Borneo's changing heart
The Kelabit Highlands in the centre of Borneo are about untrammelled nature and forest living. Trails radiate out from Bario, the main settlement, to the 13 other Kelabit villages scattered in the mountains, and hikers can follow these trails in different combinations, for treks of up to seven days. Lodging is in longhouses or homestays, where you can count on the hospitality of the Kelabit people, as well as their excellent cooking – premium Bario rice and the superlative pineapples are complemented by wild ingredients including boar, deer, mushrooms, ferns, bamboo and ginger.
Longer treks penetrate old-growth jungle, and on Mount Murud, which straddles the border between Malaysia’s Sarawak and Indonesia’s Kalimantan, I experienced the most raucous dawn chorus in ten years of travel in Southeast Asia.
It’s an experience shared by just 400 other tourists in 2008, but that number is rapidly rising. ‘This is the first year that I’ve seen a regular inflow of tourists in the low season,’ says community leader Peter Matu.
And Douglas Munney, owner of De Plateau Lodge, says that he has seen the number of tourists increase by about 80 per cent in the three years since the launch of the local food and culture festival in 2005. ‘Some stalls ran out of food last year, so I guess that’s a measure of success,’ says Dora Tigan, secretary of the committee that organises the week-long annual event, which sees each Kelabit village put up a stall and compete to see who has the best décor and food. ‘We like to say that the jungle is our supermarket, and the festival is a celebration of Kelabit forest food.’
The festival has helped to raise the highlands’ profile. It’s also an opportunity to promote the indigenous rice variety – the leading brand in Malaysia. Rice production is one of the two economic motors (the other being tourism) in the region, with around 350 rice farmers producing 400 tonnes annually. ‘The rice farmers get a good price,’ says Matu. ‘But in the end, once high labour and transport costs are paid off, the profit only amounts to a couple of hundred ringgit [£300] every year.’
Changing culture
There is no road to Bario – the only way in or out is on the Twin Otter planes that fly twice daily. The settlement has 800 inhabitants and sprawls across a plateau. Local transport consists of six pickup trucks that crawl along the rutted roads (bringing in the vehicles entailed driving them to the point where the logging road peters out, then stripping them down and transporting the parts by boat). Other Kelabit villages scattered in the mountains have to make do with buffalo transport along a network of forest tracks.
The Kelabits were completely cut off from the outside world until the Second World War, when a team of British soldiers led by the anthropologist Tom Harrisson, who had been recruited for a plan to engage Borneo’s native peoples in the battle against the Japanese, parachuted into Bario. ‘My father told me that when the soldiers approached the longhouse, they tied their guns to ropes and dragged them on the ground behind them in order to demonstrate that they didn’t come to fight,’ says Matu as we sit in that same longhouse.
Harrisson’s mission was clearly successful, as the Kelabits later fought alongside the British against the Japanese, who had advanced as far as Pa Lungan, four hours’ walk from Bario. Harrisson stayed with the Kelabits after the war, spreading Western influence, and missionaries did the rest. The Kelabits became fervent Christians, abandoning their previous megalithic, animist, head-hunting culture. They perceived Christianity as liberation from the capriciousness of their superstitions, and Sunday is now an important day: the old wear their best on Sunday, donning their colourful costumes and opulent traditional earrings, which weigh 600 grams each.
During my visit, I stay in Bario Asal, the oldest extant longhouse in the highlands. It’s a splendid wooden structure divided into three long sections: a communal kitchen, a hall for social or religious gatherings and private sleeping quarters. A longhouse engenders a community that’s inclusive, egalitarian and harmonious, and families mingle in the communal kitchen, sharing food and yarns. Just before my visit, Matu had collected funds from the longhouse inhabitants and built a small hydropower plant for electricity.
But most of the people in the longhouse are old, a recurring theme in the other villages I visit. And it seems that these will be the last Kelabits to sport the traditional body markings – dark tattoos and elongated earlobes. Most young people move to the cities and never come back, and the population has been dwindling for some time, currently down to around 1,800.
Development has been slowly trickling in. The University of Malaysia has instituted a project to try to overcome the people’s physical isolation by connecting them to the internet. Bario now has a satellite connection, and mobile phone reception was established three months before my visit. Bario even has its own website. ‘We’re getting many online requests from tourists now,’ says Munney. ‘The website and the food festival have given Bario visibility, which is why the volume of visitors is starting to grow more steeply.’
