Bario Town

I came to Borneo to get a taste of what I’d heard described as “brutal rain forest”. But getting to the jungle isn’t easy. Thoughts of landing in Borneo and being enveloped by a primary rainforest of hooting gibbons and swinging orangutans are quickly shattered when I land in Kuching, the capital of the Malaysian state of Sarawak. It’s an enormous city, over 600,000 people collected together along a slinky stretch of river – a blend of Chinese, Malay, Indians and indigenous Borneo tribes people (in this region principally the Iban culture, famous for their tattoos and notorious headhunting past).  

It turns out that a lot of people live in Borneo. The third largest island in the world is divided along several political and geographic lines. To the south, the Indonesian state of Kalimantan makes up nearly three quarters of the landmass, while to the north the two Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah orient themselves along the coastline’s southwest – northeast axis. Between them, the tiny Sultinate of Brunei clings on to an oil-rich foothold. Modern human activity on this enormous jungle island is mainly squeezed into the narrow corridor between the coast and the mountains. A dark asphalt vein connects people in a bustling web of gas stations and glass cities.

National parks pepper this stretch of human life, isolated pockets of preserved wilderness. Beautiful? Yes. Untamed jungle you come here dreaming to find? No.

To find that virginal rainforest you have to work for it. My destination was Bario, where the road ends – literally, there is no real road to get here. Beyond modern Malaysia’s power grid, the jungle rules. It is almost impossible to drive into the dark heart of Borneo. An signless, senseless weave of muddy logging tracks provides the only ground access to the remote destinations of Sarawak, but even the most experienced drivers get stuck, lost, are forced to turn back.

Traveling here means going over the forest rather than through it.  Rural airstrips are thatched together across the country, where little 15 seater planes drop by once or twice a day, carrying people and essentials.

On a map of Sarawak, Kuching and Bario are about as far as possible from each other. The little dot labeled Bario rubs up against the Indonesian border in an area called the Kelabit Highlands, a forest of dark green pinnacles named for the Kelabit people, who call Bario their cultural center. To get there you have to fly from the oil-boom city Miri, which butts up against Brunei on the eastern side of Sarawak. Staring at the map in my Kuching hotel, I am simultaneously thrilled by the epicness of the next twenty-four hours of travel and already exhausted by the thought.

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The first leg is a fourteen-hour drive. I am dreading the bus, which will undoubtedly require a sweatshirt and hat from the industrial AC vents you can’t switch off. So it feels like a sign from god when the dorm room opens and the hotel owner, Chris, sticks his head in.

“Dan, you’re going to Miri today, yes?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Have you reserved a bus yet?”

“No. Do I have to do that in advance?”

“These guys are going – you can get a ride with them if you want, just throw them some gas money.”

The guys in question are a group of Special Forces Police who make the trip between Miri and Kuching once a month for training exercises. Malaysia maintains an enormous, combat ready police force prepared to fight back against the army in the case of a military coup. These guys belong to the jungle warfare unit, which, besides being incredibly bad-ass, actively pursues and detains illegal loggers. They are forest protectors.

As I load my bags into the back of the pickup, one of the guys, Tal, gives me an enormous black garbage bag and tells me to put my pack in it. When I ask him why, he smiles and responds, “Because we drive with Four Wheel Drive.”

The trip is brutal. Kidney bruising.  This is the good road in Sarawak, but every two minutes I go bruisingly airborne into my seatbelt as the pickup thunders through another ditch, pothole, unexplainable highway speed bump. Red lights are everywhere, but Nam, the driver, seems oblivious. Maybe it’s because he’s got a police sticker on his windshield, because we’re hitting 120 kph on the surface roads past signs that say AWAS (SLOW), oblivious to the death throes of the shock absorbers.

Tal keeps turning back to look at me from the front passenger seat to ask if I’m sleeping yet. I try to reply but get cut short as the truck bucks into the air again. We all laugh together and he passes around a pack of Dunhills and we roll down all four windows and it feels like a road trip with my buddies, even though these guys are both 40 years old.

