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Return to Modern Tribal Civilisation

HAVING spent the night deep in the jungle, it was time to return upstream to our host village under the only bridge crossing the great Kinabatangan River.

Once packed up, we took our bags to the main decking area outside the dining hut. When Richard arrived we left the eco-lodge and walked down the track through the dark forest back to the river. The longboat was there waiting for us under a thin altostratus overcast sky. The boat driver were doing the final preparations – checking the outboard motor and bailing the water that had accumulated in the bottom of the leaky boat overnight.

The boat driver pulled the cord to start the outboard motor and once more we were buzzing our way heading back upstream towards the village under the bridge. The river was quiet this morning with no one else on the water apart from one sole fisherman in a small boat.

The boat meandered its way between the silt banks at each bend. The river was still fairly high and opaque. We didn’t see any crocodiles or sharks but they would have definitely been lurking just beneath the surface.

Soon the big bluff appeared in front of us, and shortly afterwards we arrived at the jetty under the bridge.

Back on land we climbed the wooden stairs up the steep bank to the community hall where we were served morning tea. With the large forested bluff on the other side of the river, I wondered how often the water would rise high enough to flood the village. There I noticed a small potted bamboo plant with stems braided up about a metre. It was quite a decorative pattern.

With morning tea over, we returned to our host families who we had met in the middle of yesterday’s siesta. Richard and I walked through the village again, passing a large three metre diameter satellite dish in front of a derelict shed and in behind a row of washing. A little further along the dirt road at the corner of the village was a small mosque. It was a wooden building about the size of a house and painted sky blue and pale yellow. It had a nice golden dome at the top clearly asserting its significance. It was a nicely gabled building, similar perhaps to an old Queenslander house. It only had one internal wall, as it was mostly open air. We walked another two houses along the dirt road back to Ishak’s old house where we unpacked and settled back into the same room we had been yesterday.

Upon our arrival we had a cooked lunch on the floor of the unfurnished dark lounge. Once finished they turned on their television set and relaxed in their afternoon siesta as Richard and I went out to the front patio. There were numerous small pot plants on the patio each looking a bit worn out. This was their vegetable garden. Looking across the patio I could see the large house where two of the other guys in our group were staying. It was about the size of my house and looked like it had started as a very small house but over the years many rooms had been added to it built from cheap fibreboard cladding. No doubt the house won’t last a long time, but it was okay by the local standards. To me it seemed to be of a reasonable size until Richard told me that thirty two people from three families lived there. That was serious overcrowding. The house that we were staying in with six people was crowded enough.

I asked Richard about the curtains, having noticed all the houses here had curtains tied together in a big knot in the middle during the day rather than drawn to the sides. Richard told me this was a Malaysian thing. You don’t find this in many other countries. Drawing the curtains into the middle of the window creates quite an interesting effect, but it doesn’t let much light in. That didn’t matter here though. This was Borneo and the views across the village weren’t very good anyway.

I walked through the house to the bathroom. Essentially the bathroom and toilet were two separate outhouses attached to the house. I went to the toilet through the tiny ceramic squat bowl going through a little hole in the floor. Whatever went through the small hole went into a bucket about two metres below. Three buckets surrounding the squat bowl were filled with dirty river water. This was their flush system.

The next derelict room was the bathroom. It was of a surprisingly similar arrangement to the bathroom I had been to in the jungle last night. The water in the buckets here was almost opaque with mud. The water had no doubt been collected from the river and carried up to the house by bucket. I dipped the plastic dipper into the large blue plastic drum of cool water and washed myself with it. The filthy water flowed out through a small hole in the floor at the base of the large ceramic shower bowl straight onto the dirt ground about two metres below.

Across the little hall was another addition to the house containing the kitchen. The floor was lined with a very cheap lino that had not been properly laid. Dangerous electrical wiring was laid all over the place. It seemed to me to be very potentially lethal in there.

Once showered, I joined Richard and our host family for an early lunch on the floor. It was actually served on a small table on the veranda, containing sausages and other cooked food along with cold coffee (not that I would drink it) and a roll of toilet paper in a yellow bowl for cleaning our hands. I was a bit over that, but still managed to have a nice lunch. Richard and I walked out onto the balcony and had a look at all the rather neglected plants growing on the veranda.

Although we were out of the jungle, the villagers here had continued their makeshift traditions of building their houses out of whatever resources they could find. By Western standards they were still very primitive in the way they lived.

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