BRUNEI & BORNEO:
BREAD & BUTTER PUDDING AT THE SULTAN’S PALACE.
The plane arrives at Bandar Seri Begawan, the one and only city in this tiny principality at 6.30 am, about a month and a half before this part of South East Asia is hit by a major Tsunami.
After getting off, I stash most of my gear under a bush by the airport. Much cheaper than posting it all back to Britain or putting it in some kind of luggage store. There’s no way I’m spending two weeks carrying all of this stuff about. I could do, but seeing as I know I’ll be back here very soon very definitely and most of my tat is irrelevant to this part of the trip, I may as well do the light load thing. Besides my body deserves a holiday too. It’s very humid. Mozzies all over the shop. Now what? Better make A Plan Of A Tack.
I hitch a ride with a Bangladeshi chap into the city a few miles away.
You could be forgiven for knowing nothing whatsoever about Brunei. I always imagined that it was in the Middle East somewhere, tucked in next to Saudi Arabia perhaps. What it does share with Saudi though is that it is a nation whose wealth is founded on oil. Lots of it.
Brunei, or to give it it’s proper full name, Nation of Brunei, The Abode of Peace, has a GDP of roughly twenty-one billion pounds which is certainly enough money to make your average Joe feel pretty relaxed about things. Having that much money also makes it the fifth richest nation in the world.
It is a tiny tiny country of just under half a million people populating an area of 2,226 square miles. It gained its independence from Britain in 1984.
It is a small and significant part in a slightly confusing bit of geography. It is one of three states that make up Malaysia. One being Malaysia on the mainland of South-East Asia, one being Brunei and the other being the state of Borneo which surrounds Brunei. Meanwhile The island of Borneo is home to Brunei, the state of Borneo and a large chunk of Indonesia (which then goes on to spread itself about a bit on some other islands off to the east).
All clear? No, I thought not. Now, you thought all those arbitrary straight lines across the maps of Africa were daft…
The name Malaysia incidentally is thought to have come from ancient Indian traders for whom the the word ‘Malaiur’ meant ‘Land of Mountains.’
I only write all this because no-one ever knows anything about the place.
Bandar Seri Begawan (or Bandar or BSB):
I arrive in the city centre; actually it is really a small town centre, where you can see the shanties of the masses within easy eyesight of anything grander in the middle.
I take a look round town and inevitably spend nearly all my time investigating the shops. The department store has all the usual things that you would find including western clothes, though not many people seem to wear them very much, some people do. There are some things I notice that I have never seen in a western store, like a whole row of anti-baldness preparations. Maybe we do have those at home and it’s just that now I am looking harder at what’s around me.
It’s very curious walking round a department store in this Muslim country. Lots of brightly be-robed ladies and gents buying much the same sort of stuff us westerners do. In fact, if you turn the heat down a bit and de-Islam-ed the place there wouldn’t be that much to distinguish it from back home. The vibe is comfortable.
On the hunt for a pee break opportunity I visit the department store loos, which are western in style. There lined up are the standard three urinals, except that the middle one is missing, leaving an unpainted oval of bare wall and some holes for fixings. Slap bang in the middle by way of explanation is a sign which reads:
‘This toilet has been removed for repairs. We are sorry for any inconvenience.’
I take a photo, with a view to submitting it to Private Eye when I get back to England.
Looking round at the other less grand and more your normal knick-knacky kinds of shops around town I encounter these other wonderfully scrambled scraps of English:
Cheap computer game:
Gout Chess.
Kentucky Fried Chicken ice cream ad:
‘Scrumptious sides – how could anyone resist?’
Woman in shop full of electrical gizmos, trying to get me to buy something: ‘Very latest everything fashionable now!’
Probably the funniest most to-the-point sales line I ever heard. I might get that printed onto a t-shirt.
There is a mosque here that looks almost new and also a Chinese temple too which is easy to recognise as it has one of those square wooden post gateways outside the front and the style is classically Chinese of course,
This is all very well but I do need a place for later to sleep. Upon entering Bandar I had noticed a small-ish sports stadium like a fourth division football ground which I made a mental note of to investigate later if needs be. When I get there, there is a gate which is unlocked. I get the feeling that nobody does ‘crime’ here, which is a nice feeling in what is technically a city.
The place has a wall about eight foot high surrounding it, but otherwise is very open. There is a terrace embankment of red plastic seats with a simple slanting roof over the top. What do the people watch? I have a suspicion it might be watching the Sultan playing Polo.
There is a groundsman’s shed here which is locked so I get myself bedded down in a corner at the back of the seats. It’s a little bit cramped for space, but as long as I am not planning on wriggling too much in the night it should be fine.
Sitting up, here I am in a sports stadium that I have all to myself. I am watching the sun going down; the sky is turning a darker blue, and the mosque is silhouetted on a back drop of stars. The last birds are finding their roosts. Around the outside of the stadium people are still driving around, like people do in cities, fuelled on that which brings this country it’s wealth. Ear plugs in, and I’m off to dream somewhere else for the night.
The next day I go to visit the city museum, which mostly seems to be full of the relics of the Sultan’s family. There is a history of his and his family’s military career, documented by various items such as uniforms, old hand-guns, even older swords.
There is much pomp about the place and it is made mildly less dull by decorating the place with vast ornate gold and silverware plates and urns and highly decorative carpets hang from the walls. It’s really quite a job to make a museum really engaging, and this one is pretty normal in that respect. I have never seen such a magnificently shiny marble floor though.
I go and get myself a dose of normality and after having looked round all the markets and fed myself on bananas and such things, it is apparent that all the happening tourist things are to be found not in Brunei but Borneo.
