Piano, piano va lontana

I'm writing this in bed with Sue snuggled up next to me reading.  In the living room next door our new pellet stove is hissing gently and pumping hot water around our central heating system.  For the first time since we moved to Puglia in 2004 it's winter and the house is thoroughly warm, instead of comprising a small island of heat in a cold sea.  It's life-changing, I feel relaxed as I wander around the place and the smell of mould is retreating daily.  I now think of taking a shower with pleasurable anticipation instead of it being an unpleasant and goose-pimple inducing chore.  The paper on my desk is crisp and firm to the touch and no longer droops flacidly when I pick it up.

On top of that we have satellite TV and I can write this in bed thanks to our new ADSL internet connection.   It seems a long way from the house we bought in the wilds of Puglia nine years ago, when we had no electricity for the first couple of weeks and were drawing water from our cisterns with a bucket on a piece of string.


Our old pellet stove has not gone to waste and is now installed in the playroom of Paolo and Elizabet's house next door, so the children can stay there in comfort during the winter.

It's been hard work making the house habitable again over the last few weeks and there is still lots to do, but as Erminia would say - "piano, piano va lontana".  I'm not sure how you translate this - "you get a long way by taking many small steps" perhaps.

Home Sweet Home

After leaving my hotel in Bari on the morning of 22nd September I drove home in brilliant sunshine with my heart thumping with a mixture of joy and anxiety.  Being a pessimist I half expected to see a smoking ruin with pigs rootling in the blackened foundations.  In fact, the place looked little different  to how we'd left it.  Our neighbour Paolo did a great job keeping an eye on things and maintaining the land, including pruning many of the olive trees, which was way beyond what I'd asked him to do.

I had two weeks to smarten the place up before Sue arrived and I worked hard to get rid of as much of the accumulated grime as I could, with the help of Paolo's wife Elizabet and his mum Palma.

The last few weeks have flown by and my sense of time now feels strangely distorted.  So little has changed here in Puglia that it doesn't feel as if we've been gone for two years, but then when I look back on Borneo our time there seems to have lasted forever.

Overall, the absence has allowed me to return and see our home with fresh eyes and really appreciate it all over again.  Our little patch of Puglia, high up on the limestone plateau called the Murghe, between Locorotondo and Cisternino, with its patchwork of smallholdings and hamlets,
is a very special place and we were lucky to have stumbled upon it nine years ago.  Our sense of being home has been intensified by the welcome our neighbours have given us, especially our adopted mum, Erminia, who stumps round from next door most days, her stick clacking on the paving stones and looks at us as we come out of the house to greet her with a satisfied smile on her face.

It's good to be back!

Benvenuto in Italia!

The last few days in Saratok passed in a whirl of packing and ticking off jobs on lists, all the time my view of our little town shifting from the present to the past.  On Sunday 22nd September Sue drove me to Sarikei to get the boat to Kuching.  I looked out of the window at the jungle, the banana plants and the roadside shops and longhouses thinking this may well be the last time I see them.  As the boat surged up to the pontoon I said my goodbyes to Sue and passed my luggage (a rucksack and my bicycle encased in a large cardboard box) up to some helping hands on the rear deck.

This was the start of three days of relentless travel by boat to Kuching, then a plane the next morning to Kuala Lumpur followed by a dash across the airport to catch my flight to Heathrow.  At Heathrow I got a taxi to Sue's brother Mike's house in Uxbridge where I left the bike.  After a pleasant night catching up with news from Mike, Tina, Adam and Tim, I got the bus on Tuesday to Stansted where I caught the plane to Bari.  Feeling very old, tired and disorientated I staggered out of Bari Airport into the neon-lit night and was collected by a van which drove me to a nearby industrial estate to collect my cheap hire car.  I drove the car out of the compound observed by two quizzical and soppy looking Alsatian gaurd dogs and made my way hesitantly to my hotel a few kilometres away on the other side of the city, everything feeling both strange and familiar at the same time, the streetlights flaring in the windscreen as I tried to focus my straining eyes.

Next morning I got the lift to the rooftop terrace where breakfast was served and "bam" - I was hit by the crystal-clear azure blue light of the Adriatic.  It's just an ordinary business hotel but the beauty of it all nearly made me cry - there's an aesthetic sensibility in Italy that can transform even the most mundane of locations into something truly exquisite.  I looked out from the balcony at a glassy sea disturbed only by the odd darting fishing boat, then turned to my left and saw the old town of Bari with its creamy stonework marking the division between the sea and an almost identically blue sky and my chest swelled with excitement as I thought to myself "benvenuto in Italia!"