Exhausted and unable to sleep. No light to read, no music. I look out the window at a silent lightning storm raging through the night sky and can’t stop thinking about the absurdity of the moment. Roaring through the night in Borneo with a pair of jungle warfare fighters. There is a curved-handled machete under one seat and a pistol under another. And me with a backpack full of books, floating along without touching down, breezing along for a few hours with these guys, probably never to see them again. Unprecedented circumstances, I latch on and breathe deep and try to remember every detail of the now.

We roll into Miri past one in the morning and drop Tal off at his apartment, where a guard with an assault rifle lets us onto the base, and I feel nervous for a moment that maybe he thinks I’m some prisoner handcuffed in the back seat. Five minutes later, Nam is letting me out at my hotel and shaking my hand and he’s gone into the night.

I stand alone on the sidewalk, empty and reeling, trying to download for a second here before having to interact with humans again. I’m staring across the street at nothing in particular when a tiny blue car pulls up in front of me and the window rolls down. A big, square face with short hair and crinkly eyes sticks out and blurts something I can’t understand.

“Sorry,” I ask, cupping my hand to my ear.

“Are you gay?”

His voice is so unswerving and inflectionless that the words don’t register. Before my brain can absorb the question some deeper linguistic area of my spine that can somehow understand words without context shoots back a punctual “No,” steady and clear as the question.

“Ok,” he smiles as though he had asked me the time of day, rolls up his window and keeps driving. The whole interaction lasted maybe five seconds. Hundreds of questions run through my brain but I ignore them all. My laughter echoes through the empty street for a minute, then I walk into the hotel and crash.

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I only spend six hours in Miri. I’m up at seven and in a cab to the airport, where I make a beeline for the air desk and snag the last seat on the 10:30 flight to Bario. I’ve never bought a plane ticket like this, day-of, in the airport. It makes me feel light and fleeting and unpredictable. Catch me if you can.

It’s the most beautiful plane ride I’ve ever taken. There’s no way to seal the plane door, light and air stream through the cracks in the unpressurizeable metal tube. We stay below the clouds and I look out the window over a sea of green. We’re close enough that I can make out the trees individually, but these discrete patches quickly fade into an analog of green that makes me question the effectiveness of the words we use for color. Pea, jade, peridot, olive, emerald, lime, sea green, dark green, light green, grassy green, leafy green; they are all here. They capture the tiniest fraction of what stretches below.

The view from the plane

The majority of Bario's residents are still subsistence farmers

Rice is the chief crop of the Kelabit Highlands

The airport at Bario is a rickety wooden building. The air control tower is the second floor. A plane shows up twice each morning, and visitors walk twenty minutes down a dirt road into town. On the runway, tiny uniformed women unload the plane and hand goods directly to villagers waiting to the side. Huge boxes of bottled water, spare parts for cars and bikes, wholesale vacuum-sealed bags of snacks and cigarettes are hauled onto once white pickup trucks decorated with concrete encasements of mud. These deliverymen lurch down the road towards town. I throw my bag in the back of one of the pickups, the guy driving says he knows a good place to stay.

Central Bario

The jungle is never far away

At 3500 feet, the highlands provide a respite from the 90 degree steam on the rest of the island. It’s calm and cool in Bario, the largest highland village, a rice bowl rounded by 7000 foot high spikes. An impregnable land of mist and jungle, stitched together by logging roads and willpower. The Kelabit people, one of the smallest ethic groups in Malaysia, are scattered across the plateau, a smattering of stilted longhouses where families live side by side in subdivided sections under a single roof, sharing a common living space stretching down the length of the building.

Less than a thousand people carve out a quiet living here. Occasionally a motorbike or jeep will putter up the road, but aside from that the only noise is the wind rustling through the fields. Serene and slow, time ticks by on a different pace here. One day when walking between villages, a man pulled up in a truck to offer a ride. In the passenger seat, his friend was holding a saturated rag to his bleeding index finger. It was dangling by a thread of skin after an accident while working on a boat propeller. The driver said there was plenty of room, that they were going to the hospital in Bario and had room for more, especially in this heat. At his injured friend’s insistence he continued down the road, grinding slowly across the stones at 20 mph – a languid emergency.