At loggerheads
But a cloud hangs over the future of both tourism and the Kelabits themselves. It all began a few years ago when a large trans-boundary national park was being planned under a WWF-pioneered project known as Heart of Borneo. Indonesia forged ahead, creating the 14,000-square-kilometre Kayan Mentarang National Park. But on the Malaysian side, the government inexplicably changed its stated intentions at the last minute, truncating the proposed protected area to the diminutive 60,000-hectare Pulong Tau National Park and handing over the rest of the forest to Samling, Malaysia’s second-largest logging company.
‘We didn’t know of the logging concessions before they became a fait accompli, so we didn’t have a chance to protest,’ says Joseph Balan Seling, a former member of the Sarawak local parliament. ‘Now we are trying to keep the loggers out of some areas, such as the hill over there.’ He points to a slope at the edge of the Bario plateau, which is one of two 1,000-hectare parcels that the Kelabits are seeking to have designated as community forest.
Everyone is concerned about the logging, and mutterings of high-level corruption are rife, although no-one wants to talk openly. (This is where the Swiss anti-logging campaigner Bruno Manser went missing ten years ago.) Now, in this new wave of logging, the fear is that virtually all of the land outside the national park will be stripped bare. The government has responded to the disquiet by promising to expand the national park once logging is finished, presumably on logged land.
The tourism operators have already lost the Bario Loop, which used to be the most popular trek in the Kelabit Highlands – a five-day trip to three villages. The area has now been logged, and many guides have switched to the other side of the border inside Kalimantan, where the forest is intact.
Logging is also creeping throughout Pa Dallih, the area that has the greatest concentration of historical sites in the Kelabit Highlands. A team of archaeologists from the University of Cambridge working there has already mapped 500 historical or cultural sites, and the total could rise to at least 800.
‘Once these historical sites are identified, a buffer zone is marked around each site,’ says Jaman Riboh, a tourist guide who is involved in the mapping and management. ‘The logging company does not touch anything within the buffer zones, hence this also becomes a way to save some of the forest.’
Penan plight
One day, I go out looking for the Penan. These jungle nomads now mostly lead a semi-settled existence, and I find some of them in a settlement on the outskirts of Bario. Just beyond the last fields, I find the rickety construction of Rose Melai’s family.
Melai is one of the few Penan who can speak some English, and she joins me as I venture farther up the slope to the main Penan camp, which consists of about 12 shacks built of wood, bamboo and sheets of plastic and corrugated iron scavenged in Bario. ‘They moved here in the hope of finding work in the Kelabits’ rice fields,’ Melai explains. ‘It’s the only way we can make money.’
The Penan still get virtually all of their food from the forest. Their vegetable staple is the succulent and astringent stem of the sago palm, and they hunt birds and mammals with blow-pipes, smearing their darts with poisonous sap. Today, they are loitering at the squalid camp and give Melai some papers to read. ‘These are government papers asking the children to go to school,’ she tells me. ‘But the Penan see no value in sending children to school.’
Later, I join Melai and her husband on a hunting trip. We venture off the path and into virgin forest. He stalks prey while she picks rattan and other vegetable material.
That evening, as we sit in the hut cooking the squirrels bagged earlier, Melai apologises for not having any drink to serve me. ‘Almost everything we hunt is for our consumption,’ she tells me. ‘Whenever we have money, we can buy clothes, pots, coffee and sugar. But we can do without those things. We can live without money.’ At least for as long as they have the forest.
Borneo: co-ordinates
When to go
Weather in the Kelabit Highlands is pleasantly warm all year round, hovering between 23°C and 32°C, but the best time to visit is in the dry season, which runs from May to September.
Getting there
British nationals receive an automatic 90-day tourist visa on arrival in Sarawak. Malaysia Airlines (www.malaysiaairlines.com) operates two daily flights between Miri on the northwest coast and Bario. Miri is, in turn, connected to the capital, Kuala Lumpur, Kuching in southern Sarawak, and Kota Kinabalu in Sabah.
