Borneo: Iban hospitality in Sarawak
It took less than 5 minutes of walking down a red earth track before we reached the shallow river. Socks off, we plunged in and began the trek towards our lodgings for the next few nights, the community of Perdu – an Iban longhouse in the Betong state of Sarawak, Borneo. Our newly purchased ‘Adidas Kampung’ (a generic term for the dirt cheap soft rubber shoes that local villagers wear) were put to the test straight-away, but the grip was good and the water took the edge off the brutal heat of the day. That said, we could never quite get over the sensation that we were jungle trekking in our slippers.
There were stretches where we disappeared up to our thighs in the water, soaking us through to our waists. But by then it didn’t matter. The cool of the river worked initially, but the heat and ever increasing humidity had reduced us to soggy, sweaty messes regardless. We negotiated fallen trees, deep mud pools, then slippery inclines as we left the riverbank behind and moved upwards through the forest. Here the paths were mainly clear as we ascended through terrain that was part jungle, part cleared land for pepper farms, the main source of income in the region. My sunglasses were lost, somehow, as we ducked under more fallen trees crossing our path. That’s the fourth pair I’ve lost on this trip.
The trek lasted around 3 hours and under normal circumstances would have been relatively easy, but the intensity of the heat had left us fatigued. We were overjoyed to see the longhouse appear on a ridge above us as we rounded the final corner.
Our guide, the ever cheerful Chris, introduced us to our host family, Iyai and Menit, a lovely elderly couple with more grandchildren than you could shake a stick at, though none lived in the community anymore. They showed us round, through the kitchen / sleeping area at the entrance, past the 10ft long rail that served as a wardrobe, to the bathroom, a small shed-like affair down a few precarious wooden steps. Here the squat toilet was positioned inside a little plywood enclosure, next to 4 buckets of water and a ladle that served as the showering facilities. An orange rubber hose was connected to a tap so you could flush the loo or wash your nethers. Outside the cubicle were a couple of plastic chairs, on which were strewn several discarded pairs of pants and knickers. More underwear hung on coathangers around the room. Three dirty white buckets completed the picture, each containing a small fresh-water turtle in their own private pond.
We thought it prudent to shower at the same time to wash Helen’s hair (it’s much easier that way). Never has a bucket shower felt so good. Luckily our hosts were unconcerned at our social approach to bathing and welcomed us back in the room with a variety of sweets and cakes and as much sweet black tea as we could drink. Leftovers from a recent festival, the offerings were all made from cane sugar. Some were dark and syrupy. Some were light and crispy. All seemed as though they came from heaven.
After a brief trip back out to see the wonderful sunset we left Chirs and ‘toured’ the longhouse. Around 100 metres long and slightly curved, the house was a rather wonderful, if ramshackle, construction of wood and corrugated iron that looked like it had expanded and evolved over a long period and without any real concern for looks or consistency. Though it had started with only a few families, the house had been extended many times over the years, with new families simply building their homes onto the end of the last one. It now consisted of 17 separate dwellings, housing around 80 people. Most longhouses have an integrated communal space, but this one did not – all community based activities were conducted in the space outside everyone’s front doors, a dirt track corridor flanked on the opposite side by a variety of duck, pig and chicken enclosures. People came out to meet us as we walked along. No English spoken of course, but lovely welcoming smiles and comments.
Returning to our hosts, we were taught an Iban word that’s repeated many times a day. ‘Makay, makay’, which means ‘eat, eat’. Our hosts led us next door for dinner. Clearly the sleeping and catering arrangements were to be shared between families. In the adjoining house, which looked remarkably similar, we were seated on large rattan mats. An array of chicken dishes were produced, along with greens that had been gathered a few moments before (jungle ferns) and a super abundance of boiled rice. The food was very good and despite pigging out on cane sugar goodies an hour beforehand, we ate a great deal, much to everyone’s delight.
Translated for us by Chris, conversation in Iban ensued, mainly between the elderly people in the room, but often with next door neighbours. Although the homes in the longhouse are self-contained, a foot high gap runs below the roof (there’s no ‘ceiling’ to speak of) linking everyone’s houses together. That and the thin walls mean you can converse with your neighbour as if they were sat next to you. There are no secrets to be kept here – everyone can hear what everyone else is getting up to.
