It's been raining here, a drenching tropical downpour, since last night. It's the sort of weather that makes you glad that you're not riding a bicycle, or sleeping in a tent. We arrived here in the capital of Sarawak yesterday, on an airplane. Despite my original plan to ride all the way to Kuching from Brunei, we decided to cut short the Borneo leg of our bike trip in the town of Bintulu, cutting out some 600 km of riding that didn't have a lot of major attractions along its length. We still managed to ride some 730 kilometres along the northwest coast of Borneo, and the riding was a good chance for Joanne to make up for a lack of bicycle preparation before the trip. We're going to fly to Johor Bahru, near Singapore, in a few days' time to start the long main leg of the trip that should lead from Singapore to Hong Kong over the next six and a half months.
We flew back to Kota Kinabalu from Sipadan on Feb. 10, and after a day of final preparation and fiddling, we started riding south out of KK on Feb. 12th. We set off mid-morning and promptly stopped to buy snorkels and masks, further delaying our departure. It was tremendously hot and humid cycling in the middle of the day, and our heavily-laden bikes felt wobbly under us. Luckily there were almost no hills along the way as we rolled along a major divided highway through industrial parks to the town of Papar. Traffic was heavy, and Joanne almost melted in the heat. It was a harsh start and it seemed as though we had cycled more than 50 kilometres. We went further, out to a beach, looking for a possible place to camp, but after watching the crabs playing on the sand, at the we opted for the comfort of an air-conditioned hotel in the rather grubby town. We had passed a string of nice beach hotels on the way to Papar, but, as luck would have it, Papar had only a rather dubious cheap hotel/brothel in the noisy centre of town. It didn't matter though, as we slept like the dead.
Having learned our lesson about heat, we set off early the next day to roll another 50 km to Beaufort, and we reached it by 10:30. The road became a bit quieter, through farm fields and forest, and it was nicer cycling. The third day, 60 km to the ferry at Menumbok, was along an almost deserted road through patches of real forest (a rarity along the roads in Sabah!) and across a bird-filled marsh, before rolling across a series of low hills that Joanne didn't really like at all. We made it to the ferry terminal seconds before an enormous downpour, and spent hours eating and watching the rain before shuttling across to Labuan Island. It's a duty-free zone, so beer was much cheaper than the usual $2.50 (US) a bottle in the rest of Sabah; we celebrated Valentine's Day with pizza and beer. The town was full of men from alcohol-free, expensive Brunei, getting drunk and chasing bar hostesses.
The next day we caught another ferry to Muaran, the port of Brunei, and after collecting entry stamps for a new country we pedalled slowly through the coastal hills into the capital, Bandar Seri Bagawan (BSB). The roads were full of cars screaming along; there were plenty of BMWs, but lots of cheap Indian Tatas as well. There were lots of nice suburban houses along the road, but there were also some old houses with rusty tin roofs; even in oil-rich Brunei, there are still quite a few people not sharing in the general prosperity. Downtown BSB was pleasant but tiny; with a total population of only 380,000 citizens plus probably an equal number of guest workers in the entire country, you don't need a lot of buildings. We bought stamps at the post office to add to Joanne's collection, admired the main mosque, then cycled out to the beach to stay at a backpacker's camp in a nature reserve. It was pleasant enough that we decided to take a rest day there the next day.
On the 17th, we awoke refreshed and left early for the long trek out of Brunei. For such a tiny country, it was a lot of kilometres (125) to the western border with the Malaysian state of Sarawak. Having run out of Brunei dollars, and with no cheap hotels outside of BSB, it seemed like a good idea to make a long dash for Malaysia in one day. Joanne held up well in the heat and the hills until we stopped for lunch after 95 km, at the oil town of Seria, a huge expanse of planned housing interspersed with oil wells and pipelines. From there to the border were a struggle for her, and once we had crossed the border just before dusk and found no villages on the other side, we set up our tent beside the road as it started to rain. Joanne was completely exhausted and it was a steambath inside the tent. We were a tired and grumpy pair the next morning as we limped the final 30 km into Miri.
Revived by tasty Indian food and a good night's sleep, we set off the next afternoon for Lambir Hills, a national park 3o km south of Miri. It was a great place to take another day away from the bikes, hiking in the virgin rainforest (supposedly, by some measure or other, the most diverse rainforest on earth in terms of number of tree and plant species). There was an observation platform high up a huge tree that swayed alarmingly in the wind, but from which I couldn't see a single bird or monkey; this continues my bad luck with seeing things from treehouses and canopy walkways. In compensation, there was a great view over the canopy layer of the rainforest, although there was also the sound of not-very-distant chainsaws chopping down yet another chunk of forest. There were also lots of waterfalls to cool off in and relax beside with a picnic lunch and a guitar.
Another longish day (85 km) brought us to Niah Caves National Park. Niah is one of the main sources of black-tailed swifts' nests, the key ingredient in birds nest soup, a great Chinese delicacy. The birds nest in a series of immense caves in vertical limestone hills. The largest cave is enormous, maybe a kilometre long, two or three hundred metres wide and fifty metres high. It's not a glittering, pristine series of stalactites and stalagmites, because of the actions of the birds nest collectors. To take advantage of prices of up to $800 a kilo for these nests, men shinny up flimsy bamboo poles hung from the cave ceiling and lashed together end to end. Looking at the poles, I can't imagine how more people don't tumble to their deaths holding on with one hand while poking at nests on the ceilings with another long bamboo stick. The caves are also home to half a million bats, whose guano is also collected to fertilize Sarawak's pepper crops. The caves are also the site of some of the oldest archaeological finds in Southeast Asia, with homo sapiens finds dating back to 25,000 BC and more recent cave paintings.
