BORNEO

I don’t recall much about Borneo, except for two days deep into nowhere, visiting the Iban tribe in their longhouses (“Rumah Betang”).My wife and I traveled the last leg of the venture in a dugout canoe with a 10 HP motor pushing up the Rajang River. Longhouses rest on stilts against flooding.

A common area runs the length—-maybe a hundred meters—-onto which family rooms open, all under one thatched roof.  The settlement lived off livestock, growing rice and fruit and hunting and fishing.  

We slept in a rude bunkhouse on thin mattresses with mosquito netting.  We shared an outhouse and a hose for showering.  That night we were treated to a ritual ceremony with much dancing, led by the chief, wearing an embroidered vest and a crown of feathers.  He was a very old man who, according our translator, hunted heads as a youth—-a practice the British ended in 1948.  He had remarkable tattoos from those days.