Kuching Part Two

One of the main tourist draws in Sarawak are the visits to the Iban tribal longhouses. These amazing structures house little villages of upwards of 100 people. When one wants to do a longhouse visit, they need to be invited by a tribe member. This normally requires going to a small, upriver village and either booking a package through a tour agent or, if you have the time and want to go hardcore, you can just hang out in one of the village markets or cafes and wait and hope to make the acquaintance of a longhouse resident who is feeling like a little company. There are also spruced up longhouse resorts, which are little more than spiritless longhouses in a motel configuration. The Hilton has even gotten in on the longhouse action. They run the swankiest longhouse resort on Borneo at a location that is only accessible by riverboat. In my case, I had struck longhouse gold. Bidas, the Borneo B & B owner, has been long-time friends with Stewart an Iban local who had been laid off from his work building roads and had been invited by the hostel to take people on local tours, including a trip out to his family’s two longhouses, about five hours drive northeast of Kuching. Stewart’s Longhouse Package included the aforementioned visit to Fairy Cave, Semenggoh Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre, the Cat Museum (I skipped this), Jong’s Crocodile Farm and two nights in genuine Iban longhouses with Stewart’s family. The whole package was 350RM (US$92), much less than booking with the tourism office and infinitely more authentic than being paraded out to a fabricated and watered down longhouse experience with a group of 50 other westerners.

We were leaving at 8:00AM. With stops at the croc farm and the wildlife centre mixed in to the five hour drive and a possible wild boar hunt after arrival (no kidding), it was going to be a very long day, much of it bouncing around on the spine-rattling jungle roads of rural Sarawak in Stewart’s van. My plan was to pack my little day bag with the bare essentials, get a bowl of noodles, shave and take my last shower for three days and then sneak to bed at 10:00 so I would be fresh as a daisy for the orangutans and reptiles. And so began the latest episode of “When Leif’s Good Intentions Get Hosed.”

When I tried to slip out for some noodles, Stewart and his relatives were laying in wait and implored me to join them. I had barely gotten my ass into a chair before there was an open rice wine in front of me. Moments later one of the guys burst through the door with several to-go packages that contained giant seasoned crabs and chicken. They fed me until bursting, with two rice wines to wash it all down. Aside from Stewart and Bidas, no one spoke much English. Well, they didn’t speak much English while sober. After several beers I was being subjected to a round table interview. We covered a barrage of subjects. How I liked Kuching, how I liked Malaysia, how long I would stay, where I would go next and if American girls are easy just like in the movies. I assured them that this was true, though in retrospect I think they were referring to sex. I thought we were talking easy, you know, easy like Sunday morning…

Just as I was taking concerned note of the advancing hour, suddenly everyone was up. “We are going to make a move” I was told. Move where? “Special club.” We piled into two cars and as we drove I grilled Stewart about this special club. Apparently this was a place where only certain, invited people can go. After lengthy interrogation I got Stewart to admit that the club was run by the Sarawak Mafia. Furthermore, it seems that Stewart does the occasional odd job for the Mafia, like repossessing cars. Road builder, travel guide and repo man. Stewart, it seemed, had layers that outstripped his innocent, Iban, regular guy persona.

The club turned out to simply be a converted apartment with a discrete sign out front saying it was a private club and anyone who is not invited should piss off. It was just one big room, with a small bar, some scattered tables and chairs and a sparkling new pool table. Before departing the B & B, we had absorbed another hostel resident into our merry band; a partied out, dreadlocked, overly-tattooed, shoeless, Welsh guy named Steve. Steve was a brick layer in the U.K. for half the year and traveler/recreational drug user the rest of the time. Somehow Steve had gotten a few mosquito bites on his feet that he subsequently scratched so ferociously that they turned into bloody wounds, hence no shoes. Steve wanted to play pool. I did too, but I was still wrapping my mind around the whole Mafia thing, wondering if maybe I should have changed shirts or shaved or something so as not to offend our hosts. Then I looked at Steve and realized that if anyone was going to have his thumbs chopped off for breaking the dress code, it would be him, so I relaxed.

Actually the club was very unassuming. There were only about 10 guys and one woman, all sitting at the bar and watching English Premiere Football League (soccer). Our arrival doubled the bar’s numbers and tripled the noise. No one looked remotely Mafia-like. Mostly they looked like Stewart; normal blue collar guys. No guys draped in gold and expensive suits, no crazy bruisers with face-scars and eye-patches and no enforcers cleaning their teeth with two foot machetes. Just average guys out for drinks.

The pool table was free and I played several games. The drinks were free too. Everything was free at this special club. I restrained from asking, if they didn’t charge for anything, how the hell they made any money. After several drinks and repeated, embarrassingly bad games of pool, we left. I had long forgotten my plans for an early night. In fact, I was swiftly approaching my optimum party-mode by this point, so when we drove past Earthquake, I asked to be let out of the car. Steve followed.

