Bario
ByThe Bario indigenous food festival was in full swing as we landed at the air strip in a small twin engine turbo prop. Small open fronted shops and cafes and unmade muddy roads gave the tiny town of Bario a distinctly wild west feel to it. Smiling welcoming faces however brightened everything up. Wooden festival stalls with thatch roofs displayed a vast array of jungle foods, some mouth wateringly tempting like roast wild boar, some interesting and tasty, like fern shoots, wild ginger and mushrooms and some a bit off putting like fat puffy grubs.
On finding out we were from Scotland, Gerawat, a local man of about our age, said he was also a highlander, a Kelabit highlander. Not only that, Gerawat said he knew Scottish songs and proceeded to perform the ‘Northern Lights of Old Aberdeen’, word perfect. Once we recovered from our surprise we joined him in singing, ‘I belong to Glasgow’, much to the bewilderment and perhaps mild alarm of the other locals of this remote wee town. It turned out that Gerawat had met Scottish soldiers in the 1960s when they were defending the Sarawak borders against incursions from Indonesia. This period of intense jungle warfare was euphemistically called the ‘Malaysian Indonesian confrontation’, when Indonesia opposed the inclusion of Sarawak into the newly independent Malaysia. As a school boy Gerawat had helped soldiers carry their equipment from the helicopters landing on what is now the airstrip.
Over a lunch of wild boar, jungle vegetables and Bario rice in the converted longhouse we were staying in we chatted to Alice and Joe, an Australian couple. They were there for the dedication of a memorial to Australian and British commandos who parachuted into the area during the Second World War to organise the local jungle head hunters to fight the Japanese. Alice’s dad had been a young sergeant in that clandestine force. She told us his fascinating story and showed us black and white photographs taken at that time. Alice and Joe had trekked to remote villages to meet people who still remembered her father with warmth and affection.
We were invited, along with Chris and Sarah, a couple from Ireland, to plant cinnamon saplings at the site of the war memorial. In time the memorial will be surrounded by a lovely grove of cinnamon tree to provide shade for the many visitors who come to the area.
The guys from Trek Force spent days and weeks in the jungle working with the locals to find ancient Kelabit burial sites and plotting them using GPS instruments. Alan the Trek force leader told us these sites would then, theoretically, be officially recognised and so protected from the massive logging operations. Young volunteers spent a month or so with Trek Force to get a jungle adventure, living in the jungle, sleeping in hammocks and cooking over wood fires. We enjoyed chatting to Alan comparing notes on the latest techniques for survival water purification. We left him with a new Swiss made filter we’d bought in Penang.
This agricultural community has developed along the lines of many farming areas around the world. Rich growing land producing excellent, but labour intensive crops supported a large and neighbourly population. Then good education, increasing employment opportunities elsewhere and modern farming methods have attracted the youth away. So now the remaining families in Bario in the Kelabit highlands of Sarawak are developing higher value added crops, like cinnamon, coffee, pineapples, rambuttan and durians. These can now be taken down a new logging road which has linked the area to the coast.
