Examinations and Celebrations

A couple of days ensued after Selingan and before Pom Pom Island in which I had to work. Yes, work. Well, somebody's got to do it. I packed Aurelia off up the Mountain and she came back down reporting that it was easy. She lives by the Alps though, so read that as you will...

With the beginning of school after the break, Year 6 had more than usual to be sad about: with only two weeks left until the national exams, they are spending every night camping at school, the better to study and learn until as late as humanly possible. Last classes are at 10pm; they start again at 7am. At one school, a teacher tells me she was up until midnight dealing with welfare issues; the kids were up until 2. The headmistress is considering sending them all home again if they don't stop seeing it as a summer camp, but the parents complain that they don't study when they're at home. Teachers are unhappy because it means a lot more work for them, and the kids - one third of whom will fail the exams entirely, on average - are stressed and anxious; their midnight antics are a side product of that. It seems to me to be one of them lose-lose-lose situations, but you know, that's just me. 

The week after the week after the break (because between now and about the second week of October, everything will be counted from then; after that, time will be marked in relation to the end-of-year holidays...) we had a much more fun event at my biggest school (and the most Muslim school): a big party, combining Hari Raya and Hari Merdeka (Independence Day). 

The children were all allowed to attend in their holiday finery, and when I arrived, they were all standing to attention in the straightest lines I have ever seen children make, listening to the teachers exhort them to do their best to make their country proud.

We sang the national song, the state song, the school song, and finally the Hari Merdeka song, and then it was time for the choir competition. I did as I was told and sat in the front row with a flag.

The kids had been put into groups spanning three year groups (1-3 or 4-6) and given a teacher as a choirmaster, then spent two days rehearsing a version of the Merdeka song. Some did better than others... :) But all waved flags and grinned in their finery!

After the choir competition, the headmaster and local VIPs cut the cake...

...which is almost as obligatory as the food at these events.

The kids got their own food in their classrooms - each child had brought one thing to share from home, as well as their own plate, spoon and cup. A few had brought an old plastic container or bowl, and some had brought nothing at all - the teachers produced spares for them.

Through all the speeches and flag-waving and cake-cutting (and the cake was only for the teachers!), I never once saw a child seriously misbehave - they were little stars, singing and smiling, even when they were hot and tired.

Pom Pom Island

Pom Pom Island is on the east coast of Sabah. It's not quite in the famed Sipadan set of islands, but for second-best, it's not bad... We unfortunately had to fly, as with work I couldn't make the 8-hour drive to Tawau in time for the transfer to the island. It felt like a rather crazy dog's leg, driving west to Kota Kinabalu, then flying east over the mountain range I live in, to Tawau, but it takes far less time. It's a 40-minute boat ride from Semporna to get to the island, through water villages and past other islands.

We also saw some kids collecting shrimps from a homemade trap, in amongst the wooden houses of the water village next to the jetty.

It's a bit bizarre, the lovely, brand-new, hardwood jetty, next to some of the poorest houses I've seen in Sabah.

It gets more bizarre, though, when you arrive at the island, which is absolute paradise.

On the day we arrived, there was an earthquake in the Philippines, which meant I did my diving certificate in water that the instructor described as "murky, horrible."

Shall I show you a picture?

Ok, I'll admit that it did get a little bit murkier the following day. I did the second half of my certificate in surging sea. I had to kneel on an underwater concrete platform for some of the exercises; my knees afterwards looked like a schoolgirl's, and not in a cute way. My instructor promised sharks when she saw all the blood, but it wasn't to be... Concentrating on the instructions was really tough when I was being dragged five metres and dumped on the sea floor inches away from spiny anemones half a metre wide. Okay, maybe not half a metre, but close. They were big, alright? 

I eventually got to dive below the swell, and it was amazing, with crocodile fish, lots of Nemo fish (if anyone still calls them clownfish, I have yet to meet those people... even my instructor called them Nemos) and several turtles. One was so enormous, I didn't see it at first, in that way that the human brain has of mentally filing a very large animal as a very large piece of sea floor.