I expressed doubt about Shoeless Steve’s chances at the door with his jungle casual wear. Steve wasn’t worried. “When we get to the door, just point up and say something and while everyone is looking up to see what you’re pointing at, we’ll just slide in.” It worked. Earthquake was a different place on Saturday. It was wall-to-wall people and I was surprised to see that Steve and I were the only Pinkies in the joint. I assumed that a prominent listing in Lonely Planet would have drawn at least a smattering of backpackers, but no. Steve’s drunken confidence was beginning to worry me. When I asked about the local consequences of hitting on a guy’s girlfriend he reported, “Man, we’re Europeans, we can get away with murder!” (Steve had clearly not been paying attention to my accent, but I let this go.) “Wait til you get to Thailand. The girls are aggressive, man! They actually come up and hit on you! Vietnam is even worse. I had guys trying to give me their daughters!” Steve’s attitude had me wondering about our chances of getting back to the hostel with all our teeth, but he ended up being very well behaved. We sat and drank, watching the restrained Malaysians get down. Only a few were dancing, with a couple of the more jubilant ones up on the tables. Everyone else was just sitting and ordering whole bottles of liquor for their tables and watching everyone else. By “everyone else,” of course, I mean me and Steve. This went on for some time. It was just like on the water taxi, every time I busted someone staring, they would fake like they were looking at the ceiling or their nails or something. There was a discouraging guy to girl ratio of about 8:1. Again, clearly there would be no line-up to partake in the wonders of my lap.

Accustomed to being the center of attention, Steve kept on talking, repeatedly wishing out loud that he had some drugs. After a few cocktails, I too forgot about our audience and instead became inordinately distracted by the dispiriting cookie-cutter techno turn the DJ had taken. I eventually bulldozed through the club, climbed the ladder to the booth and made a few programming suggestions. These were ignored and after our fourth round of drinks, noting that it was now after 1:30AM, Steve and I decided to head for home.

One block later, we passed Discovery Café, which was quieter, played better music and had more single women sitting around looking around expectantly for some debonair foreigners to chat them up. Or so it appeared from the street. Once in the club, we realized that the single women were actually transvestite prostitutes. One took a liking to Steve right away and I made my escape to accost some Pinkies that I spotted across the room. Much later Steve came lurching up. “Man I can’t believe you left me with that shemale! I couldn’t bloody get rid of her!” It was now going on 3:00AM and the Discovery Café was closing. It was piss pouring rain and Steve decided to make a run for the hostel. I wanted to hang back. Borneo downpours usually only last about 10 minutes and I wanted to wait it out. Plus, the last thing I wanted was to have to pack away wringing wet clothes into my bag for three days. Soon after Steve’s departure, a couple of Malay guys who had been hanging out with us suggested that we go get some food and they would drop me off at the hostel afterward. Normally, I wouldn’t go off in a stranger’s car, drunk as Shoeless Steve, at 3:00AM in a foreign country, but thus far every single person I had met on Borneo had been disarmingly kind, so after briefly sizing up the situation I agreed to go. I got a little nervous as we ended up driving a very long way to get food, but the guys assured me that we were going to the only decent all-night hawker centre. It turned out fine. We ate wonderful drunken, late-night food, they refused to let me pay for my own, then they drove me right to my door. I gave them a few American dollars to give to their younger siblings and staggered upstairs where I crashed around, getting cleaned up and finally got into bed at 6:00AM.

Seemingly two seconds later the alarm went off at 8:00AM. I was still very drunk, which in my case makes getting out of bed virtually painless. Fortunately I had done my packing the night before, so all I had to do was pull on a shirt and I was ready to go. Stewart and a German couple that were coming along were already in the car. I gulped down some coffee and we were off. Seeing that I was a mess, Stewart stopped for breakfast at his favorite laksa place. It was spicy enough to melt a bar of gold, but I was too far gone for it to save me. Instead I loaded up on coffee and we headed for the Semenggoh Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre.

We arrived in time for the morning feeding. The orangutans basically have free reign of the Centre grounds, so you have to keep an eye out for them as you move along the paths, because they are still wild enough to greatly value their personal space. Especially when they have a baby with them. One of the keepers led us a short distance into the jungle before he spotted a mom and baby about 30 feet up a coconut tree. He lured them down with bananas and eggs while making sure that everyone was well out of the discomfort zone. It took a lot of coaxing, but mom eventually came down with her baby clinging to her chest, collected a few eggs, put them in her mouth for safe keeping and then headed off down the path.

From there we turned around and a huge daddy orangutan was looming 10 feet directly above us in another tree. He was a monster. His torso was bigger than a full grown man, but his stunted legs made him about four and half feet tall. The keeper waved us all clear then set out a few bananas. The daddy ambled down and took his time with the bananas before following the mom down the path, with all the casual confidence of a guy who knows that if anything that got in his way he could peal the limbs off of it, like a banana.

