Olympic Countdown

The Olympic campaign is in full swing, it seems. Last week I was summoned to a sports day at the Ranau Sports Ground by the British Council - the very amiable head of B.C. Malaysia was due to be in attendance, and "would very much like to meet any mentors living in the area." I ignored the implication that them in Kuala Lumpur head office had no idea who was living in Ranau and apparently had no records of our names that they could check, and dutifully cleared my diary. On arrival I was shown to the teachers' section, my guide explaining that "Gavin's up in the VIP area, but I'm sure he'll pop out to see you." Well. I'm not used to not being the VIP in the area, but I was quite pleased to be able to quietly sit with the teachers from one of the schools taking part. Soon the VIPs came out to take their seats - typically, these were comfortable cane chairs with cushions, arranged in a line on a tiled area, before a table carrying water and snacks, in contrast to the concrete steps the rest of us were making do on. Not that I'm in any way jealous, mind you. By this stage the band had started up, and the five selected schools were making their way onto the field, each one representing a continent.

Sorry, I should have said "making their way onto the best sports field in the world." Look at that view! 

The VIPs set off a hundred balloons, taking with them a sign to celebrate the occasion - as it disappeared into the sky, I wondered about the villagers who would wake up the next day to find this incomprehensible piece of fabric tangled up in their rambutan trees.

The obligatory run with the torch came next, with students from each school relaying the homemade torch to each other, then continuing on together - surprisingly touching!

Finally came the obligatory dancing girls - which I have no objection to at all. Every time I watch this particular dance - the Bamboo Pole Dance, apparently, with no sense of irony - it amazes me that nobody loses a leg. The four girls sitting on the ground slam together bamboo poles in time to a drumbeat. Two girls then skip easily through the poles, lifting narrow ankles just clear of the sticks-of-death, smiling prettily all the while.

I'm always a little relieved when the end comes and the poles are lifted up for applause from the audience.

And then the VIPs all disappeared inside for makan-makan - the popular Malaysian pastime of eating. We were spotted by a BC official who recognised us from a previous mentor gathering, and ushered into the VIP area, where we chatted to our big boss, ate banana rice from leaves, and vaguely watched the sports events from behind a glass window. This seems to be the usual state of affairs; officials attend an opening, then leave the actual event to the participants and a scattering of spectators. The officials today were lovely and friendly to us - the Minister of Education for Sabah thanked Fiona and I for all our hard work, the MP for the district wanted to hear what we were up to - but nobody paid the slightest bit of attention to the day's main stars - the children out on the field, practising their newly-attained skills in javelin throwing and 100m sprints.

Adventuring again...

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!