I make my way to a hussling bussling bus station, crowded with people keen to be elsewhere and others looking sometimes baffled at which way they ought to be going now.
Using the pages from a guide to South-East Asia that I had photocopied in a library in Darwin in combination from some enthusiastic help – from a man who seems to be directing the people traffic when it gets stuck – I find myself onto the right bus that will take me northwards to Borneo.
I get the bus that will take me up to the ferry that will in turn carry me across the border by water to Lawas. The ferry is like one of those double-width narrow boats you get in England for taking tourists on day trips up the canals. The boat is low in the worryingly chocolate brown of the river. A lot of forest is being ploughed up pretty much wholesale in order to re-plant it with the trees that produce the profitable palm oil as found in many western foods. This is all very well for us, but the orangutans for whom this is/was home are losing habitat to the point of becoming almost totally extinct.
At the border town of Lawas, the border control is a routine process. I rather get the impression that a lot of people are crossing just to do their shopping here in what is the nearest available town.
I get the bus north to to the conspicuously Englishly named Beaufort.
The town owes its name to one Leicester Paul Beaufort, a barrister from Manchester who between 1895 and 1900 was the colonial governor of Labuan (North Borneo).
I go to a covered market place that is completely heaving with people. and have some proper fun buying some very tasty carrots, bean sprouts and rambutan and get into some theatricals with two women sellers all of us using our broken languages together. People are friendly and I feel very comfortable walking through the crowded market and the only person to stare at me is a small kid.
Noshing on my lunch, I have an idea to head up to Mount Kinubalu in the Highland Region of Sabah and at 4095 metres, it is the second highest peak in South-east Asia (the highest being Hakabo Razi (5881 metres) in Myanmar; and I’m not going there cos its too far on the bus and their government is nasty).
I go to the nearby train station and find the ticket office closed. Waiting, I am approached by ‘Lo’, a Chinese man of fifty years with five children. He works at the railway and we have an interesting discussion about agriculture. He takes me for breakfast and buys me the Malaysian version of Milo (which is the New Zealand version of Ovaltine) and a Chinese bread bun with sweet black bean paste in the middle – it is like a healthier version of a doughnut and very tasty. The cafe is just like the Chinese version of an English greasy spoon. It’s full of shopkeepers and market stall holders bracing themselves for the day to come over tea and cigarettes. The food is different. The ambience and formica is the same.
Getting back on the small train, Lo finds me again and we talk some more – he gives me two loquats which have creamy yellow skins and are about an inch long in an ovally/round shape. You squeeze them at one end to burst them open slightly. They have a segmented fruit like an orange but the texture of lychee or rambutan and have a creamy lemony taste. They are very very moreish.
I see my first monkeys! (Ticks another box on imaginary tourist ‘must-see’ list.) From the train I see one in someone’s vegetable patch, guiltily munching a big red watermelon, and two others skanking about…
I am drying loquat seeds, which I intend to send to Dawn and Chris in Belize.
The train takes an hour or so to get to Koto Kinabalu or ‘KK’, the bustling city of Sabah, the northern end of Malaysian Borneo.
I imagine what all those pictures the BBC give us of the Middle East would look like without all the rubble, bomb and bullet holes. It would look like here. I wander aimlessly round another department store and get more lunch. The city here is pretty easy to get round – it’s about as spacious as an ordinary western town and nobody picks me out as being unusual.
The bus from KK wends its way up windy forested roads, interspersed with ramshackle housing. It’s curious to note how some of these houses sometimes have cars parked in driveways that look to be worth more than the house might be. As I found with Belize, there is something I find deeply comforting about a certain level of basic functionality in places like this. I like to think that people living what I imagine to be more natural lives have maybe more time for each other. The warmth and the rich green of the mountain valleys all adds to an air of relaxedness.
On the way to Mount Kinubalu, the bus stops at the sleepy town of Tambunan. To my untrained eye, it looks to me like a major part of the population here is Chinese but they are in fact Dusun, which is the main name for about thirty sub-tribes who live mostly in the mountain regions of Borneo. The Dusun, noted for their peaceable ways, have mostly been assimilated from their animist roots into modern day society.
The journey has been long enough for one day, and I find a nice big river to spend the rest of the day sitting next to. At this end, the river is nice and clean looking, unlike the other end down on the coast where the water has been turned chocolate brown by soil run-off from deforestation.
Later in the evening I go for a bit of a nosey around and walk through a collection of homes that are something between a small English housing estate in stature but with quite nice looking wooden chalets. I notice people sitting inside, talking what seems to be quite loudly in an otherwise silent evening. I don’t hear anybody driving off to go to the pub or anything like that. It is all quiet outside. From some houses come the tell-tale fluctuating blue-grey glare of TV screens, with the excited voices of some Bornean game show host or other.
I walk further on and instead tune in to the crickets burr-burring away in the undergrowth.
This is a very easy place to be. I don’t know if this is just because I have been to a couple of non-western countries before. Maybe because I am carrying almost nothing. Maybe that helps.
The village here has a great peace about it that hangs tangibly in the air like a rain-forest fog.
At day-break I am woken by several chickens that have come to find their breakfast in the sand by the river, completely unbothered by my presence.
So here I am; under a broad wooden bridge where I slept last night, in a mountain village in Highland Borneo, a wide shallow river sliding through scatters of small boulders and sand. Exotic or what. I have brought no sleeping bag or tent with me. I laid on my Thermarest mat wearing my raincoat over my tee shirt, and another two tee shirts upside-down over my legs as a kind of baggy trouser ensemble. Just about passably warm enough which is a fair trade-off for being able to travel now so wonderfully lightly. I can see the appeal for spending a whole trip just in tropically warm places and not needing to account for all sorts of varying climates and having to carry warm coats and extra contingency stuff.
I wander back into town to where the buses come and go from, and consulting an extremely vague tourist map that I picked up for free, conclude that Ranau is where I need to be headed next if I am going to go up Mount Kinabalu.
The journey across country is luxuriant, great green valleys of busy agriculture, ploughed fields where the landscape is calm, and tea plantations. I am in the Highland Tea region. So this is the kind of place my cuppa char comes from. Nice.
Every place has its own feel, and where Tambunan seemed like a sleepy end of the road kind of backwater, Ranau seems to be something of a hub, connecting far flung places. The place is full of colour, of small-time shops selling all kinds of cheap brightly-coloured plastic knick-knacks, a garish bazaar of household tat and bags of crisps and snacks. A compact silver umbrella takes my eye, and I buy it, thinking it might come in handy in this slightly unknown climate.
I go and find an internet cafe above a shop, and ascending the stairs find it full of teenagers doing intergalactic battle with unseen opponents across the web. My usual space of write down and catch-up, of commas and full-stops to whatever has been riding in my head, is littered with the sound of battle scenes across multiple other universes.
Afterwards stepping back out into the glare of the sunshine I am glad of the relative peace of normal town life. Agricultural pick-up trucks and mopeds, mothers doing shopping with wayward snotty-nosed toddlers in tow, teenagers hanging out and old men chatting and watching the world happen.
I need to get another bus again in order to get to Mount Kinabalu and I board the one heading to Kundasang, the village where I need to get off.
Today I am feeling very comfortable about life. The ride up into the mountain is lovely. It could be New Zealand with Malaysians. They even have Punga here. (Tropical man-fern, like a crown of bracken on top of a skinny tree trunk with no other leaves.) It’s like South Wales with tropical; Belize with money.
Kinabalu National Park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it is so with very good cause; it boasts long lists of fabulous biological statistics (information courtesy of Kinabalu National Park)
Mount Kinabalu because of its broadly diverse geological and climatic features, is one of the richest areas of bio-diveristy on the planet;
The most species of orchids in the world (over 800),
600 species of ferns including fifty that are unique (the whole of Africa has 500),
The most and the largest incestivorous pitcher plants (five of the thirteen are unique to the area).
The largest flower in the world, Rafflesia Keithii which grows up to a metre across (and smells like rotten meat).
There are 326 species of birds here and about a hundred types of mammal including one of the four great apes: the orangutan.
There are 5000 – 6000 plant species, more than there are in North America and Europe put together; all found here on this one mountain.
I walk halfway up the track that leads up Mount Kinabalu. This is, broadly speaking, the highest area in South East Asia. The journey up is, in climbing up highest peaks on continents terms, relatively straight-forwards, as the starting point at the village is already fairly well on the way there in terms of altitude. Just getting off the bus at the bottom of the mountain I have to make a point of walking at half my normal speed and taking smaller steps in order to prevent myself from getting out of breath. When I reach a checkpoint halfway, I find that they want to charge me 160 Ringgets (about thirty quid) to climb to the top with a guide. I am somewhat aggrieved by this, but ruefully have to admit to myself that a guide would probably keep me from accidentally mashing myself up in some stupid manner. There is no-one here to take me anywhere now anyway. I decide to stop by the hut for the night and eat peanut brittle for my supper and eventually I fall asleep under my umbrella.
The following morning I go check out the incredible panoramic view that lay spread before me; an ocean of treetops lay all around, early morning cloud hugging the lower hilly peaks.
I take photos of curly ferns, crash out for a bit as the rising suns rays manage to climb out above the clouds. It was a cool night and not the most restful. The morning sun is an invitation to unwind my bones properly and catch up with undone bits of sleep.
After the sun therapy I spend the rest of the day walking back down through one of the parks circuitous tracks to the entrance. This is a wondrous journey of psychedelic explosions of green variety and quite mesmerising. What ordinarily would have been a short journey becomes something quite exhausting; there is a beauty here so continually astonishing that it demands my considerable awe and wonder. Many times I have to stop and let myself get drawn in to the myriad little kingdoms of green. I couldn’t begin to tell you the names of any of it. What must it have felt like to be an early colonial botanist here?
I have dry noodles out of my rucksack for tea and then crash out heavily on one of the other less-used looking tracks nearby until it starts to rain. I have to get me, an umbrella that is marginally too small and won’t stay where I want it, a torch that barely works, a pile of tat and my continuously disintegrating jandals down to somewhere that looks like it might keep the rain off me – the Chinese-style archway entrance to the park next to a hotel.
The arch is lit up all night which means there are birds there catching the light-loving insects all night. The birds squeak frantically all night, but at least the insects don’t get much of a chance to eat me.
I sleep badly, but do manage to have some very odd dreams. In the morning I scrape copious quantities of bird poo off my umbrella, have a good stretch and go and have a good old English breakfast of beans on toast in the cafe on the other side of the road.
Having regained a fair portion of my senses, I take a bus from outside the cafe to Poring, another part of the National Park; where hot springs, giant waterfalls and orangutans are promised.
Upon arrival my travel-grunged body is yearning as usual for an opportunity for a good de-greasing.
I take a bath in the hot springs and promptly get pounced upon by seven Malay kids who want to practice their English on me, so I oblige them. Where am I from?, Their name is, What is my job?, Am I married?, and all that. They are on holiday with their mum and dad and that they’re Christians is as about as much as I can work out. They are clearly very pleased about it all anyhow.
The pools, spruced up for the tourists, are quite luxurious compared to the houses in the village immediately next to the ‘resort’. The locals come in and use the facilities for nothing (as well they ought).
After, I go for a walk across a high-top canopy walkway and the wondrousness of the surroundings steps up to a whole new level, literally. The walkway is horizontal and steps out off the sloping landscape past tree trunks until it hits the canopy. Suddenly, with almost no effort, we all all standing out in the tree crowns with a birds eye view of the whole valley below.
I get chatting to a couple of women from Hong Kong. It’s interesting to me what a western outlook they have. It feels like they could just as easily have come from San Francisco or Sydney. They have that city savvy about them, which for me is a curious combination with our current surroundings; another exotic from another angle.
We go with the guide to meet Jackie, a miserable orangutan. She’s either lonely, sick of playing tricks for tourists or has a sixth sense that the population of her species is utterly screwed. Possibly all three. She grabs her requisite bunch of bananas and buggers off as soon as she gets the opportunity.
After this somewhat distressing episode, I decide to set off for Poring’s big waterfall, with the intention of sleeping by a bat cave en route.
Sleeping next to thousands of bats has the unexpected advantage of it being an insect-free area, so I sleep very well. Next time you’re in some fly-ridden hell hole like the Aussie outback or Scotland, just take a load of pet bats with you. No snakes or monkeys or wildcats attack either. I don’t suppose the bats hunting talents extend quite that far though.
I always believe I am safe when I sleep outside. I am protected by the Goddess of the Rough Sleepers, a close friend and ally of the Goddess of the Dumpster.
A wonderful walk uphill to the waterfall. (I haven’t got there yet.) Many interesting seeds fruits and plants to see and photograph. I have no idea what any of them are. I keep imagining all the stories I will have to tell when I get back to England. And then again maybe hardly anyone will want to hear stories. Last time I went back to England I was thrown by a certain level of indifference, some people just want to talk about how they hate their job or how their teacup has a crack in it. So who am I if I go back to England and don’t have a story or two to keep a conversation alive? That really seems like the ‘important question’ today. In actuality, ego-trips aside, I’m still just me. Maybe I can be more open and connect a bit better this time. We shall see.
Really, strangely, up in this mountain in this tropical rainforest, I am just an ordinary foreign person in somebody else’s ordinary world. This exotic otherness is just a brief snapshot in my world. For the animals that live here, for the people who live in the villages below; this has been going on all their lives. It’s just normality to them.
I feel this is a good way to connect to a place. That’s how I saw Darwin, the Outback, New Zealand. You really get to see how both ordinary and marvellous everywhere is, both at the same time, depending on who you are, the local or the visitor.
Really, if I were Malaysian, Chinese, Aborigine or Tlinget, My old friend Don’s house in Newbury, Berkshire or Helen’s 18th century cottage in Norfolk would be just as astonishing to them as any of their places have been for me.
What’s even more astonishing is knowing that all these ordinary amazing places are all happening at once, right now.
Well now, I have a waterfall to go and see. I can hear its distant thunder calling me through the continuous rustling chirruping and hooting of the forest.
Passing by all these tangled tree roots at my feet I am led to think of a certain tangle of roots at the base of five beech trees on the lip of the great Stone circle at Avebury in Wiltshire England, a place I’ve always felt is the belly button of my world.
A place I remember first visiting as a school kid of six years old, going out of the town without my parents for the first time in my life. It was day trip organised by my primary school and what do I see as I get off the bus clutching my lunch-box? An enormous ring of giant stones, twice the height of an adult, lining a huge circular deep ditch a quarter of a mile in diameter.
It’s truly awesome to an adult. I can only imagine my first impressions of my home countryside as a small child. The spirit, the humming peace of things growing, dying and turning the circle of an English woodland I can feel here in this tropical jungle. It’s the same. I think I’m re-connecting.
I see three butterflies each five inches wide with brown markings that make them look like fluttering hawks.
The roar of the waterfall gets closer and closer until I am there, almost upon it. The waterfall is more of a great long diagonally descending river almost and not the vertical drop I was expecting. Well, I have got here, and the journey up was full of magic, so thank you for inviting me here.
I about-turn, and revisit the little magical landmarks of my route up.
On the bus back to Koto Kinabalu, the rain is torrential. I guess this must be monsoon weather. The town is flooded, cars dodge wheel-deep half-lakes in the city road and people hide under the eaves of tatty Chinese shops. It looks like a lot of people have been taken by surprise; many people seem not to have umbrellas, Everyone’s trying to duck the unavoidable where they can and mostly failing, everyone’s clothes are seemingly melted to their bodies.
I’m in town and it’s clearly not a night for camping. I book in to ‘Lucy’s Homestay’ and play cards with Stephanie, a Dutch girl and two English blokes. A taste of home. Hmmm…. I think I’m looking forwards to it. The rain crashes down on the tin roof relentlessly.
Next day:
I spend some time wondering around town some more.
Sign noticed in supermarket halfway up escalators: ‘Beware Of Your Head’. Good advice I say.
In the same supermarket; a baldness cream which advertises itself as a ‘Hairy Fact’.
Whilst squatting down next to my pack at the bus depot, a young mother walks past with her three children. Her youngest, a girl of about three is wearing the best shoes ever; they are bright red and with every step she makes comes a high pitched SQUEEEEK!
The train from just outside KK (Tanjano Aru?) to Beaufort rattles along for an hour or two. En route I meet a woman of forty-two with her two kids and we exchange polite conversation as befits her limited English.
I change trains at Beaufort again where it takes a further three hours to shake rattle and roll along the track following an ever-brown river that winds its way up through the mountains.
We go past a train station with the name ‘Lo Fatt’. It should have a platform full of anxious dieters but sadly it doesn’t.
At Tenon my guts are wobbly after too much crisps and five hours of shaking.
