It’s hardly surprising that few outsiders have ever been to Rantau Bumbum. It has taken me five days and nights by cargo boat, another day by motor launch and two further days of jungle-trekking to get here.

Rantau Bumbum is the last settlement on the Mandai, the river that runs into the very heart of Indonesian Borneo. But it isn’t just the remoteness that has kept the village off the map. To Dayak communities all over Borneo, the Mandai is avoided as it’s considered to be the exclusive domain of ghosts. Even the otherwise fearless Iban headhunting parties steered well clear of what they knew as ‘the valley of the spirit world’.

The Da-an tribe are the only people ever to settle on the upper Mandai. As Pak Rajang, the ‘maximum headman’ of the Da-an (population 3,000), says: ‘The other Dayak people have always feared us because we must have powerful magic to be able to live among so many ghosts.’

This notoriety helped keep the Da-an safe from their more warlike neighbours, and the reputation for otherworldly powers has carried over even into the modern day. The diminutive and unassuming Pak Rajang smiles when he remembers the suspicion, bordering on fear, with which he was greeted among the Iban communities of Sarawak when he travelled there during the 1960s.

Haunted territory
Arriving at last in Rantau Bumbum, it’s difficult to believe that you’ve come to a Dayak version of the Gates of Hades. Beyond this modest collection of stilted huts, a schoolhouse
and a village store, there is a waterfall. And beyond the waterfall there is 160 kilometres of nothing but uninhabited, and apparently haunted, jungle.

I first led an expedition here 11 years ago. It took us 12 exhausting, malaria-wracked days of dugout-hauling and jungle-bashing to reach the source of the Mandai and to cross the mountains to the ‘neighbouring’ settlements.

I was returning now, albeit on a less strenuous expedition, to see how the past decade had treated the Da-an. This time, I am travelling with two friends from the USA and Hermas Rintik Maring, an ecological officer with WWF’s West Kalimantan office. Hermas, a Dayak from the local Taman tribe, is perhaps the most experienced jungle guide in West Kalimantan. Even for him, our journey would lead into unknown territory – in fact, according to Pak Rajang, we are the only outsiders ever to explore the sacred valleys beyond Rantau. It would be foolhardy to travel into this remote area without local support, but I am confident that, with the headman’s blessing, we are sure to find helpful and honourable guides among the young Da-an men.

In particular, I hope to track down Kolop, who had been the head guide on my previous expedition. I had sent word up the river (via a trading launch) that we were coming, but Kolop was on a pig-hunting trip in the jungle. We follow his trail farther into the jungle, to Kerean village. I don’t recognise the place. The rickety longhouse had finally collapsed and been replaced by the usual stilted timber-and-bamboo huts. Since defence was never a major issue with the Da-an, longhouses aren’t typical in this area. Before its collapse, Kerean’s ancient longhouse could have been a candidate for the oldest in Borneo, and I’m sorry to see that it had disappeared.

Despite the fact that our message never arrived, Kolop is in Kerean waiting for us.

‘I woke up this morning and had a strange feeling,’ he says. ‘I thought that someone was looking for me in Kerean and that I’d better get down here fast.’ None of the villagers seem to see anything extraordinary in the premonition that had brought him down to Kerean on the only day in the past decade that outsiders had arrived in their village.

Kolop had been the oldest of our guides on my previous expedition, but he seems to have survived the past decade apparently unchanged. At a little over five feet (1.5 metres) tall, he is of average height for a Da-an and appears to be almost solid muscle. He always had a penchant for the Da-an’s beram (rice spirit), and I’m not at all surprised when he suggests that we celebrate our reunion with several jugs of the cloyingly warm homebrew. Soon, there are a dozen of us, sat cross-legged, surrounded by bickering hunting dogs. We spend the afternoon chewing pork jerky, passing the beram jug and planning the logistics of our trip.

