Chapter 4
UP RIVER
Ennis made reservations at the Hilton Batang Ai Longhouse Resort Hotel, almost three hundred kilometres from Kuching, a four hour drive and a fast boat ride to the hotel jetty. The hotel was built on the banks of a broad man-made lake surrounded by dense jungle covered hills; the lake was the result of a hydroelectric dam constructed to provide power to the rapidly developing region of West Sarawak.
The hotel had been conceived by the Sarawak government for the development of eco-tourism and completed two years previously, and was managed by the Kuching Hilton that advertised it as Borneo’s nature retreat. The hotel offered one hundred comfortable guest rooms with jungle trekking in the national park and river safaris up the nearby rivers to visit the Iban, descendants of head-hunters, and their longhouses.
It was quite unlike any other Hilton, constructed in a form designed to resemble the local longhouses, built in wood and natural materials and decorated in the traditions of Borneo’s ethnic arts.
After crossing the mist covered lake they arrived in the vast and airy reception area of the hotel decorated with beautifully carved hardwood panels and beams from the nearby forests, with traditional furniture and textiles. It did not take them long to discover that though they were not totally alone, the hotel was almost deserted with the exception of the personnel. There were very few guests, less than a dozen rooms were occupied, a sure sign that the economic crisis was beginning to bite.
Ennis had visited the hotel the previous year and had started to explore the longhouses by reachable by river, one or two day’s boat journey into the interior. He had found that whilst they offered a certain authenticity, they had been naturally heavily influenced by the outside world since the construction of the dam, and by tourism following the opening of the hotel, in spite of the fact tourism was still in very hesitant phase.
Jungle trekking was not exactly designed for the ‘sun, sand and booze’ trippers, though unfortunately that would certainly come with a little persistence and patience on the part of the tour operators encourage by the Sarawak state government. For the present its appeal was more to those who wanted a little eco-exploration in comfort and without danger. The upper ranks of business people and expatriates from Singapore and Kuala Lumpur were amongst the leaders in exploring the region.
On the other hand however, it could not really be said that the Hilton was designed for hardy adventurers, mountaineers, potholers or new age anthropologists, who scorned tourists as if they themselves were amongst the daring explorers of the late nineteenth century.
At the approach of the new millennium there were no longer any distant frontiers to be explored. Any backpacking explorer with time and a shoestring budget could hop on a Singapore Airlines flight to Pontianak and then head inland by river bus or road to a town such as Putussibau, where he could find guides who would help him to risk his life crossing the Muller Mountains to some unheard of remote town before continuing on to the east coast town of Samarinda.
Dangerous? It was certainly not for the weak hearted or those having fragile constitutions. But who cared if a few amateur adventurers of the extreme wanted to risk their lives, as do tens of thousands do each year, either on the face of Mount Blanc or on trips to a thousand strange distant adventure parks around the world, potholing, scuba diving, trekking across deserts or exploring volcanoes.
Ennis had no illusions about the risks of such adventures; he sought no challenge or proof of his own mortality by leaving his body to rot in a dark corner of the humid rainforest. His own justification was more down to earth – business - searching out rare examples of ethnic art and antique heirlooms he could sell at a profit in his galleries. His travels represented a significant but worth while investment, the costs were always more than covered, paid by his discoveries always sold at a substantial profit, the rarer the object the higher the price he paid, and the higher the price he sold it for. He ran a successful business assisted by Marie-Helene Springer, his executive manager; her dedication to the business gave him as owner and founder of the East Asia Galeries SA., freedom, freedom to travel, to stay in fine hotels, to eat in good restaurants and to appreciate the finer things in life. Success also gave him what he desired most; independence to indulge his own pleasure and when the going got hard in some hot and dusty corner of the world he could return to the comfort of a king size bed in a five star hotel by the next flight back to civilisation.
He entertained relations with wealthy collectors and institutions in Europe, the USA and Japan, they were his privileged clients, willing to pay thousands and tens of thousands and on occasions hundreds of thousands of dollars for the fine art objects, rare tribal art and textiles that formed the core of the ‘collections’ presented in his galleries and at the major antique fairs. The private collectors were the anonymous rich, who were not a disappearing species; on the contrary they existed in much greater numbers than could be imagined, crisis or no crisis. It was the rare tribal art and the heirlooms of tribal peoples that were in short supply and very few places remained on the planet where they could still be found. The search was his adventure, the satisfaction of finding the unfindable, a rare object in an isolated longhouse where the headman or ‘Tuay’ had not already exchanged the family’s heirlooms against a chainsaw ‘Made in China’.