Further information
Most of the Kelabits speak good English. Accommodation in Bario includes De Plateau Lodge for a guesthouse atmosphere (deplateau@hotmail.com), Libal Paradise for farmstays (+60 19 807 1640; libalparadise@hotmail.com), or with a host family in the Bario Asal longhouse (+60 14 896 7905; paranmatu@yahoo.com).
February 2010
Longer treks penetrate old-growth jungle, and on Mount Murud, which straddles the border between Malaysia’s Sarawak and Indonesia’s Kalimantan, I experienced the most raucous dawn chorus in ten years of travel in Southeast Asia.
It’s an experience shared by just 400 other tourists in 2008, but that number is rapidly rising. ‘This is the first year that I’ve seen a regular inflow of tourists in the low season,’ says community leader Peter Matu.
And Douglas Munney, owner of De Plateau Lodge, says that he has seen the number of tourists increase by about 80 per cent in the three years since the launch of the local food and culture festival in 2005. ‘Some stalls ran out of food last year, so I guess that’s a measure of success,’ says Dora Tigan, secretary of the committee that organises the week-long annual event, which sees each Kelabit village put up a stall and compete to see who has the best décor and food. ‘We like to say that the jungle is our supermarket, and the festival is a celebration of Kelabit forest food.’
The festival has helped to raise the highlands’ profile. It’s also an opportunity to promote the indigenous rice variety – the leading brand in Malaysia. Rice production is one of the two economic motors (the other being tourism) in the region, with around 350 rice farmers producing 400 tonnes annually. ‘The rice farmers get a good price,’ says Matu. ‘But in the end, once high labour and transport costs are paid off, the profit only amounts to a couple of hundred ringgit [£300] every year.’
Changing culture
There is no road to Bario – the only way in or out is on the Twin Otter planes that fly twice daily. The settlement has 800 inhabitants and sprawls across a plateau. Local transport consists of six pickup trucks that crawl along the rutted roads (bringing in the vehicles entailed driving them to the point where the logging road peters out, then stripping them down and transporting the parts by boat). Other Kelabit villages scattered in the mountains have to make do with buffalo transport along a network of forest tracks.
The Kelabits were completely cut off from the outside world until the Second World War, when a team of British soldiers led by the anthropologist Tom Harrisson, who had been recruited for a plan to engage Borneo’s native peoples in the battle against the Japanese, parachuted into Bario. ‘My father told me that when the soldiers approached the longhouse, they tied their guns to ropes and dragged them on the ground behind them in order to demonstrate that they didn’t come to fight,’ says Matu as we sit in that same longhouse.
Harrisson’s mission was clearly successful, as the Kelabits later fought alongside the British against the Japanese, who had advanced as far as Pa Lungan, four hours’ walk from Bario. Harrisson stayed with the Kelabits after the war, spreading Western influence, and missionaries did the rest. The Kelabits became fervent Christians, abandoning their previous megalithic, animist, head-hunting culture. They perceived Christianity as liberation from the capriciousness of their superstitions, and Sunday is now an important day: the old wear their best on Sunday, donning their colourful costumes and opulent traditional earrings, which weigh 600 grams each.
During my visit, I stay in Bario Asal, the oldest extant longhouse in the highlands. It’s a splendid wooden structure divided into three long sections: a communal kitchen, a hall for social or religious gatherings and private sleeping quarters. A longhouse engenders a community that’s inclusive, egalitarian and harmonious, and families mingle in the communal kitchen, sharing food and yarns. Just before my visit, Matu had collected funds from the longhouse inhabitants and built a small hydropower plant for electricity.
But most of the people in the longhouse are old, a recurring theme in the other villages I visit. And it seems that these will be the last Kelabits to sport the traditional body markings – dark tattoos and elongated earlobes. Most young people move to the cities and never come back, and the population has been dwindling for some time, currently down to around 1,800.
Development has been slowly trickling in. The University of Malaysia has instituted a project to try to overcome the people’s physical isolation by connecting them to the internet. Bario now has a satellite connection, and mobile phone reception was established three months before my visit. Bario even has its own website. ‘We’re getting many online requests from tourists now,’ says Munney. ‘The website and the food festival have given Bario visibility, which is why the volume of visitors is starting to grow more steeply.’
