Kapit, Rajang River, Sarawak, Borneo: Iban Gawai New Years Day
I had grand plans to write this before I left for the lands of the Iban and the longhouses but then a number of things transpired mostly revolving around sleep deprivation.
The story begins in Kuching, a town named after cats and I’m not talking about the musical stage show. Real cats, furry things, not wild jungle hunters either but your average run of the mill domesticated cat. A town that prides itself on its statues of cats scattered around the city centre. This is a town that has been plundered by headhunters, then “civilised and cultured” by James Brooke the first of the British white Raj that quelled the war-like Dayak people.
The White Raj brought peace and harmony to Sarawak but not before all kinds of mayhem had occurred.
There was that thing known as WW11 when the Japanese occupied Borneo. The allies bombed the living daylights out of the place and local tribesmen were recruited by the British to take heads of the Japanese. Both teams did some very tough fighting in incredibly hostile terrain. Japanese brutality caused the deaths of thousands of allied POW’s on forced death marches in the state of Sabah and locals were also terrorised throughout the occupation.
News just to hand: I read moments ago that the last headhunting took place in 1988 just over the Sarawak border in Kalimantan. But I heard that it took place in Indonesian Kalimantan even more recently when the locals took a dislike to the Javanese newcomers deposited into their homelands by the government. Maybe it still goes on, somewhere remote and inhospitable – groovy!
So as you can see it makes absolute sense to name the city after a ball of fluff. After all that rowdy behaviour the folk in charge of naming the joint were probably trying to distance the place from it’s previous history and the stigma attached. There is a theory that when James Brooke first arrived in 1839 he asked a local, whilst pointing in a vague direction towards a basic settlement, the name of the village. The local followed his line of sight and his pointing finger and assumed he was looking at a passing cat and said, in the local vernacular “kuching.”
So there you have it a town named by a someone incorrectly due to a communication breakdown. Pretty lucky really that the town wasn’t called something much more British like Hovel on Bog or Cesspool.
Side note: Isn’t that the same reason kangaroos are called kangaroos coz a British chap asked a black fellow what the large jumping marsupials are known as and he responded with, “kangaroo.” Which in the particular dialect of the community he was from translated to “I dunno?”
My last full night’s sleep was on the Mon 26th of May, the final night of this last tour. On this day I took the group to Bako National Park 37kms from Kuching. We boarded the van at 8.00 am and drove for about 45 minutes until we reached the Assam River where we climbed aboard 2 waiting boats for the 30 minute journey up to the park headquarters.
The next night I was out late, the following night whilst staying at the St Thomas Anglican guesthouse, the cheapest digs in Kuching and the place Andrew and Dorey and I stayed in ‘91, sleep didn’t come my way due to the sound of the torrential rain belting on the roof in a fashion not to dissimilar to being in a house that is perched in the fall out zone of an erupting volcano. The following night, at the same place the roof must have been saturated as there was a constant drip on my head and the bed was damp, moist, dank and uncomfortable. In Sibu the bed was infested by blood sucking bed bugs so that night I got no sleep at all and was sitting drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes by 4.30am whilst I waited for the boat to Kapit. That night I ended up in an Iban longhouse up the Baleh River for Gawai the Iban harvest festival so I was forced to drink my first rice wine about 3.00pm and consequently passed out to wake up and have another. That was a rough night.
However the next night I slept really well!
Back in 1991 Andrew and Dorey Hazewinkel and I ventured up to Bako having met a man in Kuching who introduced himself as “Kipli Abu, the black pirate but I don’t do that anymore.” Kipli was a boatman on the Assam River and to prove that he was a good bloke the next night he took us under his wing and showed us that he could be trusted by taking us to the coldest karaoke bar in the world. How we got to that point is a long story in itself.
Note, this is a very condensed version of the 91 story.
We agreed to travel to Bako NP with Kipli in a few days hence. The brief version goes that we met his wife and baby in his village whilst we were waiting for him to come back from the National Park. When he came back we jumped aboard his waiting longboat to putter down the river, proboscis monkeys in the mangroves and macaques swinging from the trees. On arrival we checked into the park HQ where we were to be staying. Kipli offered us dinner at the fishing village where he was kipping with friends. That night we ate ikan bilis (white bait) on the floor of the fisherman’s hut with Kipli and his mates pretty much my first experience of real travel and the hospitality of Asian people. The village was about 500m through the jungle from the HQ. Satiated on what I knew to be bait for catching flathead in Port Phillip Bay, we wandered back but before we left Kipli asked if there was anything from town that we might want as he was heading back up river the following day.
As an after thought we asked for a bottle of whisky.
The next day we trekked off to Sea Stack beach near Teluk Pandar Besar, my first time in the jungle. The beach was magnificent and deserted. Perched at one end, stands a giant rock outcrop similar to a cobra or some kind of sea serpent, this is often the iconic symbol of Bako NP. The water was fantastic after a sweltering trek through the jungle, I felt like we were the first people ever to set foot on this stretch of beach. Sometime during the course of the afternoon Andrew’s bag was snatched by monkeys and later, after we had recovered it I found a large cat print up the small creek. Exciting stuff indeed for a lad like myself.