Kolop’s thirst seems limitless, and I soon realise that the reason he spent so much time alone in the rainforest was to be as far removed from his ‘devils’ as possible. I am happy to walk with him again out of Kerean, but during the next few days he is rarely sober, and it was with sadness that I accept his decision not to join us as head guide after all.



Village life
We spend several days preparing for our trip in the settlement that I have come to think of as ‘Headhunter Heaven’. Rantau Bumbum had always struck me as the model of how village life should be led. The people are more mutually respectful and caring than any others I know. No villager would dream of climbing a tree to pick a coconut for himself alone; he would harvest a great heap and distribute them among his neighbours. Even the smallest of children knows where to find roots, vegetables and spices in the jungle, and when a man returns from a fishing or hunting trip, he feeds not only his family, but also his neighbours. The slaughter of a domestic pig is cause for a feast that will include most of the neighbourhood.

Our entire entourage (now numbering eight) sleep spread out on the floor, or on hammocks tied to the roof beams in the stilted house of my friend Pak Rabone. There’s never talk of payment for Da-an hospitality, and to offer cash can still be seen as an insult; instead, we reciprocate with gifts from the huge stash of provisions we had bought from a Chinese trader back downriver in Putussibau. Sarongs, torches, fishing hooks, cigarette lighters, soap, tins of coffee, sugar and condensed milk, packet noodles, pens and paper, and packets of clove-scented cigarettes are all prized presents.

Only recently has a village store introduced a cash economy to Rantau. To a great extent, however, the villagers here still have little need for money: in addition to their rice, they have well-tended vegetable gardens and domestic pigs, cows, chickens and ducks. The jungle is loaded with fruit and teeming with pigs and deer, and I’ve seen the river here so packed with fish that you could literally scoop them out of the waterfall by the handful.

Slash-and-burn rice planting is central to the Da-an way of life, and during the clearing season, the Mandai spirit world is moody and misty with the haze of countless fires. Pak Rabone has already cleared a new paddy field and is about to start planting his precious rice. His main responsibility now is to ensure that he can supply food and, of course, alcohol in sufficient quantity to attract a serious labour force from the village.

It seems that the entire village is crossing the river to make the long walk to the new paddy field. At a shrine in the middle of the smouldering clearing, Ibu Habui, a female shaman, calls the benevolent arwah (spirits) to bless the work. Her shouts echo across the valley and a luckless pig and two chickens are sacrificed to ensure that the ancestors attend the call. Blood is sprinkled liberally over the seed rice and faces are besmirched with soot from the fires.

Pak Rabone’s family play host in a makeshift camp at the edge of the clearing while his pretty daughter supplies sustenance to the thirsty workers from an apparently bottomless aluminium teapot of beram. With typical good humour, the bodies of ‘exhausted’ workers are dragged into the shade to sleep off their excesses. Despite the party atmosphere, the work continues at an impressive rate – the clearing of a new paddy must be completed by sunset on the second day – and many of the labourers continue to work by the light of fires through the long night.

‘Don’t offend the spirits’
The departure of our expedition is delayed by the ceremonies and the accompanying beram sessions, but at dawn on the fourth morning, we paddle away from Rantau with three carefully selected dugouts and four experienced Da-an woodsmen. Seventeen-year-old Adi has brought his homemade rifle but is under strict orders to shoot at a distance from camp and to aim at nothing but pigs.

Soft-spoken Ismael, the oldest in the group, is nominally head guide. Having married a woman from one of the lower villages, Ismael is unusual in that he was the only Muslim Da-an I have ever met – he isn’t disappointed by Adi’s lack of success in bagging pork and our consequent diet of mostly fish and fern tips.

We carry the boats and baggage around the pounding waterfall, and as we paddle back out into midstream, a pair of magnificent rhinoceros hornbills fly across the valley, the air-pockets under their wings making the distinctive chugging noise that sounds so much like a labouring steam-engine. ‘A good omen,’ Hermas says with a grin. As a professional with WWF, Hermas is one of the new generation of Dayak. Many Westernised Dayak have abandoned their roots, but he has an enduring faith in the beliefs and cultural heritage of his people.

