Jul 2005

Day 21. Tis the day of the sabbath, and the lord was lurking... We got up at 7ish, with brekky at 8. Breakfast was only crackers and sugary tea this morning, due to it being a sunday. Yes, they ARE christian here, just in case you couldn't tell!
Then it was off to the very local church to sing (in Kelabit! local language!) some happy, happy songs. Part of the bargain was for us to do our delightful rendition of "He's got the whole world in his hands" (with hand movements!) in front of the church congregation... which was just about everyone important in the village! They sure did look at us oddly when we changed the lyrics, not that they could really understand our english waffle. This led us to make leech and monkey movements with our hands! Oh dear...
For the main part of lunch, the hunters brought in a freshly caught monitor lizard! I missed seeing the whole start product - all i saw was the end product - lizard stew! The longhouse had an "endangered species/don't eat these" list on the wall... apparently it's fine to eat non-eared monitor lizards, but not eared ones... or is that the other way round?! We didn't know, neither did the villagers i'm sure! Nor did they care! The eared/non-eared thing wasn't particularly well explained or shown as the poor thing was cut up and broiled! I think the plan was to use us to eat the evidence! Anyway, the monitor lizard was 90% bone, with no parts spared for the cooking pot!
Full of reptile, we bumbled off to a nearby river, across lotsa grassy plain and down a steep slope that disliked my sandals. The river was cool and refreshing, and paddling was quite enough for me thankyou! I'd heard rumours of willy fish around these parts, so like hell I'm swimming! The sunbathing on the rocky/pebbly riverside clearly didn't work again! My tan is still inadequate to say the least - damn my pasty Englishness! And now my spine is horribly mis-shapen from lying on the rocks!
All the girls in our expedition group seem to have taken a shine little Shirley, the 4-or-so daughter of someone's in the village! She now follows us everywhere, in a cutesy way - the other children are normally ignored by us! So basically we'd adopted Shirley by this stage of staying in the village...
To be honest, I find Shirley quite annoying... and she's got a silly name... and I'm not sure that's her real name, maybe just the name we gave her!
It was more bony monitor lizard for tea too, and the night was whiled away catching up on journals and looking at a decomposing mouse being mobbed by l'il ants in the doorway of one of the rooms.

Do lizards hAvE eArS?!

Day 20 ("Emma's leadership" as she so kindly wrote in my journal!)
Brassieres! After another night's wonderful sleep on our matresses in rooms with not much else in them, we were off into the jungle again! This time armed with spades and other digging implements! Our task (no choice whether we choose to accept it or not) was to build a "road". Yup, that's the word that was used. As it turned it, we had to build a path... out of dirt! With hoes! It wasn't really hard work with all of us taking turns - it was harder walking there and back!
So we moved earth on a steep slope, digging up cicadas and other weird bugs, and rejoining the two parts of the already-existing path again. After our slogs came lunch, courtesy of the rainforest! Bamboo and fern was the order of the day, lovelily cooked by the women of the village who had just appeared! Sitting on big leaves by the river, this was a tasty and quite watery lunch. Longboats revved along the muddy-brown river, cicadas chirrped loudly and we were surrounded by green. I now felt as if the rainforest was home!
Today's work finished early, and after the walk back to the village, we had the afternoon off. What better way to spend it than sunbathing in the tropix?! It's not as if we could go retail shopping or to the cinema! The sunbathing was futile, as I'm not really going brown... probably more lobster-esque!
Back in the longhouses, we had some cold water showers in a spiderweb infested, dogs and chikkens peering in, fusty "cellar"-like area. It was downstairs, out of the way... by one of many toilets, which coincidentally were also fusty holes in the ground! But I'm not really complaining - it was a great experience! As shower shifts continued, we practised "The whole world" for our involuntary performance at church tomorrow!
Then came dinner! It was now customary for the village head (or other significant other community member) to start meal time with a prayer. The second he finished, he did a simple hand gesture and us lot charged up to the dinner table and tucked in! It must've looked so funny, and I only hope that the villagers thought we loved their food THAT much... and we did! It was more tasty, tender wild boar tonight, and mmm... sugary tea/coffee... and PLAN water. All this came with piles of rice and other various odd foods. It was now also customary for us to douse our rice in soy sauce. Every night, the bottle was tipped upside down and squeezed as we coated our rice in the stuff, using up all their hard-to-come-by supply!
Everyone was very much a happy bunny and night settled in as the lights went out. Cereal was thrown and chaos insued!

Squat-pooing is fun!

Day 19. We'd just spent the first night with the tribe! They're so very cool, much cooler than you. The only SLIGHTLY bad thing was that our lovely group was split up overnight. Different small groups stayed in different houses that were linked to the main longhouse. I was in one room with Calvey and Kyle, with Soos and Annie next door! Beds were matresses on the floor (...soon infested by ants that had decided to attack the "parmesan" cheese that Calvey was carrying!) The walls were paper thin, almost literally. You could see and hear a slither of the happenings next door and you also had a good insight into Soos' & Annie's room! Mmm... brassiere! <----- sneaky little sex frustrated boys looking into naked Annie & Soos! HA!
After a highly scrumptious breakfast (they feed us like kings here!), it was the first day of the project phase! And what work we did! After walking a fair distance to the outer reaches of the village, we basically WATCHED the locals repair/build a bridge. The only thing we significantly did was to briefly carry the bat-inhabited, oversized grass (bamboo) that was cut for us. The locals were a menace with the chainsaw. It looked so dangerous, flailing this machine wearing no safety gear, whilst standing in the middle of a semi-destructed very wobbly bridge!
The new bridge was soon built, although the old one looked perfectly adequate and far chunkier! Ah well, there's still a few more days of "work" to go!
Afternoon: on the hunt! With the locals armed with machetes and blow-pipes... and guns we set off into the depths of the jungle to kill us some meat! We walked, dared to cross some swirling rivers, we sat, we waited, we sat, we waited, we sat, we waited... i carved my name on a log!... oh but we caught nowt! Instead, we played good waiting games... "In the land of odd..." Silly Annie.
But i did see a monkey!
Dejected, we walked back to the village and after more scrumptious food (dear god, wild boar is nice!), it was night. Me, Calv, Soos & Annie talked the night away, whilst tucking into a secret bag of flying fish that no-one knew about! Mu ha ha. How cheeky...