On his previous trip to Sarawak Ennis had chartered a light plane, a four seater Piper 28 at the Flying Club in Kuching, explaining to the curious owner that he was an ethnologist and wanted explore the upper reaches of the rivers that flowed down from the border region to localise the isolated longhouses built along their banks for his research. He had obtained a photography permit and flew up to Bandar Sri Aman, a small market town, an hour’s flight from Kuching in the small plane, it was situated on the Lupar River and had an airstrip from which he could fly over the area leading up to the Batang Ai National Park and along the Sarawak-Kalimantan border. Flying into the adjoining Indonesian airspace was not permitted. That was almost seven months earlier and he now planned to continue his exploration by a small expedition, heading upriver to the longhouses that he had pinpointed and suspected had very little contact with the outside world.
He had hired Winston Marshall, a reputable local guide, who took charge of organising the ten day jungle expedition. Marshall, who Ennis had got to know on his previous visits, respected him as a specialist in ethnic art and knew he was no novice, capable of living rough when the need arose.
The transport was composed of four ‘perau’ longboats with a crew of eight Iban tribesmen. Marshall wore a slouch hat in the style of a Hollywood hero; under the hat was a red bandana that prevented transpiration dripping into his eyes, hidden by coke bottom glasses in very thick black frames attached by a boot lace behind his head. He cut a very raffish figure with his machete slung in his belt, wearing high laced jungle boots.
Winston Marshall was a jungle survival specialist who had spent many years in the Ghurkha Regiment of the British Army training commandos and airmen in survival techniques in the dense Borneo jungles that covered the mountainous Malaysian-Indonesian border region, a terrain that he knew like the back of his hand.
In spite of his very Anglo-Saxon name he was in fact a mixture of Indian, Burmese, Scots and Australian. His father had fought during World War II in Burma where he had met and married Winston’s mother.
After retiring from the army Winston had set up his small company Borneo Exploration Sdn. Bhd. where he hired his services to all kinds of businesses and government organisations. Amongst his clients he could count the armies of Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, the major oil companies who explored and drilled wells in Borneo, the forestry departments of Malaysia and Indonesia and a multitude of logging and mining companies that operated throughout the region.
His wife came from one of the so called Hill Tribes of the region. He had lived amongst them for years learning to identify many hundreds of trees and plants as well as the animals, birds and inse
cts that lived in the forest. He knew exactly what plant was required to care for the daily ills and even more serious sicknesses without recourse to modern medicine. He knew exactly what trees or creepers supplied the required materials for making weapons, tools, clothes and shelters. He knew all the fruits, leaves and roots that could supply food and drink in the forest. He knew how to hunt every kind of animal and bird, where to find honey or edible insects and how to fish in the rivers and streams of the jungle.
Experience had shown him that the forest could be hell or a Garden of Eden and whilst his knowledge was no greater than that of the ancient communities of forest dwellers he had the advantage of the know-how and training of a soldier with benefits of modern technology.
The following morning they left soon after breakfast. The four longboats were waiting patiently at the quay as Winston gave instructions to the hotel porter to load their belongings onto the boats that were to carry equipment and supplies, and hopefully, on the return journey filled would be with valuable collectors’ items, another boat was loaded with drums of fuel and a spare motor. As soon as they were installed the small convoy headed across the mist covered lake in an easterly direction towards one of the rivers that flowed from the mountains. The boats cut through the still waters where the only other movement was the occasional bird that rose from the still dense vegetation that overhung the river disturbed by the noise of the boats motors.
They had planned ten days in the longhouses on the Sungai spending two or three nights in each with side trips to nearby neighbours. That would be enough to explore the potential stock of quality heirlooms in the catchment area of the Sungai.
