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The Kelabit’s Forest
Travel to the famed longhouses of Borneo.
In the longhouse at Longlellun it was still dark when a harsh-crashing sound dashed into my sleep, jolting me awake. The dogs began to howl. I stumbled outside to check what the commotion was about, and I found a man outside the chapel hitting a bamboo contraction with a stick. I ruefully shook my head. The man smiled – the “church bell”, he explained, designed to awaken the inhabitants for mass at 5am. I was surprised that these jungle inhabitants in Borneo’s interior had clung so piously to the Christianity introduced by missionaries. But it proved an erroneous impression: the three old women at mass were in fact the last vestiges of Christianity, and the frantic croaks of the bell seemed more of a symbol of desperation by the native lay priest.
Yet everyone had hustled out of bed anyway, for an early start at the rice fields where the harvest was gathering momentum. I found only four people in the communal kitchen after mass. A young woman, a baby dangling from her shoulders, was preparing our breakfast – coffee, rice, and barking deer sautéed in ginger, ferns, and pineapple – and there was another young woman, a woman who had grown in town and now visiting her grandparents who sat at their favourite place near the fire. Town-life had given her a finesse and appeal not otherwise found among the jungle dwellers, and my companion, Ridi, started to act giddily in her presence.
I was more interested in her grandparents’ traditional attire. The old woman had patches of checkerboard tattoos flowing down her arms and legs, but the wrinkled saggy skin made the tattoos look faded, almost like dirt. And the man had heavy and elaborate coiled metal earrings dangling from the sagging lobes of his ears. Both of them wore sarongs. “Only the old people still have these decorations,” Riddi told me when he saw me studying the old man’s earring. Riddi, by contrast, wore jeans and sporty T-shirt (the latter donated by an expedition team).
Yet another tradition, hunting with blowgun that bore darts daubed in the venom of cobras, was making a come-back as the government was barring shotguns in tribal areas due to the potential for poaching. The blowgun was something I wanted to play with, and, leaving Ridi to indulge his lascivious fantasies in the longhouse, I went outside with the blow-gun. The projectile, a wooden splinter tapering to a needle-point, surprised me with its speed and reach, and I cracked open a pineapple from a distance of thirty metres.
I was content that I had discovered these remote mountains in the interior of Sarawak, the Malaysian part of Borneo, called the Kelabit Highlands. The mountains are home to about 2,000 Kelabits, a separate race of longhouse people who still largely subsist from hunting and gathering. Most inhabitants live in Bario, the largest village in the region, which is set on a plain hemmed in by mountains, and consisting of houses scattered among dusty roads and rice paddies, some supplies shops and a landing strip for the twin-otter plane that was the only link to outside world. Bario also has two longhouses, and in one of them I had found Ridi, a father of three who made some money guiding trekkers; I paid him to take me on a four-day loop trek to some of the remote villages scattered in the mountains.
On our first day, the walk from Bario to Longlellun was an eight-hour slog over muddy and slippery ground, and the tobacco leaves I had stuffed in my shoes and smeared on my legs failed to repel the ubiquitous leeches. Near Bario, we traversed the kelanga – a marshy habitat formed by silt settling in the valley over a non-porous bed of clay – an eerie watery wasteland of skeletal trees, mangled ferns, and ponds of black water that were five or six feet deep – my walking stick, which I used for balance, almost disappeared in the water. Skirting along the edges of the webs of these watery graves, I contemplated the peat squelching underfoot, the colourful birds squealing away in alarm, and the tubular containers of pitcher plants, a carnivorous plant. It’s a famous plant, having evolved to nourish its growth by an elaborate trap: its dark tubes lured insects seeking refuge, and in the tubes the insects would get stuck to a gluey mucous which would then dissolve them into a form that could be absorbed by the plant as food.
“Watch out for the cobras,” Ridi said as we passed the kelanga and entered closed forest. “Cobras will bite you either if you step on them, or if they happen to be laying eggs – they will shriek if they are laying eggs, so if you hear a shriek step back.” But the people who were mostly struck down by cobra’s poison, he added, would be walking barefoot at night in the forest and unwittingly step on a snoozing snake.
Further on, as the forest became denser, we found ourselves in a hush, wet, and dark green world; the melancholic uniformity was only broken by the bright red flowers of ginger and the pinheads of tiny delicate off-white mushrooms. We heard macaque monkeys muttering in the trees and hornbills calling loudly or assertively. “Hornbills are the messengers of the spirit world,” Ridi said. “Eating them or killing them would provoke the spirits into taking revenge.”
Other animals weren’t so privileged: the Kelabits eat deer, monkeys, birds, fishes, boars, and snakes. “Pythons are delicious,” Ridi said. “We cut them in round cross-section steaks and fry them. It’s easy to kill them – they are docile and unafraid – but they are rare.”
Later, arriving in Longlellun, I was inducted into the legendary hospitality of Borneo’s longhouse cultures when people approached me to greet me. My visiting arrangement reinforced the inclusiveness – I ate with my family hosts, and slept in the bedroom they freed up for me. Longhouses, in fact, had evolved as a design of egalitarianism, and a longhouse is build in two lengthways sections: the communal kitchen, a hall stretching along the length of the longhouse, with a cooking rack for each household, on one side, and the private sleeping quarters on the other side across an elevated walkway. In this way, a complete village is incorporated in a fifty-metre-long longhouse; in Longlellun, only the chapel was a separate structure, something that illustrated also its cultural separateness. (And something that made me gleeful – it showed that the missionaries had largely failed – and I detest missionaries, for they are cannibals of cultural diversity.)
In the culture of the longhouse there is no concept of private ownership, and this was an advantage for the loggers – the government had been generous with logging concessions, and the Kelabits got the crumbs (cheap bribes) in return for acquiescence for the destruction of the forests (in these same forests, a Swiss anti-logging campaigner had gone missing, presumably murdered by the loggers). But recently logging had been banned, and the government had promised the village committee at Padallih, our next stop, that the area would be transformed into a ‘highland garden.’ Padallih was the largest village we visited; it has a school, clinic, and several private houses. Andreas, my host, said: “In the past some shut one eye to the loggers and accepted money, but now we have lost a third of our forests and we’re glad that commercial logging is banned.”
His words alerted me to the incongruous affluence around me – the largest private house around, a chainsaw, a boat tied at the riverbank, an electric kettle, and a baby skittering around in a fancy wheelchair. Now the loggers were gone, but the rich would be lured back: the government’s idea for Padallih was to set up an airstrip, an upscale hotel, and a golf course. And I found myself fantasizing that Andreas would become a porter and his wife a cleaner, and that the scheme would fail.
Andreas said: “We are already getting many tourists.”
I hadn’t encountered anyone else. “How many?”
“More than one hundred every year.”
At the last village we visited, Marudi, we saw the gash in the distant slope that marked the end of the logging trail. “They cut 300 trees just to get one tree,” Ridi mused.
But there is still a lot of old-growth forest left, among the largest pockets in Southeast Asia in fact, and Ridi was trying to entice me to join him on a “jungle survival expedition” – a week in a stretch of desolate forest that only had faint paths that required hacking through with a machete as one pressed along. We would sleep in hammocks, and cook what we hunt and gather. The Penan, some of Ridi’s forbearers, used to forage in that forest years ago, and now Ridi want to follow their footsteps for sport or spiritual reasons. He said, “It’s the one thing I must do before I die.”
(C) Victor Paul Borg 
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