Nanga Sumpa Longhouse – Sarawak

 BORNEO ADVENTURE

So I’m married now, her name is Ophelia, nice girl, cooks a mean chicken rice!!!...........Now that’s how this BlogSpot could have started had Ophelia not refused to pay the dowry of 5 cows, 3 goats, 2 chickens and proboscis monkey I had requested as payment for my hand in marriage.  Looking back though I’m thinking the monkey may have been the deal breaker..................

One of the locals leaving his mark

So after spending three weeks hold up in KK I finally managed to escape and headed south to Kuching to start my first official onsite project with Arkitrek.  The project is an ongoing renovation of a tourist longhouse in the Sarawak Rainforest near the Indonesian border and is part of the “Ulu Ai Experience”; offered by the eco-tourism company Borneo Adventure.  Their underline goal is to form a partnership with the local Iban community that enables them to offer their guests an alternative to the “Staged” forms of cultural tourism presently found in other parts of Borneo.  The idea being that by forming a sustainable relationship between the host’s and visitors, the visitors can then experience the local lifestyles but on the terms of the hosts.  In doing so the experience would benefit all involved, as the host’s reap the financial gains, the visitors receive a more authentic cultural experience and the local wildlife receives a rest bite from the relentless hunting inflicted by the local community.    In keeping with this a lodge was built across the river from the main Iban longhouse to provide accommodation for the visiting tourist, which consists of three separate buildings built at separate periods over the last 20 years;  The main lodge, the resource centre and the BBC Building.  The Main lodge was the first to be built followed by the Resource centre building, and finally the BBC building which was built over a period of a month.   The latter was given its name because it was specifically built to house the contestants of a reality TV show called “Fat Teens” back in 2007.   That’s right as part of the reality TV boom the BBC decided to send a bunch of fat teens into the Borneo jungle to work up a sweat and lose some pounds.  They even built a “jungle” lodge further up river as part of the show  that is so remote that the first thing I came across when I went there the first time was the reminisce of a large snake that had shed its skin in the communal area.  I really felt for those poor buggers when I saw that, as I’m guessing running probably wasn’t a viable option for them and this is some wild bush.  I can only imagine what it must have been like for them as even for the fittest this place can be hard going given that everything is on an incline. 

So as part of the brief the works were divided into two phases, phase 1 being to renovate the two smaller buildings (both in a state of disrepair) into additional accommodation over a 3 month period with all the onsite work being undertaken by the Iban Community.  For those who haven’t already googled it the Iban are an indigenous tribe that form the largest percentage of Sarawak’s population making them one of the biggest tribes in Borneo.  Most if not all still live in longhouses, which as the name suggest is a very long timber structure built on stilts, divided into several apartment type units occupied by different families and usually located on the river bank.   In essence they are basically like a terraced street constructed under one roof with the main road being the communal area or the “Ruai” where all the social activities occur.   As a community they generally still practice many of their traditions (hunting being one of them much to the dismay of the visitors) except for one (which I for one am very thankful of) and that is headhunting.   Yes that’s right the stealthy art of sneaking up behind your unsuspecting victim while they go about their daily business and taking off their head.  After which on returning to the safety of your own longhouse you would shave, skin, strip and hang your trophies above the fireplace (usually where the cooking took place) where it would stay preserved by the smoke and as a permanent reminder of your hunting prowess.    But what afforded you even more respect and admiration and elevated you to the status of the ultimate hunter was the number of woman and children’s heads you had on display.  Why you may ask? Well apparently it was considered very difficult to sneak up on a woman and or a child especially while they were bathing.  The thought shooting fish in a barrel pops to mind but it seems actually catching women and children off guard was an extremely rare occurrence and required a lot of skill and cunning.  Plus I’m guessing a woman bathing would probably have the attention of pretty much every male in the village from some unknown secure hiding place and thus reducing the chance of anyone sneaking up on her unnoticed. This pastime thankfully was outlawed when the Brits arrived in Sarawak or should I say the Brookes family arrived and has not been practiced since.  All in all I new this would be a culture shock for me and no doubt the Iban, as I got the feeling that those of the African persuasion rarely visit this part of Borneo.   Nevertheless it was an experience I was looking forward to and if anything I knew it would take me out of my comfort zone and throw some interesting challenges in my direction, something that hasn’t happened in a while.   

 

When we first arrived in Kuching (the boss came with) our time there was short and sweet, we only stayed there long enough to meet the client and stock up on supplies before heading to site.  Given I only had two weeks before the Christmas break and the journey to site took 6 hours, on this occasion exploring Kuching had to put on the back burner.  Now one of the main reasons I initially had concerns about working in such a remote location was the 6 hour journey it took to get there.  I had imagined a nightmare journey that involved rough roads and choppy seas on rickety, unreliable transport which probably should have been decommissioned years earlier.  However when it actually came to taking the journey much to my surprise It turned out to be considerably more pleasant than I expected, in fact I even felt parts of it were not long enough.  In particular the one and half hour longboat journey which to date is by far the most pleasant boat journeys I’ve taken especially considering that I’m not a major fan of boat journeys.   On arriving at the jetty the journey begins on one side of the Batang Ai Lake and takes you over glass like waters to the other side where it enters the “Batang Ai” river system.  From here it snakes its way deeper and deeper into the Sarawak rainforest flanked by pristine jungle as it gets narrower and shallower until at some points in the dry season the boatmen have to get out and push the boat up river.  By the time you have arrived chances are good you have seen or heard a couple of hornbills, seen the odd osprey fishing and for some even orang-utans watching curiously from the trees above.    I say some because that experience has eluded me thus far but I’m determined to catch sight of one of the red hairy buggers at some point as I know they’re up.

 

   I spent the next two weeks settling into my new surroundings, meeting the locals and getting to grips with the project.  By the time we arrived the two buildings had already been stripped internally so we set the locals the task of stripping the envelope,  while Nick the Dutchman and myself went about starting work on digging the pit for the sceptic tank.  As you can imagine the biggest hurdle was the language barrier and given that very few of the Iban spoke English (or just to me it seems) it meant I had to start learning some key phrases very quickly in order to get by.  “Hello”, “thank you”, “how are you?” “Yes I’ll have a top up” and “no I can’t get married today as I’m clipping my toenails” (this particular phrase flowing out like lyrical river).  It seems the women folk find it rather peculiar that a man of my years has not taken a wife and are hell bent on rectifying this oversight.   While the gents on the other hand are very much of the attitude that I am too young for such things even though most of them were married by 18.  Those first two weeks were quite an experience and I spent most of it digging a sceptic tank pit and answering such questions, as well as the mandatory “where are you from originally” and “what the hell are you doing out here”.  Luckily for me I had the lodge manager Nick the Dutchman (who’s been here for a while) as an interpreter and affectively my personal guide and Raymond (the site foreman) a local who has travelled quite a extensively and speaks very good English and actually understands mine, to keep me on the straight and narrow.  It wasn’t long though when they released I wasn’t going away that I received my first dinner invitation to long house.   The first thing I noticed about life in the longhouse was the transformation that occurred when the sun went down.  During the day it was as you would imagine a village community deep in the Borneo rainforest would be; rustic, sleepy and lacking in all mod coms and creature comforts, you would believe!!  But in the evening when the electricity came on (we only had 4 hours of electricity a night) the place would transform into something that resembled a city nightspot with bars, sports cafe’s and pumping house music.  It seems that once again even in this remote location where phone reception can only be achieved by trekking an hour and half up a large hill, that every apartment has satellite TV, a pumping stereo system and of course the obligatory karaoke machine.  If you couple that with rice wine and whiskey you can imagine what the evenings are like here.

         I was pretty much expecting the worse in the case of having to deal with a drunken work force on a daily basis and had spent quite some time figuring out how I was going to deal with it especially given the language barrier.  But as fate would have it I’d need not of worried as apparently before I’d arrived the situation had got so out of hand (full scale Brawls in the Ruai) that Borneo Adventure had stepped in and  recruited some help to basically perform a mass intervention.   The outcome was that the consumption of alcohol in the Ruai and the selling of it had been banned indefinitely and the only place which was considered acceptable to drink was in their own homes.  This surprisingly not only reduced the violence but also the rate of drinking and the knock affect was it spared me from the nightmare scenario of dealing with a drunken work force on site.  Only here would that be considered a blessing and not a requirement!  The only withdraw back with this situation was that whenever I wanted to have a wee tipple (and just a tipple mind) after a hard day’s work it was like trying to find speed in a retirement home?  But even so given the horror stories I’d heard from some the other interns about their experiences it was a no brainer and I considered it the lesser of two evils and accepted it gladly.  Although in saying that it wasn’t quite as dry as I make out as Nick had made a few contacts within the community and was able to source the necessaries on most occasions.........where there’s a will!!   It wasn’t long though before it was time for me to leave and I was back on the longboat heading to civilisation and Christmas break in the Philippines.  It had been quite an intense two weeks and in some ways I was looking forward to the change; because as I discovered even though it is such a beautiful and tranquil place, there is only so much time one can spend in the bush before cabin fever sets in, especially for a city boy like me.