Activities in Kuching

Hello again, my abandoned English speaking friends. Here you are, the entry I began to write almost two weeks ago.

Again quite behind the Spanish blog... When I started all this I knew it would take time but... it takes more than I thought. I really couldn't write you before, and it has also been a long time since I don't write in the Spanish one. Now I am in London, with jet lag, it is Saturday, 8 in the morning, and I am already in front of the computer translating for the blog (and I have already replied a couple of mails). Somehow this jet lag thing is quite useful.

You might have seen that there are two new entries in the Spanish blog, one of them is about when I am coming back (Ok, I tell a bit about some other things) , too late for that one, and the other one is the one I am writing here.

You already know that I have been twice in Gunung Mulu and that in between these two times I have been doing some activities that I had contracted with an agency. They are those activities I told you a loooong time ago when I began to write about Borneo.

And what are all those activities? I visited a rehabilitation centre for orangutans. I was two days and two nights in an Iban Longhouse. And I also visited Bako National Park. After a month of this, I went back to Bako with Zuzana so she could also see it and I could take more pictures, because just one day was too rush. I will tell you about Bako some other day... when I find the time.

The rehabilitation centre for orangutans is called Semenggoh and it is located close to Kuching. In Malay, as in many other languages, the name is the same, but it is written separately: orang-utan. In Malay "orang" means "man", and "hutan" means "forest", so you know where the origin of the word comes from. A long time ago, orangutans lived in a wide area of South East Asia, but nowadays they can only be found in Borneo and Sumatra. During many years, orangutans were hunted by the aboriginals because of heir meet, this reason itself is not enough to decrease its number so dramatically, but together with forest fires, deforestation due to logging and palm oil industry, and the hunting for souvenirs and illegal trade as pets, all together makes that orangutan is an endangered species. Nowadays orangutan is a protected species.

In Malaysia there are two centres of rehabilitation for orangutans: Semenggoh in Kuching, Sarawak, and Sepilok in Sandakan, Sabah. In these centres they educate orangutans which are found in captivity to reintegrate them into the jungle. They are also an information and rapproachement point for the people to learn about orangutans. But there is controversy about how they work. These centres are not closed, they are open to the rain forest without any fence or barrier, and they have fixed feeding times for the orangutans, so if they are hungry they come at those times to eat. This makes that detractors of these centres see them as a tourist attraction making orangutans go to eat habitually and missing their natural feeding habits in the rain forest. I think that things are not either white or black. It is true that at feeding times what you see there is a little bit as a show for the visitors. But the fact is that there are orangutans that can not be reintegrated because they are not able to adapt themselves to the groups or wild orangutans. This happens, for example, with orangutans which have been living for too much time in captivity. So these orangutans still can live free in the rain forest close to those rehabilitation centres, otherwise they would die in the rain forest. If in this way it is possible to collect funds with tickets and souvenirs, I think it is no so bad.


From there we went to the Iban Longhouse. When I asked the travel agency in Kuala Lumpur to prepare this trip for me, I told them that I wanted to be there alone rather than going with a group of tourists, even if I had to pay extra. What I wanted was being able to take pictures of their normal life and not to see how they behave in front of tourists.

So after four hours by car and half an hour by boat upstream we arrived there. this was my first longboat ride, and it was one of the things I liked the most, going in that long, narrow, wooden boat through the river in the middle of the jungle.


Iban people, as many other aboriginal people in Borneo, live in villages where the main construction is called Longhouse. A Longhouse, as its name suggests, is a very long building and the concept is very similar to what we call "terraced houses". Imagin a Longhouse, empty inside, and divide it in two parts lengthwise (now you have two long thin parts); now you take one of the long parts, divide it in many parts (as terraced houses) and leave the other one empty. So this is approximately a Longhouse, many single-family homes in the same building sharing the same common area. This is the common area of the Longhouse I visited.


This area is protected from the heat and the rain, but through the doors there is enough light entering so they can work inside. Here is where they seat to make the carpets, baskets and many other objects that they use for their normal life or that they sell as handicraft.


It is also the area for social relations. When they don't have anything else to do, they seat here to talk between them or simply to be there calmly. These people don't know what stress is, and I mean it in the best sense of the word, not as a criticism, and in general they are not as expressive as we are, I guess due to the kind of life they live. Many times you could think that they are bored, but they aren't, are just there, watching life go by. Some times I wonder what is in their minds, what they are thinking about... I can't get to the idea, I don't know how their perspective of life is, or their needs, their ideas or what their worries are... because for sure they are not the grades of the child at school, the mortgage, the car insurance, the next holidays, the politics... the world economical crisis...



And I absolutely can't think that during all this time their thoughts are something like "it is going to rain". I find fascinating how they can have such a simple life so easily; of course it is because I am used to the life in Madrid or now everyday going here and there. Maybe they think how we can have a life like this in a relatively easy way, because definitely our lives have many more worries than theirs.