I’m feeling a bit grotty and can’t-be-arsed.
It’s dusk and there’s the strangest Hitchcockian spectacle ever – the town is absolutely filled with birds. There are thousands and thousands of them. They are everywhere except on the ground. They are all the same species, looking rather like sparrows. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a hundred thousand of them. Even more amazing perhaps is that it is not raining endless streams of white shiny bird poo.
Whilst standing outside a Chinese greasy spoon and trying to figure out how to ask for my dinner before going in, a rather portly chap comes up to me and invites me inside. He figures out the menu and we eat together. Somehow, almost inevitably, he grins happily at me and convinces me to pay for his dinner, which is ‘backuss sedap’ (very good, delicious). This is countered by the promise that he’s going to take me out for drinks, and this time he will pay for me.
His name is Michael, he’s a telephone engineer from Koto Kinabalu on work out of town for a day or two and is looking for company.
I was planning on finding a lovely free ditch somewhere, but for the sake of simplicity, I go along with his plan to find me a hotel for the night. Looked at from a variety of angles this situation could turn out to be as dodgy as anything especially as I have just bought him dinner, but really things feel okay I think. It’s a strange feeling being in a situation like this. It’s very much an internal conversation between my instincts and the kind of worried thoughts that can often occur. You always hear such mixed tales about strange scenarios with people you don’t know in places you haven’t necessarily got the measure of. When every day is different, your fortune can change at the turn of a corner. I just hope our culture gap manages to mask any overt signs of doubt. It seems too.
We go to a karaoke bar and we drink Carlsberg and I attempt to sing ‘Hey Jude’. I’ve never sung anything in public before, let alone amplified with a microphone. In celebration of this fact, the woman running the machine turns the volume down so all you can hear is Paul McCartney ‘la-la-la-la-ing’. My singing’s not THAT bad is it? I guess it must be.
Michael doesn’t sing his half of the bargain, and we leave to find another karaoke bar. It’s closed and Michael leads me down a dirty-looking darkened back alley with stacks of cardboard boxes that anyone could be hiding behind. Fortunately, I’m just about drunk enough not to start freaking.
We arrive instead at a small cafe of the Chinese greasy spoon variety and an old man brings us a bottle of ‘Arak’ which is the local hooch, which of course I am obliged to try. It’s made from coconuts and tastes like eco-friendly drain cleaner. I wish I was from the Highlands of Scotland and could say ‘Very nice. Hmm, now try OUR local brew…’
I have the distinct feeling it is going to make me quite ill, but waking up the next morning, miraculously, I feel reasonably okay. This sense is betrayed when I look in the mirror and see that I look like I’ve been sat on by an elephant.
The previous night, the old man had tried to sell me a taxi ride for this morning’s planned journey to the agricultural museum for thirty Ringget, but when I told him I could get the bus for two Ringget he graciously conceded. What gentlemen; even when trying to make a fast buck.
Another shop front: ‘Chin Advertising’ (A rubber stamp that says ‘Get A Shave Today!!!’ perhaps?)
An industrial works signpost: ‘Kac Quarry’ (Coff.)
November 9th 2004
In town I see the old man again and he asks me what I think of ‘Arak’, to which I politely lie, though I do act out graphically how I feel like somebody has pulled my eyes out, rubbed them on the ground, jumped on them and then pushed them back into my head again. I figure that is not an undiplomatic gesture as I guess booze the world over leaves you with that feeling. He laughs and points out which bus I need to get.
Rather than hanging about with a dull hangover in a bustling street waiting for a bus, I decide to walk out of town.
This seems to be a good move and I enjoy walking past various houses and shacks hiding in the undergrowth alongside the road. People going about their homely morning activities; throwing out dishwater, feeding the chickens, putting out the washing, bare feet to the earth.
I flag down a bus and go to the agricultural museum.
A very grand entrance to a place with lots of employees but strangely no other visitors which I find a bit sad. It’s such a shame to go to all the effort of maintaining this place and have no-one here to appreciate it. I guess that’s part of the process of trying to create a tourist industry instead of just mangling your forests for a living.
I earnestly read some information boards, eagerly start walking down the path that leads to tropical fruit trees and promptly get attacked by bees.
After some friendly fussing over by some staff and me nursing an astonishingly painful ache in the back of my neck, we figure out where the bees nest is and I duly give it a wide berth.
I am only moderately terrified.
First prize for my efforts: another chocolate pudding tree with lots of fruit on it.
At last; my quarry! My Holy Grail! What do they taste like? I hear you ask, and I am hugely embarrassed to admit that even after my global questing in search of the mythical chocolate pudding tree, I feel compelled to bow to the instincts of cultural courtesy that dictates that I don’t go scrumping from an exotic fruit museum. Especially as the staff here have just been so nice to me. I guess this leaves me with an open excuse to conduct a sequel journey; ‘Return of the Chocolate Pudding Fruit Hunter’ or something.
I discover a number of other interesting trees, among them rambutan, lychee, ackee from the Caribbean, breadfruit and weirdest of all, the Monkey Pot tree which has a seed pod a bit like an acorn the size of a coconut on it which forms a handy drinking vessel when the fruit is removed.
I visit an orchid centre, which at last there are other people at, a young family with their two kids. I attempt to take lots of arty photos of orchids, but ultimately get bored by the contrivedness of it all. I’ve got ‘Can’t Get You Of My Head’ the Kylie Minogue song stuck in mine. The whole event makes me question my sexuality again.
There are huge scary black bees about an inch and a half long. They possibly wouldn’t have so scary if I hadn’t so recently had one Kamikaze itself at full thwack into the back of my neck.
