Arminta Wallacevisits the rainforest of Borneo, where she discovers wonders that surpass even her childhood dreams.
So there you are, sitting barefoot in a dugout canoe, basking in the cool of a tropical evening and admiring the sun as it slides ever lower through the trees, when suddenly there's something in the water not more than two metres from the boat. A scaly head, beady eyes, a forked tongue. An alien, ancient something. It's wild, it's inexplicable and it's zooming towards you. Snake? Crocodile? Dinosaur straight out of Jurassic Park central casting? This is the kind of heart-stopping sight that, just for a second, makes you wonder whether a week of watching wildlife in Borneo is really such a good holiday wheeze.
Personally, I've wanted to go to Borneo ever since, as a kid, I saw a documentary about headhunters. The film etched two messages into my clearly muddled brain. One said: "Scary. Stay away." The other said: "Wow! This is the most exotic place on the planet." Happily, the second message won, because, although head-hunting is, at least officially, a thing of the past, Borneo is still big in the wow department.
It's an extraordinary feeling when your boat glides into what is, effectively, the livingroom of a pack of long-tailed macaque monkeys as they munch, groom and squabble their way through another night in the jungle. Or you find yourself staring into the eyes of an enormous owl, which is sitting motionless on a branch at the water's edge, staring crossly back. Higher up in the forest canopy there's an astonishing sight: proboscis monkeys, which are so rare that Borneo is pretty much the only place on earth where you're likely to see them - and so ugly that it's hard to tear your eyes away from their enormous noses and drooping bellies.
Our mysterious river monster, meanwhile, turns out to be just a monitor lizard. Just? Among the largest of lizards, monitors are highly intelligent and insatiably predatory. They'll eat insects, crabs, snakes, eggs, small deer, rubbish and dead bodies of any description. They can stay underwater for half an hour, they can climb trees and they can run faster than we can. Also, where there are monitors there are often crocodiles. "So don't," our guide Yahya tells us with a grin, "even think about putting your toes in the water." We did, in fact, see a couple of estuarine crocs - one of them was just a baby - lurking on riverbanks during our dawn and dusk cruises.
The truth is, you'd have to be a complete wildlife duffer not to spot some serious flora and fauna-type stuff in Borneo. The world's third-largest island - it clocks in at a whopping 750,000sq km (290,000sq m) - is home to, among other things, 105 species of lizard, 100 types of amphibians and 600 species of birds, from the exquisite white-collared kingfisher to the enormous crested serpent eagle, from madly coloured hornbills to eerily white egrets. But even if you never see anything you can put an impressive-sounding name to, messing about on a river in Malaysian Borneo is a delightful way to spend your time.
A river, to be precise, in a place called Sabah. The island of Borneo is divided between Indonesia, which owns the vast southern region known as Kalimantan, and Malaysia, whose provinces of Sabah and Sarawak cover the northwestern and northern coasts, with the sultanate of Brunei forming a tiny blob between the two. I chose Sabah, to be honest, because it sounds so delicious. Its name, pronounced SAA-bah, means "the land below the wind" - south of the hurricane belt, in other words - and in real life it is impossibly beautiful and distinctly, and endearingly, tatty.
The coastal landscape around the capital, Kota Kinabalu, is a tropical picture postcard come to life. On the western horizon the five islands of Tunku Abdul Rahman Park glisten in the sun, their array of coral reefs, mangrove forests and white sandy beaches just a boat ride away. To the northeast lie the misty summits of Mount Kinabalu, Southeast Asia's highest mountain, at 4,094m (13,431ft), which emerges from its wreath of clouds every now and again - usually when your camera is out of reach.
With the equator not far away, the weather in Sabah has two gears: hot, and wet. The real rainy season, which is February or thereabouts, is to be avoided; the rest of the time it's glorious. During my 10-day stay in August each morning dawned hot and sunny, with cloud cover building gradually during the afternoon and spectacular rain at some point - usually the early evening - reviving the rainforest and turning unwary tourists into examples of that totally unendangered tropical species, the multicoloured drowned rat. I was delighted to find that my tour group was small and select: three Irish and two English, all of us fond of a chat and a joke and, where possible, a glass of wine. Over several glasses of the latter on our final night together we decided that although our visit had included orchid-spotting on the slopes of Mount Kinabalu, a visit to a (boiling) hot springs, a spot of snorkelling and the shameless, spoil-yourself-rotten luxury of several idyllic nights in the Shangri-La Tanjung Aru hotel, it was our three-day sojourn on the river that effortlessly stole the Borneo show.
The river in question is the Kinabatangan, which runs some 560km from the heart of Borneo to the Sulu Sea. To get there we flew from Kota Kinabalu to the eastern coastal town of Sandakan - you can do it by bus, but it's bumpy and takes the best part of a day - then spent three hours on a speedboat to get to the river village of Sukau. The lower Kinabatangan wetlands have melted into one vast flood plain as the river meanders through a series of mangrove swamps, oxbow lakes and swathes of primary rainforest. Despite the tea-coloured water it's a place of startling beauty - and sudden shocks. Some of these have to do with wildlife, as in the case of the monitor lizard, or the day we realised that a sizeable delegation from one of Sabah's 600-plus species of ants was hitching a lift in our boat. But the biggest shock has to do with the amount of rainforest. You'd think there'd be more rainforest in Borneo than you could shake a stick at, but it's obvious even to a goggle-eyed tourist that the lush corridor along the banks of the river - which in 1999 was finally, after a 10-year battle between big business and environmental activists, designated a wildlife sanctuary - doesn't tell the whole story.
