Tales of a travel addict
THE EXCITEMENT OF flying into a place where no road goes is hard to underestimate; suddenly you’re at the frontier between wilderness and our blighted, wonderful global culture – a fragile spot that perhaps one ought not to be promoting to tourists. And yet the best thing for the remote jungle trading-post of Bario in the highlands of Malaysian Borneo is to develop small-scale trekking and wildlife enterprises for ecologically-minded, culturally-sensitive tourists.
A night spent in the local timber-shack bar where the men drink their days’ wages from logging or road building would convince anyone that it’s too late for stable-door shutting. Economic and social migration is already endemic. Of the estimated 5,000 remaining members of the Kelabit ethnic tribe only a fifth are still in the highlands.
Among those who remain, many are not there by choice. Their knowledge of jungle plants and medicines, of longboat building, blow-dart hunting, bird augury and ceremonial rituals is precious, especially as the world comes to realise that the cures to our greatest medical challenges may well lie in the surrounding rainforests.
The transitional nature of Kelabit society is reflected in their longhouses. These communal homes in which a dozen or so families live side-by-side with shared daytime space and enclosed sleeping quarters were at the core of Borneo culture.
Nowadays it is only the elderly and the very young who remain here, apart from at tribal gatherings and family ceremonies when the whole community returns. The photographs hanging on the walls of the longhouses reveal a period of phenomenal change; from sepia-tinted images of the grandparents when they were young, as sinewy hunters in loincloths and blow-pipes, to the glossy photos of their well-groomed grandchildren today, smiling proudly in college robes.
Although the grandparents’ photos were taken in the 1950s they look centuries old, with leopard fangs strung around their necks, bones and metal weights dangling from elongated earlobes and elaborate headgear crowning their proud, steely faces.
The Kelabit highlands were an isolated paradise until 1945, although being surrounded by hardwood forest, incursion by loggers was inevitable.
The government is now, in principle, committed to sustainable forestry and has declared the area around Bario a national park, but for vast tracts it is already too late. Logging routes wind their way through the highlands, and some of the best trekking trails are already denuded – making it all the more important to find an alternative means of income for local people.
Naturally hospitable, the Kelabit are ideal guides and guesthouse owners. They are proud of their local culinary produce and their methods of salt production, paddy farming and boar hunting, and are keen to share it with others. What is most exciting of all about frontier zones like Bario is their power to lure in even more remote tribes from the deepest jungle realms.
A few Penan hunter-gatherer families have settled temporarily on the outskirts of the village so that their children can attend school. I was invited on a monkey hunting trip deep into the forest by one loincloth-clad man, who gestured me into his timber stilt hut to show me how to apply poisonous resin to slender-carved darts he uses in his blow-pipe. As we talked his angelic daughter in a faded dress and dirty-nose was scribbling beside an open fire that smouldered on a metal sheet on the wooden floor. The hunting trip would take a few days and my presence would make it less likely any monkeys were caught, but my money would help him keep his daughter in school.