I wasn’t so much falling down the hill as I was sliding. A thick sheet of rotten leaves and colorful fungi sailing in front and below me, ushering my clumsy mass down an unbounded path of noisy brown mud. Wooly pillows of moss, inches thick, crawl across the ancient trees all around me as leaves larger than my entire body droop in front, slapping across my face as the uncontrollable tumbling carries me deeper through the forest. Green on all sides. Everything glistens. The air twinkles as the few rays of sun that manage to fight through the canopy shatter their way through the sodden mist. Even the rocks seem soggy, blunted black chunks that look squeezably wet. Sweat refuses to leave my body. It can’t evaporate – there is no room left in the air, so it falls off in sheets, mixing into the forest floor, more wetness. 

It hasn’t rained here in days.

This is Borneo, where the earth exhales. Dark. Green. Always Wet. Life is different along the equator. There is a lot more of it.

I fight to stay upright, streaming through webs and nests whose inhabitants don’t enjoy the disturbance. As I try yanking the sticky skein from my hair, fist size mosquitoes examine my steaming, sputtering presence. Thick, hot, loud life is bombarding from all sides. It is choking me. I am an invader here. I pause in my slide to lash out wildly, throwing my arms through the air to clear some breathing room. But each deep gasp attracts more dangly airborne creatures to my rich carbon emenations, and from below, gummy black leeches materialize out of nowhere to gobble blood from my ankles. I tear them off in a panic and start to run, but after only five steps I find myself tumbling – not along the path but down into it. Face first into the rotting ground. I look up and see the biggest mushroom of my life – orange and glowing and phallic – and a wasp stings me on the shoulder

Welcome to the jungle. 

 

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

First Thoughts Malaysia

I’ll miss Thailand, but there is definitely something nice about crossing the border south into Malaysia, a country that, for all its money and regional influence, a surprising amount of people (me included) no almost nothing about.

Southern Thailand is a vacation destination. Island hopping in the Andaman Sea, you bump shoulders with honeymooners and people taking two weeks off from work. It’s an expensive place to travel, and it doesn’t meld well with the rest of the standard SE Asian poor man’s trail.

But, it seems, now in Malaysia we are back on that trail, hard. The food is cheap and the people traveling are weird. Fewer Swedish bombshells wearing fedoras on the beach, more crusty old men walking through the streets in floor-length dresses. The dregs of western society come here to scoop together some new affirmation. It is a different vibe, one that I hadn’t realized I’d been missing for the past month. That sort of breezy transience, everyone is just passing through; you carry a continuity with you on your back.

There is so much to see here and I have huge constraints placed on me in the time and money departments. I never realized that Peninsular Malaysia held so many gems. The dense foliage and mountains of Borneo hold a well known steamy jungle playhouse, but this bloated stretch of land between Thailand and Singapore – who knew? Here on the island of Penang, the history of conquerors and colonists are steamed together in a sweet and tangy mélange of noodles, sauces, and midnight buffet lines that stretch out the door. But the jungle clad thumb of land that was once called Malay also boasts the worlds oldest rain forest, complete with the world’s largest flowers and some of the most massive trees humans have ever walked between. Kuala Lumpur, the shy but kaleidoscopic cultural blender of a city whose only mark on the international consciousness seems to be the massive twin Petronas Towers, can proudly call itself the greenest city in SE Asia, a park-clad capitol waiting to be explored. Or there is the eastern coast ballooning into the Pacific, with some of nature’s most perfectly manicured beaches and islands, mile-long sprawls of blinding white sand stretching into an azure ocean teeming with life.

You get fewer travelers here than come to visit the ancient inland empires of Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Part of that is due to a sort of blank slate when it comes to Malaysia.  There is less of a defining aesthetic character here. Malaysia is a cultural scattershot of Chinese, Indian, ethnic Malay and English colonial influence. It’s reflected in the food, the urban planning, the money. It’s that last one that I never grasped the gravity of, until now.

Malaysia boasts the highest GDP per capita of any country in SE Asia (excluding the city-state of Singapore), a fact that’s echoed in the infrastructure, the condo blocks, the ubiquity of the automobile. As an important trading center, the Malaysian economy has grown steadily since independence was granted in 1957.

Now, parts of it look like Florida. Driving south through the evening, you can’t tell the difference (except that you are driving on the left side of the road). It’s straight, flat, a superhighway, the grey guardrail a blurry smear in the framed view out the window. Two lanes with white, fluorescent dividers ushering a mass through a forest of billboards, big green exit signs, and roadside emergency call boxes. The blazing sun sets behind the palm trees and stucco developments with Toyotas and Nissans parked outside. These are big, two story houses in the suburbs, with red roofs and lots of windows. It’s a sight that screams comfort and sprawl. It’s what people with money do. 

Little Window

The room seems slightly out of square. As though the contractors got their math wrong on the ground, and by the fifth floor the compounding angular inconsistencies had turned nice neat boxes into blunted parallelograms. The small mote of light that tumbles through the northeast-facing window once a morning throws a highlighter of dust across the room. It lands on you, sprawled across the cream colored, diamond stitched mattresses, one abutting the other. Our sticky skin belies the truth: that is us in the air, the dead skin, little crumbs billowing in their cone of turbulence. We are decomposing, shedding, covering the dislocated walls with physical memory. No one will miss us. But we were here. 

Wet Prayer

Malaysia is very wet. It rains throughout the year, seasons be damned. This equatorial band of moisture makes the country incredibly green. Luscious jungle clad mountains twist down the peninsula, dotted here and there with glittering little pockets of technologically advanced humans. It rains and the sleek black highways turn to shimmering rivers. It rains and the forest takes a deep breath. It rains and streaks down the sides of the giant glass skyscrapers.

And through the heavy air floats the sound of an overdubbed loudspeaker. A man’s voice intoning an ancient chant. The call to prayer.

Malaysia is a predominantly Muslim country. It is a mélange of color and diversity, where Chinese, Indians, ethnic Malays and colonial Europeans have traded, battled and bred for hundreds of years. Hindus, Christians and Buddhists all have their place here - Little India, The Colonial District, Chinatown - but Islam makes up 60% of the country. In Thailand I saw and heard the minority Muslim population in small pockets, (the closer you get to the equator in this part of the world, the stronger that presence is) but until now, I haven’t really felt it. I didn’t realize that I missed that feeling.

Traveling through Israel last fall, where the sandy winds and the desert sun serve as a constant geographical reminder, I was at home in the Arab shouks. The crowds of shrouded women and imperiously mustached men were my avenue into an exotic and ancient culture. It felt right, is all I can say for it. In the northern tendrils of the Arabian desert there should be an Arab presence. It was an incredibly immersive shock to my system, something I badly wanted but didn’t realize I needed.

The call to prayer was a soundtrack to my time in Jerusalem. No matter where you are in the old city, it seems that someone, somewhere is calling for prayer, or praying over a sound system, or blasting a recorded hymn from a portable speaker. The droning Arabic singing became a background presence that I will always associate with the pale buildings made of Jerusalem stone, perfect blue skies and lots of hummus.

Which is why I find it so bizarre to wake up in my hotel room in Kuala Lumpur to the sound of Arabic drifting through the open window. Hearing it again in this jungle country sends me back. It seems so out of place after four months of Buddhist temples.