Tom Harrison, an Australian anthropologist and WWII militaryman, successfully parachuted into Bario and lived their for two years after the war. He later described the location,

…a far upland plain which can only be reached by foot, … There are just one or two places on the map of Borneo – and, more widely, on a map of the world – where you can get farther away from a known place fro what most people call “the world.” There are fewer places where you (or I) are likely to feel more remote, more “cut off” from the great outside…

The description still holds. You can’t escape this atmosphere. The village envelops its visitors. The only accommodation comes through homestays, where for a flat price you get a bed to sleep in, three square meals, family banter over the dinner table and a local social network happy to let you in. And they are Happy. Discontent seems impossible here, at least on first glance. A small community of uncles and grandparents and third cousins where every door leads to another relative. For generations, it was not only normal but necessary to marry within the family. “The longhouse…that’s why we’re all related,” one woman explained to me. “Once you get to the third cousin, it is OK, but first cousins cannot marry.” There is no alternative when you live in an isolated mountain community.

The surrounding mountains reach up to 7000 feet

The home I stay in is big. The brother, Apoi (Christian name Scott) is in charge. Along with his four sisters, he manages the lodging – cleaning and cooking and maintaining the sheep farm down the road. He also teaches at the local school and is involved in every level of local politics. It’s an inherited level of responsibility. Among the other residents of the house is a modicum of fluctuating nephews, nieces, and grandkids who practice their English alphabet in the kitchen, while Auntie, Mom and Dad (who apparently have no other names), hang out by the fireplace all day.

On the second day of my stay I learn that Dad was once the chief of the entire Kelabit region. “Before, if you were a leader from Miri or anywhere else and you came here, you came to see my father,” sister Nancy explains. Now Dad is stooped and silent and grey. A collection of long hoary strands trail off his neck mole, and he spends his days basking in his accumulated family prestige, leafing through old magazines or noisily sorting through a selection of aluminum coated medicine packets. When the family stands in a circle with heads bent, to say grace over every meal, he sits in the corner with his dated periodicals, eyes open. But if anyone deserves this kind of swag it’s Dad; it’s because of his efforts that there’s an asphalt airstrip in Bario.

It’s the airstrip that connects Bario to the outside world. The airstrip brought a sense of modern life. Until four years ago there weren’t any phone lines in town. There still isn’t electricity; at night generators spring to life behind each house. Dad changed this town. Now people can come and go on a $30 whim. Now kids grow up thinking about what they are going to do when they get out of this town, when they get to Kuala Lumpur or Miri or Kuching.

Bario was the sight of an evangelical Christian revival in the 70s, and the town maintains a deeply religious ambience. Stores shut down on Sunday as everyone files into the hulking blue church on the edge of town. This old-timey-ness and communal quaintness is one of the reasons Malaysian people like to visit Bario, to get a sense of a world apart from the wealthy, modernized Islamic society.

The view from prayer mountain

It’s also what keeps Bario alive. With access to the outside world, the Kelabit people are dwindling out of the highlands. “Everyone is mixed now,” an old uncle observed at dinner one night. “They marry Chinese or English or even the Negro now…very seldom do Kelabit marry Kelabit anymore.” Kelabit children grow up, they leave for the city, and the older generation stays put. If it weren’t for the church this town would disappear. Every holiday season, on Easter, Christmas, big birthdays, the children all find their way back to Bario. “It’s good, or else the parents would have to follow to Miri or Kuching because they can’t live alone.”

Bario is changing. There are plans to build a modern hotel in the future. And a modern highway has already been started. Although the road could take up to ten years to finish, they’d only have to extend the runway to start the packaged droves streaming in and out. The fear is that while it will provide a huge economic boost to a tiny town, it will drive the farmers, who hang on through a slow trickle of rice sales bolstered by occasional homestay payments, out of business. Bario is still a community of subsistence farmers, a lucid glimpse into the past. A hotel will change all that. It will become a tourist town.

Family dinners here are enormous. With twenty heads to feed, tables groan under the weight of the food. Wild boar and carp and fern sautéed in garlic. Ginger shoot salad and sweet bee larvae and huge tubs of rice. On my last night I peer down the table at Dad, who sits chomping silently, concentrating on picking the bones out of his fish. I haven’t heard him speak one word in the four days I’ve been here. Without him I would have never made it. 

Borneo is sometimes called The Land of Hornbills, this guy was sunbathing on a neighbor's porch