Junglebluesdream

After three wonderful days at Batu Ritung Homestay I really felt sad to leave.  Supang gave me a farewell present of Bario rice and a rice scoop and showed me, William and Michele around the family museum, a room where Supang and her husband keep heirlooms and mementos.  Including the battered old leather briefcase her father used to use.

After saying our goodbyes Matteo came to guide us back to Bario.  Instead of walking the water buffalo trail it had been decided we would travel by canoe.  This is the route most supplies take to get to Pa Lungan and still involves a fifty minute walk before reaching the boat, then a two kilometre drive at the other end.

It turned out to be an eventful trip as the river level was very low and instead of a thirty minute journey we bumped and ground our way over shallows and half submerged trees for about an hour and a half.

At the end of our river journey we were met by Stephen Baya of the Junglebluesdream Homestay, where we were to spend our last night in Bario before flying back to Miri.  Stephen is an artist, highly influenced by his native kelabit art and culture.  He runs the Homestay with his Danish partner Tine and they have a young son, Noah.

We had another evening of excellent food and spent a long while talking with Stephen and Tine about their life in Bario and the difficulties of running a tourist business there.  Bario is a very special place, but tourist development is problematic because the only realistic way to get there is by the heavily subsidised MAS Wings daily flights, which even at full capacity are going to deliver no more than a handful of tourists a day into the area.  As it is there are about twenty-five Homestays all struggling to get the odd guest.  You do the maths!

On Wednesday morning Stephen and Tine drove us back to the airstrip for the short flight back to Miri where I said farewell to William and Michele, who are travelling on to Kota Kinabalu.  Bario and Pa Lungan and the people I met there will stay with me.  If you ever get the chance to go I'd thoroughly recommend it.  The perfect place to spend a few months writing a book or meditating on the future and at eighty ringgits (20 euros) full board distinctly affordable.

Boarneo

 

As a paid up carnivore there is no flesh I love more than wild boar.  It's pork with all the flavours turned up, fantastic in rich sauces, sausages or straight off the barbecue, dribbling in fat so good you could drink it by the cupful.  It's a staple meat for the villagers of Pa Lungan and as luck would have it they had killed two the day I arrived and I got an invite to the barbecue the next day.

So on Sunday afternoon I joined Stephen and his family and friends around the fire.  The combination of woodsmoke, fatty meat and thin crispy crackling was divine.  The hunter-gatherer ambiance was completed by the salivating dogs circling around the group, waiting for tossed scraps, a reward and an incentive to do their job on future hunts.

The following day Stephen's brother Matteo, the village Headman, took me out for a day trekking in the jungle, accompanied by Supang's young dog Baddei.

We ate lunch by a stream.  Mine was fried rice and wild boar prepared by Supang, while Matteo had to make do with stewed civet (aka cat).  In the afternoon as we tramped through primary rainforest, Baddei mooching behind, Matteo went very quiet and held up his hand.  He raised his rifle and fired it with a loud crack which sent Baddei scampering home.


Matteo disappeared and after several minutes returned through the undergrowth with a wild boar piglet over his shoulder and a broad grin on his face.  It had meant to be a day showing a tourist around the jungle and the boar was an unexpected bonus.  I watched as Matteo eviscerated the creature and emptied its warm guts onto the jungle floor, before lashing it in his pack.

That evening in Batu Rintung Homestay I was joined for another superb supper by Michele and William from Lyon.  I went to bed early only to be woken by Supang about half an hour later to be told Matteo had invited me to another barbecue.  So Michele, William and I ate more boar, this time roasted over an oil drum illuminated by head torches, the milky way arcing above us, the dogs circling yet again.

Pa Lungan

Life moves at its own pace in Bario with no compromise for visitors on a tight timescale.  Douglas' promise that he would get a guide to come and see me at De Plateau Homestay finally materialised on my second morning there, by which time I was climbing the walls with frustration.  Liam is an amiable middle aged local kelabit who has returned to his roots after taking a "package" from Shell down on the coast.  He quickly disabused me about the availability of guides and trekking routes, which have dwindled as a result of logging activity.  During a chat with Liam I conceived a plan to walk to the village of Pa Lungan about twelve kilometres away, on a track which can be managed without a guide.

