In the Land of the White Rajahs
Dec 5, 2006
Giant Centipedes, giant flowers, giant bat caves - Lawrence Millman finds all that and more in Sarawak, on the island of Borneo.
One morning in Sarawak I found myself wandering through the jungly extravagance of Gunung Gading National Park. The heat was formidable, the humidity even more so. Working together, they made me feel like I was at once drying up and drowning.
"...And in this supposedly dangerous part of the globe, the most dangerous behavior I ever encountered was, well, my own. Toward the beginning of the trip, I was chatting with some Bidayuh men about the catholicity of their diet (python, various insects, fermented wild boar, and so on) when one of them asked me if I'd like to try some smoked cat. I shook my head vigorously and took an involuntary step backward, whereupon my leg slipped into a crack between the bamboo-slatted floorboards of their longhouse; it took the men several minutes to extricate me.
This is a remote-control area, " one of the Bidayuh men informed me, his slightly uncertain English being a testimony to the presence of television in his longhouse. But it wasn't really that remote; his longhouse, Anna Rais, was about an hour by road from the bustle of Kuching.
Beware, we sarawakians eat everything with its back towards the sun...(well, almost anything...)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment