From this base, guests explore traditional Iban communal longhouses and the 240-square-kilometer Batang Ai National Park. My Borneo Adventure tour company day trip starts next morning at 9am when I board one of a dozen longboats at the resort dock. With James driving the long, narrow boat and jungle guide Jalan navigating from the front, we cross the lake, pass some freshwater fish farms, and leave the modern world behind. It is soothing this brilliant Borneo morning sitting low in the boat, savoring the blue sky, white clouds, green jungle and brown river, while lulled by the hypnotic hum of the 15-horsepower outboard and the water slapping at the bow.
At the end of the lake, Jalan, giving hand signals, guides us through a maze of upright dead tree trunks, stumps, sticks, branches and floating driftwood. Entering a river, we pass a few dilapidated longhouses looking like long-abandoned summer homes up on the bank, then patches of cultivated land and orderly rows of pepper trees up on the hills.
Suddenly, the river narrows, and a powerful current rocks the narrow boat. With James driving and Jalan fending off rocks with a pole or paddle, we fight our way past the rapids. I search the trees above, looking for hornbills and proboscis monkeys, nature’s little joke, with their weird, pendulous elongated noses. Ahead, I spot a vine -- or a thick, grey snake -- stretched across the river. But it is only a power cable bringing electricity to the ranger station.
An hour-and-a-half after leaving the resort, we reach the Batang Ai National Park ranger station. In the office perched up on the bank, I see by the guest book that I am the first visitor in three days, and the last person here was a forestry officer.
Back across the river, Jalan and I slather on insect repellent - especially on our ankles to ward off leeches, which are common here - and head up some wooden steps on a jungle trek. Along the way, he points out several ancient Iban graves with large clay pots on them to hold sacrifices (or funeral items), and one more modern one with a small tin trunk. Only warriors are buried up here, he explains.
Puffing and sweating in this jungle heat and humidity, I climb to a ridge and walk along, catching occasional glimpses of the valley on both sides. Jalan tells me about the different types of foliage: the pandanus used for thatching roofs and weaving baskets and mats; ferns for making bracelets and armlets; and the large hardwood trees used to build longhouses and longboats.
It is here we encounter the lounging lizard sunning itself at the side of the path. It is a startling sight, the size of a Great Dane, on Pekingese legs, with a long tail and a Jurassic Park monster’s head.
When we get back to the river, James is cleaning five silvery fish he caught while waiting for us. On a small pebble beach nearby, he salts them, impales them on sharpened sticks, and roasts them over a campfire. They make a tasty supplement to our packed lunch. Jalan promises me that “Next time I’ll catch the monitor lizard, and we can eat that as well.” I think I will pass on that.
After lunch, we make a short visit to a functioning longhouse. Rough cement steps lead up to the communal home, but inside it is still basic. The only modern objects are some kerosene lamps, a few plastic containers, nylon fishnets hanging to dry and a John Player cigarettes poster. Hand-woven baskets, mats and fish traps hang on plain, unpainted wooden plank walls and a handful of pig-sticking spears leans against the corner next to a stack of firewood. Deer, not human, skulls decorate the support posts in this longhouse. The smell of wood smoke lingers in the air. Roosters crow, flies buzz, dogs snuffle around.
Jalan urges me to be careful walking over the springy bamboo floor so I don’t plunge through. “You have a strong body,” he says - meaning heavy, and I do weigh far more than these small, wiry warriors who are built more like junior gymnasts than boxers or wrestlers.
Only a half-dozen members of the 22 resident families are around this afternoon, the men in shorts, the women in batik sarongs. In Iban fashion, they gather around to greet me. The oldest man’s back, arms and legs are completely covered with dark tattoos. Among the traditional patterns, he proudly shows me one of a naked lady on his arm, done in Kuala Lumpur with a modern tattooing needle. I note that his fingers are not tattooed, so he is no headhunter. The old women also have dark blue tattoos around their arms.
Feeling like Santa, I hand over the large plastic bag of candy and chocolates that I’d been told to bring as a traditional present. With all this concentrated sugar, I feel like I’m contributing to future dentists of Sarawak, but the oldest woman gives me a thumbs up, so the gift is a hit.