That night the three of us had noodles sitting on the porch of HQ. It was hot and incredibly humid. It was so humid water was sweating. The light was in the centre of the ceiling fan and insects were attracted to it and the bugs in Borneo are BIG. We had to make a decision to a) either have the light on and see what might be in lurking in the food or b) light off and the fan on, stirring the humid air around like a thick hearty pumpkin soup. After much deliberation we went for the fan off/light on option. The consequence of this decision became horrific when a little bat came in, a flipping and a flapping like a small breasted womans bra blown off a clothesline in a stiff breeze, flocked on to a monster bug and was summarily “thwocked” by the blades of the slowing fan when his sonor got scrambled and subsequently decapitated himself, his inert body landing in my noodles.
Dinner done the light went off and the fan went back on. I went hungry.
I also recall that when we returned from one trek some twerp had left the door to the kitchen area open and the macaques ransacked the joint leaving the scene looking like they’d been hurriedly searching for stashed diamonds or a disc containing the codes to world domination. Drawers had been emptied and discarded willy nilly, paintings were left askew, the safe door hanging limply open and pillows gutted by very large sharp knives, goose down covering the whole shebang. The place was a mess and Helga and Ferdi weren’t happy their stock of noodles had been snatched and trashed!
What inconsiderate thoughtless clown could be so stupid as to leave the place where all the food was stored unlocked?
Unfortunately that bozzo was me but I was far too embarrassed to fess up. Anyway, what was I going to do for Heinrich and Hilda? Plunder the jungle as if it were Coles and come back with all manner of goodies to replace their 2 Minute noodles?
I’m all for the dwellers of the forest and their macaque burgling ways, they were here first. I say good luck and good tidings to our clever primate brothers. There, my guilt is neatly squared away.
After awhile Kipli emerged from the darkness bearing a bottle of brandy and though not the tipple requested we invited him to join us for a drink. I’m not sure where Dorey was during this part of the story as I only remember Andrew, Kipli and myself drinking. Kipli really didn’t want to drink as he announced he was a “born again Moslem” converted when he gave up piracy and met his wife. But we were insistent coz, we too are bloody good blokes and it’s only fair when you are young and naïve to foist yourself insensitively on others goodwill. During the course of our drinking and chatting we asked Kipli about his days as a pirate, something he seemed hesitant to talk about. Then we got him on to the Koran and again he was less than enthused to discuss his religion but he gave it his best shot. Then to cap things off we got him onto the topic of black magic as we’d heard of an Indian devil woman called Pontianak who was meant to frequent this neck of the woods.
I had read that some Europeans had a run in with Pontianak very near to where we were and that one of them ended up in a coma speaking in tongues for a couple of days. The legend goes that Pontianak appears like a siren drawing you to her and causes all kinds of mischief and none of it good. By this stage the three of us were quite drunk and Kipli was getting more and more uncomfortable to the point he burst into tears and took off back through the jungle to the fishing village. Shortly after, Andrew went off to bed and I sat pondering what we had done to someone who was being so good to us. Feeling ashamed of the situation I went and woke up Andrew and recommended that we should go to the village, find Kipli and make amends. Andrew felt it was mainly his doing so he decided to go and I obliged coz I was pretty hammered, lazy and gutless. He unfolded himself to his 6’4” altitude, wrapped a white Indian doti (similar to a sarong) around himself and pulled on his Blundstone boots. With his long hair dishevelled from sleep and shirtless he ambled off into the dark foreboding jungle. About half way along the trail he saw Kipli returning, Andrew began calling to him. Kipli stopped dead in his tracks before disappearing into the jungle never to be seen again.
As the story goes Kipli from that moment on vanished without a trace. We think that in his drunken state and in the darkness he believed he saw Pontianak and freaked out. Andrew, being backlit from the HQ lights, tall, dark skinned, long hair and dressed in a doti may have, through Kipli’s drunken vision, looked all the world like Pontianak.
Brief side note: When I started at Intrepid I had to tell an irresponsible travel story and this is the one I chose. Whilst I was in the telling, a guy named Frank also beginning work with Intrepid kept trying to interrupt but I had to get the whole thing out in one hit. When I’d finished Frank announced that he had recently been in Bako NP and had heard how 2 Australians had made a boatman disappear. Frank heard the story 10 years after it happened.
So, for the past 17 years I have been telling this story of an event that I am certainly not proud of but I am confused by.
Why would he disappear? Did he really believe that he saw Pontianak? What happened that night to Kipli?
Well, on the 26th of May 08 I went back to the scene of the crime and began asking people if they knew or had heard of Kipli Abu. Then whilst having something to eat a man walked up to me and pulled up a chair and asked if I was looking for a man named Kipli Abu. The man then introduced himself as none other than Kipli. He didn’t look at all familiar but it had taken place a long time ago. At first I was sure that it wasn’t him but then he started to remember events of the night he took us to the karaoke place on the other side of the river, driving us around whilst we sat on a couch in the back of a truck. He remembered us eating at the village with him. Handy to have, as travelling companions, a gorgeous blonde girl and tall blonde man to enhance the memory but he couldn’t remember much else of the night or me for that matter. He told me that after that night however he started drinking heavily again and gave up in 1995. The baby we met in 1991 is now married with a son. Kipli divorced his first wife not long after the event. He now has 7 children (I think) and lives not far from the boat landing in a different village to where he lived when we first met.
I will be back in Bako in a few weeks time and we have arranged to catch up again and hopefully put to rest the whole saga. I am very happy that Kipli is alive and well but I am disappointed that one of my stories has been shattered.
The end result was final night dinner at The Junk in Kuching was not only a culmination of a successful 17 day trip but also the celebration of finding a long lost soul that had been taken by the devil 17 years previously.
--------
Adam Martin - June 08.
0 comments:
Post a Comment