Borneo to be wild

What ever made me think I could climb Mount Kinabalu?

By Jame DiBiasio

Sept. 11, 1999 | It all began with a couch. My couch. An ugly, beat-up thing. I was lying on it earlier this year wondering what to do during my next vacation. I didn't want to see places. I had already seen enough, from the lost ruins of Angkor Wat to the sharp pinnacles of the Karakoram Highway.

No, enough seeing. Time to do. In the secure cushion of broken-in furniture, I decided I should climb a mountain. Mount Kinabalu, in fact, Southeast Asia's highest peak (about 4,100 meters), located in Eastern Malaysia, on the northern tip of the great island of Borneo.

Borneo. The wilds of. It sounded good, in the confines of my Hong Kong domesticity. I stretched my toes and reclined some more. Ah yes.

I resolved to prepare myself physically for the task: Daily two-hour gym workouts and strenuous hikes on Lantau island would be the order of the day. But you know the Lennon adage -- life is what happens to you while you're making other plans. It was inevitable that the hours pledged to my mountain training would transform into prolonged sessions of drinking beer.

Then one evening it occurred to me: I'm leaving for Borneo in 10 days. I bullied some friends into a reasonably difficult walk on Hong Kong Island. It involved a lot of climbing up to a remote observatory and took a little over two hours. As I clung panting to the observatory floor, unable to stand any longer because my legs had turned to jelly, I realized that perhaps I was not ready for the relentless two-day slog above the tree line.

Seeking moral support, I communicated my concerns to my father. He and my mother had lived in Japan during the late '60s and at one point he had climbed Mount Fuji, which is about the same height as Mount Kinabalu. How did it go, Dad? "I was a wreck," he replied. "The final climb was over gravel. I'd take two steps forward and slide one back. You know the saying, kiddo, 'Only a fool climbs Mount Fuji twice.'"

I decided that only a fool climbs a mountain at all. Surely it wasn't too late to exchange my ticket for a trip to a beach in the Philippines?

It was too late, said the travel agent. The lesson, I thought as I went out to buy a proper backpack, is never to dream up a vacation while lying on the couch.

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Before heading to Kota Kinabalu, the provincial capital of Sabah state, I had to relax, to put myself in the right frame of mind. Why not see a bit of Borneo, and why not begin on the other corner of the island, at Kuching, capital of the neighboring state of Sarawak?

And so I found myself in a pub in Kuching, populated mainly by locals plus a couple of expats based in Borneo. The bartender gave me a shot of tuak, the rice-based hooch conjured up by the local Iban tribespeople. Never turn down a drink offered by an Iban, one of the expats elbowed me -- it hasn't been that long since these guys, the biggest ethnic group in Sarawak, stopped headhunting their neighbors.

The days of blowguns and loincloths are nearly over, responded one of the locals, all of whom were sporting AC Milan soccer jerseys and drinking Guinness like maniacs. "After all, we are a Commonwealth nation," added his bar-mate, who turned out to be an anthropologist studying the impact of government relocation and development programs on the indigenous peoples of Sarawak.

Iban culture, according to my new soccer-obsessed friends, is threatened with a gradual but steady erosion. The Iban are forgetting their oral history, their dances, their crafts and their music. The crucial craft of building the longhouses in which these villagers dwell in the jungle is becoming lost. The languages of the smallest ethnic groups are vanishing.

It's an old story: You can't deny a society the benefits of electricity or modern medicine, or tell them not to wear blue jeans and get decent city jobs. The hoards of Chinese cookery and porcelain in the Iban longhouses testify that Borneo's indigenous people have wanted to trade with and be a part of the world for the past 1,500 years.

In fact, a Scottish expat explained, small groups of Chinese traders have lived in Kuching for centuries, and under British rule the immigrant population swelled as cheap laborers poured in. They give the place a cosmopolitan air, but Kuching is no hurly-burly, deal-making Hong Kong knock-off. It's a sleepy place, and the sleepiness makes it one of the few cities I've visited in Asia that I'd call charming. It boasts a lively mix of people, an attractive downtown with great markets and kitschy statues of cats ("Kuching" means "cat"). And tuak.

But even tuak couldn't make me forget my real reason for being there -- Kinabalu. The task before me, all 4,100 meters uphill of it, beckoned.

Next page: 2:30 a.m. on the slope of Kinabalu