“How big is your longhouse?” asks the older man, who I take to be the chief. I wonder how to explain Hong Kong apartment blocks, before simply replying, “Quite big.”
As I squat on the floor, I am introduced to the most amicable of Iban customs. Whenever welcoming visitors, these hospitable people break open a bottle (or more) of tuak, the local rice wine. It is surprisingly tasty, and the chief keeps refilling my glass. I’m too well-mannered to refuse.
Iban welcomes can go on for days, with extensive drinking, singing and dancing. But tuak apparently packs a powerful punch, and Jalan says our good-byes after we finish the first bottle. With a mixture of relief and reluctance, I board the boat and we head back to our own longhouse. In this wild and wonderful corner of the world, there are more adventures to come.
PHILIPPINES
ATI ATIHAN
Days of Madness
January, 1983
WHEN the doors of the Philippine Airlines’ plane swing open a band of sooty-faced natives in pseudo-Zulu outfits bearing a sign “Black Beauty Boys” advance on us waving spears and bashing bass drums.
Screaming, “I gotta get this sound; we may not hear it again,” Matt, a CBC correspondent, shoves past me down the stairs.
Blunt fingers jabbing at the black piano-key controls of his Sony portable tape recorder, he marches towards the wild, shuffling band, his mike held forward like a bayonet. But the natives are friendly, here to greet junketing politicians from Manila, a jet hour to the northwest.
The occasion is the annual January Ati-Atihan Festival in Kalibo, Atlan district, the biggest and best in a land of festivals. But Matt need not fear missing the sound. For the next two days we can’t escape it.
It drives him over the edge, until he buries his head under a pillow at night screaming, “The drums, the drums,” like a melodramatic colonial officer in a 1930s adventure movie.
We learned of the festival a few days earlier while lounging pool side at the Manila Hilton, sampling exotic fruit juices and baking ourselves to the toasty brown of the Filipinos. We were resting from an exhausting tour of the country, reporting on faith healers, dog eaters and cockfights, seeking out the perfect secluded beach and sampling local delicacies like balut (fertilized duck eggs eaten from the shell, tiny bodies with feathers already formed, reputedly a potent aphrodisiac).
My companion was a London-based radio reporter. His area, the world; his beat, the bizarre. And with his trained eye for the offbeat, he spotted the item in What’s On in Manila.
“Here, look at his,” he said one afternoon, pushing aside the crumbs from an adobo sandwich (chicken and pork steamed in soy sauce, vinegar, garlic, peppercorn and spices). It was a photo story on a little festival on a secluded island, a quiet celebration in the boondocks, far from the blaring jeepneys, the brash, nonstop disco in Manila’s notorious del Pilar bars.
“We can relax for a few days, get some peace and quiet, maybe even get a story,” Matt declared, slurping on his calamansi (lime) juice. “We’ll go tomorrow. Carlos, can I see that menu again?”
By Sunday morning, last day of the festival, Kalibo looks like host city to a giant, noisy chimney sweeps convention. People from barrios (villages and districts) from miles around parade through the sun-blanched streets and open square with faces and bodies soot-blackened in imitation of the Atis, the original short, kinky-haired negrito inhabitants of the area. (Ati-Atihan literally means “make like the Atis.”)
They march alone, in family groups of
10 to 20, or in ragged “tribes” of hundreds from the barrios, with names like D’Black Maharlikan Guards, Tribu Amazona or Sound Tripping. Some wear homemade costumes of woven palm leaves, straw, seashells or coconuts, others dress in camouflage ponchos, T-shirts or hats, mechanics’ overalls and Arab headdress, or military uniform with wooden guns.
A few parade more elaborate costumes: a prisoner with ball and chain made from silver-painted basketball, a giant baby sucking on a quart of local rum with rubber nipple, a 120-pound, green-faced Incredible Hulk, a Jesus Christ with fake blood dripping down his face from a crown of thorns (expensive cowboy boots showing beneath his crimson gown). And each group carries a white-skinned, blue-eyed doll dressed in red cloak -- Santo Nino, the Christchild -- in a happy, if confusing blend of Christian and pagan celebrations.