Day 18. We woke up, as MOST humans do. Not including Cinderella or one of them... Sleeping Beauty?! Apologies Cinderella...
The walk-trek-hike started with looking at and poking a hunted dead boar that had been killed the night before... possibly by our guides. They were too modest/great/odd to admit it! It was all nicely cut up, and Calvey promptly decided to hold the poor beast's head up! The guides went one step better and stuffed their bags full of leg and spleen... Anyway, we got some speed up, had a well-organised lunch (most likely consisting of crackers or similar crushed-up food) and even overtook another team! Ha! We're much better than them, oh yes, oh yarse! Bastads!
"Leechy McLeech" was the tune of the day! We sung it for hours. Oh thankyou dear Soos for creating that oh so enjoyful song, to the tune of Eleanor Rigby. Time flew... for the first few minutes... then after about ten minutes, when everyone realised it was actually scientifically impossible to get the song out their heads, it got a tad annoying! Argh! "Leechy McLeech..." ... a song we'd get used to, hour after hour! Day after day...
We HAD had to try and have a different band day every day, but the Kinks etc had now been replaced by this mish-mash hapzard Beatles tune of Leechy McLeech!
Aaaaanywya, we were at Long Dano in no time at all (in heinsight only), where we'd spend the next few days in longhouses, living with the tribe! We emerged out the jungle into never-ending pastures new and green, past buffa-ma-los, over slightly newer, less wobbly bridges, until the oasis of Long Dano appeared...
The houses were longhouses, all on stilts, with dirt and scabby dogs under them. They were quite a building feat and all interconnected by walkways... quite stable too!
Leaving our boots to the scabby dogs, and up the stairs, we were warmly welcomed by some un-tribe-looking people, and hastily fed with bananas (littluns) and hot, sugary tea. Whilst sitting on the floor... as this place seems to be lacking a fair bit of furniture! Twas yum yum. Just what the doctor ordered! The main longhouse was huge and dark, with uneven wooden floors. The occasional mat or rug was dotted around the place - normally where we were meant to sit, or where the food was. It was surprisely dark and murky, even in the daylight, seeing as how many doors and windows there were. But the main thing was how authentic it felt. These people really lived like this. Before us, they had only had a couple of other expedition groups to stay with them. So it was culture shock all round!
The rest of the day, today, was spent settling in, relaxing, sweet chilling lazy boy...

Ok, they don't look like tribes-people should, but they act and live like it! All cool beans!

Today's Leech Count: 2 (Total: 3) I got a big fukk-off leech today, which was quikk-er-ly squished by my big pointy walking stikk, covering nearby persons in my blood... apologies all!

Day 17. What a number, what a day! We slowly arose from our Nancy-house induced sleep and before we knew it we were out of the door! The trekking began early, and so did the tiredness. We were heading towards Long Dano (the stilt village in the jungle!) where we would do some project work for the locals there.
Heave! Puff! It started out by going through lots of leg-swallowing marshes, culminating in balancing acts on logs... and failing to balance, and lots more leg-swallowing. And laughing at certain people when someone, cough, refused to help them up! Well, I was well-and-truly buried and well-and-truly stukk too!
There's not much you can say about the hiking really. Knackering yes. As much as you try and look up at the amazing scenery, you have to look at the floor all the time to make sure that you're not tripping over anything, or slipping up, or about to be bitten by anything!
HA! Then came a highlight of the trip so far. We were walking along a particularly slippery and steep part of the "path". There was a sheer drop to the right. We were in a long line, surely one of us had to fall down?! Yup, step up Kyle... fall down Kyle! So he summersaulted down the mini-cliff (about 7 metres)... and survived with no major injuries. His backpack fruit was even still intact! Despite how spectactular it looked, Kyle didn't even loose a limb!
Today was a momentous day for one specific reason! I lost my leech virginity! However, it DID take me 15 days of being in Borneo! If you find one, the trick is to grab your DEET (insect repellant) and coat the thing in it, until it quickly rolls off, leaving you bleeding. They're really cool little things, fascinating to poke and prod. And they don't hurt at all when they bite, nor do they spread any diseases. You only discover them when you're itching your leg for example, and you feel a bump! Or you may not realise you've been bitten until you see the blood down your leg, with the leech long gone!
And so we were soon (ha! like hell!) at camp (nothing there but trees, we had to set it up ourselves). We chopped a few trees down just for fun, cleared some shrubs and set up hammox, slowly but surely. Bugs kept attacking me as I put my hammock up, but the fear of the mozzies (and the use of DEET) rapidly subsided. Evening entertainment was ourselves and brilliant. Sleep that night was strangely uncomfortable for once... maybe i was simply too moist?!

Today's Leech Count: 1 (Total: 1)