Through A Friend's Eye - Continuation

In my previous post, my friend Dr Benjamin had sent some of his diary pages and pictures of his stay in Bario to me. He has sent more this time! These are some of his favorite posts (which were about his first day and last few days in Bario) along with more pictures.

Here's the one about his first time coming to Bario:

"Day 1: Plane Ride, Arrival and Climate

I arrived in this hidden world, flying in a tiny twin propeller plane. It’s unerring to be able to look past the pilot, past the cockpit and out of the front window as you take off. It’s more unerring still to see the mile after mile of untouched, uninhabited, thick mountainous jungle fall by below, leaving nothing but the overwhelming sense of isolation and the rush of excitement that accompanies it as you make your way to your destination.

Unlike the jets I’m used to this, plane flies low between the clouds rather than above them… and then they part to reveal an oasis of land, a plain of green grass and scattered huts and long houses, a flat basin hidden in the midst’s & mists of the Borneo hills and mountains, Bario.

The airport’s nothing more than a landing strip and people mill about here and there with no sense of the strict security I’m used to. It seems that the morning plane is a bit of an event here. People gather in the airport’s little café to see who’s arriving.

The plane flies almost straight back to Miri again and while I wait for my luggage to be wheeled out to me I watch the departing. Here’s a warning: be careful of how much you eat while you’re here. 

The food is good here what with the famous Bario rice, the mainstay and freshly caught Civet Cat, Wild Boar and Bucking Deer making occasional appearances on the menu as well as a great variety of freshly picked exotic fruits. When they charge you for flight weight they don’t only weigh your luggage, they put you on the scales too!

Well, the plane flight here is an early one so it left me with the larger part of the day to see where I will be staying. It’s all 4x4’s or motorbikes here, although the one main road has recently been improved, any others are little more than dirt tracks. I get a lift on a 4x4 and head to what will be my home for the following weeks.

Gerawat’s family consists of his wife Janet, daughter Nicole and her 3 children; Dom, Victoria and Victor. They all welcome me with smiles and food soon after and I quickly feel very at home. Traditionally, the Kelabit people live as a community in a long house with many compartments each housing a family. Gerawat’s is slightly removed, originally it was planned to be the start of a longhouse, but these plans changed and a road now runs between it and the rest.

I’m staying in a quaint wooden structure with a corrugated metal roof. There are plenty of gaps here and there and about a foot clearance between where the wall ends and the roof begins, but since there is such a pleasant climate here it only adds to the charm. Unlike our western brick and concrete boxes in which we store away our lives, this house feels more like an extension of the trees and plants around it; nature feels like something we have to step outside and find, it permeates the walls and grows around you.

I mentioned the Bario climate and it really does deserve a bit more than just a passing mention. Despite perching almost at the very peak of the earth’s equator, Bario’s altitude cushions it from the sometimes oppressive heat of most of the rest of Malaysia. 

Imagine a warm English summers day and you have Bario all year round. Sure, there are periods where it rains a little more or where the sun barely gets hidden all day long, but, either way, the daytime temperature tends to settle around 30 degrees Celsius and seldom strays much more than a couple of degrees from this until the sun dips and the temperature follows it and cools nicely to somewhere around the late teens.

I fill the first day with a trip to the recently built hydro-electric power generator up in the hills and a meeting with Famy, the local doctor, a guy in his early 30s who informs me that people here are far too healthy for his job to be particularly interesting. The hydro-power provides the Bario longhouse community where I stay (Bario Asal) with electricity, meaning lights when the sun goes down and, best of all, Premier League football games late in the evening on weekends!"

Hmm... I will never understand men's fixation with football. I really don't and I don't think I could begin to either. But I suppose everybody is entitled to their own opinions. The following ones are about Dr Ben's last few days in Bario:

"Day 25: Bugs and Stars

Do you know where pictures of paradise have the edge over the real thing? It’s their lack of bugs. I know how the guys in the movie ‘Starship Troopers’ felt; this place is infested with bugs. Some are huge, as big as your thumb, defying the very laws of physics as their thin wings propel their bulbous bodies through the air…. And directly into my forehead!