Blackavised Atis shuffle to the pounding beat of military drums or bamboo tubes or beer bottles banged with sticks and stones. The incessant boomtataboomtataboom is broken only occasionally by a marching brass band, a tinkling xylophone or piercing tin whistle.
It is a smaller, less-organized version of the great, pre-Lenten Trinidad and Rio de Janeiro carnivals -- but also different. Trinidadian and Brazilian festival groups write their own music, songs that will be sung in bars and streets as the popular music for the rest of the year. Filipinos are the most musical people of Asia, providing nightclub and cabaret bands and singers to all of Asia and the Pacific. But I hear little singing at the festival, just the constant drumbeat and the slow shuffling dance.
A bus pushing through the human traffic jam blares Yankee Doodle Dandy on its horn. All morning, the dancing, shouting, eating, drinking groups wind through the streets, meet and mill around the jammed square.
A sooty fire-eater spews black smoke and flames into the sky in front of the cathedral: a motorcyclist splutters by with Santo Nino riding high on his side car; a chubby, straggly haired American girl waves a huge Confederate flag as she circles the square. Young girls from the local hospital bounce by in T-shirts promising, “Marry me and you will get free nursing forever.”
As the sound level increases, so do the beer prices. Yesterday, a small San Miguel was three pesos. Today it is three-fifty. Street kids follow us around as if we were Pied Pipers of Hamelin, waiting for our empties. In the heat, we drain the beer quickly to be rid of the urchins, who squabble in the dust for our castoff bottles.
A radio announcer plucks us from the chaos to do a live interview on the local station. The soundproofing of the ground floor studio off the square almost muffles the hypnotic drumbeats outside.
Before we start, our interviewer sends out for quarts of icy San Miguel beer and a plate of dinuguan (pork innards stewed in fresh pig’s blood and chili). Matt grabs a squiggly, lumpy bit and drops it down his throat. The Vu dials on his Sony quiver at his appreciative lip smacking.
After a short introduction in Tagalog, the announcer switches to English. “We are honored today to have with us two journalists who have come all the way from Canada to cover the Ati-Atihan Festival.”
He turns suddenly somber. “Now gentlemen, what do you think of these foreign peoples, not Canadians of course, but these foreign peoples who come from Europe and America and Australia, who come here wearing just shorts and shabby clothing and taking part in Ati-Atihan?”
“I’ll take this one,” Matt says, dipping his pan de sal (bun) into the sticky, reddish-black sauce. “Yes, well, I think this is a wonderful example of international harmony and brotherhood, people of all nations getting together to enjoy this fine festival.”
“No, no, that’s not what I mean,” the Filipino says, his eyes flicking over the microphones. “But these people who come here to live on the beaches and don’t work or anything.”
“Ah, yes, great show of Filipino hospitality, that,” Matt says, reaching for a fresh quart of San Mig. “Very friendly people here.”
The little interviewer turns desperate, almost pleading. “But these hippies …”
“Oh them,” Matt says, finally catching on and, licking the last red drops from his fingers, launches into his anti-hippie tirade.
Outside, the square has quietened down for the lunch time, the bands have disappeared to restaurants or parks. One barrio group sprawls out under the blazing sun in the cathedral yard, surrounded by red and yellow bits of costume. We can still hear drumbeats from nearby streets.
Our search for a motorcycle taxi to take us back to the hotel for a siesta is interrupted by a high-pitched voice. “Yoo-hoo, boys, come over here.” It is the young civil servant we met in Manila airport, now changed from his crisp, formal barong shirt and pressed trousers.
Batting mascara-caked eyes and pursing rosebud red lips he coos, “Come and join me for lunch at my friend’s house. He is a newspaper publisher who would like to meet you.” And fluttering a long silk scarf behind him, he leads us down the street.
The house is a cool, high-ceilinged sanctuary from the burning street, a typical Filipino household with women cooking in the kitchen, men drinking rum and beer in the living room, and children underfoot everywhere. One of the daughters, a typical long-haired Filipino beauty in her 20s, sits with the men, privileged because with her American university degree she has a good government job.