At loggerheads
But a cloud hangs over the future of both tourism and the Kelabits themselves. It all began a few years ago when a large trans-boundary national park was being planned under a WWF-pioneered project known as Heart of Borneo. Indonesia forged ahead, creating the 14,000-square-kilometre Kayan Mentarang National Park. But on the Malaysian side, the government inexplicably changed its stated intentions at the last minute, truncating the proposed protected area to the diminutive 60,000-hectare Pulong Tau National Park and handing over the rest of the forest to Samling, Malaysia’s second-largest logging company.
‘We didn’t know of the logging concessions before they became a fait accompli, so we didn’t have a chance to protest,’ says Joseph Balan Seling, a former member of the Sarawak local parliament. ‘Now we are trying to keep the loggers out of some areas, such as the hill over there.’ He points to a slope at the edge of the Bario plateau, which is one of two 1,000-hectare parcels that the Kelabits are seeking to have designated as community forest.
Everyone is concerned about the logging, and mutterings of high-level corruption are rife, although no-one wants to talk openly. (This is where the Swiss anti-logging campaigner Bruno Manser went missing ten years ago.) Now, in this new wave of logging, the fear is that virtually all of the land outside the national park will be stripped bare. The government has responded to the disquiet by promising to expand the national park once logging is finished, presumably on logged land.
The tourism operators have already lost the Bario Loop, which used to be the most popular trek in the Kelabit Highlands – a five-day trip to three villages. The area has now been logged, and many guides have switched to the other side of the border inside Kalimantan, where the forest is intact.
Logging is also creeping throughout Pa Dallih, the area that has the greatest concentration of historical sites in the Kelabit Highlands. A team of archaeologists from the University of Cambridge working there has already mapped 500 historical or cultural sites, and the total could rise to at least 800.
‘Once these historical sites are identified, a buffer zone is marked around each site,’ says Jaman Riboh, a tourist guide who is involved in the mapping and management. ‘The logging company does not touch anything within the buffer zones, hence this also becomes a way to save some of the forest.’
Penan plight
One day, I go out looking for the Penan. These jungle nomads now mostly lead a semi-settled existence, and I find some of them in a settlement on the outskirts of Bario. Just beyond the last fields, I find the rickety construction of Rose Melai’s family.
Melai is one of the few Penan who can speak some English, and she joins me as I venture farther up the slope to the main Penan camp, which consists of about 12 shacks built of wood, bamboo and sheets of plastic and corrugated iron scavenged in Bario. ‘They moved here in the hope of finding work in the Kelabits’ rice fields,’ Melai explains. ‘It’s the only way we can make money.’
The Penan still get virtually all of their food from the forest. Their vegetable staple is the succulent and astringent stem of the sago palm, and they hunt birds and mammals with blow-pipes, smearing their darts with poisonous sap. Today, they are loitering at the squalid camp and give Melai some papers to read. ‘These are government papers asking the children to go to school,’ she tells me. ‘But the Penan see no value in sending children to school.’
Later, I join Melai and her husband on a hunting trip. We venture off the path and into virgin forest. He stalks prey while she picks rattan and other vegetable material.
That evening, as we sit in the hut cooking the squirrels bagged earlier, Melai apologises for not having any drink to serve me. ‘Almost everything we hunt is for our consumption,’ she tells me. ‘Whenever we have money, we can buy clothes, pots, coffee and sugar. But we can do without those things. We can live without money.’ At least for as long as they have the forest.
Borneo: co-ordinates
When to go
Weather in the Kelabit Highlands is pleasantly warm all year round, hovering between 23°C and 32°C, but the best time to visit is in the dry season, which runs from May to September.
Getting there
British nationals receive an automatic 90-day tourist visa on arrival in Sarawak. Malaysia Airlines (www.malaysiaairlines.com) operates two daily flights between Miri on the northwest coast and Bario. Miri is, in turn, connected to the capital, Kuala Lumpur, Kuching in southern Sarawak, and Kota Kinabalu in Sabah.
Further information
Most of the Kelabits speak good English. Accommodation in Bario includes De Plateau Lodge for a guesthouse atmosphere (deplateau@hotmail.com), Libal Paradise for farmstays (+60 19 807 1640; libalparadise@hotmail.com), or with a host family in the Bario Asal longhouse (+60 14 896 7905; paranmatu@yahoo.com).
February 2010
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