When we left on Sunday morning, it was still unfortunately feeling the effects of the earthquake and was really very gloomy below the jetty as we walked to the boat. Ah well. I guess I'll have to go again sometime to see it when it's really good.

Turtles... again...

You know how turtles are one of only three animals with a crystal lodged in their brains so they always know east from west? And how they're so smart they return to the beach they were born on thirty years later, despite only having seen it for a few moonlit minutes in the dash for the sea? And how the clever little babies just know to head for the moon when they hatch because it'll lead them to the ocean? Don't believe all the hype.

We arrived on Selingan Island mid-morning, and after the usual talk from the tour guide, decided to head for the beach. Shortly thereafter, squeals of delight were heard from atop the dune, where we, too, soon saw tiny blue heads poking up out of sand, as an army of baby turtles came charging towards the sea. Even the existence of an arrogant Aussie man who persisted in holding his camera 5cm from their noses and walking backwards to get his shot, did little to lessen the sheer delight I felt in seeing this for the first time (seeing them released from a hatchery is simply not the same.) 

Soon the army thinned and then stopped entirely as the last, awkward, little tanks reached the water and transformed into graceful sea creatures, raising their heads now and then to get their bearings. We all knew that we might have increased the survival rate by as much as ten-fold simply by being around, keeping predators at a distance - one case in which I believe (and I'm sure there are many who disagree) human intervention is okay - in a way, it's just making up for the negative intervention: plastic bags in the ocean, polluted waters, brightly-lit island resorts... (and on, and on, and on...)

But the true test hadn't yet arrived. I walked to the back edge of the beach to see if I could spot the now empty nest. From the dune forest I heard the sudden grunt and rustle of a monitor lizard, and as my eyes adjusted to the relative gloom, I realised that half the babies were still stuck in the forest, blindly flapping away from the short, and being picked off by a huge monitor lizard and his small minions... What to do? Baby turtles are endangered, monitor lizards are not. A fellow visitor said she'd been told, "If you have to touch them to save them, do it." Basically you can leave them to die in the forest, or you can at least give them a fighting chance in the sea. So in we charged, hauling out soft little bodies from the leaf debris and entangled roots, and passing them out like a bucket chain to the sand. I told the lizard to back off, and he did, though I admit it may have been the wild eyes and waving arms rather than any true sense of conscience. An Italian angrily told me to let nature take its course, but I explained they were dying in the forest, and another guest explained that we were carrying out the instructions of the rangers, of course a much more knowledgeable source than a holidaymaker, and he quietened down. He was wearing Speedos, anyway, and it's hard to take a middle-aged man in Speedos seriously.

When we'd helped all the babies we could find, and the forest floor was free of all rustlings but the ones of a pissed-off monitor lizard, and we were back on the beach, the guilt kicked in. Apart from ill-fated rescues of baby birds as a kid, this was the first time I've ever intentionally interfered in nature and touched a wild animal. Although I hate cruelty, I'm not all that sentimental about animals, and recognise the fact that all animals need to eat, even the nasty ugly ones with lots of teeth... If turtles weren't so endangered and monitor lizards so not, I wouldn't have done what I did. 

A week later, I got to talk to a marine biologist, though, and she told me I'd done absolutely the right thing.

So there.

Lahad Datu to Sepilok

From Lahad Datu we curved up towards the north-west, mainly through oil palm plantations again, but also, with a pang of adopted patriotic pride, over the lovely Kinabatangan River.

Shortly after, we took a right turn to go and have a look at the Gomantong Caves. We were a little late, though, and just as we stepped onto the trail from the carpark to the caves, there was a rush of sound as far above us the 250,000 fruit and wrinkle-lipped bats left for the night, swirling into a single helix as they tried to avoid being ambushed by bat hawks and peregrine falcons. Too late for the caves, then, we watched from ground level. The flight formation was just dispersing when a troop of maroon langurs arrived above our heads; they snacked and talked and occasionally glanced down at us, clearly not disturbed in the slightest.