That evening I was taking more pictures and then, at night, they performed a typical dance they used to perform when warriors came back after cutting a couple of heads or just after a long journey. I had already told them not to act in front of me, that they didn't have to do things that they didn't want to... it didn't matter. The feeling of "we have to do it" that I had while they were dancing was continuous. First the man made the typical dance and afterwards the girl did her dance, both quite interesting, yes, and I can even understand that it was useful for me and to take pictures, ok. But putting us (me and the guide) a hat with feathers and making us four dancing in circles... that was absolutely unnecessary. The only one having fun there was the guide because he didn't care at all. In the Spanish blog some of my friends were asking for one picture of me, so here you are. You can see the happy face of the man, I think the girl and me... well, we did what we could.


Next morning we went through the river upstream so I could see some of the things they usually do. First they collected some bamboo canes, they took some small shoots to be cooked in the evening and one big cane.


We reached an area where there was a small river with more clear water and they were fishing to get something for the lunch. They caught three small fish with a fishing net, and diving with old goggles and a rudimentary harpoon they got a river prawn. All this is to be put in a branch and then it is ready to be cooked.


With that and some other things they had taken from the village they prepared the lunch in a very interested way. The menu was: some meet, the fish they caught (and more fish they took from home) and, of course, rice. All this is cooked at the riverside with all that mother nature provides you in its huge kitchen. Why using a pot when you can use a bamboo cane to cook the rice and the meet?. Recipe for bamboo cane rice: take a big leaf which you have previously let dry up and wrap the rice in it. Put it aside.


Now let's go with the bamboo cane that you have just taken from the jungle. Cut it in smaller pieces taking care of leaving a knot in one of the ends of each one. Now put the dry leaves with the rice in the small bamboo canes.


Go to the closer river, take some clear water and fiil the pieces of bamboo. Cook on a moderate flame.


Once the rice is cooked, open the canes with your machete and serve yourself, with the hand, of course, as much as you want to eat with the meet you have just cooked in the same way.


As I told you, the guide took some more fish because obviously he knew they were not going to fish enough for me, for him, the man taking us and his three sons.

When we came back to the village, I kept on taking pictures of the people there until I was shown two new things: how to use the blowpipe and cock fighting. I found the blowpipe quite interesting because it was easier and more precise than I expected. I am quite useless with all this aim stuff and I hit the target on the first and the second try. I failed on the third one, but I even like this was quite close.


Cock fighting is a tradition which is illegal in Malaysia nowadays, especially if they are about gambling. Cock fighting can only be celebrated with a special permission in some festivals or in touristy demonstrations such as this one. But anyway they have to finish before one of the roosters is injured, or as soon as possible.


Every time I see this picture I can't help thinking that it is the rooster "Trinity" of Matrix and my mind tries to turn around the frozen roosters in the air.

Anyway, illegal cock fighting still exist in Malaysia, it is only a matter of knowing where, but if you want you can spend your money in cock fighting every week.

A bit later we went to have dinner. In this kind of trips, the guide takes food for the tourists and the family "hosting" them. Even if in my case I was not sleeping in the family's home but in another hut close to the Longhouse, there is always a family hosting the guests. The guide cooks with collaboration from people of the family and they cook several dishes for everybody. That night they cooked the bamboo the got in the morning and the usual dishes: rice, curry chicken, fried vegetables... During my visit, the procedure was always the same: The food was cooked, everything was put on the floor and I was always the first one beginning to eat. I imagine that if there is a group of tourists there, they eat first and then the family, but in my case I started alone and after a while the rest of the people were coming. That night the guide asked them if we all could have the dinner together, I absolutely preferred it like this, but even then I was the only one sitting and I started eating alone.


In Malaysia (as in many other places) many people eat with their hands, well, better said, with the right hand. But don't think it is only at home or in small neighbourhood restaurants, it is even like this in weddings (in the nice ones, like the one we went in August), so don't think that it is only the Iban or aboriginal people doing it. Oh! And there s something else, what you are not going to see ever, unless you go to a special place, is a knife; here you eat everything with a fork and a spoon. In fact the first thing I am going to do as soon as I arrive home is throwing away all the knives. Or if not, the first Malaysian visiting me, I am going to take him to eat a big steak and I will give him just a fork and a knife, and we will see what he does with them.

After dinner we stayed talking around an oil lamp, or maybe I should say that I stayed there looking how the talked in between them, because so far... I am not really fluent speaking Iban language.


In many of the villages they have power generator which they switch on at night. So now there are people watching television or movies in DVD or VideoCD (here it is quite usual). But many people keep on doing their normal life, meaning that they meet in the common area of the Longhouse to talk. Again, sometimes you see some people sitting around a candle not saying anything, just being there.


Next day on the morning we went back to Kuching. Just when we took the car from the small jetty and driving through the gravel road, the car suddenly stopped. And that's how I got my first experience driving on the left and with the steering wheel on the other side. I woud have never thought that it was going to be like that: driving a Proton (national Malay brand) which was falling apart, with more kilometres than the Transiberian, borrowed in an Iban Longhouse from a friend of the guide and through a gravel road. That's life.

The problem was in the fuel pump. The car could be repaired in he same day and we went back to Kuching in the same day with the car stinking of petrol. We stopped for the dinner in the way back and we arrived on time for, at least, the visit to Bako national Park on the next day.

What happened afterwards, you already know it: Many stories happening ni Kuching and changing my plans for the next month. At least I told the agency that they didn't have to take me to the airport on the next morning...