Monday, February 11, 2008

Jungle Boogie

Borneo and Brunei

Kelly's Jungle Book

Royal Brunei Airlines on the morning of Chinese New Year – heading for a Muslim country since everything will shut down in Singapore for the next four days. Our flight is blessed with a television screen of a mosque superimposed with Arabic phrases as a man speaks in tongues.

Once we arrived, we took a taxi to the boarder of Brunei and Borneo to meet Lim, our guide who drove us to Medamit to catch a long boat into the jungle.

“Don’t worry, the man is handicapped and can not speak very well, but he can still drive the boat.” Lim explains as a guy comes up with one arm put on backwards, his knees do not bend and he has three teeth, but as promised, he is one hell of a jungle boat driver. We wait on the dock for the driver’s mom, grandma and grandpa to finish shopping in town. Lim says we are lucky today because the tribe has hunted two wild boars for dinner tonight.

Up Shit Creek with 3 Paddles

The river winds through the jungle with dark clouds above. The water is the color and consistency of chocolate milk. An hour upstream, we reached the Long House of the Penan Tribe, the former cannibals who once ruled the jungle of Mulu National Park. They were featured in the August 1999 issue of National Geographic. The driver and our guide are the chief’s sons and I believe this to be the chief in this photo, but when I saw him, he was in a baseball cap, t-shirt and shorts.

http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/enlarge/penan-tribesman_pod_image.html

We spent the night in a Longhouse, which is exactly that – a long house with many families living next to one another. Their homes are on stilts and connected by a long exterior porch which becomes a communal street for the village. Again, I make friends with the jungle kids who love their new glow bracelets and want me to hang them upside down by their ankles.




The slaughtered boars are out back with their heads cooking on the grill and carcasses being chopped up for dinner tonight. The bugs are Jurassic Park sized. Ants have bodies the size of wasps and a delirious cicada is mesmerized by a fluorescent light and has been banging his body repeatedly against the ceiling. I thought one of the kids was throwing a tennis ball at the roof.

At night we play blowpipe darts, which was their way of hunting before guns. You put a poison dart in a long wooden tube and blow. I ask to see their skulls, but our guide informs me that they have been buried. The Christians were good for one thing in Borneo – eliminating cannibalism. The missionaries brainwashed the tribes into good souls who now farm and kill pigs instead of eating people. Yey Jesus!



Jungle Hickeys

From the longhouse, the chief drove us three hours upstream to the beginning of the Headhunter’s Trail of Mulu National Park where we began an 11 ½ km trek through the jungle. We waded through calf-high murky water, swamps alternated by wet roots that are hard to tell from the snakes. The forest canopy is high with red monkeys flying overhead with prickles and vines hanging in the air, all covered in moss. Leaves are the diameter of hoola hoops. You can feel the photosynthesis happening around you. Blood sucking, malaria-ridden bugs and worms are driving me nuts.

I am traveling with my friend Tim from the ANZA bike team. He is a former outward bounds instructor who came prepared with gators and Gortex boots. I’m in my aerobic shoes with ankle-high socks, so the leeches are having a feast on me. Wild boars are crossing our trail and at km 5, the downpour begins.

When we reach Camp 5, our 19 year old guide is pulling the leeches off me. I run to the bathroom to clean up and as I squat to pee, I notice my shorts are filled with blood. One little sucker crawled almost to China and attached himself to the crevice between my inner thigh and buttocks and he is STILL sucking my blood. All the other bites have turned into dark purple blood freckles.

Camp 5

Backpackers gather from all over the world at camp 5 – Norway, Australia, Wales, Japan, Holland, KL and South Africa are all represented. Even though it is pouring, I occasionally get a glimpse of the limestone cliffs above us, which look like Yosemite. Our 19 year old jungle boy cooks for us too. Everything is a carb-overload and I will not be eating rice for a few weeks after this trip. Bats are dive bombing our barracks which consist of outdoor sleeping quarters covered from the rain.

