Picture a beautiful wide green valley, mountains standing sentinel on all sides, wild jungles threatening its borders, green fields and wooden stilt houses, the occasional water buffalo stumbling through the mud and rice paddies as far as the eye can see. Well this is where we were headed, the Kelabit Highlands around the interior town of Bario. If the indigenous people of Borneo wouldn't come to us then by God we would go to them. Bario seemed perfect, unspoilt and better still there was as yet no road to the place... there was nowhere for them to run!

The Kelabit highlands



And so we were back in Miri, reclining once more in our favourite hostel of all time, the Highlands Hotel. Nothing had changed, Joanne still followed us about with a dustpan and brush, Captain David (the owner and pilot for the Bario flight) still dropped in now and then and drove Amanda to the supermarket out of town for cheese, we all still convened at Wheelers bar for a beer at around seven and the DVD wheel still rotated constantly with sporadic bursts of BBC News 24 and MTV. This was our home away from home in Borneo, tea and coffee on tap (without the uncomfortablesness of wondering how much we had to pay for it at the end) a microwave for baked potatoes, cheese and baked beans and loads of nice people sat about on sofas to get to know. In fact, by this second time round we'd recommended the place to so many people that when we arrived we found it was already full of folk we already knew! Saves a lot of time on small talk.

We'd given up on Bario when we were here before because we had been unable to book a flight for three days in a row. Flight companies were rowing about the route and had closed them all down in a huff. We had however kept in touch with a girl we'd met called Claire who had flown a few days before and knew they were back on. I hadn't been that interested in going before, content to stay on a sofa and watch yet more DVD's, Amanda was planning to go with Claire. But now she was already there, I'd now seen Lord of the Rings Trilogy and we were both raring to have a proper adventure.

Lush



We'd met a guy who seems to spend most of the year in Miri working against the logging companies with the Penan, a nomadic tribe that still live in what's left of the rainforest. His activities and identity are a bit hush hush to be honest, many of the people who are effective against the activities of the loggers, the forestry department and the ministry for the environment (which all pretty much amount to the same few people) end up either dead, missing or in jail. Through him Claire had managed to get enough information and contacts to organise a Penan guide into the jungle to a semi permanent village called Patik. She had left on foot a few days before and we were determined to catch her up. That night we spent several hours in the supermarket buying pasta, tuna and noodles for our journey, salt and sugar by the kilo as accommodation 'offerings' for the village we hoped to stay in and rice for the guide (should we find one!) The next day we were on a plane, one bag full of dry clothes, another full of food. We had a vague idea of where we were going but knew it would take a little charm and a lot of luck. This was one of those all or nothing situations, we could feel a seriously big adventure coming up, we just didn't have any idea yet how we were supposed to make it happen.

Kelabit lady

The flight into the interior was in itself a revelation. Miles and miles of geometric irrigation channels supporting huge palm oil plantations stretching from one horizon to the other. It wasn't eating into the jungle, it had completely devoured it. Ninety percent of Sarawak's primary rain forest has gone forever, the animals, plants and people it supported are either extinct, nearly extinct, stuck in zoos or herded into government built long houses where they scratch a living out of the mud-pit they used to call home. The only forests left have been left alone only because they occupy difficult terrain, mountains, valleys and serious floodland. The company CEO's obviously decided to strip the easy trees first, reap as much profit as possible as quickly as they could, then, if the rest of the world were still doing nothing about their (illegal) activities, take the rest apart at their leisure. This they were now doing, we could see straight away the 'logging road' they were building to get to Bario. It split, circled and sprawled its way round valleys, up mountains, doubling back on itself and generally taking the long way everywhere, twice. This may seem a little like a waste of resources, but it's a prime example of how the companies think, the more twisty-turny their road is through the jungle, the longer it is. The longer the road is the more trees they have to chop down for it. The more trees they chop down the more profit they make. So the road that could have been fifty miles long twists so much it ends up 150 miles long. Genius really.

The more you see in Borneo, the more you want to find the people who are responsible for the cultural and natural genocide that's going on there and lynch them.

