Flying into Borneo is like landing in the open pages of a Boy's Own adventure story, especially if you can mentally overlook the beach resorts and apartments blocks that scatter the Kota Kinabalu coastline and focus instead on a couple of miles inland: thick, pristine rainforest, rising in a lush carpet to form the slopes of the mighty Kinabalu mountain, Sabah's roof, in the foothills of which lies the town which will be my home for the next 26 months.
It's taken a 2.5 hour flight to get here from the Malaysian peninsula. Borneo is an island, the third biggest in the world, three times the size of Britain, shared between three countries: Indonesia, the Sultanate of Brunei, and Malaysia. There are two Malaysian states, Sabah and Sarawak, and both are heavily protected by the government, requiring separate visas and customs clearances from the peninsula, even for Malaysian citizens. Even with this protection, though, Borneo is being deforested faster than any other forest in the world, although I'm told this is mostly due to the mass settlement in the southern, Indonesian section, where poor Indonesians, tired of of the crowded, urban lifestyles of Java and Sumatra, are being encouraged by governmental migration programmes. The rainforest is 130 million years old, the oldest in the world (the Amazon is a baby, at 60 million years!) and is home to an incredible amount of flora and fauna, and despite the mass immigration, it's still one of the wildest places on earth, with much of the interior only accessible by boat.
My hotel, which has porters who send me off to my room, arriving shortly afterwards bearing all my luggage on one of those four-postered trolleys I've only ever seen in American movies, has been chosen and paid for by the British Council for a one-week induction, and it makes me feel like an imposter every time I walk in in my shabby jeans. The pool deck overlooks a section of the waterfront and I can sit and watch beautiful houseboats navigate a wide stretch of the South China Sea between islands. On an opposite beach, the house boats are mirrored in more stationary homes, built on stilts over the blue water, laundry hanging from windows, tin roofs, haphazard walkways connecting each home to the next. I imagine there must be a pretty strictly enforced sense of community, as, if you pissed off a neighbour and he decided to cut off your access to his section of walkway, you'd be swimming to work every day. There's not even any evidence of boats...
I am keen to learn at least some Bahasa Malay while I'm here and was relieved to find out that they use the Latin alphabet. All the street signs are in both Malay and Chinese; there's a large ethnically Chinese community here too, and although Chinese would probably be a more globally useful language, those tiny, complex characters set my knees to wobbling. So Malay it is. And even better - from reading street signs, I've noticed they Malayacise a lot of words, like insurans and imigrasi. There are even a few other familiar words - we passed the Gereja Katolik on the way to the hotel - gereja, church, is igreja in Portuguese!
My hotel, which has porters who send me off to my room, arriving shortly afterwards bearing all my luggage on one of those four-postered trolleys I've only ever seen in American movies, has been chosen and paid for by the British Council for a one-week induction, and it makes me feel like an imposter every time I walk in in my shabby jeans. The pool deck overlooks a section of the waterfront and I can sit and watch beautiful houseboats navigate a wide stretch of the South China Sea between islands. On an opposite beach, the house boats are mirrored in more stationary homes, built on stilts over the blue water, laundry hanging from windows, tin roofs, haphazard walkways connecting each home to the next. I imagine there must be a pretty strictly enforced sense of community, as, if you pissed off a neighbour and he decided to cut off your access to his section of walkway, you'd be swimming to work every day. There's not even any evidence of boats...
I am keen to learn at least some Bahasa Malay while I'm here and was relieved to find out that they use the Latin alphabet. All the street signs are in both Malay and Chinese; there's a large ethnically Chinese community here too, and although Chinese would probably be a more globally useful language, those tiny, complex characters set my knees to wobbling. So Malay it is. And even better - from reading street signs, I've noticed they Malayacise a lot of words, like insurans and imigrasi. There are even a few other familiar words - we passed the Gereja Katolik on the way to the hotel - gereja, church, is igreja in Portuguese!
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