The Iban were traditionally a nomadic tribe that came up into Sarawak from Kalimantan (the now Indonesian part of Borneo). Many still live there too, along with a sizable community in Brunei. They are one of several distinct ethnic groups here and maintain their own cultural identity through social practices and language (there’s even a dedicated TV channel in Iban). Though they no longer dress traditionally and have largely embraced modern life, they still live in their trademark longhouses which operate, effectively, as little villages. There are apparently still around 3,000 longhouses in Sarawak alone and the practice is very much alive and thriving. Each longhouse has a chief who is officially sanctioned by the local government as a representative of the village. It’s their responsibility to lobby for funds and improvements, negotiate trade deals and the like. At Perdu longhouse, the very recent connection to the mains electricity supply was due to the chief’s lobbying endeavours. Equally a road under construction way below the hill on which the house sits will eventually connect the community to the outside world via a quick, concreted route rather than the rutted dirt tracks it currently uses. Though not wealthy, this is not a poor community. Most families here own 4×4 trucks, the ubiquitous Toyota Hilux which though very cheap compared to UK prices, still requires a hefty outlay.
But perhaps the most striking example of the march towards progress was the new longhouse, still under construction in places, but in the main structurally complete. Built from concrete, this new structure was positioned a mere 20 meters away from the old place we were staying in, and families were in the process of moving-in their stuff. To us it looked like a horrid, horizontal version of a 60’s tower block, but the Iban were incredibly excited with it. More space, bigger kitchens, ‘modern’ living.
After dinner we were given a couple of chairs and sat in the communal space on the road outside and were joined by around 20 other villagers, each bringing their own chair. Some gave us hearty handshakes as welcome. Others gave us a nod and kept their distance. Some ignored us completely. For a couple of hours a conversation between neighbours took place. Topics included the new longhouse, inevitably, but also snippets of juicy gossip. A nearby longhouse was in scandal as their chief had recently married a young woman and brought her back to live with him. This wouldn’t have been so bad aside from the fact that his current wife knew nothing about the arrangement. The villagers held a vote and unanimously decided to kick him out in support of the distraught ‘old’ wife.
We’d brought some gifts for the community. We’d been advised that practical gifts, like tools and sewing materials would be welcome, along with pens and paper for the kids. These we gave to the chief, a fairly young, chubby man who proceeded to distribute everything to those present at the gathering. It was a rather strange affair, with individual cotton reels being taken from a pack and handed out to individual women. There were not many young kids about, so a lot of the coloured pencils were given to the adults. What they thought of them is anyone’s guess. They were polite but I suspect they wondered what on earth we’d brought them. The hammer and nails we’d brought caused amusement, though what happened to them we’ve no idea.
We slept like babies that night, on mattresses that our hosts had dragged into the living area and covered with a strung-up insect net. We awoke to find them asleep on mattresses in the kitchen, along with a teenage boy we’d not seen before.
The day’s interest now turned to the jungle trip. Chris, ourselves and 4 others (our lady host Menit, one of the older neighbours and another couple of village men, one middle aged, one a young lad, plus 3 constantly rowing dogs), set out on a 4 hour trek to a spot where the longhouse had set up a rudimentary camping area where two small rivers met. We stopped at several points on the journey. The first was to cut down a bamboo pole and chop it into cooking-sized sections, much like we’ve seen in Vietnam and Vanuatu, the second to harvest a few ripe wild pineapples and the third to gather wild palm hearts. This latter process was utterly fascinating. The older men used machetes to chop down the trunk of a couple of Bertam Palms (a fearsome looking beast with hard, sharp protective thorns). The trunk was then cut vertically using 2 inch cuts to enable layers to be peeled off. The heart is a tubular section of the very innards about an inch in diameter. We tried some raw and it tasted delicious.
The going was not so bad, despite being totally overgrown with ferns in many places and needing much machete work, but the heat and humidity were still intense and our energy was sapping quickly. A long and very steep descent eventually led us to the community fishing and hunting camp, a couple of wooden framed constructions, one with a large tarpaulin draped over it, the other a cooking area covered with a sheet of corrugated iron and a few scraps of plastic sheeting. We took off the tarp and washed it in the river, replaced it, then constructed our sleeping arrangements for the night. Chirs had brought some camp stretchers that we erected using long thin tree trunks and strapped them to the frame.
Menit prepared lunch using what we’d gathered – boiled palm hearts in a bamboo tube, plus the ever-present pot of boiled rice. It was wonderful, squatting by the river bank eating produce as fresh as it’s possible to get and taking in our surroundings. The camp was beautiful, one small stream leading into a shallow wider river overlooked by towering foliage. It was a jungle camp dream.