In Sepilok, we, of course, went to the Orangutan Sanctuary, but the animals were smarter than we were, and stayed away, except for one large male. Just as he sat down on the platform, the trees began to shake and wind poured into the forest, bringing just behind it the rain. We tried to wait it out but eventually had to make a run for the main building - not quite fast enough, though.

All part of the rainforest experience!

The following day, we were off on a boat trip across the Sulu Sea to visit the Turtle Sanctuary again, and that would turn out to be a much more successful day...

Things I learned in Tabin

1. Don't try to win in the "Nings Being Last in a Dark Jungle" game against a Japanese woman with a child. You will lose, and then you will be not just last, but alone in the dark jungle, as they disappear round a big tree with the torch.

2. Ants are not our friends. They may seem tiny and industrious and friendly, but when your guide looks at your feet, widens his eyes, and shouts, "RUN!", run.

3. "The Song of the Gibbon" isn't in any way euphemistic or metaphorical or exaggerated - gibbons really do sing to each other at dawn. Just not anywhere near a camera.

4. Baby pygmy elephants are small and cute. Mummy pygmy elephants are not, especially when they are inside the lodge and decimating an area of wild grasses a mere 30m from your cabin.

5. Male Orang Utans are hairy everywhere but their armpits.

Primarily Within the Rainforest

So, do you want the statistics? Sure you do! (If you really, really don't, just skip to the next paragraph...) The Bornean rainforest is 130 million years old, the oldest in the world. It contains 15,000 species of flowering plants, 3,000 species of trees. 361 brand-new, never-before-recorded species of animals and plants were identified just between 1994 and 2004, and scientists believe there are still many thousands more. It's home to the world's largest flower, orchid, moth, python, and carnivorous plant. More gliding animals live here than anywhere else on earth - flying squirrels, lizards, foxes, colugos, frogs, and (eeeeeeeeh!!) snakes. This rainforest contains more species of plants than the the entire continent of Africa. More than half of the dipterocarp trees (them's the typical tropical rainforest trees) are endemic to Borneo, and since I have moved here, I've used the word endemic more times than in my entire previous existence... There are 420 species of birds. One-fifth of the mammals on the island aren't found anywhere else in the world. Bio-diversity? This is it, right here. Except it's under attack. Sixty years ago, Borneo was around 95% forested. It's less than 45% now, and a large proportion of the deforestation has been in Sabah. In the 1980s and 90s, logging was the most intensive ever seen in the world - per hectare, around 23 cubic metres of wood is harvested. In Borneo, it was up to 240 cubic metres. Another reason for the deforestation, and I think I hear you crying in unison out there, PALM OIL! Fancy that. Clearing for plantations accelerated in the 1990s, and by 2004 900,000 hectares of previously forested Sabahan land was under intensive, monocultural cultivation. That's one-eighth of all available Sabahan land, dedicated to a single crop, largely owned by West Malaysian and non-Sabahan companies. Where do forests stand against this? Well, approximately 16% of forests in Sabah are under some form of protection. 84% of forests are therefore legally allowed to be exploited and degraded with no controls, and there's currently no obligation to replant any of the degraded land. The 16% that is protected is still under threat from illegal logging. 

Okay! Well done if you actually read all that! If you did, you now understand a little of what I felt on entering Tabin Wildlife Reserve, where a buffer zone of secondary forest surrounds a core area of, breathe deeply, virgin primary rainforest.

Passing the border between secondary and primary rainforest - for the first time in my life - the temperature drops dramatically. The trees are enormous - something I had already glimpsed from the lone trees left standing in plantations, towering above the palms - and there are 50m lianas trailing from 100m trees. Did I mention it's also one of the tallest rainforests in the world?

I have mixed feelings about this visit. It's sad that we have to be driven to look at rainforest in Borneo - it brings to mind the kids' poem by Alan Brownjohn about going to see the last rabbit in the world. All this way, even in wild Borneo, just to see a patch of undisturbed forest...

But there's also hope: all along the road into the core reserve, there are little blue ribbons tied to sticks in the ground. These mark the planting of seedling trees, about every 3 metres, and we're told that, given a hundred years, the whole area will be almost back to the way it was before it was so rudely demolished by humans.

We Are Going To See The Rabbit

We are going to see the rabbit,

We are going to see the rabbit.

Which rabbit? ask the children.

The only rabbit,

The only rabbit in England,

Sitting behind a barbed-wire fence

Under the flood lights, neon lights,

Sodium lights,

Nibbling grass

On the only patch of grass

In England, in England

(Except the grass by the hoardings

Which doesn’t count).

We are going to see the rabbit

And we must be there on time.

First we shall go by escalator,

Then we shall go by underground,

And then we shall go by motorway,

And then by helicopterway,

And the last ten yards we shall have to go

On foot.

And now we are going

All the way to see the rabbit,

We are nearly there,

We are longing to see it,

And so is the crowd

Which is here in thousands

With mounted policemen

And big loudspeakers

And bands and banners,

And everyone has come a long way.

But soon we shall see it

Sitting and nibbling

The blades of grass

On the only patch of grass

In – but something has gone wrong!

Why is everyone so angry,

Why is everyone jostling

And slanging and complaining?

The rabbit has gone,

Yes, the rabbit has gone,

He has actually burrowed down into the earth

And made himself a warren, under the earth,

Despite all these people.

And what shall we do?

What can we do?

It is all a pity, you must be disappointed,

Go home and do something else for today,

Go home again, go home for today.

For you cannot hear the rabbit, under the earth

Remarking rather sadly to himself, by himself,

As he rests in his warren, under the earth:

“It won’t be long, they are bound to come,

They are bound to come and find me, even here.”

Alan Brownjohn

Crossing the jungle

We left at 9am, because I was completely and utterly lazy and somehow managed to waste two hours on such things as an English breakfast (i.e. Cornflakes by Kelloggs), losing my precious Capetonian sandal to an enthusiastic dog, and checking Facebook. Yes, apparently that's the kind of person I am. 

Anyway. We left Nabawan on a lovely, new, tarred road, and travelled at pretty high speed for half an hour, until, very suddenly, we dropped off the edge of the tar onto graded gravel. Some mercenary villagers had put up a toilet and were charging travellers 30c a time. We paused to stretch and get our bearings before moving on.

The Nabawan-Tawau Road. What to say, lah? Most maps you see of Sabah - particularly the ones provided by car rental companies, in whose car you are driving - show only one main road making a sharp curve from the south-west, through Ranau and the northern interior, and down the east coast. The central and southern interior are shown as a big empty space, sometimes occupied by a suitably large grinning orangutan. And this is, in fact, mostly the case. On either end of the road there are cities and industry and plantations. In the middle, there are a few logging companies, a couple of tiny houses, and the Maliau Basin, the most remote primary rainforest in Sabah. That said, the road is excellent, recently graded and levelled, with only a few spots where I needed to slow down to under 30km/hr. Compared to the road out to Malinsau, this is a city highway! 

We drove through beautiful secondary forest for nearly three hours, stopping briefly at an awesome restaurant halfway along for sustenance. The only other patron was a Malaysian lumberjack sitting with a place of mi goreng. The Chinese owner - in itself unusual, as most Chinese Sabahans are urbanites - spoke great English. He'd built a wide verandah hung with plants, and decorated his land with recycled truck tyres, plastic cups, and corrugate iron scraps. 

We couldn't stay too long, though, as we still had another hour on the dirt road, and a further 4 hours from there to our hotel.

It wasn't long after the cafe that the first oil palm plantations began to appear, and by the time we hit the tar it was road-to-horizon palm trees.