 

After it hits me, it lays on its back, traumatized and unable to get up. I felt rather like doing the same. Instead, I stood watching it a while, contemplating whether or not to crush it. 

In the end I decided to reserve my bug killing skills for mosquitoes, which are far smaller and quieter, unfortunately for me. 

 This place literally swarms with them at times, add to this the presence of horseflies and you can end up very itchy. 

Today is a particularly itchy day…even with a toxic mix of lotions, pills and potions to try to ease the itching and prevent the bites.

There’s also your standard black fly to add to the itchiness and their constant buzz and on off landing masking the mosquitos presence. You get used to it sooner or later though… apparently.

Well, let’s buzz away from the cigar-sized bugs with eyes legs and other bits poking out, and from their various friends, and move onto a reason TO be here.
 

 

I don’t think I’ve ever really seen the Milky Way before. I have now though. I’ve always been a little bit miffed with people who are interested in astronomy; it’s always seemed to me, like the sky itself, to be a sparse and barren science. 

Not tonight though, tonight the sky shone. Bario is often cloudy through the night, but when it’s clear like this it’s absolutely stunning. 

I’ve never before seen so many stars and seen them so bright. You haven’t seen stars till you’ve seen Bario stars, like a backlit canopy with holes punched in it. I guess it’s partly being so far away from any ambient ground light sources. 

 

I tried taking a picture but my camera doesn’t have the settings to allow it to take in small amounts of light for a stationary picture over a long period in the way needed for this sort of picture. My friend suggests using the flash. I attempt to explain how we would have to wait between ten to a few million years for the light from the flash to bounce back to us from the distant stars and galaxies and eventually give up."

 

Well, that's no surprise to me. The bugs here are really big and mostly harmless, fortunately. I bet you can't find these types of bugs in the suburbs or the cities. Let's not forget the stars too! When I was living in Kuala Lumpur a couple of years ago, there were some nights when I'd wished I could see the stars like I once did back at my hometown, not the lights and cloudy night skies of the city.
 
My kids sometimes used to stay up a little past their bedtime to count the stars outside their windows...until I come into their bedrooms and check up on them.
 
Anyway, this is the last diary post that Dr Ben shared with me:

"Day 27: The Jungle Supermarket

I put on my walking boots (or in my case, my grip-less black trainers) and head out for some trekking. I’m going alone to Pa Lung An. The original plan was to walk there with the local doctor, but he’s ill (ironic, huh?) and I’m told that the route is one that, although it runs through 5 hours of jungle, is one that I can’t get lost on. 

Ha! I’m an expert at getting lost and this direct path that I “can’t help but follow” forks on a number of occasions. I’ve walked for 4-and-a-half hours and taken my best guess at a number of these forks and now it’s approaching dark.

I’ve passed a deserted jungle hut and just as I’m beginning to think about giving up on reaching Pa Lung An, accepting that I’ve taken a wrong turn and bedding down in the jungle hut, the trees part and, as they do, Pa Lung An appears between them.

My feet are aching and I pull off my socks to find one has changed from white to claret. It takes me a moment to register its blood, I’ve felt no sharp pain… but that’s leeches for you. Boy, do they leave a lot of your blood behind.

Batu Tirung Lodge though is very welcoming. It’s quiet, no other visitors around, actually that’s often the same in Bario, this bit of the world is still relatively undiscovered and you won’t need any advance bookings of rooms here.

The owner of the lodge has coined the phrase jungle supermarket. By this, they mean that if they need anything; food, supplies, anything, they head out to the jungle and find it. Just as well, they have their jungle supermarket and that its always well stocked because it’s a long, long way to the real one and I’m starving. I go out to the jungle supermarket myself and catch some fish which we eat for dinner… my first time fishing!"