I set off soon after my meet with Liam and followed his fairly vague directions.  It turned out to be a delightful walk through a small village, alongside quiet streams and paddies and into gentle woodland.  I had expected a track negotiable by four-wheel drives, but the trail turned out to be for water buffalo drawn sleds only.  Despite carrying a ten-kilo rucksack my damaged knee held up well and after four hours I arrived at Pa Lungan followed by a curious water buffalo.

 It's a little hamlet of twenty or so houses, a church and about a hundred people.  A wonderfully peaceful spot far, far off the beaten track.  Liam had recommended the Batu Ritung Homestay run by Madam Supang, so I made my way straight there, knocking on the front door a little anxiously, a lone traveller from God knows where.

Supang came to the door as if I had been long-expected and showed me to a simple room on the upper floor of the large wooden house.  Shortly after, her husband took me on a short tour of the village megaliths, said to range in age from two thousand to six hundred years old.  En route we took in some clumps of pitcher plants, which he took delight in describing in detail.  That evening I dined with the two of them, being, unsurprisingly, the only guest.  The food was a superbly prepared range of local vegetables, harvested from what Supang likes to call the "jungle supermarket", Bario rice and chicken.

I went to bed early and content and was happy to dive under the blanket when the generator died at about ten o'clock, the lights flickered off and peace descended.

Flying to Bario

Bario is in the heart of Borneo.  The best way to get there is by the twice daily MAS Wings service from Miri, which uses robust old 14-seater Twin Otter light planes.  You can also go by four-wheel drive using a network of logging roads, but it's a muddy, bumpy 12-hour ride.  The flight is a visceral experience during which you can watch the pilots wrestle the controls and flip the switches as they dodge the clouds then swoop through a clear gap down towards the tiny strip of grey tarmac which is Bario Airport.

I had made no plans, which is just as well because the Lonely Planet Guide to the area is uselessly out of date.  As I left the arrivals shed there were several locals milling about, looking for clients.  I spoke to one who invited me to his Homestay (Malaysia's word for "bed and breakfast").
"What's your name?" I asked.
"Douglas".
"Guess what my name is?"
So I joined Douglas in his four-wheel drive truck along with three young obstetric nurses from Miri and went to De Plateau Homestay a couple of kilometres outside Bario itself.

De Plateau is quiet and charming and, like pretty well every Homestay in Bario and its environs, costs 80 ringgits (about 20 euros) per night, full board.  Also like all the other Homestays, De Plateau relies on a generator for electricity, which runs from around 7.00 to 10.00pm, there is cold water only in the basic toilet and shower cubicles and it gets chilly at night.  The food is good, with a wide selection of vegetables, chicken and sometimes wild boar for lunch and dinner with fresh local pineapple for desert when I was there.  Breakfast is omelette and noodles.

Once in Bario the big question is "what do I do now?"  To which the "Lonely Planet's" answer would be to find one of the many local guides queuing up to offer their services.  Not so, guides are actually few and far between and I found myself kicking my heels for the best part of two days, while Douglas promised me the immanent arrival of an experienced local.  During my wait I did a four wheel drive tour of Bario with Douglas' son (for which a charge of c twenty ringgits was made) and walked up "Prayer Mountain," a three to four hour hike to and from a local peak with excellent views over Bario and the paddy-strewn plain in which it lies, with the three nurses.

Kuching Skies

Sue and I went to Kuching last week for a final visit to Sarawak's capital before we head back to Europe in a few weeks.  For me it was a frustrating time as a couple of days after my 58th birthday I woke up with intense pain in my left knee and was unable to bend it.  It was no better one week later when we set off for the city with me struggling to fit in the passenger seat with a leg which wouldn't bend.  It felt uncomfortably like shifting Dad in and out of cars in recent years and left me with a nagging feeling that I was doing penance for not having been more patient with him.

We stayed at the Pullman, one of the posher hotels, where I spent a lot of the week lying on the bed, reading and watching TV.  When the boredom got too much I took photos out of our bedroom window.  When you look straight down at it, Kuching is much like any other city anywhere.  But look up or zoom in on the middle and far distance and a different picture emerges.  When the sky is not filled with dense, billowing, rain sodden clouds the intensity of the sunlight creates fantastic colourful and sculptural cloudscapes reaching far up into the atmosphere and at dusk these fade with amazing speed into twilight and darkness like God is turning down a dimmer switch.  I will miss these blue, yellow and copper skies when we return to Europe, especially monochrome England.