After that excitement, we got back into the car for the hours long drive to Jong’s Crocodile Farm. This place was better than any zoo I have ever seen. First, with a few exceptions, the animal habitats were huge and seemed very well kept. Although the main attraction here is the crocs, there are also a host of other jungle creatures; various monkeys, cats, honey bears, birds and lesser reptiles. We had to race to catch the croc feeding as soon as we arrived. There was one huge pen that must have held upwards of 50 crocs and they were all fed at once. Handlers flung giant slabs of meat into the fray and the crocs thrashed around to get their share. This was arresting in and of itself, but then the handlers inched some dangling pieces of meat out over the pen on clothes line pulleys. In order to get at this food, the crocs had to push up on their hind legs and tails, reaching roughly six feet in the air to snatch the meat off the lines. I had no idea crocs could stand up like this and these guys were so huge that it was slightly frightening to see this happen.

Once the meat was gone and the crocs dispersed, we ventured through the rest of the park, admiring the other animals. There was one monkey who liked to reach his arm out of his cage and hold hands with people. We all took turns doing this until he got bored and retreated to pick at his anus. Seeing this, I also retreated to vigorously to wash my hands.

On the way out, we ran across a photo display of croc-related disasters. One showed a croc with his mouth clamped on the bloody arm of a handler who had fallen into the pen. Another showed a croc that had been killed by a village after it had eaten a little girl. The photo montage showed the girl’s father cutting open the croc’s carcass to removed the pieces of his daughter. Yeah, it was gruesome.

By the time we got into the car I was really suffering. I had long since sobered up and while my hangover wasn’t nearly as bad as I had expected, the minor discomfort compounded with the sorry amount of sleep I’d had the previous night was making me wish we were going to the Hilton longhouse instead Stewart’s family’s undoubtedly uncomfortable longhouse in the deep jungle. It was another two hour drive before we stopped for a late lunch. I had desperately tried to sleep, but the state of the Sarawak roads prevented this. It was like riding a roller coaster. Constant hills, dips, sharp turns and a steady series of pot holes and road dimples. Road work crews were scattered every few kilometers, usually with all but one, temporary gravel lane blocked off, so the going was very slow at times. We finally pulled into Stewart’s Mom’s longhouse at 5:00PM. Stewart explained that we were going to be staying at this longhouse the following night, but for now we were only picking up his mom and heading for their old longhouse, where they still keep a dwelling. Unlike in the western world, longhouse dwellings are not sold like a house when people move. Even if they sit empty, the dwellings stay in the family forever.

The outside of the longhouse was a bit of a surprise. From the pictures I had seen on the Internet, I had expected it to be all wood, with a thatched roof, up on nine foot stilts, accessible only by a rickety rope and wood plank bridge, like from “Temple of Doom.” But it was a just a really long, haphazardly constructed jumble, made from available materials, like mis-matched walls seemingly pulled off other houses, with a tin corrugated roof. It was on stilts, but only about three feet off the ground. The front porch was up a short step ladder that only had thin, precarious looking sticks as steps and a thinner stick handrail. I was sure this thing couldn’t hold the weight of a full-grown man, but Stewart climbed up with no problem. I out-weighed Stewart by at least 20 pounds, so I tentatively made my way up, skipping a couple stick-steps that weren’t much thicker than my thumb. The exterior porch was laid out with thin planks of wood, with huge gaps between them, large enough for a modest ring of keys to fall through them.

The interior porch was where my fading expectations were rescued. It was exactly like in the pictures. It was made of unfinished hardwood, stretching uninterrupted for the entire length of the longhouse. This particular longhouse had 22 dwellings, about the length of a moderate city block. People were out in front of their dwellings for the entire length of the longhouse, sitting and talking with neighbors, sleeping, weaving baskets and/or sewing. It was mostly women and kids. While Stewart collected his mom, one of the neighbors got up and approached us. She was a tiny woman, if I had to guess roughly 112 years old and naked from the waist up. I recalled from my visit to the Sarawak Museum that most of the women in the old pictures were shirtless, but those pictures looked to be between 50 and 100 years old, meaning this chick was probably the last bastion of that habit. Everyone else that I could see was clothed at least in full-body sarongs, with the younger girls even in regular t-shirts with bras. The topless granny wanted very much to talk with us, but there was no hope. After a few moments, she seemed to suddenly realize that she had her wrinkled boobs out and pulled up and tied her sarong around her chest. Stewart emerged from his mom’s place at this point and kindly led us away from the babbling granny.

We were taken on a brief tour of Stewart’s mom’s place. Once out of the of the communal porch, the dwellings are very much like a normal house, but it’s all wide-open space with very tall ceilings. The house was divided into a living area, a middle storage/work area and a back kitchen/eating area. There was also a loft above the living area where we would sleep during our stay. Out back there was a porch where they had both western and crouch toilets, plus a shower closet and steps leading down to the chicken coups and pigpens. This longhouse had electricity, running water and, disappointingly, a satellite dish and computer. It was sparingly furnished and the interior wood floors had been covered by adhesive, paper-thin linoleum.

Go to Kuching Part Three