The first day was a four hour journey to the nearest longhouse of any interest with a couple of brief stops to stretch their legs and take a drink. Winston had settled down his hat pulled over his forehead for a nap in the first longboat seated between the look-out who was half standing in the prow and the helmsman who manoeuvred the boat following the cries and signs from the look-out. The river was a mine field of logs and branches that sometimes floated just below the surface, with stones and boulders in the shallower reaches that could swamp or overturn a boat in an instant throwing its unwary passengers into the river.
The endless staccato noise of the motor was hypnotic, only the rush through the rapids broke the monotony as they pushed upstream, passing isolated Iban longhouses with their small fields of pepper and mountain rice. It was just after midday when they caught a glimpse of the longhouse where they planed to spend their first night, it lay at a bifurcation in the river almost hidden by the forest. There was a small floating jetty built of bamboo poles bound together by rattan cords with a couple of dugout pirogues moored alongside swinging gently in the stream.
The traditional longhouse was built on stilts in axe-hewn timber, tied with rattan cords, roofed with leaf thatch, and a stairway leading down to a boat jetty. The Ibans built their longhouses to last for several years, until the small plots of land that they cultivated in jungle clearings along the river banks were exhausted. They then gathered together their belongings, animals and reusable elements of the structure and moved upriver, to another site building a new longhouse.
The stairway up the slope to the longhouse was cut into the laterite clay, reinforced by rough cut lengths of wood. A couple of black pigs were sprawled on the steps surrounded by a litter of squealing piglets. The doorway to the long house was three metres above the ground, above the stilts that provided protection from flooding whenever the river rose with the heavy rains during the rainy season. Winston pointed the way upwards climbing the steep notched log that served as a ladder, followed by Ennis and Kate. A dog barked and a small Iban with a deeply wrinkled face dressed in jeans and a blue tee shirt appeared at the entrance. He smiled slightly to Winston and languidly lifted his hand in a sign of welcome to the visitors.
The sun was high above the canopy of the trees; its beams traversed by small winged creatures fell in almost vertical columns through the forest on the opposite bank of the river. They climbed the ladder into the longhouse; the light was dim in the ruai where only two or three oil lamps suspended from the ceiling gave off a dim light above a small group of people seated on the rattan mats, curls of blue smoke drifted through the heavy air.
The headman led them forward and invited them to be seated on the mats. It was the communal area, a veranda that overlooked the river; to the left hand side were the individual family rooms or biliks as they were called by the Iban. The Ibans nodded to the new arrivals and made signs of welcome. Winston translated the simple exchanges as the Tuay made a sign and a bottle of tuak appeared on a tray with several small glasses.
They Tuay sat next to Ennis and Kate, as the women of the longhouse who had gathered around observed her with unabashed curiosity. A young Iban man who was evidently mentally retarded smiled at them and touched Kate’s hair. He giggled and pointed to a rattan basket suspended on the bamboo rafters overhead, at first glance it seemed to contain dusty coconut shells, then as their eyes pierced the murky shadows they saw the gaping eyes of human skulls and large grinning teeth.
The heads of the Iban’s enemies, whose skulls were preserved, symbolised bravery. A head was believed to bring strength, good luck and prosperity to a longhouse. It was one of the most prized possessions and not long ago it had not uncommon for fathers, whose daughters were about to be married, to demand human heads as dowries from the bridegroom.
‘They are very old, from my grandfather’s time or before,’ the Tuay said in broken English.
Ennis was comforted to learn they were not too recent. Looking at the Tuay he calculated that he was probably about sixty-five years old maybe more maybe less, it was difficult to know if Ibans in the forest aged more rapidly or lived to great ages. In any case sixty-five plus two generations that would make his grandfather’s time somewhere back in the early part of the century, at least before WW II, when the forests of Borneo were known to a mere handful of hardy Europeans and when head hunting was still fashionable.
After welcoming toasts and exchange of news in the Iban dialect Winston got down to practical matters. They unloaded their bags and material carrying them to the bilik indicated by the Tuay. That evening before eating, they slowly got around to business with questions on the handicrafts that the women of the longhouse made for sale to local traders who passed by from time to time taking them for sale in the markets of the towns beyond the lake. Ennis and Kate politely examined the rattan baskets and mats, then one of the men presented a pahang with a handle carved in the form of a fish eagle’s head, in a wooden scabbard, to illustrate its usefulness he pointed to others hanging on the wall, worn and obviously well used.