Malaysia is a young country. This year marks its 50th year of independence, and the anniversary is being celebrated in some style - as well it might. Fifty years ago the territory formerly known as Malaya, which had been invaded first by the Portuguese, then the Dutch and, finally, the British, was in pretty dire straits. A ruthless Japanese occupation during the second World War compounded the problems, as did the region's apparently endless ethnic and religious diversity. For centuries Malays have been rubbing shoulders with large numbers of Chinese, Indian and Filipino immigrants, as well as a selection of indigenous tribespeople, all of whom bring eclectic, and sometimes conflicting, traditions and beliefs to the mix. Even after gaining independence, or merdeka, Malaysia hasn't had an easy time. Ongoing confrontations with neighbouring Indonesia, followed by Singapore's withdrawal from the Malaysian federation in 1965, caused a ripple or two.
To have forged a working democracy, let alone a thriving economy, under such circumstances is pretty impressive. Malaysia's multicultural juggling act offers a lesson in tolerance to the wider world, and Malaysia's economic miracle has dramatically raised the standard of living for the country's 24 million citizens. But economic miracles don't come free - and in Malaysia, as elsewhere, the environment has paid the price. In earlier times rubber plantations did the damage; by the turn of the 20th century commercial logging was the major culprit. This explains the colour of the river water; it's caused by silting and is a sure sign of years of intense logging activity.
These days there's a new agribusiness in town. Malaysia is the world's largest exporter of palm oil, and demand is almost certainly going to increase in the coming decade, as plans by western countries to use the oil as a biofuel - and thus, ironically, cut our carbon emissions - swing into top gear.
While the debate over large-scale monoculture rages on, however, local people in Sabah have taken matters into their own hands. They've set up small eco-tourism ventures to raise awareness and allow visitors to enjoy an authentic rainforest experience. We were lucky enough to be in the hands of one such company, Special Interest Tours, which has been bringing tourists to eastern Sabah since 1991. We knew we'd hit the jackpot the minute we stepped off the flight from Kota Kinabalu. "My name," said our guide, with a beaming smile, "is Yahya." The first thing he did was to learn our names; the second was to remember them. Yahya's knowledge of local wildlife was encyclopaedic, but what made the greatest impression on us - apart from his quiet efficiency and unfailing good humour - was his pride in his place and the obvious joy he took in our jaunts along the river.
Our home in Sukau was Kinabatangan Riverside Lodge, a series of low wooden chalets built around a beautifully kept garden under the trees. Here we ate simple but delicious meals of rice, river prawns and stir-fried pak choi, followed by desserts of local papaya, lychees and rambutan, or just relaxed with a cold drink or a cuppa as the sun slipped into the river and one of the cooks quietly strummed on his acoustic guitar.
The lodge shop was the place to get kitted out for a forest trek in a pair of hip cotton leech socks - or, to be precise, anti-leech socks - and a hat that folded into a fan and was so heavily impregnated with insect repellent that no self-respecting mosquito would be seen within several kilometres of it.
Thus attired, we ventured into the forest, following in the footsteps of elephants. This, alas, sounds much more romantic than it is. Elephants have much the same effect on forest as bulldozers, and an elephant trail is a muddy track punctuated every now and again by treacherously squelchy bits. There are leeches in the squelchy bits - Yayha caught one, put it on his hand and offered it to us: there were no takers - and, while you're watching out for them, low-lying branches whip your hat off and plonk it into the mud.
Luckily, it was retrievable, because a hat is essential for a visit to the fabulous Gomantong Caves. These vast limestone cavities are, as fans of Planet Earth will recall, the site of the biggest pile of bat pooh on earth - lovingly, and famously, filmed by a BBC cameraman who rigged a rope that moved the camera up the pile, centimetre by smelly centimetre. This, it was claimed, gave television viewers an insight into the scale of the thing. Having been there, I'd have to argue that it's far bigger and infinitely smellier than you could ever imagine. Besides the bats, the 90-metre-high cave is home to large numbers of swiftlets, whose nests are used for bird's nest soup.
Chinese merchants have been coming to Borneo to trade for these delicacies for at least 12 centuries - hence the name "kina", or "Chinese", in many of Sabah's place names. Nowadays the trade is controlled by the Malaysian government, but harvesting the tiny bowl-shaped chunks of dried saliva is still a dangerous business. We gawped at the men swaying on precarious rattan ladders high above us until Yahya's whispered warning - "When you're looking up, keep your mouth closed" - had us swaying ourselves on the steep, slippy boardwalk. Grabbing the handrail was no good, either. It was covered in bat pooh and appeared to be moving. Cockroaches. Somewhere to my right Yayha was offering consolation: a close encounter with bat pooh is, according to local legend, a good thing. "Brings you luck. It does, really." Oh boy. Welcome to Borneo.
HOW TO GET THERE
I booked Trailfinders' six-night Sabah Supreme package, which includes all internal travel in Borneo, several stand-alone day excursions, a visit to Sepilok and two nights at the Kinabatangan River Lodge. It also includes two nights at the Shangri-La Tanjung Aru Hotel: I added three more, and strongly urge anyone who visits Borneo to do the same. The brochure price is approximately €900 - but if, like me, you're travelling alone you'll have to pay almost double. I would also have liked to spend longer on the river, and you can book this yourself less expensively through Special Interest Tours at their website, www.sitoursborneo.com. And remember, none of this includes flights to Malaysia. I flew to Sydney with Malaysian Airlines, and the €2,000 ticket price included a three-day stopover in Kuala Lumpur plus free return flights to Kota Kinabalu.