The pretty bits



Anyway, The word 'Bario', roughly translated means 'wet and windy' in the language of the Kelabit tribes that inhabit the area (part of the 'Orang Ulu' or Upriver people) which makes it sound reassuringly like home. It is a town of no more than 1000 people spread thinly around a wide, green valley filled like a dinner bowl with its world renowned rice paddies, dotted with the occasional water buffalo or cattle egret. The surrounding mountains are all jungle clad (for the time being) in rich shades of yet more greens. The effect is utterly breathtaking. I felt like we'd arrived back in time to a mystical lost world. The houses are still mostly built in the traditional way and the people still seem to be holding onto their cultural identity though not their religion, a wave of Christian evangelists in the 60's saw to that. Many do still believe however that if you laugh at an animal you will get turned to stone, but that's just common sense. Older women sport hugely elongated ears, weighed down with big dangly brass earings and complicated tattoos on their hands. The more tattoos a woman has, so the tradition goes, the braver they are, therefore the better wife they'll make. Many of the local families live in the same types of longhouses their ancestors built hundreds of years before. Bario still relies a great deal on hunting and farming for the peoples daily needs. If they don't grow it or shoot it they generally have to have it flown in, we saw all of seven shops in the town centre, all selling exactly the same noodles and rice, all with no customers at all. The skies above us were frequently ominously dark and cloudy, but it was actually nice and bright most of the time, even hot, with only a couple of hours of torrential rain from exactly 5pm to 7pm... you could set your watch by it.

Longhouse living



The Kelabits are a seriously proud people, and with reason. During World War Two a British army officer named Tom Harrison parachuted into Bario with a group of British, Aussie and Kiwi SAS troops. They set about creating an army of Kelabit volunteers that waged a guerrilla war, totally destroying the Japanese occupation of Sarawak. They are some of the most empowered, educated and successful of all of Borneo's ethnic people and carry themselves accordingly. One of them, Harris met us off the plane and drove us to his homestay ready and able to see to our every need. Our man in Miri had seemingly advised him ahead of time that we were coming.

Our mission for the day was to find a guide to Patik. Nancy, Harris' wife kindly offered to find us a suitable Kelabit guide who knew the area and could speak some Penan, but we were going after the real thing. We'd heard that Penan people who came to town normally stayed in temporary shelters on the edge of the forest, our man in Miri had even provided a couple of names as a starting point. We jumped in Harris' jeep and set off to find our guide.

Nailing down members of a nomadic jungle race who only come out of the trees when they absolutely have to, then finding one who you feel you can trust on first impressions (most of them), who speaks a little English (almost none) is exactly as hard as it sounds. Obviously there are no registered Penan guides in some hostel tour book, we would have to do this the hard way. After fording a river and climbing through buffalo poo infested forest we found the shelters of several women who had come to Bario to get their children immunised at the local clinic. They might have been willing to take us, and we might have gone except that their idea of guiding was much different than ours. Harris translated that if we didn't get to Patik in one day (very hard trekking) we'd be expected to just lie down in the forest and sleep till the next morning. Visions of rain, leeches and mozzies clouded my manners. We found a family that could take us if we could wait a few days, but we didn't have the time, the flight back to Miri was already booked. Our first day of guide hunting ended with no joy. We arranged for Harris to show us around the highlands the next day and Amanda, having been briefed by Captain David in Miri demanded to be cooked the towns famous pineapple curry. Nancy (Harris' wife) professed to a distinct lack of pineapples to which Amanda replied that if she couldn't find one she'd be happy to have David fly one out on his next run. As if by magic a pineapple appeared, having just grown in her back garden.

26 heads hunted!



Our whistle stop tour of Bario was interspersed with many quick stops at hopeful Penan looking shelters and side trips to places Harris knew some Penan sometimes stayed. We wandered through a rice paddy during a bout of proper tourism and found a huge monolith carved with the image of a famous, long dead Kelabit tribesman. His ears were enormous and below his feet were notches representing the amount of enemy heads he'd taken, there were more than thirty!

Our best bet for a guide ended up being a lad called Julian who was camping out with his brother and sister in a small house in the village. We tracked down his mother for her permission, she told us it was up to him, but to please take the younger one, he could use the money for school. We stuck with Julian (who had agreed to be our guide), older seemed a little safer.

Preparing for take-off



And so we were set, guide ready, food packed, dry clothes wrapped in three plastic bags (just in case) and insect repellent at the ready. Nancy cooked us up a big feast that night and we thanked Harris profusely for everything that he's done to help us. Without his language skills, his local knowledge and (frankly) his jeep we would never have found a guide in time. We went to bed excited and apprehensive about the morning. We'd heard that the trek to Patik wasn't particularly easy... we had no idea what we were letting ourselves in for