Jungle trek and long boat to Iban Longhouse

Friday 15 August 2008

Camp 5 to Iban longhouse

Our destination was an Iban ‘longhouse’, a forty door long house. Forty doors, forty families!

I stayed awake until 20h00 last night and, although I felt as though I could have slept on a bed of nails, I didn’t sleep very well at all. I guess I was still really rather dehydrated and my muscles ached…. all of them, all over. Anyway, at 03h10, the skies opened and everyone who was asleep was soon awake as a violent tropical storm dumped a load of rain, very noisily, onto our tin roof. It lasted about 30 minutes and was gone as quickly as it had come. Then, as the last drop fell, I think I finally fell properly asleep… without my mosquito net. With no mozzies or other biting insects around, what a relief it was to be able to catch any breeze that might waft by, something you can’t do wrapped up in a mozzie net.

I was awake at dawn and up shortly afterwards packing my things in the half light and pulling on my wet and clammy clothes to go to breakfast. Today, that repast consisted of tea, coffee, toast, sausage and a fried egg, but no baked beans this morning. I was finished and ready to fill in time writing up my diary notes by 07h00. No morning walk and explore for me this morning! We have a long walk ahead of us today.

So what is the plan for today? We are supposed to leave for the walk to a native Iban longhouse at 08h00. So far, all I know is that we’ll do an 11.3 km walk (that should take 3-4 hours) along what is encouragingly called the ‘Head Hunter’s Trail’, followed by a 3 hour boat ride. My body is a bit tired, legs from walking and upper body from hauling on the ropes and ladders yesterday, but I guess, I hope, that all my tired muscles will loosen up after a kilometre or two. Now, sitting around waiting for the rest of the group to get ready to leave, I find my wet tee shirt a bit cold to keep on as a sneaky little breeze has risen. I’ll peel it off and drape it over my backpack in the vain hope that a little more of its moisture will evaporate before I have to put it back on. No such luck, I fear. The sky is leaden and a few spits of rain are falling. I wonder what the day ahead has in store for us? It’s time to find out!

Much later:

We set off this morning across a suspension bridge still in sight of the camp. In no time at all, I really found each one of my over-walked, over-worked muscles…each screaming abuse at me for putting them to work again so soon. No, walking did not loosen them up.

It was quite dark walking through the forest due to the canopy and overcast conditions. Everything was wet from last night’s rain and I dreaded the thought of all those leeches you hear about just waiting in ambush to attach themselves to juicy body parts. The track was mercifully level and in good condition. Some wet areas had a boardwalk while other sections had a bed of river gravel to walk on. The walk took us 3.5 hours which was pretty good going considering our very tired bodies.

We waited by the river at Kuala Terikan for 50 minutes until our longboat arrived. All aboard, and we set off on the 30 minute ride downstream to a Ranger’s camp. By now my aching legs were something I felt I could do without. But more was in store for them! The stubby-legged plastic chairs we had to sit on in the boat contributed markedly to my further woes… and those of my fellow travellers, for we all felt the same way – except for Frau G, of course! These plastic chairs were just the same as the ones we see here at home… excepting that the legs had been cut off just a couple of centimetres below the seat! Why? This lowered the centre of gravity and made for a much more stable boat but it forced us to poke our legs out in front. There was nowhere else to put them. This immobility added to our discomfort.

Our already wet shoes just got wetter but, being positive, they also had a wash, which was probably a good thing. I know mine weren’t nice to be near, not nice at all! We’d carried our lunch ingredients with us in the boat. This was cooked when we reached the ranger’s camp and this time I was hungry. Rice and another tin of Ayam curried chicken was on offer.

My camera had decided to ‘dew up’ earlier during the morning because of the high humidity, so it was no good at all. I wondered how I was going to dry it out in the present conditions. I opened it up and laid it in the sun on the concrete surrounds of one of the ranger buildings in an attempt to dry it out whilst we had lunch. When I picked it up, it still didn’t work but, fortunately for my video diary of the trip, it sprang back into life again some 10 minutes later. Such are the worries of an ardent videographer in such climates.

Back in the boat, it was another 2.5 hours along a crystal clear stream, through verdant jungle, legs stuck out in front again – painful again! The sitting was relieved a couple more times as we scrambled over the side to push the boat over rocks in the shallows. Finally we reached the confluence of a much larger but very muddy stream, not at all like the clear smaller stream we had been enjoying. The Iban longhouse we were to stay in overnight was just around the corner.

The demarcation line between the National Park that we had been exploring over the last few days and the area outside of the park was very dramatic. The boundary was obvious as slash and burn agriculture began as soon as the line was crossed. The villagers have to live, of course, but it was so much nicer to be in the untouched forests of the National Park. Even in the National Park I didn’t see one animal and only half a dozen birds. I wonder just how protected and patrolled the National Park is. I get the impression from what was not said by the guide, that the locals still hunt and kill in the park. This will not promote eco-tourism.

Our destination was an Iban ‘longhouse’, a forty door long house. Forty doors, forty families! So there were about 150 people living in the long wooden, rusty corrugated iron roofed building which is raised some 1.5 metres above the ground. It has a long, 4-5 metre wide veranda running the full length of the building. This is where shoes are left and lots of communal activities take place. Kids certainly play on it and I watched some ladies weaving mats on it. It is also where the market was set up for us to buy from. There was a lot of bead work and some carved wooden and bamboo items.

Off the veranda are the actual living quarters for each family. In the house we were in, a corridor ran down one side with various open areas opening off it. There were some bedrooms and other rooms which contained the family’s arm chairs, cupboards and TV. Somewhere outside was a generator that supplied power to run the TV, phone and lighting. The kitchen was a ramshackle affair that appeared to just occupy a bit of a gap between two sections of the house. Most preparation of food appeared to be done on the floor. Bottled gas seemed to be the preferred cooking fuel.

The ‘bedroom’ we were all housed in was 20 metres long and 3-4 metres wide. There was a pile of mattresses stacked along a wall and an equally high pile of pillows and some blankets. We each selected our mattress and spaced them out on the lino covered floor. We each had a mosquito net that was suspended from nails driven into the wooden wall studs. This was to be our communal home for the night.

The place for ablutions was down some rickety wooden steps that took us back down to ground level. There were four wooden doors, two of which opened to reveal a slatted rough-sawn wooden floor with ample spaces for the water to escape, to where I don’t know, and don’t really want to know! A tap turned on a shower rose of sorts - cold water of course. Nonetheless, it was wonderful to wash my smelly body and to clean my teeth etc. If you picked one of the other doors you got a shower and a toilet bowl!

The dining room was next to the kitchen and consisted of a long wooden table that could have seated twenty or more people. There was a kitchen hutch that was full of food packets and other items, all just tossed in. I think menu selection consisted of opening a door and catching what fell out!

Our dinner was a beef stew, fern fronds, pumpkin and rice. It was good and we all seemed to have got our appetites back. I’m sure my calorie intake over the last few days no where equalled the outgoings. My shorts just seem to hang on me.

After dinner the rice wine came out. There was a homemade brew which was pretty strong but it was nothing compared to the bottle Chinese rice spirit that simply knocked your socks off! A little try of each was enough. I much preferred the COLD, yes COLD, Tiger beer that was on offer for RM6 each. A couple of those went down quite easily.

And so it is time to try to sleep in this amazing longhouse, the traditional communal way, all in together, the way the Ibans have always lived. It’s all so very different from our way of life… each family in it’s own ‘home’ and, in most cases, with our own private rooms. The world is so full of different ways to live life, is it not? And that is so special.