Six go bonkers in Borneo

15 October 2022

Serian, Sarawak. Photo by Robyn Flemming

I had stamps from Sarawak in my collection when I was a child growing up in Albury. In my imagination, there were few places more exotic than this Malaysian state on the island of Borneo. It evoked images of indigenous head-hunting tribes in brilliantly ornate costumes, colonial-era white rajah rulers, and jungles teeming with orangutans and carnivorous pitcher plants.

It had been my first main destination back in 2010 after I’d sold my house, rehomed my two dogs and set off from Australia with a suitcase and a laptop bag intending to wander the world indefinitely as a freelance editor. I showed up again, with my passport and vaccination certificates, four days after Malaysia’s border reopened to visitors on April 1 of this year.

I’d made many other visits to Kuching, Sarawak’s capital, during the intervening decade. I had a life there: friends, routines, a favourite place to stay. I was well known at a local hospital, where I often timed my visits to include a health check-up. One year, I’d even flown halfway around the world to have a plate inserted in my arm after I broke it in Morocco. I had suffered heat exhaustion in a running race one time and been hospitalised and placed on a drip. I had memories of helping to organise Friday film nights at the Batik Boutique Hotel, of singing karaoke in a ramshackle riverside bar with the woman who cleaned my hotel room. I had even apparently acquired two ‘husbands’, one Malaysian-Chinese, the other Malay, a story I tell in my book.

I knew Kuching well, but there was much of the state I still hadn’t seen. So, in early May when I was invited along on a five-day road trip from the coast to primary rainforest in the highlands with five Malaysian-Chinese friends who were all passionate about the local cuisines, culture and countryside, I jumped at the chance.

I’d known Jackie and Joanna for years. We’d once trekked through a leech-infested swamp in search of a lost antimony mine with Jay, a retired Canadian forestry expert. The experience of finding just the tail end of what I assumed was a leech when I reached deep into the front of my walking trousers to investigate a troubling sensation has possibly scarred me for life. It undoubtedly scarred the young doctor in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand, who examined my nether regions some months later after I’d continued to be bothered by the niggling thought that a leech may have made its home there.

My five Sarawakian friends were all bonkers about food. In fact, I suspected our entire itinerary had been designed around maximising our opportunities to try jellyfish fresh from the sea, ferns gathered that day in the jungle, pineapple grown in the garden of our treehouse-like guesthouse. ‘Where are we having lunch?’ Jo asked at breakfast one morning while still only halfway through her bowl of kolo mee noodles, a local specialty.

We had changed our plans the previous evening and squeezed into two rooms in a two-star hotel in Serian after we found no record of our booking at a homestay in a village in an area of high limestone hills filed with caves. ‘No worries,’ the host said. ‘You can sleep in the longhouse.’

Longhouses are the traditional communal homes among Sarawak’s indigenous people, or Dyaks. There was a fine example of a longhouse in the village, but it wasn’t the one we were offered. Our six intrepid adventurers weren’t keen on sleeping side-by-side on a ramshackle verandah that was also home to mosquitoes, rats and cockroaches, as well as some local ruffians.

We travelled by narrow longboat powered by outboard motor across a lake formed when a river had been dammed to generate hydroelectricity. The building of dams and the destruction of virgin rainforest in Sarawak are controversial topics, not least because of the destruction of the natural habitat of the tribal peoples who have survived off the land and rivers for thousands of years.

We stayed some miles upriver from the lake at a newly constructed lodge in a traditional village. The place was aimed at high-end travellers, but it didn’t provide the sorts of basic amenities we assumed would come with its high prices – towels, toilet paper, working toilets, lights. I went a little bonkers myself and thought I should tell the manager how to run his business, which always goes over well ...

‘Hopefully, [when you travel] you leave something good behind,’ wrote the chef and food writer Anthony Bourdain. I don’t think he meant the three large handwoven baskets I bought during our road trip into the heart of Sarawak, which I will reclaim from my friend Emily and use and enjoy whenever I next spend time there. Rather, I think he meant the positive impact we can have as travellers by engaging with local people in a place we choose to call home for however long or short a time.

For more travel tales, please see “SKINFUL: A Memoir of Addiction” (Golden Grrrl Books edition, 2024) available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the usual platforms.