She explains to Matt’s ever-ready Sony the origins of the festival. One complex legend involves the arrival of Bornean chieftans here hundreds of years ago. They bought land from the Atis and during a feast to celebrate the transaction, smeared themselves with soot to look like the natives.
A beaming matriarch comes to the door to announce that lunch is served, then swats children away from the groaning table so the guests can have first go at the fried chicken, salad, huge chili prawns, lumpia (spring rolls stuffed with shrimp, pork, chicken and tender heart of young coconut), tropical fruit and lechon, fat, suckling pig roasted deep honey-brown with a crispy skin.
Dipping a slab of pork into the liver sauce, Matt juggles with his microphone and pursues his investigation into the festival’s origins. Where do the Christian elements, the Santo Ninos, come from?
“Spanish missionaries introduced the Holy Child Jesus and his feast day to the negritos many years ago,” the young woman explains, delicately nibbling at a peppery prawn. Each year the Atis came down from hills to celebrate the Christian festival in their own pagan way, sacrificing pigs and singing and dancing in the streets.
The idea became popular with the Filipinos, who started covering their faces with soot to resemble the Atis. While once Ati-Atihan was celebrated during harvest, now the week’s festivities culminate on the second Sunday after Three Kings, the Spanish day of the Feast of the Holy Child Jesus.
While Matt is interviewing, and eating, I strike up a conversation with one of the matrons. She promotes one of her nieces as a good prospect for marriage.
“She is almost a virgin,” she boasts.
After seconds on the buko pie, made from young coconut, we plunge once more into the maelstrom of color and noise in the streets. The festival has reached a fever pitch, the streets choked with jiggling, bouncing, writhing bodies, like ants in an overturned hill.
Matt, in his CBC correspondents’ uniform of brief white shorts, belly bulging through blue tank top, cowboy-style neck scarf, European tinted glasses, monitoring earphones, large microphone and tape recorder dangling from his shoulder, plunges into the milling mass.
Always working, he attempts to interview a craggy old man in net stockings, brief dress and sun umbrella. “Now my dear, how are you enjoying the festival so far?” But the background noise is too much, the needles on his Vu meter bounce madly to the drum beats.
Matt screams in my ear, “This is even louder than the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise where I …” but the rest is lost in the noise from the White Castle Whiskey float.
By dusk on this, the last day of the festival, revelers are marshaled into some chaotic order for the final parade. For hours frenzied devotees shuffle past
, Santo Ninos carried on floats lit with portable generators or gently cradled in the thin arms of poor farmers. A noisy group marches by sponsored by Hilda’s Shoes, another with a hand lettered cardboard sign “Hey, Joe.” We’ve heard the WWll comic book cry for the past days as marchers called us to join their groups.
Three hours later, the last float passes, the revelers slowly head out of town, the din gradually dies. We squeeze into a tricycle taxi to return to the hotel. A few rowdy Atis drinking rum under a street light give a last few beats on their bass drums.
And blessed silence falls on Kalibo, Atlan, Philippines.
THE VISAYAS
Winging It
March 1991
“HEY JOE” yell the schoolboys, squealing with delight at the unexpected sight of foreigners riding a modified jeep through their Philippine village. I feel like an extra in a WWII movie.
We are touring Legaspi in southern Luzon Island, an area seldom visited by mainstream tourists despite its scenic and historic attractions. The Philippines, a tropical archipelago of more than 7,000 islands, lacks adequate roads or ferry services. Bus and rail travel are slow, sea travel infrequent and inconvenient, and most flights originate from the Manila hub, forcing travelers between rural cities to return to the capital.
So moving around the country has always been arduous. Then the Blue Horizons tour company flew into the picture with its air safari, a week-long jaunt by private aircraft that opens the southern Philippines to adventurous travelers willing to tolerate some provincial discomforts. So I am island-hopping Luzon and the Visayas islands in an airborne limousine with a congenial band of traveling companions, including a Swiss anthropologist/journalist, roving British lady diplomat, Filipino tour operator and a Canadian expatriate woman on holidays from Hong Kong.
The Peace Correspondent Page 19