Winston carefully broached the question of heirlooms and ritual textiles in the catchment area of the Sungai as Kate with the permission of the Tuay and some small gifts occupied herself making a photographic record.
They were then invited to eat the meal that had been prepared, rice and chicken - the wiry kind that scratched the earth under the longhouse. After diner they set up the mosquito repellent unrolled their sleeping bags and settled down under their anti-mosquito nets to sleep after their long day up the Sungai Batang Ai and Sungai Lalang. The noise from the forest was incessant, the whirring and clicking of insects and the calls and cries of birds and animals.
The next morning they were awoken as dawn was just breaking by the crowing of the rooster followed by barking dogs and the creaking of the longhouse as the families rose in the adjoining biliks. The morning shower consisted of a quick plunge in the river avoiding the thought of tropical parasites which theoretically could not survive in the fast flowing current. Then breakfast, instant coffee in freshly boiled mineral water and a couple of slices of supermarket bread and marmalade from the stock of food that Winston had included in the supplies brought up river with them. Those together with the beer, soft drinks and bottled water were the only concessions made for food. The rest was from the longhouse gard
ens and the Ibans domestic animals, mostly chicken and pork.
Outside life got slowly under way as the blue smoke from the fires drifted upwards in the moist dawn air, the temperature was refreshing 23 degrees. Very few animals or birds could be seen in the forest though insects were present everywhere and in every form and colour imaginable.
There was nothing of particular of interest for Ennis in the longhouse but through Winston’s probing they learnt that further upriver there was a longhouse where the old Tuay had recently died and the younger people were eager to sell there old useless things to buy motors and radios.
They continued their boat journey up stream. Ennis compared the map he had prepared with the aid of his aerial photographs and satellite images to that Erkki had given him in Singapore. The details on the map made by the Finnish engineering team who had exploring for mineral deposits in the region was more technical but they had carefully noted all the longhouses they had seen.
On the fourth day they made a halt at a remote longhouse near to the border with Indonesian Kalimantan where the families had visibly very little contact with the exterior.
They decided to stop for a couple of nights to rest and explore the area, they were exhausted after the constant noise and buffeting in the rapids as the boats had struggled against the current as the river rose amongst the densely forested hills.
That night unable to sleep Ennis made his way down to the river bank, the night was clear and a full moon gave ample light. He looked at the stars, the clear night sky unhampered by the haze of pollution that covered cities. His mind wandered back in time to when men lived in the same forest in primitive isolation, probably not more than a hundred years previously, before the arrival of the outsiders. A time when the forest provided their every need for both body and mind. They depended entirely on themselves and their family, the group consisted of close relatives, when even the notion of tribes was vague, perhaps the next nearest neighbours spoke another dialect or language, maybe they were friends or enemies, in any case they were probably head-hunters, even cannibals. Life was certainly fraught with dangers but it was not necessarily nasty.
What was extraordinary in those remote areas was that life had not changed on Borneo for thousands of years, since a time long before civilization and history had been invented or before countries and political boundaries had been imagined. Today’s inhabitants of Borneo, such as the Ibans and the Dayaks were very recent peoples, arriving probably not more than three thousand years ago.
Before that other men had lived on the islands of South East Asia for tens of thousands of years, for hundreds of thousands of years, as climates changed and as the oceans rose and fell.
The prehistoric site at Mulu a few hundred kilometres to the north was the proof that man had lived on the island of Borneo 40,000 years ago but the most significant evidence of ancient man was the discovery in the gravel on the banks of the Solo River in Java of the remains of Pithecanthropus, when Indonesia had been part of the Dutch East Indies Empire in 1890. The skull was later dated to being 1,800,000 years old, but its finder Eugene Dubois died a recluse, after being ridiculed and heaped with scorn by the learned anthropologists of that time. It was only many decades later that his discovery was recognized for its true value: a fossil hominid who had lived in Java at the very dawn of human time.
Dubois had commenced by exploring caves in Sumatra, he was the first person to search for the prehistory of man in the Indies, and he was rewarded for his work by his extraordinary discoveries. The same principal was applied in Borneo by Harrison at Mulu, where there were countless unknown and unexplored caves; certain had already yielded evidence of Stone Age man and primitive cave art.
