In search of head hunters

Belaga, Sarawak4 September 2009

Borneo, certainly in my imagination, was always a place of wild jungle and wild people. But no more. The primary forest has been felled in most accessible places, fragmented by vast plantations of oil palm or replaced now by secondary growth. Its once head-hunting tribal people are now also tamed, many having converted to Christianity in the ’70s (odd in a country that is predominantly Muslim and I’m sure it is no coincidence, though I have yet to find out why).

Our Air Asia flight from KL landed in Bintalu airport on the 4th of September and we were slightly late meeting our driver Steven Lepi in his boss’s Toyota SUV – the Land Rovers that used to ply the rough roads in this ex-British colony are now rarely to be seen. As we made our way over that initial stretch of tarmac and then bumped over the muddy logging road that is the only ground access to the frontier town of Belaga (pronounced ‘Blagger’), the air conditioning kept us icy cool as mile after mile of damaged landscape rolled past.

My fantasy of leaving the coast to forge into serene forests of gigantic hardwood trees was smashed. There was lots of forest, but it was mostly small trees, re-grown in the last 20 years since the logers went through. Or even less, as many of these hillsides are burned to make dry paddy fields for the local peoples and then left to recover after just one year’s use.














It’s not all bad news. Some of the most important areas of Malaysian Borneo have been designated national parks, preserving many of the astonishing number of species that live here, and the secondary forest grows fast and is still beautiful. And of course, the local people gain employment and hence a better standard of living from all this economic activity. However, there is no doubt that big money rules here and the government and even the people seem to care little for the wilderness or that they are losing their beautiful landscape for a uniform sea of near lifeless plantations.

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We arrived in Belaga, and met up with our local guide and 'fixer, Hamdani, to arrange the next stage of our travels (over a welcome bowl of peppery noodle soup in his favourite café). Gangs of moth-hunting geckos on the walls kept the boys happily entertained. Later, we returned to our shabby hostel – the ‘B&B’ – that we made insect proof by teetering on a suitcase placed on the bed to suspend our mossie net.

The next morning, after a breakfast of poor coffee and poorer toast (they eat noodles for breakfast here), we visited the local store to buy rice and a frozen chicken to take as gifts for the local tribe we were to be visiting, along with a box of bottles of drinking water for us.

Our host to be was ‘Papa’ (not his real name) – the deputy chief of a community of Kejaman people an hour’s boat ride upstream from Belaga (no roads here).

We were heading here because Jasmine our friend in KL had spent time with him, learning to carve wood in the traditional manner of the tribe – a skill that is sadly now dying out through lack of interest and lack of good ironwood, the hardwood of choice. She’d also helped Papa when he and a few local colleagues, including Hamdani, visited KL to carve the huge funerary poles that stand in front of the national art gallery (a rare nod to the traditional arts in a modern capital city that seems to want to forget its jungle roots; the main museum has not one piece of tribal art on display).















After an exhilarating, cooling ride over heavily silted water between banks crowded with lush green growth and sparsely settled with stilted wooden longhouses, we arrived at Long Segaham feeling like true adventurers. Taking all our belongings in large bags was a mistake, we then realised. The steep, slippery banks to the village were negotiated via planks and logs with simple steps axed into them and, to an inexperienced outsider like me, were absolutely impossible to traverse with a rucksack on my back. Luckily Hamdani was up to the task, and as we wobbled up the planks, he manfully carried all the big luggage over the tricky bits.













At the house, with muddy shoes removed at the door, we met Papa at last – an 80 year old with sparkly eyes and an evident cheeky sense of humour; though not a word of English. He invited us, via Hamdani, to sit on the floor of the baking hot kitchen (damn these tin roofs they all build here) and have a cup of tea and biscuits served by his daughter.













After tea, we went and sat on the veranda that opened into the shared space of the longhouse community (Long Segaham is so big that they actually have three longhouses arranged around a square – most are a single long building divided into small houses allocated to each family).