Since I do not have my backpacking gear in Asia, I look like a tool with my 1200 count pristine white cotton duvet cover I stole from the serviced apartment with matching pillow case and fluffy white towel covered in a pink mosquito net. I feel like Paris Hilton in the rough life.

I wake in the middle of the night hallucinating. With my eyes closed, I see snakes and centipedes transforming into roots and trees winding in and out of giant leaves that turn back into snakes. With eyes open I see glowing objects floating in the pitch dark. a.) This is the onset of malaria, b.) Someone has slipped me some acid, or c.) The correct answer is my mind is so stressed from the hike through the jungle. I have a horrible nightmare that our long boat is lost down stream in this storm happening outside and we’ll have to walk back to the longhouse.

Pinnacles
5am and it is still storming, but we are going to try to summit anyways. The river has raised at least a couple of meters by now. I went pottie with a preying mantis.

Our guide has calves of steel and is carrying a machete. There are no switchbacks on this trail, only straight up, pulling myself up on roots and trees, trying to aim for the ones that are not alive or have 1,000 legs. The rocks are encased in moss and intertwined with vines feeding back up to the rain forest. Some points have ropes and cables to hold on to.

At 1800m of the 2400m view to the Pinnacles, our guide turns us back due the danger of the impeding rains and the fact that if we slip, we may be impaled by a limestone pinnacle. We are soaked from head to toe and know there is nothing to see in the cloud above us.

It takes more time to maneuver down the cliff than up. At one point I remember feeling like Bat Man spelunking down the side of the bat cave, just as my tree gives way and my back hits the limestone shaft on one side and flies me back to rack my stomach on the other side and send me into a small pool of water. This is not a trip for the weak or light-hearted. I think I saw this on TV once when it was called the Eco-Challenge.

36 hours straight of rain flooded the river an extra 20-30 feet, but luckily the chief managed to hold tight of the longboat. He has been waiting for us to come out of the jungle for two nights. The usual 4 hour trip downstream only took half that today with the speed of the flood waters.

Brunei

One night back in Brunei to dry our feet. The opulent mosques look like they are ready for the Vegas strip, but the main mosque I wanted to see was under scaffolding. The Sultan must have been at the height of his wealth during the 1960s and early 70’s by the looks of the Brady Bunch era architecture. Our goal is to find something that does not contain rice for dinner and we discover the only Italian restaurant in town along side of the lagoon. Across the lagoon is a community on stilts and ‘water coffins,’ as they call their water taxis, cutting through the choppy wakes in front of us. The thing that sucks most is Brunei is dry and we can not even have a glass of wine.

Brunei is one of those been there, done that types of destinations. Our flight is blessed for its way back to Singapore. I’m glad we did the trip – it was an adventure of a lifetime. Kelly’s Jungle detox too. Breathing pure oxygen, sleeping dusk to dawn, full moisture treatment, absence of sun to ruin my skin, my carbo diet and new blood. I feel great – like Keith Richards after a transfusion. My psyche will take a little longer to recover.

Saturday, February 2, 2008

Borneo & Brunei

Borneo and Brunei
Happy Chinese New Year Everyone!

We have an extra two days off in Singapore this week, so I am heading to Borneo for the CNY! Even though I hate monkeys, I will be looking for the ugliest of them all- the endangered proboscis monkey! He has a nose that looks like a dong! Poor ugly monkey.

We'll be flying to Brunei and bus to the boarder to find our jungle trekking guide to take us into Mulu National Park - the Yosemite of SE Asia. We'll be staying in a longhouse on the river the 1st night while trekking the head-hunter trail, which yes, used to be the thoroughfare for cannibals.

From there, we will go to camp 5 to summit the Pinnacles route, complete with cables - just like Half-Dome. Look for pictures next week!

http://www.mulupark.com/html/activities/jungle_trekking_headhunter.htm