Well, I guess that is all Dr Ben has for me to share. I wonder if he plans to return to Bario again.

Through A Friend's Eyes

Dr Benjamin (or as I call him 'Ben') is a friend of mine who came to visit Bario a couple of months ago to check the hydroelectric dam/station here and play his role as, he quoted, a British tourist. After he returned to his homeland in UK weeks after his stay, he contacted me recently, telling me how much he liked (and missed) Bario. Apparently, he had kept a couple of diary pages whilst he was here and he has emailed some of the pages he wrote along with some pictures he took too.

This is one of them written by him:

"Day 8: Prayer Mountain

It’s raining heavily. At least it is while I am writing this. Every time so far I have cycled to Bario center I have been caught by the rain. It didn’t rain this morning. This morning I climbed to the top of Prayer Mountain. 

The mountain is one of the highest peaks surrounding Bario. It’s quite a climb; the combination of the altitude and the climb had my heart pounding. It’s a climb that takes about an hour and is, at times, very steep, but a rope has been strung along the side of parts of it and there is a church about half way up to rest. The church is wooden roofed but otherwise open air and with a great view.

I’ve made the climb with Oliver and we get into some deep conversations whilst sitting there. Best of all though is the peak itself, marked by a cross and with a view over the whole of Bario.

In the distance, looking out the other way, you can see a ridge with a gap in the trees.

This is where the Kelabit boys on the verge of manhood would trek to cut down a tree, the gap left being something they could point to showing they were men… Or where a wealthy family would have a tree cut from to signal their affluence when holding a feast for the whole village… depending on who you listen to.

When we first arrived at the peak it was like standing in the clouds, which you can literally do later in the day, but in the morning it’s just mist.

Slowly it drains, first from Bario and then up the mountain. You can see it rushing past, swirling and flowing like a white river.

It’s hard to pull yourself away from the place and the climb down is as hard as the journey up, but we have fruit to pick today and maybe rice to collect from the fields… and by this point I’m very hungry for breakfast, so off we go." 

Here's another one that he wrote:

"Day 13: Bring Earplugs

If you’re coming to Bario, I’ve got some advice for you: bring earplugs. I could give you loads actually.

You know the Baz Luhrmann song sunscreen? (If you don’t, then go look it up now because its great)… well, I could ramble a whole lot of advice off, just like in the song, but like old Baz and his insistence on the benefits of sunscreen, the rest of my advice could be useful, could just be what worked for me… but trust me on the earplugs.

The reason I adamantly insist on having these earplugs is simple. There’s a thin metal roof above you most places you might stay and it often rains during the night. I have never before felt the need or even had the mildest inclination to wear earplugs. The ones I have had been given to me on the plane and have sat unused ever since…. Until now when, by shoving these little bad boys in my ears I have just turned a thumping cacophony into a mild pitter patter. I stumbled on them quite by accident, forgot I had them even, but after 2 nights of being woken around 3am by an onset of rain and with the rain currently beating down hard, I’m glad I did. 

Other than that the days had been good, I picked some fruits, ate some fruits, and did a bit of work and a bit of play. I’ve been teaching Victor, the eldest of Nicole’s kids, how to fix bikes and he’s enthusiastic and quick to learn. We went to look around the wind turbine control centre after. It’s redundant but all the equipment and wiring is fully set up and ready and Victor would like to be an engineer so he finds it interesting.

I think the family is really warming to me now so that’s giving me a nice warm glow and I’ve got to know the 3 Western guys who have made Bario their permanent home. The combination of these two things is warding off any feelings of homesickness. 

Rain, rain, go away. Come again another day."

I didn't know the rain could be that loud to wake you up at night! However, I have been living in Bario a very long while. Come to think of it, I realize I don't notice the rain because I'm so used to it! Or perhaps because I'm a heavy sleeper? Hmm...

