneo
May 18, 2007
I have now been in Sarawak (in the Malaysian part of Borneo) for five days. If I had done things according to my itinerary I would be on my way to Bangkok at this moment, but I just couldn’t tear myself away. My words will come nowhere near an accurate depiction of this place, but I will attempt to feebly do it justice nonetheless. If you have any desire to go somewhere that hasn’t been completely corrupted by tourism and will completely blow your mind culturally and environmentally, come here.
A little geography lesson: Borneo is an island east of Malaysia. It is divided between three countries – Indonesia has the southern strip, little Brunei sits smack in the middle, and Malaysia has the majority across the northern length, which is divided into the two largest provinces in Malaysia, Sarawak and Sabah. I have been staying in Kuching, the capital of Sarawak on the western end of the island.
If you do come here, give yourself more than a week. There is so much to do and see. Borneo is the native home to the orangutans, and if you want to see these magnificent creatures in the wild, this is the place to come. There are a number of organizations here that are set up to try to save the orangs, as with the increasing destruction of their habitat, and the illegal animal trade, their numbers are dwindling. There are sanctuaries and rehabilitation centres where people are working to reintroduce some of the rescued orangutans into the wild, so you can really see them up close. A major problem for these guys is that in Taiwan there exists a myth that if a woman can’t conceive, if she gets a baby orangutan and takes care of him for three years as if he were her child, she will be able to have a baby. This is terrible in two ways. First, the bond between mother and baby orangs is the strongest in nature. They do not part for the first six to seven years of the baby’s life. You cannot get a baby orang without killing the mother. Also, when the poachers do shoot the mother down from the trees, there is a good chance that the baby will be crushed by his mother in the fall. There are approximately ten casualties for every one baby successfully captured. The second problem is that baby orangs are little and cute (and very human – we share 96% of our DNA), but then they grow up to be enormous beasts with fingers the size of bananas. Once they get too big they will, like any naughty child, start destroying things. Some of the orangs in captivity get sold to zoos, but as it’s an illegal trade, most of them simply disappear. There are purported to be more illegally-owned orangutans in Taiwan than in the whole of Borneo, their natural habitat.
As well as the orangutans, Borneo is home to a greater variety of plant and animal life than you can imagine. In England there are 50 different types trees; in the Amazon 500. Here in Borneo there are 2500 different species. More than in any other place in the world. Hiking through the forest here is spectacular, and is a touch closer to the world of the dinosaurs than anywhere else I’ve ever seen.
A couple of days ago a little group of us went for a little walk to a village in the mountains called Semban. The only way to get to this village is on foot. The “little walk” took us six hours. This is six hours of trekking through jungle, walking the bamboo highway (all of the steps are made of bamboo), traversing the most extraordinarily engineered bamboo suspension bridges. A swim in a waterfall over lunch gave us a little respite before the gruelling final walk which is uphill all the way in the steambath of the noonday tropics. We were all finished by the time we reached the village, a little place that due to its location is rarely visited by tourists. What astonished us is the sophistication of the place, especially considering that everything in the village was carried on their backs. 40kg bags of concrete, huge pots, floor tiles, televisions: all carried there on the backs of the villagers.
The evening was extraordinary. After being shown how they tap palm trees for the wine (and drinking it fresh from the tree), we enjoyed an evening of dancing and music with a group of older ladies from the village. Until about forty years ago these people had a practice of winding metal coils around their calves (and sometimes wrists) at the age of twelve. There are about twelve of these ladies left, ranging from about fifty-five to eighty-nine. Full of laughter and joy and as intrigued by us as we were by them, we had a joyful and slightly drunk evening of dancing with them and being party to their tradition. A picture is worth a thousand words, and in this case I will let photographic evidence do the illustrating. (I will post these as soon as I can get my card downloaded.)
The next couple of days I will be spending time with the orangutans, hanging out with my local and Aussie pals, and trying to soak up as much of the culture here as I can. I will be very sad to leave.