No rest though – as soon as we’d done, we set out to a nearby waterfall where a deep, cool and refreshing pool awaited. We trudged up the shallow river. As we went, the older men and the young lad started looking for the small fish that congregate around bigger boulders where the river forms deep pools. Armed with snorkelling masks and homemade spear-guns (tiny harpoons catapulted from a wooden frame using four rubber straps for tension), they managed to amass a decent haul of little river fish for dinner. Alas, and much to Helen’s dismay, they also discovered a large softshell turtle. The young lad made many attempts to shoot it and for a while it successfully eluded him. Its luck eventually ran out however and he shot it through one of its back legs, then surfaced and gleefully waded out to the pebble river bank with the doomed amphibious beastie dangling from his spear. Once deposited, the older man killed it by chopping into its neck with the machete. Helen, luckily, was sat on a rock further upstream and avoided the sight. She was distinctly perturbed though and vowed not to eat a scrap of it.
The mood at the swimming pool was a little subdued as a consequence, despite the deliciously cooling waters . We were joined in there for a while by the spear-fishers and were slightly concerned they might mistake us for fair game. We were a little relieved when they left us alone.
Dinner was a rushed affair in the end. The food was great, bamboo cooked fish and fried smaller fish that could be eaten whole, plus the dreaded turtle soup. The latter was pretty good to be honest. Helen stuck to her principles and politely refused any of it. The rush was due to the onset of a seriously heavy bout of jungle rain. We managed most of our eating in the open on the shore, but were forced to retreat to the cooking and sleeping areas for shelter once it really started to come down. This was the point where we discovered that the tarpaulin was not in the best of shape. Ants, it seemed, had been at it since the longhouse residents had last been there, and there were small holes all over it. We tried in vain to patch it using strips of tape but it was like trying to catch a tsunami in a plastic bag. The whole roof was dripping and completely soaked our stretcher beds, excepting one, which we allocated to Helen. Chris and myself tried many variations of patching using wooden poles and spare plastic and in a rather Heath Robinson fashion managed to get all the cascading water to drip between the stretchers. We had no real faith that it would hold out. After two hours (it was pitch black by this time), we gave up and contemplated spending a very wet and uncomfortable night. To our great relief, the rain stopped a half-hour later.
Whilst this was occurring the other Iban men decided to go out fishing again in the dark, with head torches. We didn’t see them again until about 10 o’clock in the evening. When they returned I was hoping to go out with them for some land hunting for wild boar (the older guy had brought his rifle along), but they were reluctant to go back out and were dubious about our success, thinking more rain was on the way.
I dried off my stretcher as best as I could, but it was still saturated. We had sleeping bags, courtesy of Chris, and I just hoped it wouldn’t soak through (though it inevitably did). Still the weather was mercifully quiet until dawn and we remained undripped-on through the night, though sleep was still difficult to come by. When we awoke we noticed the Iban men had slept in the same soaked clothes they’d been fishing in, albeit wrapped in thick blankets. Tougher breed than us it seems.
As the dawn broke, so again did the weather and a steady warm drizzle stayed with us for several hours. We ate turtle soup and fish leftovers, decamped and became drenched by rain and sweat. Then the hard and treacherous trudge up the steep, now very slippery, slope that we’d descended yesterday. Another 4 hours back, mainly uphill. Mist and drizzle, carefully placed footsteps, ducking under low tree branches and pushing through drenched ferns and other jungle foliage. A real Borneo experience.
Back at the longhouse we indulged in another welcome bucket shower, ate another large lunch with yet more rice and longed to simply flop down and sleep on the mattresses for a while. Our hosts had other ideas though. The 63 year old Menit, unlike us, seemed as sprightly as ever, despite doing the same amount of trekking, carrying a 20kg pack and cooking all the meals. She convinced Helen to try basket weaving and took her off to the new concrete longhouse to have a go. Whilst they were busily employed, Chris and myself went to nosy around and check out the new place. Like the old house, this one was around 100 metres long, but was much deeper, so each of the individual homes seemed considerably bigger. Unfinished, unpainted in the main, the place seemed soulless and depressing to my mind, though I was clearly out of step with the others. Everyone we met seemed overjoyed with their new digs. In one we were asked to stay for tea. As well as festival sweets, coffee, juices and teas, the family also brought out a 1.5 litre water bottle full of rice wine (tuak), which had been produced in another nearby longhouse. We were invited to sample it by downing a small glass full (it seems the same wherever we go – no one wants to savour anything!). We rescued Helen from enforced basketry and all joined in. The sampling continued between the three of us and our male host, until the entire bottle was finished. We loved it and were totally at ease in their company (our more elderly hosts tended to be a little more cautious around us). Slightly squiffy, we made our way out, only to be collared again, this time by the chief himself.
