DEMANDING: Bario, located in the northeastern highlands of Borneo, is a cluster of 18 communities. An area held in the embrace of misty, forest-clad mountains, it is the heartland of the Kelabit — hunters, gatherers and padi farmers whose only link to the world beyond is by a 19-seater aircraft, 12 hours on a logging trail or in the days of yore, on foot and girded with sheer tenacity. Liew Suet Fun ponders the idea of a journey in one of the country’s most remote and beautiful places
FROM your seat, you can see the pilot’s chambers. Out of the window, the whirring propellers. When the engine kick-starts and rises to a deafening crescendo, you can feel the ground shifting beneath you as the Twin Otter totters forth, first tentatively, then in a sort of a stumbling run, it gains strength and lifts off.
Looking out, a slow recession into the sky grants you, first, a sweeping vista of Miri and the South China Sea on the horizon, then a wondrous view of the mighty Sungai Baram, followed by gradations of blue that form the remote highlands bordering Kalimantan.
This is the journey to Bario, if you are flying there. By road, it is less inspiring. You will begin smoothly from Miri and within a few hours, you will find yourself lurching along dusty trails that morph into treacherous logging tracks. It is a 12-hour ride, an impressive improvement over the 20-something hours it took five years ago.
Planes and roads were anomalies to the people of Bario, the former till the 1950s when a grass runway was built but proved unreliable as a landing space because the mist-clad mountains was also a refuge for temperamental weather. A tarred tarmac built in 2006 reduced the 70 per cent flight cancellations that dogged the old airport.
Gravel and clay roads made an appearance, connecting villages only in the last three years. Today, the sole paved road links Bario Asal Longhouse to the airport.
This slow awakening of access nurtured walking as a way of life for the Kelabit, the people of the highlands. While distances are shorter today, usually between villages and taking up to four hours at the most, there was a time not long ago when walking was the only way to go beyond the mountains that encircled the riverine plains in which they lived.
Till at least the early 1950s, people would walk, usually in small groups for safety through thickly forested jungles to East Kalimantan and other Malaysian towns to trade and look for work.
Tales abound of people walking weeks and even months on hunting and fishing trips further afield where there were fish-filled rivers and forests, replete with wild boars, deer and other wildlife. Sometimes, it would just be to “ngerang”, to explore and discover what is in the world outside their boundaries.
Still, the ways would be hard and these journeys were only made by the fittest, the bravest and the most able. Everyone understood that when a group left, they would never know if and when they would return to their loved ones.
“We only knew they would come home when they came home,” they would say. “We just wait.”
If it was a fishing or hunting trip, it would be a group of men; if it was for work or trading in town, there were women but only rarely, for they would usually stay home tending to their family and padi fields.
Marudi, the colonial administrative centre at that time and a busy trading port on Sungai Baram, was one of the most frequent destinations for work and trade. From Bario, one had to walk for two weeks to reach Lio Mato, where the journey would continue on a longboat for another two weeks to Marudi.
It was said this undertaking was so demanding that a person could lose up to a third of his bodyweight due to exertion and lack of nutrition.
Upon setting out, each man would carry an “ait”, a rattan backpack filled with rice, salt, dammar to start fires, a spear or a blowpipe for hunting, a parang and a samit, a fan-like cover to protect him from the rain and sun. It could even be used as a blanket.
The idea was to travel lightly so that the task of scaling mountains or fording fast-flowing rivers would be made less onerous. Before World War 2, when cloth was uncommon, men and women would wear barkcloth.
Each evening, they would set up camp using large tree branches and leaves, sleeping on round trunks laid on the ground. A fire would burn all night to keep animals at bay.
While these are stuff of tales today, such perilous journeys were accepted as a way of life then. It was said that upon their return, they never dwelt on the difficulties but often told stories of their experiences in town and how they worked for the Chinese to buy among others, that precious cloth by “de pah” (by the yard). And yes, how they brought these home to their loved ones tracing the same passage in which they came.