I plan my moves cautiously.
It’s been a strange day here, wandering round a meticulously manicured garden full of bushes with fantastic flowers, wide spreading lawns and a pagoda cum ice cream shop surrounded by an unnaturally landscaped lake that looks as though it has been nicked from Alton Towers.
All this effort and barely anyone here to appreciate it. The staff here don’t seem to mind. It makes me want to go and hang out at BSB airport and corral every tourist that gets off the plane; ‘Look! I know you are going off to look at caves and monkeys and buy cheap DVDs, but there’s these really nice people at the end of a railway line up a mountain that could REALLY do with some visitors to make their lives worthwhile..’
I wonder how I could effectively bribe them?
I get the bus back to Tenom with a very interesting old fellow who’s of one of the local ethnic groups. (He tells me there are thirty six.) He was in the British Army which is why he speaks such good English. On the way back to town we divert down a jungly track and drop off a young schoolgirl of about nine years old at her family home.
Waiting for the train back to Beaufort I meet a young chap who is also in the army. He comes from Tenom but is doing his training in KK and is expecting to do a years service in Indonesia. He’ll only get home to see his wife and two young children once every six months.
The train back down the mountain has gravity on its side this time and it shudders and rocks with an even wilder abandon than before, it’s like being on a ghost train.
The guide book says it is notorious for de-railing and I can quite believe it. Then again nobody seems phased – in fact most people seem amused by it (including me), and also it’s only cost me 2.75 Ringgets (about forty-five pence) so it’s the best value Russian-roulette-ghost-train-with-jungle ride I’ve ever been on.
At Beaufort I hitch a lift with four young chaps going to Simitang and we groove merrily on our way to the music of the Black Eyed Peas (‘Where Is The Love?’) which fills a linguistic gap nicely.
At Simitang it’s dusk. It’s Ramadan and people are busy with their first meal of the day. I go to the first ‘restoran’ I see, a halal one, and have rice, greens and tofu served by two giggling teenage girls in head-scarves.
(And now the French have made it illegal for Muslim girls to wear head-scarves in French schools. Damn the stupid French.)
I was going to sleep under a bridge I spotted whilst coming into town but it’s a bit too nasty. I go lay down instead behind a mosque next to the sea. I can hear the Imam doing his Koranic yodelling whilst I watch distant lightning out at sea.
Two entwined dragonflies pass by. How can dragonflies have sex whilst flying? How come they don’t just crash?
I can hear the waves breaking and a breeze is blowing through a line of coconuts trees. This is almost a special moment but for the fact that I’m really really really desperately bored; I am in a weird limbo of almost being on my way back home, feeling like I am now just going through the motions on this last little bit of my travelling expedition.
I go for a walk to the other end of town and sleep out near the road. I trip out on memories of being in my twenties, of girlfriends and various situations we found ourselves in. That seems to do the trick and I feel much better.
In the morning no bus is to be found and I get hijacked by a taxi driver who then drives me to the Sabah-Sarawak border. I buy peanuts from a teenage girl and give her three times what she asks me. She furrows her eyebrows asking me ‘why?’ and looks a bit offended. Oops. My simple unthinking gesture of goodwill might very possibly have really pissed her off. I have a suspicion that maybe I have unintentionally made her a ‘charity case’ against her will and offended her pride.
I get a bus to Lawas where I’m hoping there is a domestic flight to the south that bypasses having to bugger about in Brunei. Ordinarily, I would always choose to go overland rather than flying, but I guess I’m starting to hit a certain kind of fatigue with things. It’s the last day of Ramadan (I think) and all the flights are full of boarding school children going home (or something like that).
I walk back into town and book into a hotel, get very washed, shaved and clean up all over. I have reached a point of grunginess where absolutely everything is pissing me off. I watch TV and wish I had something better to do. I write a bit and then go out to a Chinese greasy spoon just downstairs from where I am roomed. It seems to be the restoran of choice and is very busy, with hectic slightly confused looking teenagers running around trying to keep up with everything. I wait patiently for my meal which turns out to be rather disappointing. I think in their hecticness they have forgotten to put any sauce on the food. Never mind.
In the morning I get the ferry to Brunei and then get the bus back to BSB and eat at a fantastic Halal restoran. The proprietors looks rather grumpy. I wonder whether this is because of Ramadan slowing business down for them, or whether this is their natural disposition. Whichever way, the food tastes like it has been cooked with love.
At the hubbub-bly bus depot I buy a ticket south to Seria and on the bus talk to an Indonesian girl who is working as a chamber maid. She is away from home because it is easier to work and study here; Indonesia is too unstable.
At Seria there is a strong British army presence. There’s also loads of oil refinery industrial sites too.
I get the bus to Miri and then another bus towards my destination of Batu Niah caves where I spend half the journey talking to an anthropology student.
I find a nice quiet bus shelter to spend the night in and sleep quite comfortably. Up at 6 am I get a bus to Batu Niah village for one Ringget (fifteen pence) then walk four kilometres to where the National Park and its giant caves are. (The caves are among the largest in the world.) I buy my entrance ticket, read some information boards and head out along a board-walk which looks quite promising as it transports me away from civilised lawns and buildings and once more into the bush.
The landscape is unexpected with low cliff escarpments that are weird and tantalising. Big outcrops of limestone that look like castle ruins are all over the place, all being over-run by snaking writhing vines and impossible tree roots. It’s all a bit Indiana Jones. I’m really glad I came, and I haven’t even got to the cave yet!
This place really is surreal.
A couple of times I am passed by small mysterious chaps with enormously loaded sacks twice their own torso size upon their backs. I come to a point on the track where I am obliged to buy bits of tat from seven stallholders, all of them old women. No doubt you can appreciate the fairytale undertones here. I buy trinkets from each of them, in fear that I may be misdirected along the path and into the waiting mouth of a giant troll or something.
