LORE OF THE JUNGLE
IMONG stopped along the trail. Delicately, he held a frond of unidentified creeper between his index finger and thumb and gave it a short, sharp tug. A strange sound followed, a fizzing like the bubbles of a freshly poured glass of champagne. The sound continued for a few seconds and then gradually faded. 'What do you think makes that noise?' he asked, tantalisingly, knowing that none of us would know.
'Water,' one of us suggested. After all we were in the rainforest, even if it wasn't actually raining.
'No,' he replied. 'The noise is made by ants. They climb up the inside of the hollow rattan stem and, if you shake it, you can hear them falling down.' The thought of thousands of ants tumbling thorax over abdomen down a kind of vegetable lift shaft provoked a rather macabre, comic fascination in us. We all had to have a go. As we walked on we grabbed at passing fronds and gave them a tug. More often than not, nothing happened. 'That's because you tugged a different type of rattan,' said Imong. 'Not hollow, no ants there.' Imong is from the Iban, the largest of 27 tribes living in Sarawak which, along with Sabah, is one of the two Malaysian states on the island of Borneo. For countless generations before him, jungle knowledge has meant life or death - knowing what foods are safe to eat, how to extract poison for blowpipe darts, and which leaves can be made into frying pans or twisted into rope. For Imong's small tour groups, all this provides nourishment of a different kind - an endless supply of curious and startling information.
Imong stops many times along the trail to make observations. He points out a tree with bark that burns even when wet and another known as the joss-stick tree, whose incense was traded for porcelain with Chinese traders who visited the coastline three centuries ago. He plucks a particularly unspectacular leaf from another bush and announces that it is widely used to increase male potency.
Perhaps this leaf is favoured by the male proboscis monkey which boasts a permanent erection, even while leaping around the slender branches of the forest canopy, no doubt hoping to encounter a female from his sizeable harem. Then there's the python fat vine which drips a seemingly endless, potable flow of water when cut. Not that there's a shortage of water. Rainforest is aptly named; it rains an awful lot here, which means Sarawak is latticed with rivers curling their way to the sea. Until recently, all transport was waterborne.
AT Batang Ai, four hours' drive from Kuching, Sarawak's historic capital city, the Hilton group has built a hotel on the shores of a 90-square-kilometre lake formed by a massive hydro-electric project. It has been designed, somewhat incongruously, in the form of a longhouse - which is rather like a village under one roof, and the traditional communal dwelling of river tribes in this region. From the luxury of the hotel, a two-hour ride by longboat takes tourists through spectacular scenery to a genuine Iban longhouse at Sumpa, where they are greeted by an aged, tattooed headman and several naked children leaping into the muddy river screaming with delight.