The chief’s house was the most complete and he had a fully working kitchen along with an actual table to sit down at. While his wife pounded some leaves in a mortar and his mother prepared some vegetables, he and his dad handed out cans of beer, more sweet treats, oodles of tea and a large glass handled bottle of more rice wine. The beer was duly downed, then the rice wine was sampled. This one was like an acidic limoncello with an aftertaste that was the oral equivalent of being kicked by a donkey. Emboldened by the booze, we asked the chief what it was like being chief. If we expected a measured, dignified answer we were mistaken. We got head in hands, a woe-is-me, hang-dog expression and a list of how utterly burdensome his life had become. Stuck in it for 4 years until the next elections the moribund fellow acted like he’d been handed a life sentence of misery.
We left, somewhat fattened by the hours of quaffing wine and sweets, and walked straight into dinner. Chris was visibly waning by this point, but Helen and myself kept the side up and munched our way, rather miraculously, through our fair share of the grub. Our hosts were clearly not drinkers, but handled our more lively deportment rather well.
A brief and quiet night later we tackled the last of our rice-based breakfasts and asked our hosts how to make some of the sweets we’d been eating. Cue a 40 minute exploration into the art of making sugar cane dumplings, involving the retrieval and display of all the ingredients and cooking utensils. A more thorough answer to a question was never received…. We gave them a postcard of the Yorkshire Dales with a note to thank them, then were off, back down the same track we’d come up on to rendezvous with the 4×4 pick-up. We found my lost sunglasses on the way back on a pile of leaves under the fallen tree we’d had to duck under threee days earlier.
We were, so we understand, the last people to get to stay at that particular longhouse. There were no other bookings for the company we used to arrange it all, and any future visitor will have to stay in the bland concrete monolith. It seemed a real shame, at least to those who would value the experience of a traditional longhouse stay. But, as ever, progress means different things to different people and in their situation we’d most likely do the same thing. Plus the Iban people, who are most welcoming and generous, remain the same of course. It was at times a difficult experience – we were constantly wet or damp, rarely anything but sweaty and very dirty and always a little sluggish in the high humidity and heat (notwithstanding an alcohol induced burst of energy). But at the same time we were most definitely privileged to witness a lifestyle that hardly anyone gets to see. Most other longhouse visits in Borneo are of the tourist kind, with dressed up performers laid on to try and recreate some historic authenticity. This was different. Here we were dropped into people’s everyday lives and simply soaked it up. Yes we went camping and fishing, but the Iban do that all the time anyway. Yes we were treated to some wonderful hospitality, but again, that’s what they do for any visitor. Best of all, and despite our misgivings about their choice of materials for housing, the Iban culture shows no sign at all of disappearing. People, it seems, still want to live like this. We wished them all success for the future, but they most certainly won’t need our wishes to continue to thrive.
Foot(wear)note: Despite the overall success of our rubber footwear choices, 5 minutes before we were due to be picked up I managed to break the heel strap of my left shoe. A very hasty repair courtesy of ripped-up strips of gaffer tape ensued and from there I had to hope for the best. Luckily, and despite hours spent trudging through rivers and mud, the repair miraculously held out. Helen’s shoes, though more robust than mine, eventually rubbed the skin from a large area of her instep and she was in considerable pain on the way back down. Not bad for £3 each though. We bought a pair of true ‘Adidas Kampung’ in a village shop on the return to Kuching – bright white rubber affairs with studs for grip and hastily coloured-in stripes down the sides. We’ll look like we’re ready for tennis as we start our treks in Sumatra in a few days time….
Footnote: On the trek back from the camp to the longhouse, Chris, Menit, Helen and myself went first (largely as a means to separate the accompanying dogs so they’d stop fighting each other). At a rest stop Helen and I sat on a thick log propped up in two sturdy ‘Y’ shaped supports, the same log we’d sat on at the same stop the day before. We ate a bag of cashews and almonds for sustenance. Two minutes later, a sharp crack and the log snapped in two. 4 legs flew into the air, along with 50 or so assorted nuts. We laughed off the indignity (what else can you do?), but suffered a serious wardrobe casualty. Helen’s cotton trousers now had a 10 inch gaping rip in them and her arse was hanging out. Luckily a spare pair of walking trousers came to the rescue….
Simon (10th June 2026)
Well this is what you expected on your travels no tourists or comforts. You both did really well to survive the ordeals. Wet beds and clothes broken shoes and split pants.hey ho on with the journey. XX
Wet beds aren’t normally a problem. Not now I’ve got my incontience pants
Very interesting and authentic, well done both, I would have struggled with that turtle too.
Yep – at least it didn’t suffer so much