Having paid off this elderly indigenous matriarchal Mafioso, I wend my way a short distance further and happen upon the most spectacular crevice I have ever come across. (Stop it there you in the cheap seats.)
The track enters into a great long cavernous overhang that is open to the jungle all along it’s right hand side. There are ricketty-looking scaffold-like structures made from bamboo that reach high up to the cavern’s ceiling, and flights of steps built also from short lengths of bamboo that snake around the random bulgings of the rock wall. They are the handiwork of the workers I have seen earlier, for them to stand on to reach high up ledges of the birds nest of Swiftlets. My jaw drops and I laugh in utter wonder. This truly is an astonishing place. It really is like being in a fantasy film. It’s more Lord of The Rings than Lord Of The Rings itself. Or Indiana Jones. Take your pick.
I take loads of photos and follow some very inviting wooden steps that snake their creaky way up to the next even more enormous, even more exciting cave.
The entrance to the cave is about 200 metres wide. There is a little house in the middle of the entrance which serves to emphasise the vastness of this second cave.
As I enter into the cave it gets darker. I can hear voices calling. As I venture in, I see lamp lights. High up in the very tops of the cave some one hundred metres up, I can see two men trowelling out bird nests into a bucket. They use dim paraffin lamps and instead of using ropes, they have shimmied up long lengths of bamboo tied end to end that are somehow attached to the ceiling of the cave.
This is the stuff that becomes bird’s nest soup, which really is made of bird’s nests;
The swiftlets that nest here make their nests from a kind of salivary cement which for the purposes of making soup, is dissolved into a gelatinous substance that is rich in nutritious minerals. The nests are the most expensive animal food product on the planet. One nest can be worth nearly a thousand US dollars. Mostly it gets exported to Hong Kong and the United States. These guys don’t look like they are getting particularly rich on it, but it does explain their willingness to risk their necks.
Further into the cave, the ground drops away and steps follow it down. In the distance the glorious sunlit green of the jungle shines in through another large round entrance on the far side, rimmed with glowing ferns and dusty sun-beams.
Over to the right, the steps drop down and down into inky blackness. The board walk and railings hairpin down steeply into the dark. At the bottom I turn off my torch. I see nothing at first, but then can make out other collectors’ lamplights away in the distance. Their calling to each other in the darkness is mesmerising.
People have lived in these caves as far back as 40,000 years ago and this is the earliest known settlement in Eastern Malaysia. The whole place is truly surreal.
Following the wooden steps even further, I bump into an English woman who I get talking to and, knob taking control of brain, I turn back uphill and leave the caves with her.
We talk for a while and then we get a taxi to the village. She heads south and then I get a taxi with a chap who has delivered pak choi from Miri and wants to carry a load of something/anything (this time me) back to Miri so as to make the most of the journey.
I wander round Miri city centre and try to find somewhere to sleep out. I feel lonely.
I find a better place to sleep out on top of a half-constructed building. I get a good view of the town, and I don’t think anyone can see me up here. There’s a banging techno party going on just across the road which plays high speed hardcore noise at the same pace all through the night right until the morning. After the sublime pleasures of my journey here, it’s all a bit psychotic. Thank god for earplugs.
The next morning:
At the bus depot I spot two confused looking backpackers, whom I take to be Canadians on account of a certain innocent air they have about them. Once I’ve given them the benefit of my new found local bus route knowledge I discover they are actually from Melbourne.
We get on well and end up booking into the same hostel in BSB and having lunch at my new favourite Halal restoran again. I make the mistake of ordering a bit of everything, and instead of getting little bits enough to fill a plate, I’m given a whole plateful of each, which is enough food to bloat the guts of three people. They must have thought I was American.
As I am wondering how on earth I am going to eat this enormous quantity of fabulous looking food, an Irishman I had met earlier walks past the restoran door. I call him in and order him to eat as much as he can.
The Aussies at the hostel leave for Sabah the next day and in the meantime I meet some new temporary friends who this time some them really do turn out to be from Canada, another is from England and one woman who is half Dutch half Indonesian.
I spend some time hanging out with the Canadians and playing curly Frisbee on a descending stair-wall that curves in on itself so that when you throw the Frisbee against one side of the wall it gets centrifugally stuck to the wall, rolls round to the end of the wall and comes back at you again boomerang style.
The Irish guy has printed a fake ‘Lonely Planet’ journalist ID card which he’s trying to use to blag a free stay in a swanky hotel. Another English guy can see an opportunity to not pay for his accommodation in the hostel we are now in. I tell him he’s being crap.
The people here are very trusting and helpful and for the most part very friendly – they have asked us to just leave any money we owe them under our pillows if we happen to leave while no-one is at the reception desk. It’s really refreshing that there are still places in the world where skin colour or religion don’t seem to be a dividing issue. And this guy thinks he’s being smart to rip them off of the ten dollars (three quid) a night they are asking for us to stay here. I put it to him that there better things than saving three quid, like respecting the kindness of strangers for instance. Especially considering how strained East-West relations are in other parts of the world. Little things count for a lot.
Two days before I am due to fly back to Britain it is the first day of Hari Raya, the big feasting that goes on after Ramadan has finished. The idea of Ramadan is that everyone spends one lunar month spiritually cleansing themselves by not eating during the day, and only eating ‘moderate’ foods in the evening, that is, not cakes and sweets and gack. So of course this Hari Raya festival is highly gack-centric, and everyone goes round and visits their friends and gives them presents. The streets are full of people sitting around on the pavement chatting and smoking cigarettes and eating little bits and pieces. It’s a kind of relaxed chaos.
