COUNTRY: Borneo & Cambodia
PROGRAM: UniBreak
PROJECT: Teaching & Environmental Conservation
WRITTEN BY: Richie Allchurch
Our adventurous UniBreak students have recently returned from their 4-week placement in remote Borneo. Due to no internet access, they were unable to blog on the go, so we are now sharing their stories post-placement.
Orientation
Touching down in Borneo was a pretty surreal and exciting experience for the Antipodeans crew of Richie (yours truly), Gus, Sumi, Linda, Catherine, Caitlin, Kaitlyn and Grace. Flying over the mountainous jungle that was wild and dense but noticing the logged areas with smoke still rising from them and fresh palm oil plantations was an amazing yet sad sight. The coastline looked beautiful and the local houses very different and basic so it really did feel as though we were entering into another world. Miri airport felt very rural as we could see out into the jungle but also very holiday-like and dreamy since it was small and we were all extremely tired from a 15 hour transit from Australia, for Catherine it was at least 20 hours by herself at KL airport :l
We met Linda from Melbourne wearing the Antips shirt at the airport and Tom, one of the in-country partners, uber-relaxed in his Hawaiian shirt, shorts, thongs and sunnies and we headed by bus to our accommodation. Miri seemed like a fairly simple coastal town with a noticeable difference between the rather wealthy in their palace-like homes – chiefs of logging companies we were informed and the ordinary folk in wooden shanty-like houses. It was quite a developed place but not quite as good as Australia with older, simpler looking buildings, no gutters on the roadsides to drain away water or sewerage, lots of rubbish around and generally not as flash as Sydney. We got to Treetops Lodge, a nice eco retreat in a semi-rural area around a lake which our rooms were above. We settled in, getting used to the mosquito nets, the outdoor toilets and showers, the spiders in Grace’s case – a large one appeared in her bag that we were all notified of through her screams and the geckos squeaking in the roof.
We had a run-down with Tom about some of the local history in regards to the logging and governance issues with the Penan, what we needed to expect in Borneo generally and out in the villages and what we needed to take out there to survive comfortably. Going into town was interesting to see what the local Malay looked like – short, relatively dark and usually slight of build and they were certainly interested in this little group of white people, especially the blonde girls. We stocked up on some necessary clothes and food and had a good dinner at Ming Café. An early night was in order as we were all exhausted from the previous days’ travel exploits.
The next day we had a bit of an excursion out to Niah National Park getting our first taste of the jungle up close which was lovely with its interesting millepedes and caterpillars, tall, radiant trees and lush greenery. After an hour or so walk we arrived at the Niah Cave, a vast cavern that reminded me of the Goblin realm in the Mines of Moria with Gollum’s Cave barely visible down below. You could imagine him trying to out-riddle Bilbo at the bottom. On the bus we got a good taste of the extensiveness of the Palm Oil plantations in Borneo which even in and around Miri was very large. It is a cash crop, generating huge amounts of money due the strong demand in a huge and diverse array of products from chocolate bars, to two minute noodles to cosmetic items but is very detrimental to the environment as it not only replaces rainforest that acts as a carbon neutraliser but it renders the soil useless once harvested two or three times with a lifespan of only 15 years as it changes the pH of the soil so that it can’t support future plant life.
We headed back to Treetops after getting some more supplies at a local market, some Pierre Cardin socks for me – rather fancy, and did all our final packing for the plane ride in the morning. We had to leave a fair bit behind as we did bring a lot of stuff but the weight limit was only 10KG which almost everyone was over by so we had to be very careful and trust Tom when he said it wouldn’t be a big problem. We tucked into our last Western style dinner of rice and chicken, getting us prepared for the constant supply of rice we would be consuming out in the villages. It poured with rain that night, like I ‘d never really seen before, just bucketed down with the water cascading out of the down pipes and the pool that we had made whirlpools in earlier almost overflowing. This was something to get used to in Borneo.
Arrival to villages
The trip out to the villages was an adventure in and of itself. We flew on a Twin Otter plane out into the jungle, flying over palm oil plantations and wild jungle into a basic one runway airport where our leader for the next 3-4 weeks, the lovely Hollie Tu, was waiting for us. We piled onto some Hilux’s and drove deeper into the jungle passing logging trucks with huge logs on them and out over the vast and fast-flowing Baram river and into the jungle beyond. We had our first encounter with a village when we stopped for supplies and clothing in Long Siut. It was pretty basic with fairly, run-down wooden houses and poor roads that were clogged with mud but the children looked very smart in their impeccable school uniforms and the locals were friendly to us as we walked through the village. I saw a sign saying ‘Save Baram River Stop Dam’ which was our first taste of the local politics and another front the villagers were fighting with the government to stop their livelihoods being destroyed by a dam that would literally flood the regions where they were living.
We loaded on our bags onto the longboats, which were just that: long, narrow, wooden, low to the water and with a little engine on the back to power up the river, when we made it to an old logging town by the river and set off. It was beautiful travelling up the river this way, not having to do a thing and just being able to sit back and take in the lovely surrounds of the jungle, the river and the odd rice hut or village we would pass as well as the clear, slowly setting sky. It was a long boat ride to Long Kerong but I really enjoyed it and got talking to Hollie about the local Penan issues, particularly the logging which they haven’t been able to stop but wasn’t occurring in the areas we were visiting thankfully. Land rights is also a very big issue for the Penan as they wanted autonomy in governing their land so that they are free to carry on their close relationship with the jungle, hence the formation of the Penan Peace Park – a defined zone where they can do this but the government wants to retain control of the land so that they can use it to bring in money from the timber companies and for generating power through hydroelectric dams.
We finally arrived at Long Kerong, a pretty little village that was quite green with trees planted through it and simple, wooden houses built on stilts. I introduced myself to the locals who were interested in meeting me and immediately I noticed their warmth and kindness to us. They didn’t visibly have much by our standards but they seemed very happy in their lives. I could see that Western influences had made its way even to the remote Baram region with children and adults wearing EPL shirts such as Rooney or Ronaldo, posters and pictures of famous soccer teams and a church in the middle of the village that represented a core part of their lives thanks to the missionaries who converted much of the Penan in the 1950s and 60s. We were allocated to a host family who spoke little English but showed us to our house. It was basically a wooden structure, new and painted blue and pink with three rooms in it. We had to rig up our mosquito nets, mine very frustrating to put up since I couldn’t hang it from the ceiling and with irritating bugs crawling all over me but I got there.
Our host family had some cute children who we said hello to and played with while we got talking to Edwin, one of the fathers who knew some reasonable English and managed to teach us some Penan words and ask us about where we were from and what things were like in the jungle. He taught us some words like Babui – Wild Boar, which was very tasty. They cooked fantastic rice, and gave us some jungle greens for our meals which were mostly nice as well as some jungle fruit, Rambutan being the favourite. I felt rather tired and a bit overawed at where we were and my stomach was starting to churn with the change in diet so I had to get used to the squat toilet situation – a hole in the floor pretty much, quickly. But I was feeling pretty comfortable in the peaceful, relaxed villages enjoying the lush surrounds, introducing the children to cricket, tennis and catching and bathing in the cool, natural river. I was getting used to it.
No comments:
Post a Comment