Here's another one:

"Day 15: Loads of Stuff

Yup, loads of stuff; so much that I thought rather than writing out every detail, I‘d go more the way of just listing it.

I woke early and watched Karate Kid with one of the kids before breakfast. Then, I had a big breakfast with Gerawat later and I was off with the kids and Ollie to buy myself a plane ticket. I wasn’t leaving for good but I had a Skype interview for a job in the UK and I didn’t trust the web connection here in Bario. Instead I was flying off to Miri and back to do it. 

We made it back just in time for lunch, which consisted of Bario rice, freshly hunted deer, freshly plucked degnayen (a green herby thing they use to make soup), freshly picked Kieran fruit (my new favourite fruit) and chicken.

After lunch, I taught Victor a few more bike fixing tricks. I think I’ve taught him all I know now. Then I was off to meet Stuart. He’s a Canadian fella whose been living here some while now, on and off; and I enjoyed the rare bit of Western company to share past experiences with. He has got a pineapple farm here, a guest house and kayaking experience business.

He also helped in running the hydro-station here, which was what I was interested in (though I love kayaking and a trip along the river that runs by Bario is definitely worth a go as a way of seeing some of the jungle; apparently, it’s got a good mix of white water and lazy drifts). Plus, a day of kayaking with Stu had a barbeque by the river thrown in."

I don't know if he has any more but I believe that's all Dr Ben shared with me.

Welcoming Dinner for Alan Vest

25th January was a very special day for my friend, Thomas Low. 

It was his first time to attend a dinner at the longhouse with the community in Bario. It was also the first time he met everyone in Ulong Palang. It wasn't just a simple dinner but a dinner reception to welcome Alan Vest into Bario. 

The dinner was held at Apoi's place, which is the Nigmat Homestay. Earlier, he went with Uncle Gerawat to our primary school to photograph Alan who had been giving a football coaching clinic to the school team. 

Alan Vest was a football coach for the Football Association of Sarawak (FAS) in the 1990s and he'd been dubbed as the 'White Raja Brooke' of football. If I'm not mistaken, under his coaching, the FAS team won the Malaysian Premier League, the Malaysian Charity Shield and the Malaysian FA Cup! 

Before the dinner commenced, a group of children from our primary school performed a traditional Kelabit dance for Alan. Thomas thought the children were so adorable when he saw all of them trying to squeeze nicely in the narrow longhouse. His two children are already teenagers and he misses seeing young children in his house! His daughter does ballet and he wondered how she would hold the Kelabit fans in her ballet. 

Then, a group of women including Aunty Connie and Aunty Dora sang a 'Toast' song to welcome Alan. After the song, they served him 'Tuak', our rice wine.

Then, dinner was served! 

People of Bario

We Kelabits here are all related to each other.

When I walk around Bario, I can be meeting with cousins, nephews, nieces, uncles, aunties, distant cousins' nephews and so on--we are one big happy family! When there is a wedding or a funeral or a birthday or a name-changing ceremony, everyone in Bario goes to the event and celebrate or feel the loss of a loved one.

So we all know each other.

Have you met my uncle Gerawat?

The kids think he's a very cool guy because he likes to tell jokes with a straight face. His wife, Janet, is also a pretty cool lady, they say.

Aunty Janet always makes the best Kelabit donuts. The donuts are basically just milk flour, butter and sugar mixed together and rolled into a ball before it is fried. Sometimes when I come over to visit them, she'll always serve me those donuts and honestly, I still can't get enough of them. They're really good! Aunty Janet is also soft-spoken and very motherly. You feel warm and at ease around her.

When you first meet Uncle Gerawat, I'm sure you'll find that he's a very funny and laidback man, especially for somebody his age. He likes to 'mess' with people's minds and tell them stories that aren't always true. Morever, he does it so effortlessly that some people do get easily fooled by him. I almost fell for some of his stories too! Sigh! Uncle Gerawat!