As word spread of the arrival of strangers at the house and crowd of children and adults grew, so Aron passed around balloons and sweets that we’d brought with us from town.













For a happy hour, the kids all played enthusiastically and Aron and Ariel had soon made friends. From that moment on, aside from meals and bedtimes, we hardly had to look after the boys; they just played and played in an environment free of cars and buses and the other hazards of modern life. There were dangers of course, like the river and the forest, and the heat of the sun (it was really hot there), but the villagers kept a close eye on them and were not shy of telling them off if they were straying.













We spent several lazy days at Long Segaham; taking occasional walks around the village, watching the womenfolk (the men seemed to disappear off to jobs, go off hunting wild boar, or just sit around) go about their daily tasks, such as drying and winnowing rice, or preparing home-grown tobacco into sellable rolls.

If it was too hot we’d while away the hot hours seated on the great slabs of dark wood that served as seats on the veranda. These were relics of the old days, possibly 100 years old and had been carved down with axe from sections of the huge trees that used to grow around here.

The Kuching museum folk had supposedly offered large amounts of cash for these, but had been turned down. Thankfully, as they had already bought up much of the traditional carvings that the village owned. The rest had been munched by termites or rot, or had disappeared in the fire that destroyed the previous longhouse. Now the only other piece of carved wood that was evident in the settlement was an ornate tomb of the old chief; mounted on a pole next to the river bank. But this was also starting to disintegrate.




















In search of more, we asked local lad Kennedy and ’Father’ John (the youthful stand-in minister) to take us to the cemetery, 10 minutes ride downstream, to see the queen’s grave (the chief’s wife). Needing little persuasion, they borrowed a boat and motored us down there with great enthusiasm.

There was no proper landing stage, so we waded through calf-deep mud (imagine the boys’ delight) and then walked barefoot over crunchy leaves and twigs to the graveyard. ‘Er, should we worry about scorpions or snakes?’ I asked. ‘There are none’ came the reply. (Well, we saw deadly pit vipers later on, but in another part of the island; maybe they were right about their neck of the woods).

And the carvings? Well, there were none. The queen’s grave was a simple concrete affair with a cross on top. There were more graves further into the overgrown cemetery but none were wooden. It seems Kuching museum had nabbed the lot.

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It was evident from being around Papa over those few days that this was a community in the latter stages of dramatic change, and currently undergoing some hard times. Since Papa’s early days – growing up in a vast forest in which the only felled trees were those cut down by the animist villagers to provide fields for their crops, the large mammals were still there to raid the crops, and the river could flood to the tops of their wooden houses – the forest had been felled, the village had adopted a new religion (Catholicism) and western dress, and taken to working for a living to be able to buy such modern luxuries as TVs.

And now, some kilometres upstream, the vast Bakun hydroelectric dam scheme was nearing completion - aimed to provide power for the big cities of Malaysia and Brunei, it is muddying up the river, damaging populations of local fish and taking away a major source of drinking water. They were not even going to get any power from the project. Now they rely on a small stream in the hills for drinking and bathing water, but while we were there, there had been no rain for three months and even this was intermittent. A noisy diesel generator provides them with electricity between sundown and 10pm, during which time the TV ruled in Papa’s house and a small crowd of village children would gather to watch ghastly Malaysian soap operas or the Astro satellite sport channel.

Each day, Papa would walk us over to one of the other village houses to have a jug ‘shower’ with their precious water, as his block hadn’t been plumbed in yet. And would stand guard outside to stop the local kids from peeking. We were too hot and sticky to say no.













Three days later, after we had interviewed Papa for a possible magazine article and recorded Papa’s carving tools with Maja’s Leica, Hamdani picked us up and boated us back to Belaga for a couple of days’ rest and swimming in the clear local river – thankfully unaffected by the dam construction.













Oh and I had my 44th birthday on the 8th, which was a day like any other, but in the evening, I was serenaded by my boys in the town park as we munched Ferrero Rocher chocolates as a special treat. Happy day…

[Note all pictures and words on this blog are copyright Maja Kardum or Daniel Palmer]