The caves were interesting for their size, if not their cleanliness, but the walk through the swampy jungle to get to them was the highlight for me. There were more butterflies than we had seen anywhere so far, and lots of birds, frogs and lizards. Other tourists even saw flying lemurs, although I struck out on them. Walking back from the caves in the dark we saw three different species of phosporescent creatures: a caterpillar, a small fly and a beetle, all glowing green in the dark. Plenty of monkeys and birds too, although, as always the case in rainforest, they were far harder to see than to hear. It was another good nature fix, especially welcome since the cycling between Lambir and Niah was almost entirely through oil palm plantations, with not a native tree to be seen for kilometres.
From Niah to our next national park, Similajau, was 150 km. Mindful of the Brunei experience and its effect on Joanne, we decided to break the journey halfway. Our map didn't show anything there, but we thought that we would ask to camp near the housing complex of an oil palm plantation. It was a stinking hot day, the hilliest yet, and Joanne struggled on gamely but more and more slowly until we decided to call it a day. As luck would have it, we had passed no more plantations, and precious few settlements of any kind. We cycled on, looking for a likely place to stop, and found a tribal longhouse, with a spanking new church in front of it, beside the road. Having heard of the code of hospitality among the Iban (the indigenous tribe inhabiting the lowland parts of Sarawak), we decided to ask if we could camp near the longhouse. John, the man we spoke to, would have no talk of camping and invited us in to sleep at the longhouse.
John was a lay worker for the Catholic church; most of the indigenous people of Borneo (they're known collectively as Dayaks, a term that has acquired a sinister atmosphere, like Serb or Hutu, in the last few days in the Indonesian part of Borneo) have been converted to Christianity in the last 100 years. John had overseen the building of the new church, and, although he would accept no payment for himself for putting us up, I was able to convince him to accept a donation towards finishing the interior of the church. He was an interesting man and spoke fluent English, so we were able to quiz him on lots of aspects of life for the modern-day Dayak. He said that the biggest problem they faced was that most of the land area suitable for establishing new settlements to accomodate the rapidly growing population (the Pope's teachings on birth control seem to hold sway among the Dayak) was held by oil palm plantations owned by outsiders. The plantations paid such pitiful wages (about $4 a day) that none of the Sarawak Dayaks were willing to work on them, and so the plantations imported thousands of Indonesian workers, both legally and illegally, exacerbating the pressure on the land. His longhouse had had a 10-year legal struggle to try to obtain land for growing food and pepper (their main cash crop) from a giant plantation, but they had finally been granted a 90-year lease on the land a few years before.
The longhouse had about 15 families in it, each with their own apartments in the back half of the longhouse but sharing a common front verandah. Despite the modern construction materials and the satellite TV and laser-disc karaoke system in John's living room, and despite the conversion from head-hunting and polytheism to Christianity, it seemed as though the traditional longhouse system of social organization was alive and well. The families spoke Iban amongst themselves, instead of Malaysian, and their church services were conducted in Iban. There were a few hours of Iban-language broadcasting on state radio every day. Cultural identity and self-esteem seemed to be surviving the wrenching economic and social changes of the modern world better than in some other traditional cultures such as the Inuit of northern Canada or the Aborigines of Canada.
We dined on freshly harvested rice, then turned in for an early night. In a less religious Iban household, we would likely have been served copious quantities of home-made tuak liquor, but after a hard day's cycling, we were glad to miss out. We actually ended up using our tent, without the fly, as a mosquito net that evening on John's living room floor, and it was amazing how much heat can be trapped by mesh netting. Early the next morning, we said our goodbyes and heartfelt thank-yous and rolled off towards Bintulu and Similajau.
The day before Joanne had rebelled at the idea of cycling from Bintulu to Sibu, another 220 kilometres through the interior, to reach the Rejang River. I had wanted to go upriver to visit the highlands inhabited by the Kenyah and Kayan peoples, but Joanne had had it with cycling through the hilly interior and wanted to fly from Bintulu to Kuching. Since Borneo was initially planned as a warm-up ride to the main trip, mainly to get Joanne into cycling shape, I agreed to cut the cycling short in Bintulu. That day's ride, 55 km into Bintulu and then 30 km out of town to Similajau Park, was the hardest yet for Joanne and she was mightily glad to coast down the last hill to the golden sand beaches of Similajau.
Similajau, where we spent two days beachcombing and bodysurfing and doing very little, was a wonderful oasis for Joanne to recover from the rigours of cycling. Hills, heat and humidity, the Trinity of the Cycling Dark Side for her, have taken their toll. The cycling along the east coast of Malaysia is supposed to be fairly flat, and sea breezes and short days should revive her enthusiasm for the bicycle. The ride to Bintulu airport, along with short jaunts from Kuching airport into town and back again, should be the extent of our cycling for the next week, so her body will get a decent period of physical rest.
Anyway, having droned on this long, it's time to go hunt down some food. Stay tuned for more musings from Singapore and peninsular Malaysia in a couple of weeks' time.