Were those primitive men the ancestors of the present day Papuans of Niu Guini or the Aborigines of Australia? It was difficult to say. If the Australian aborigines’ ancestors had reached the southern continent 60,000 years ago there should be signs of their presence along the route that they took on their long voyage of island hopping.
It was not unreasonable to think that Borneo was one of the stops on their long voyage. When Homo sapiens arrived on Borneo did he find other men? Primitive men who had lived undisturbed for countless generations on the coast or on the banks of rivers at the edge of the virtually impenetrable primary forests? Even today the forest is impenetrable, the proof is that even the Ibans and Dayaks live on the river banks and only use the forest for hunting and foraging. A European could survive not more than three days or so alone in such a hostile environment as the primary rain forest, no doubt an explanation why Borneo was colonized so late in history.
Whenever primitive man migrated, it was essentially in search of food. When game or foraging became scarce or if competition became too great whether from others of their kind or from the animals they simply moved on. They had advanced by short steps, very short steps, perhaps a mere couple of kilometres a year. But 10,000 years represents a great distance.
The inhabitants of these isles, those who had crossed when land bridges existed, established their dwelling places on the coast and river banks. When waves of aggressive new migrant populations arrived, maybe more evolved forms of men with more advanced technologies, they pushed the existing populations deeper and deeper into the forest taking the best living sites for themselves.
For Kate Lundy ten days with the Ibans was not only a personal experience, she had also agreed to prepare an article for the review ‘Art and Ethnology’ a bi-monthly monthly publication edited in collaboration with the Musée Guimet. She had persuaded the editor, an old family friend, to agree to an article; a discussion on the impact of modern civilisation on the use of traditional utensils in the everyday life of the longhouse communities.
For centuries Borneo had been one of the main destinations of heavily laden Chinese junks that plied their wares of porcelain and stoneware in exchange for spices, exotic wood and feathers. Until recent times these ceramics were still abundantly found in every day use or as revered heirlooms amongst the tribal communities. Her research would be supplemented by data she hoped to find at the University of Sarawak and in the State Museum and Library.
They had briefly visited the museum on their arrival in Kuching and had discussed their project with the director of Anthropology and Ethnology, Doctor Nordin Ibrahim, with whom Ennis had exchange information over many years. Nordin was charmed by Kate and gave them a personal tour of the museum. Kate was particularly interested by the photographic archives that gave a considerable insight into the everyday life and traditions of the local tribes; more interesting than many of the reports of travellers and administrators of the period, as they at least transformed the reports into graphic images with real people in the environment of that time. It was not unusual to see in background of the photographs artefacts and objects that were of great interest to modern specialists.
They paused at one of the displays where Ennis had his attention drawn to a photograph that was entitled ‘the dance of the heads’. A group of young women in sarongs woven in the traditional patterns of the Ibans and adorned with necklaces and bracelets appeared to dance in a slow moving choreography, seeming to move rather stiffly not unlike well brought-up young women, the objects they were passing from hand to hand were heads, human heads, those of young men whose skin looked dark but not wizened or shrivelled, to all evidence the heads had been recently cut.
Kate looked in silent horror at the faces of the young women, frozen in enigmatic smiles not unlike the Giaconda, there was no sign of repulsion, it was no different to a coconut harvest dance.
In another gallery of the museum were the reconstructions of longhouse dwellings and there were several baskets of human skulls hanging from the roof beams, certainly the trophies of past forays against neighbouring enemies, after all it was a tradition that ran through the whole of the South East Asian archipelago, from Malaya through Borneo, the Celebes, the Molocas and the island of New Guinea.
Who were these peoples? Wher
e did they come from? They were questions that had always fascinated Ennis. Nordin replied to their questions in great detail guiding them with his vast knowledge of the tribes of Borneo. His own ancestry included an Iban grandfather and a Bidayuh grandmother on one side, and on the other two Chinese grandparents, all of whom had contributed to his multi-cultural education. His father had married a Chinese girl and he later converted to Islam. As a result Nordin spoke many of the languages of the ethnically mixed population of Sarawak, composed of Malay, Chinese and Dayak communities.