The next day, my last, we all get ourselves tarted up to visit the Sultans palace.
His Majesty The Sultan of Brunei, Hassanai Bokiah, makes over ninety Euros a second (that’s over fifty million euros a week!) and the people of his country love him; they have free medical care, free schools and pay no taxes.
The entire country is invited to come and shake hands with the great man himself, the second richest man in the world.
We are required to have various parts of our anatomy covered and some of us have a bit of hassle finding sufficient clothing to meet the required standard. I end up borrowing a bed sheet and wearing it as a sarong to ensure proper knee coverage. It looks authentic to me, though I have this nagging feeling that to the locals I may just look like a stupid tourist wearing a bed sheet.
I hope that I am suspecting correctly that no-one will actually care.
We get the bus and join the thronging crowd of all-together more gloriously dressed masses all wearing their Sunday best (maybe that should be Saturday best?)
I really envy the Muslims for their wonderful clothes. I fantasise about getting myself some wonderful Muslim women’s clothes and turning up in England announcing ‘Hello I’m back – I’ve been away!’
We eat a free lunch of the expected delicious Malaysian nosh and, most unexpectedly, bread and butter pudding. I can’t help but think this must be a post-colonial legacy of some kind. It would be nice to think to think that the Brits left something worthwhile behind after several hundred years of dubious shenanigans in the far east.
Imagined posh Victorian colonialist:
‘Hello! We’ll take your best tea and opium and your naughtiest prostitutes, thank you! Here! Have some railways and bread and butter pudding! There you go what-ho! Ta-ta!’
After eating, the general populous splits into two queues, one for woman and children and one for men. (There’s a few kids in this queue too.) As we progress with mind-numbing slowness the queue gets bottle-necked into a tighter and tighter line. Three hours of preventing some kids from getting squashed; giving the evil eye to some bloke who decides that sticking his knuckles into my back is the way to move forward. Having some friendly incomprehensible chat with others as light relief, we eventually get to the front of the queue. At last we get to meet the Sultan!
Everyone is inspected by security police, not for bombs but for respectability. I get the hand-on-the-shoulder treatment and pulled out of the crowd for having naked toes. I know my feet can get a bit smelly, but this isn’t fair. The peaked-capped bloke jabbers and points at my feet in an unfriendly way. I know my toes are far too erotic for my own good, but can I help that? Apparently I can, by either finding some shoes or buggering off. I’m rather pissed off. They could’ve told me this BEFORE I queued in a sweaty mass of people for three dreary hours. I am handed a yellow plastic box. I’m confused. I am thinking there must be a pair of shoes inside that I can borrow, but they look like they would be miles too small. It’s not a pair of emergency jandals. It’s a box of sweets. It’s my consolation prize; everybody gets it whether they get to shake hands with the toe-sensitive Sultan or not. Bollocks to a box of sweets. I’m not a bloody kid. I almost throw them in a hedge on the way out. I try to laugh about it afterwards and sort of succeed, in a semi heat-exhausted gut-curdled kind of way…. Queuing for hours is still bloody tedious though whichever way you look at it. (Hrumph!)
Oh well at least I can get to say that I’ve eaten bread and butter pudding at the Sultan of Brunei’s palace on my last day of travelling.
I am very looking forwards to going back to England and some familiarity and loose-end tying. I’ve got four hours before my flight goes. I grab one of the many free buses that have been especially laid on to minimise the human confetti bottle-neck on the way out of the Sultan’s palace.
Everyone on the bus seems very excited. I imagine the chaps must have been discussing the state of the football league table with His Royal Most In Chargeness, or some such pally banter.
Getting back to the hostel I say my goodbyes to my new temporary friends. It’s lovely to end this chunk of my life the same way I’d started it; in the company of gently genial Canadians. What good chaps they all are. (Generalise, generalise…)
I get the bus back out to the airport and head for where I stashed my stuff. At first I can’t find anything which is a bit alarming. When I do, I pull everything out onto the grass to find that the tropical heat and occasional rain has started to do its decomposition thing on some of my stuff so enthusiastically that it hasn’t noticed that some of it is plastic and not actually meant to rot. Emptying everything out, I found a bunch of ants have decided that one of my boots would be a great place to start a new colony. Rather than coming in through any of the more polite entrances, they have just barged their way in by munching a hole through my rucksack. Well that makes a particularly cute bit of wear and tear I suppose.
When I go inside the airport, I get Gurkhed. This is a new word I have just made up for the process of having an interaction with one of her Majesty’s Gurkhas (so-called because they like Gurkhing I suppose). Actually there are two of them, so I guess I get double-Gurkhed.
Their mission seems to be to smuggle as many books as possible out of Brunei as they can manage. I figure these books are probably for some educational mission of some kind. Their Commanding Officer, a British chap of the ‘Stop-your-mucking-about-and-polish-those-boots’ variety, seems to be taking a dim view of their vaguely illegal activity of trying to palm off their huge quantity of excess baggage onto me. But as I joke to the C.O, it seems that with an army chap like him around, I feel fairly confident that I’m not being asked to carry a bomb. The C.O then decides that he will take a dim view of me as well. The check-in woman in her refreshingly paranoid-free dim-view proof Asian way happily takes everyone’s luggage and nothing more is said on the matter. I guess the C.O will now have to go and exercise his dim view elsewhere.
Passing through departures with my guitar and case under my arm, the Bruneian Airways attendant smiles happily, points at the guitar and says ‘Oh! This is your tennis racket?’ I tell him that ‘If it is, then I will surely win Wimbledon next year.’
FIN
Richard Terry 