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Lawas -> Long Sukang -> Long Semado -> Bario -> Long Metapa -> Long Taan -> Long Pila -> Miri
In December of 1967 I returned to Borneo, this time to hike with Len's students to their homes in the interior, a trip that took us about a month. The day school was over (December 1) I flew to Singapore for some jungle shopping (including a Leica camera for Len), and then on to Kuching for a three day stopover (I still hadn't seen the capital city of Sarawak). Because of transportation difficulties in Len’s area, I had to fly to Brunei and take a speed boat to Lawas. The cost was high, but there was no other way to get there on time. Len wanted me by Wednesday, so we could start hiking Thursday morning. It turned out to be one of the longest, grubbiest, most difficult hikes we had attempted. The best news of all is that Peace Corps approved the hike as a project for me (a very unusual move, since I am a West Malaysian volunteer) – I guess Len must’ve persuaded his boss that we were on to something big. Project approval meant that I didn't have to use up next year’s vacation days (22 of them in all) in December, which meant I’ll have some free time if you decide to drop by this part of the world next August.
We had a devil of a time keeping up with his students, as they skipped along, most of them barefoot, but they were patient with us - after all, we were teachers, a calling much respected in this part of the world. Each carried a parang, a form of machete unique to the Malay Archipelago, which they used to clear brush, chop wood, and most importantly, knock off leeches with a swift downstroke. If we had tried that, we would have risked injuring ourselves.
The students' families lived in longhouses, some of them housing as many as 50 families, with side-by-side living quarters, and facing a common aisle, which ran the full length of the longhouse. They were elevated on stilts, with entry ladders at each end.
Each time we arrived at a longhouse where one of Len's students lived, we would be invited to enter and meet the chief in his "apartment" at the center of the longhouse. We soon learned to clean our feet and legs before entering, because they were inevitably bloody from leech bites (the students were never bitten, thanks to their parang skills). Then we would be offered food, and in some evenings a dance might materialize.
As we proceeded further into the jungle, we eventually reached the longhouse of the last of Len's students. No more students to guide us! Fortunately several Ibans we had met earlier in Lawas agreed to show us the way to our final interior destination:
The dude below cooked up some tender bamboo shoots he found, then built us a sleeping platform in about 5 minutes.
Bridge? What bridge?
We would entertain the locals with pictures of our family.
After about three weeks and 200 jungle miles hiking into the interior of Borneo, we reached our destination: Bario, about 2 miles from the Indonesian border. One of its best features is its location: close to the Baram River. No more jungle trail! No more leeches! Instead, we took a series of vessels on the Baram River, for 350 miles, all the way to Miri, on the coast, about 150 miles from Lawas. All in all, a wonderful adventure - but with one glaring exception: my camera, the one with all the photos of the leeches on our bodies, was stolen.
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