Rafting Champions and Instant Celebrities
Loading Map
Baleh,
Malaysia
Saturday, April 21, 2007
While looking into visiting Iban longhouses from Kapit, we discovered that the annual Baleh-Kapit Raft Safari was due to happen on the weekend. The Ministry of Tourism here is very keen to get more tourists to come and we were easily persuaded. So we cut our longhouse visit down to a day trip from Kapit. It was a very interesting day at the Iban lonhouse, where we couldn't communicate all that well but the people were all very friendly and happy to see us (nothing to do with the large amounts of cash we were contributing of course). The longhouse way of living came about from the time of the headhunters, when it was not feasible for a family to live alone in a single house cause they wouldn't keep their heads for very long that way. So the longhouses are like villages, with many unrelated families staying in the one huge house. They can be tens of metres long, with loads of rooms with a shared hallway and porch area. Each family then has their own house or room within. They had some skulls hanging up in the shared hallway, and the Iban I believe are the last tribe to still display them. Nice one!
So anyway, our rafting trip was on Saturday so we spent a very relaxing few days in Kapit, wandering about the tiny town, sipping ice lemon tea or kopi (coffee) with our plates of noodles or rice or rotai cannai. Saturday afternoon we were off up the river for three hours in a longboat with a number of people from the Ministry of Tourism and some other locals drafted in to ensure we tourists didn't end up paddling in circles for all eternity.
The longhouse was full of visitors for the race. There were forty teams in all, with up to eight members in a team, and all staying like us and taking advantage of the hospitality of the longhouse. There were some VIPs there as well, a government minister and the head of the Ministry. There was a huge shared meal after dark, where outside each house in the hallway there was a large circle of folk all chowing down together on rice, wild boar, bamboo shoots, beans, chicken and whatever else. I'm pretty sure the women in our house didn't actually stop cooking from when we arrived till we left the following morning at 5.30am. After that there was some traditional dancing and music, followed by a live band who were doing karaoke numbers, mostly in Malay and presumably Iban languages. By this stage the beer we'd brought and the local tuak or rice wine was definitely flowing, with one group of lads intent on killing everyone by forcing them to down shots of the horrible stuff. Seemed like a good idea at the time. However, I did end up doing a stunning rendition of Guns 'n' Roses' "Sweet Child O' Mine" with the live band, to obvious critical acclaim. Sleeping was wherever you could find a place, and I decided I was pissed enough at about 1am to manage a couple of hours kip on the lino floor...
A rude awakening at 5am with an outrageous hangover. Quick breakfast of spicy noodles (!) and out and onto the river, just in time to faff about for three hours before finally setting off. The pain was excruciating: the hangover, the bamboo raft sitting about six inches under the surface of the water, trying to paddle, trying to be pleasant and join in the fun... impossible! I shamefully got my ass into the support boat for as much of the day as possible. It took five and a half hours to raft back to Kapit on the slow moving river, very picturesque with the brown water and surrounded by dense jungle, with the odd longhouse or logging station now and again. I won't go into the logging situation, except to say that it is depressing, that it appears all over the place, but that thankfully we haven't seen any huge deforested swathes as of yet.
Finally got back to the beautiful soft bed in the hotel about 2pm and promptly (blessedly) lost consciousness for four hours. At 7.30pm we made our way to the reception, where there were tables for about 1,000 people with lots of speeches and the usual thanking the sponsors, etc. We were the only foreigners involved, and the first year that there was a "full" tourist team (lies: we had loads of help from locals), we got name checked a few times, had to stand up, got photographed and interviewed many times, and basically were kind of treated like celebrities. We won third prize in the tourist category, a princely sum of 500RM (quite a lot here actually, about seventy quid). Without going into too many details, our 'guide' who had gotten us involved in the first place tried to appropriate the prize to pay the boat drivers etc, despite having charged us a king's ransom for same, and so there was some argy bargy culminating in the filthy-toothed little midget attempting to shout me down and push me around a bit. In a crowded hall. The Ministry of Tourism were amazingly helpful and mortified by the whole thing, and I would recommend anyone coming here getting in touch with them for any longhouse visits or trips from Kapit as they are well organised and far more reasonably priced than we could find.
The following morning we went to the brand spanking new Ministry office to get our permits to travel further upriver, and to claim the 200RM rebate they give to help with the costs of building a boat for the rafting trip (our guide, who shall remain nameless but is recommended by name in one of the guide books, was intent on claiming this for himself in order to further boost his profits - I take pleasure imagining him turning up to collect it later in the day, har har) and then to donate our total booty of 450RM to the Red Crescent. Of course this is another photo opportunity with the newspaper reporters and photographers in attendance.
Since then we have been pictured in three of the local newspapers: the Borneo Post (English), See Hua Daily News (Chinese), and the Utasan Borneo (Malay). Every day for the past three days. With a full page spread yesterday. Next week we are appearing as judges on Malaysian Pop Idol.