He's also hardworking because he's still working in the farm after he retired, harvesting the rice annually and doing other farm work. He and Aunty Janet also love to drink coffee.

Out of curiosity, I once asked Uncle Gerawat how he met my Aunty Janet.

He told me that they met through a traditional ritual, which led them to an arranged marriage to each other. In Kelabit culture, when a young woman is of age, her father will give her a rice pounder. At the Rice Harvest Festival, she will have to beat the rice with it and it will produce a loud 'BOOM!' every time the rice is pounded.

The louder the sound gets, the better it is for the girl as it is meant to attract the girl's future husband. If he shows up, their families meet and an arranged marriage is on its way. It shows the girl is capable of farmwork and she is strong. Aunty Janet, who was sixteen at the time, performed this ritual and Uncle Gerawat happened to hear the beautiful sound and followed it. That was how they met and the rest is history. Now, they live happily ever after. (Do you believe this?)

Besides them, there is Uncle John Terawe.

About forty years ago, when Uncle John was ten years old, his father was the Pemancar of the village. He was in a helicopter with a few of his uncles and the Pemancar to Miri. Unfortunately, the helicopter crashed. Uncle John was the only survivor. When Uncle John woke up from his coma, his whole world changed. He realized that not only did he lose his father, but Bario also lost a leader who was very committed to making life better for the villagers. Over the years, he committed himself to develop Bario like how his father would have done so.

His mother, Sinar Terawe, became a single mother to six children. She worked in the rice fields and collected jungle produce to feed the family.

At eighty two years old now, she's still planting rice!

Eventually, Uncle John was picked as a community leader for the e-Bario project by USM. He developed the first homestay in Bario and he convinced us that bringing tourists into Bario will bring more development for all of us.

Below is a short video of three of the most well-known people in Bario.

History of Bario

I was born in Bario Asal.  ‘Asal’ means ‘Original’. The longhouse was the first settlement of the Kelabits in Bario.

This is the story told by my grandmother, Bungan:

Bario’s territory is all the way from Tama Abu Range to the Dabpur River, near the Indonesian border. The longhouse, named Lemba’a (literally meant wet place) was the original longhouse of Bario (the only one up till 1963). In 1945, the British landed some troops in Bario through a parachute drop, setting up a headquarters. They waged a guerilla campaign against the Japanese with the help of the local Kelabits under the operation name:  The Plains of Bah.

Shortly after the war, a missionary team arrived in Bario, converting our whole village into Christians, almost all at once. Although the religion brought us light, it came at a heavy price as we soon found out. Many of our traditions were abandoned. Clay pot-making with carvings, tattooing, traditional dancing, traditional clothing and rice wine-making were just some of the many things we sacrificed in the conversion.

In 1963, Sarawak joined Malaya as a state of the newly-formed Federation of Malaysia. Indonesia, who claimed Sarawak as its land, marched soldiers into Sarawak and began attacking tribal people living near the borders. This is now known as the ‘Confrontation’.

An airstrip was built at Bario Asal as it had the largest area of flat land. Due to the area’s accessibility, Bario became the operational ground for the British forces stationed there to defend the longhouses deep in the interior. However, many of the longhouses were located very close to the Indonesian border and were too spread out to efficiently defend.

This confrontation with the Indonesian soldiers led many people of the borders to flee from their settlements to the Bario plains. The people from the Lemba’a longhouse were very generous, donating land not only for building new longhouses, but also for planting padi (rice). These migrations from the borders increased over time. To differentiate from the newcomers, the original longhouse people renamed their home Bario Asal.

DAGS: This is Our Story

I dug this up while unpacking my luggage a few weeks ago. Scanned it at e-Bario, our local telecentre. This book was written in conjunction of the successful setup of the telecentre in 2004 and how it changed the local community life, encouraging us locals to become more internet savvy. (Click on the images respectively to view them clearly.)