We were hoping to find a shortcut along another dirt road which would cut out a large loop through the city of Tawau, but despite stopping to ask some very amused villagers for directions, we missed the turn-off. We drove through Tawau and Kunak, on some very dull, tarred, and well-lit roads, and arrived in Lahad Datu in time for dinner.

We'd been driving for nine hours.

The End of Fasting

 In retrospect, I probably could have planned it all a little better, but honestly, when I asked around, everyone said it was very unlikely that Hari Raya, the end of the fasting month, would be celebrated before Monday. So I didn't bother to factor the celebrations into our trip and instead booked a bed in K.K. for Saturday night. And yes, in retrospect this might be seen as tempting fate. So I guess it shouldn't have come as a surprise when the young guy in the stall at the night market mentioned that he was heading home as soon as he could shut up his stall, to prepare for the two days of feasting that would start in the morning. The problem was that we were meant to be driving south east in the morning, a 3-hour journey to a village called Nabawan. Instead, I found myself having to accept two invitations in Ranau, resulting in a 2.5-hour detour home, then a 3-hour drive south to Nabawan.

There's a lovely custom in Malaysia called the "open house." These happen around religious festivals - Christmas, Lunar New Year, and, of course, Hari Raya, the king of them all, the Muslim celebration of the end of Ramadhan. People literally open their houses on a set day, put out loads of food and a stack of chairs, and then simply welcome every single person from their extended family, their village, their kids' school, and every other possible source of vague acquaintances. Sometimes they even get an orang putih or two. Because Hari Raya isn't set until the new moon is sighted, people will invite you to their open house on either the first or second day of feasting, or perhaps a later day during the official week of holiday. This year, the moon was sighted on Saturday, so the invitation I'd received from my friend, which I'd expected to be for Monday, when I couldn't possibly attend, suddenly became Sunday, when I could. So I dutifully responded to Suryati's invitation, and when another arrived from one of my teachers, I said yes to that too. 

And thus it was that on Sunday morning, after a restless night of celebratory fireworks, Aurelia's first journey in Sabah was up into the mountain range to little Ranau. Dropping in at home for a short time, we met Lungkiam and Othman leaving for their niece's open house, so we joined them for that. After an acceptable amount of time and food, we said our goodbyes and drove onwards to Suryati's house to coo over her gorgeous newborn baby girl and laugh with teachers from my village school about finding a Malay husband. More food. More dirty jokes. Ah, a day in the life... Suryati's beautiful children and husband were dressed in brand new Hari Raya clothes in coordinating colours and I had to ask them to pose for a photograph before I left. This unfortunately meant that I had to give baby Nur Qisya back...

Then we travelled out to Lohan Village where one of my headmasters was holding court at his enormous house. More food. Sweets. Coffee.

We joined one of my teachers here who was visiting all her colleagues on one long day, together with two other teachers from the same school, and their families. All Christians, but still made so welcome by their Muslim hosts.

From the headmaster, we went to the deputy head's house, a beautiful blue wooden house on stilts. As we walked up, I saw her husband preparing to greet us, and, realising from the clothing and beard that he was a strict Muslim, had to hurriedly whisper to Aurelia, "Don't offer your hand until he offers his!" He didn't, and she didn't, and it was all fine. He welcomed us into his home with a gracious dip of his head. We ate some more food, a lovely curry this time.

And then, of course, because I'd eaten at the headmaster and the deputy head's homes, I couldn't leave before also visiting the home of the head of the afternoon school, so off we went down the road to one last house.

And it really did have to be one last house, as it was by now an hour and a half after my deadline for leaving Ranau. Well-fed-and-watered, we finally set off on the road south, arriving at the house of a very patient colleague well after dark. Her village - little Nabawan - is the last stop before Tawau, a city on the east coast. Between the two lie nearly 300 kilometres of road, most of it untarred and straight through rainforest.