dum-dee-dum

Where did I leave off?

Ok. I arrived in Miri to find a quiant little city, virtually exploding with prospects. Miri, like Kuala Belait and Seria, in Brunei, is an oil town; offshore rigs are visible from the scenic waterfront. I arrived in the heart of town at the bus depot and made my way over to a relatively large multi-story shopping complex. A series of shops outside blared karaoke-style christmas caroles, selling christmas wares to a population of mostly muslims and chinese. The Christmas caroles echoed through the rainy streets; a kind of surreal feeling - it being such a foreign holiday yet having the commercialism of christmas haunt you. I did enjoy the reminders of the holiday season back home, though. Sarawak is unique from the Peninsula of Malaysia in having a significantly greater proportion of Christians, still a small number though. I found my internet cafe, as previously mentioned, and enjoyed the coolness and familiarity of the environment. My mission was to relocate a thread of a lonely planet travel forum online, which was posted by a MAS pilot who ran a budget backpacker lodge in Miri. After sifting through pages and pages of SE Asian travel advice I found it: David, a Kiwi expat, and Pauline, a local Bornean native. The address wasn't listed per se, and I was too unfamiliar with the geography of the town to wander around. I caught a taxi, he refused to turn on his meter, but we negotiated a reasonable price. turned out that the hostel was only a few minutes away and I had virtually kissed my 5RM goodbye. The outside of the hostel was nothing to brag about, and the only indicator that there was anything there was a small 8 1/2x11 sign protected by lamination. The Highlands "Tourist Information Centre" (and guesthouse) was located in a brand new building in a virtually vacant (and sparkling new) waterfront.
The dorm rooms here were nice and clean, air conditioned (RARE in dormitories here) and mostly vacant; I took a bed for 25RM, which was more than other places but I hoped that the owners could help me out with some trekking plans.
The owner, David, who looks shockingly like a young, pudgy William Shattner, turned out to be VERY helpful indeed. He's been a pilot for Malaysian Airlines for 9 years in Miri, flying small aircraft into the small settlements in the interior of Borneo. I met with him, and some other travellers staying there, at the bar below the inn where we happily consumed 3RM Tigers (1$CAD) and overcooked plain chicken wings; there we discussed the plethora of trekking and sightseeing opportunities that borneo has to offer.
The next day David offered to take six of us tourists to the nearby Niah National Park where a series of caves winds through the limestone mountains. The two hour trip embarked around 1030, later than hoped. We stopped at a park on the way, and a few other tourist stops, including a huge cafeteria at the turnoff to the batu niah park. Here I enjoyed my fried noodles (mie goreng) and canned soybean drink, had a bundle of rambutan fruit - a strange hairy fruit resembling something from a Dr. Suess tale, or maybe Fraggle rock. It like a soft horse chestnut shell which peels away to expose a white grape-like fruit which clings to an almond-like pit. It's really a lot of work to eat, but very delicious! Peel-Pop-Pry-Chew-Chomp-Spit.

We set off for park headquarters where David was going to hang out while we went to the caves, some 3km along a roving boardwalk. We paid 10RM each and set off, first crossing a narrow river (bridge? maybe they haven't built one so they can employ a local to drive from side to side for 50sen/pax?) The jungel we would walk through was prime territory for spotting wildlife, however the creaky, croaky boardwalk made so much noise as we walked along that anything that was there would have surely sprinted away long before we came close. Much of the boardwalk was built over flooded jungle floor, made for a serene, peaceful walk, except of course for the clomping. About 2km in there was a branch of the boardwalk that led to a local longhouse - our time was short so we went straight to the caves. The first we came upone was the traders cave, a undercut limestone hillside where traders used to set up camp to sell their guano and lucrative birdsnests collected in the caves a little further. Eventually we came to the main cave system, massive and dark, cold; the stench of bat shit attacking your nose. An archaeological site near the outer part of the mouth of the cave was fenced off, protecting the 40, 000y/o history of human activity in the cave. Apparently man was thought to have arrived in this region later than the oldest human remains found here, throwing the accepted theories of human migration out the window. Impressively old.
In our natural pairs (two couples, and aussie and myself), the six of us wandered at different paces through the cave system; the aussie couple wandering around very slowly, the british army/navy couple a little faster, and Daniel and I more speedily. Armed with flashlights we navigated the slippery boardwalks carrying you deeper and deeper into the huge cavernous interior. We eventually ended up emerging on the other side of the mountain. Everything in the cave was covered in bat guano, making it very slippery and very smelly. As in Thailand the manner of bird-nest collection was the same; long poles tied together dangling from the ceiling to the floor of the cave, on the roof a network of poles and ladders branched between prime bird nesting locations. The cave was filled with these dangling poles of impressive length (surely some were taller than 50m). Apparently each pole was owned by a different family of certified collectors. I still have no idea how the nimble locals scale the slippery poles... And further how they clambour about on the ceiling with a long pole, poking at nests until they fall to the floor to be collected later. Keep in mind that it is pitch black.
A trail led from the main network of caves to a cave further away called painted cave; it is here that fabulously detailed and well preserved pictograms decorate the walls. Unfortunately a barbed wire fence keeps the public about 6m away from the cave wall, making it very hard to see the red images of men hunting and boating and dancing...

We headed back to Miri in a hurry to make the british naval couple's flight to KL.

The next morning David was flying to Bario, and kindly put Daniel and my name on the stand-by list for the usually heavily booked flight into the interior. Around 8:30 we headed to the airport, about 15min from town. Immediately I was shocked by the granduer of the building. Virtually brand new, and very big, the architecture resembled that of KLIA with tall arching domes. The modern complex lacked what Daniel and I were hoping for; shops! We were urged to bring gifts for the longhouses at which we were destined to stay, but had not had time to buy anything. I bought a stack of newspapers and a readers digest, thinking the english speaking tribesmen might like me a bit at least...
We managed to get on the flight, which was oddly only half booked. I carried on my half-full backpack (leaving most things of worth in the hostel) onto the tiny 19seat twin otter plane. forgot that my bag had a leatherman tool and a few pairs of scissors - oops! Luckily (though dangerously) the security did not detect anything amiss, and even if they did, I think they wouldn't have cared.

The flight to Bario was awesome, the tiny plane flew low, below the clouds, and the landscape below was impressive. for a good while the vast Oil Palm farms were obvious, rows and rows of palm trees stretching for miles and miles. The rolling hilly terrain below had huge snaking mud rivers and beautifully textured jungle. Networks of what would turn out to be logging roads zig-zagged across the landscape; it wasn't immediately obvious that there was any logging at all below, as the logging companies are very particular over which trees to extract; very selective logging. Unfortunately this conservative loggin practice has a huge impact on the environment, causing massive siltation and erosion or the landscape. Though there are not vast plains of clearcuts, the damage that is done here is huge - especially since the region recieves so much rain.
We flew past a limestone spire, then angled in on a distant patch of farmed land in the distance. We flew past a tiny airstrip, narrow, bumpy tarmack, grass overgrown - I was happy that we weren't going to land there, but before I knew it we were turning around and coming in to land. Wobbling this way and that we touched down on the strip and bumbled our way speedily down the tarmack, lurching to a halt outside the farm-like building that was the airport of Bario. Stepping out into the tropical plains of central Borneo was an exciting feeling...