So I'm still becalmed at the homestay in town, but, oh miracle, my 4x4 was finally ready on Friday and I'll be leaving this afternoon (Sunday) for the sticks.
Meanwhile, the homestay is a lovely, welcoming place, owned by a fascinating couple. They're very well-known in the area and every time I tell someone I'm staying with Dr Othman, they lower their eyelids and click approvingly. Dr Othman was an MP for a time, and is still a bit of a father figure for many Sabah politicians. Also, being fairly wealthy, they're the informal lending facility for the area. His wife, Lungkiam (also a Phd) was born into a Dusun Christian family but she converted to Islam when she married. The house is enormous and welcoming and populated by a number of different species - dogs here, unusually, are treated like members of the family; the field out back is controlled by several wild horses and foals, all descended from a rescue horse; the lounge area, which is wall-less and built out of wood, stretches over a river filled with koi. There's even a turtle in the kitchen - but I'm on the case and am hoping to persuade them to release it into the river. A very fat cat moans piteously at sundown, but nobody's ever fooled into thinking he's actually hungry.
But the biggest reason for their most recent fame is a rather sad reason. In the early 1940s, Singapore fell to the Japanese. It happened very quickly - my colleague's father was one of the British army doctors caught up in the invasion. Prisoner-of-war conditions were fairly bad, but they became far worse for some of the men, who were transferred to Borneo in 1942-3. At a camp in Sandakan - around 60 kilometres east of Ranau - they were forced to build a military airfield using nothing but their hands. Then in 1945, they were forcibly marched west to Ranau. Because it was a massive operation - 2700 prisoners were at Sandakan - paths were cut through dense jungle to avoid the Allied planes. The prisoners had been kept in horrendous conditions for 2 or 3 years and they were badly malnourished and diseased; the route of the march is considered very difficult even today, with our modern equipment and technology. The POWs usually had to forage for their food - and sometimes they were helped by local villagers, when the Japanese weren't looking. Of 2700 men, just six survived the marches to Ranau - all Australian - all escapees who were hidden by villagers from the Japanese army, and only three of those survived to testify at war crimes trials the following year. The others - British and Australian - starved to death, died of disease, or were shot just after the Japanese surrender in August 1945. It's a very moving and sad story, and many of the descendants of the marchers come to trek the route every year. And most of them end up sitting on the same chair I'm sitting in as I write this. The exact route of the trek was lost for many years in the jungle, but was recently uncovered by a couple of very determined researchers, who found the site of the Last Camp - on my hosts' land. The site has been confirmed by a number of digs, which turned up cast-off buttons, old tins of fish, belt buckles, Australian army badges, and even an enamel mug. Dr Othman has pledged to keep the land undeveloped, apart from a simple memorial, and regularly leads teams of scientists, historians and researchers to it to investigate further.
On the tables one afternoon, he spreads out some of his finds to document them before they're turned over to the University of Malaysia, the hodge-podge remnants of the lives of the few who survived until Ranau.
But this sad story doesn't colour the homestay, which is a few kilometres from the camp site. Here the river plays backing track to an orchestra of birds, geckos and squirrels, and fruit drips from the trees - mangos and pawpaws, limes, pineapples and rambutan. The noise is incessant - the minute the sun drops below the horizon, the call of the mosque is almost overpowered by the call of the crickets and frogs and geckos.
Ramadan continues, and is now coming to the end of the second week. On Friday, we were invited to one of Fiona's schools, in a small village near Ranau, for the breaking of the fast. We arrived a little late and dusk was approaching fast when we walked into the school's courtyard. Two long tables had been set up, and one of these was full of men, dressed in traditional sarongs mostly and wearing the songkok, a traditional hat. A few children raced each other round the other table, but there were no women in sight! A little nervous, we joined the head of the table and each promptly fell into deep conversation with our neighbours. They were so friendly and so welcoming, and so interested in our programme, that neither of us realised when the radio was turned up for the sundown prayers! We stopped for a local dignitary to chant his own short prayer to which all the men solemnly replied, something similar to the way Christians would murmur "Amen" during a rousing sermon. Then we all took a date from the plates on the table, and broke the day's fast with it. Or at least, the men and children did - of course Fiona and I had been snacking all day long :) After this initial fast-breaking, the men all disappeared for prayers, and while they were out, the women appeared and invited us to help ourselves to platefuls of food. The teachers had prepared the food in a sort of bring-and-share buffet, and although I was limited as a vegetarian, I wasn't complaining - I heaped piles of satay and steamed rice and curried wild greens onto my plate, and by the time my neighbours returned for their own dinner, I was digging in happily.
Unhappily for the Boss, who is a little man in a little job out for all he can get, my neighbour turned out to be his Boss, the District Education Officer, and we got along so well, we've been invited to break the fast next Friday at the District Office in Ranau - where I shall be sure to display my close friendship with the Big Boss...
Other than hobnobbing with the locals (the British Council calls it "relationship-building" and it's actually part of my job! It's a hard life...), we've been viewing a few of the local sights too. Today we went out for a "fish massage" which is a famous attraction in these here parts. You know the trendy salons in the UK that let you stick your feet in a tank for half an hour while little fish nibble all the dead skin off your toes? A pleasantly tingly pedicure? This wasn't like that.
We bought our tickets at a little booth and then walked down to another little booth by the river, where a smiley lady checked them and stamped them. We turned to walk over to where lots of chairs were laid out in rows and where we were obviously meant to sit and wait, but we were the only ones there, and we'd only taken a couple of steps before our numbers were called out over the tannoy - a little unnecessarily, as we were still within whispering distance, but there you go.
When we got down to the river, we realised that this is not your standard London establishment. For one thing, a lot of the fish are very big fish.
Basically - for that is the word for this fish massage, basically, which is why we were intrigued in the first place - a lot of river fish have been trained with the use of fish pellets to gather at a particular bend; you wade in ankle-deep on the sand and the fish swarm expectantly. You have a few fish pellets to give them, which they go crazy over, but in between being fed, they nibble on your feet.
It's pretty tingly. But then the big fish get involved, and this is not tingly. Not tingly at all. The big fish are very big, and their bites hurt. I jumped out a couple of times, but Fiona was braver - until she came out of the water and we saw her ankles.
I think we may have completely put off the Korean ajummas who arrived just as we were taking photos of the damage!
So. When you come to visit, and I suggest "a lovely fish massage", and you happily accept, imagining an afternoon of relaxed pampering at a spa, I shall know who's read this blog to the end...
;)
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