‘My tribe also believe this to be the spirit world,’ he continues as we paddled steadily upstream. ‘My grandparents would never have dreamt of coming here, and even my mother warned me to be careful. “Speak with respect,” she said. “Don’t offend the spirits”.’

We paddle for two days. The sharp rocks of the riverbed cut our feet when we have to haul the canoes, and as soon as we enter the jungle itself, we could see leeches looping excitedly towards us. I recall one particular rainy morning during my previous expedition when I removed no fewer than 72 leeches (we passed the hours and the miles by counting them) from my legs.

Wherever we stop for the night, our guides set up a comfortable, secure camp. They disappear into the jungle armed with their trusty machete-like parangs, and within half an hour, we have a long row of bunks on a sturdy platform. It seems to me that the Da-an live more comfortably in their rainforest camps than they do in the simple huts that they call home. Old rice sacks stretched across a framework of timber make for an infinitely more comfortable night’s sleep than the usual rattan mats on a bamboo floor.

These days, plastic sheets are preferred to the fiddly labour of roof-building with leaves and bark strips, but any clearing within reach of a bamboo grove and a rattan stand can be converted into a homely camp in less than an hour. Here on the equator, darkness falls almost instantly on the dot of six o’clock, after which there is little left to do but join the perpetual laughter and chatter of our guides.

‘The old people who feared this region were certainly wrong about one thing,’ Hermas says, as he casually sweeps giant ants out of his bunk. ‘The Da-an are the most hospitable and most mutually respectful people I’ve ever met... even among the Dayak of Kalimantan.’

While in many Dayak communities the young are drifting away – looking for work in logging camps, or among the ‘bright lights’ of the city – there seems to be a reassuring depth of commitment among young Da-an for the traditional ways of their people. Adi, like most Da-an teenagers, has had basic schooling in his village and then at a boarding school in Putussibau. He resists the lure of the outside world and hopes that the Mandai will always be his home.

‘Most of the neighbouring Dayak tribes already sold their land for logging,’ he points out. ‘Everyone wants to cut the jungle – get fast money from timber. The Da-an will need money, too, if we want good schools and medicine, but I hope we can find a way to preserve our valleys so that our children will have something to live from.’

There are worries, too, about where the spirits of headhunter heaven will go when the bulldozers come to drive them out.

Threatened wilderness
Although they forage and hunt tirelessly, no Da-an will deplete an area without leaving room for natural replenishment. Even so, you have to travel to the upper Mandai before you begin to see frequent signs of wildlife. Then, deer trails and pig wallows are everywhere. We saw the spoor of a clouded leopard and the scratches in tree trunks from the sharp claws of the sun bear. One evening, we sit in a ‘natural Jacuzzi’ among the rocks and watch a spectacular sunset flyby of more than 4,000 flying foxes. Even to Hermas’s experienced eye, it becomes apparent that this uncharted and rarely visited area might be one of the last great refuges of wildlife in Kalimantan.

In the evening, big groups of long-tailed macaques come down to the riverbank to drink, and at dawn, our campsites are serenaded by gibbons. We are visited, too, by flying lemurs, clumsy-looking creatures that launch themselves from the canopy with all the finesse of a hurled coalsack. The Da-an won’t kill these animals, and attribute strange powers to them: their call at night foretells the death of a traveller who hears it.

As we walk up a sandy beach – unmarked by human footprints – I am astounded to see the unmistakable tracks of a rhinoceros. According to our guides, the last rhino was killed here about 50 years ago, although one was sighted about 15 years ago. Perhaps the sacred Mandai valley will turn out be one of the last extensive territories of the Borneo rhino.

Unfortunately, it might already be too late. This entire area is now being sought after for logging concessions from two different timber companies. Given an alternative, the Da-an would prefer to preserve their forest, but timber exploitation can pay for schools, better housing, medicine and electricity.

August 2008