With the zoom one can reach out beyond the edge of Kuching to the jungle, paddies and rivers that
encircle it.  At the fringes of the city are the Malay kampungs (villages), from this distance they look like the hovels that surrounded the walls of a medieval castle.  The simile is appropriate, for the city is a concentration of wealth and privilege and the lives of many inside its walls are very different to those on the outside.  We come here to get a dose of modern life and to remind ourselves of the "civilisation" we come from.  When we are outside the cocoon of our hotel room we are on the streets and in the malls, buying stuff like there is no tomorrow with little rectangles of plastic that would be useless in our local market in Saratok, where even if they accepted credit cards, nothing costs enough to make it worth the bother.

Miri Again

After two days at Batu Niah I finally escaped to Miri by bus with my new found friends Martyn, Janina and Eva.  They were planning to get a bus from Miri to Kota Kinabalu in Sabah, a journey which involves crossing the Brunei border four times and gathering an unfeasible number of passport stamps, while I was headed for the luxury of the Marriot hotel to meet Sue.  I said goodbye to my friends over a very indifferent lunch in the centre of Miri and with time to kill decided to walk up the hill overlooking the city centre to visit the Petroleum Museum.

After slogging up the hill in the afternoon sun it was, surprise, surprise, closed until further notice and
serving no other function than to provide some shade to a pack of disconsolate dogs.  I took a photo of "the Grand Old Lady", Miri's first oil well, had a diet coke at a nearby cafe, then said "fuck it" and walked back down again.  It would have been easy to get a taxi to the Marriot, on the outskirts of the city, but having spent the last few days as a parsimonious backpacker, I decided to walk, arriving tired and a bit footsore in the late afternoon.

I passed the time waiting for Sue by sitting in the foyer cafe drinking cappuccino, eating expensive cake and watching the people come and go.  I have a love-hate relationship with places like the Marriot.  If I'm honest I like the comfort, coffee and cake and that feeling of being "looked after", but I hate that sense of being part of a privileged elite that upmarket hotels foster so deliberately.  I especially hate this because it is so seductive and so quickly morphs into a sense of entitlement.  I've actually been part of this hotel foyer society for much of my life and I feel I know so many of these people personally, particularly the white ones that make up about half of the total.  I've worn those slacks and carried that briefcase and it has been my sporty little number in the hotel carpark.  I've also worn that Timberland shirt and cotton shorts and those deck shoes.  I want to walk up to some of these people and say "hey, don't pretend that you deserve this, remember you're just lucky to have been born in the right place at the right time and had the right opportunities."  But maybe I'm just frustrated that as a grumpy and jobless old git I'm not really part of this society anymore and that what I really hate is my own irrelevance and exclusion.  Or all of the above.

Batu Niah - Not Just a Mountain of Bat Shit

It's funny the things that stick in your mind from a journey.  Batu Niah is one of the most spectacular of Sarawak's national parks.  It comprises a vast cave network full of bats and swallows in a setting of jungle and limestone cliffs straight out of "Jurassic Park".  There are mysterious wall paintings, mountains of acrid bat shit and a profound sense of darkness and silence as you grope your way along a two kilometre subterranean boardwalk.  And what do I remember best?  The National Park canteen.

From the second you walk in the door there is the smell of desperation.  The National Park is three kilometres from the town of Batu Niah, so the canteen has a captive market of tourists.  It's located in a brand new building with new steel and formica tables and chairs and yet the place is empty.  In one corner there are a few lonely boxes of potato crisps under a notice warning that "thieves will be prosecuted".  There is also a set of swing doors leading, presumably, to the kitchen, with a large "no entry" notice scrawled across it, as if hastily put up by someone who, having murdered the cook, now needs time to dismember him with the rudimentary kitchen tools available.

Suddenly the kitchen doors burst open and a Malay man in his late thirties emerges with a panicky smile on his face.
"You want food?  I have food.  Please to sit down.  Chicken and rice set?"
I am with Martyn, Janina and Eva, a dad, mum and teenage daughter I first met at Simlilajau.  We look at each other doubtfully, Janina and Eva are vegetarians.
"Do you have any vegetarian food?"
"Rice?"  He offers, nervously.
I settle for the chicken and rice set, which is bland and under-seasoned, while the others just have drinks.

We try the canteen one last time in the evening.  By the time we arrive there are already several tourists ploughing their way resignedly through platefuls of dry and bland chicken rice.  In a desperate search for variety I try a new tack:
"Chicken and rice set?"  Your man asks.
"You have noodle?"  I parry.
"Yes we have noodle."  He offers with a matter of fact air.
"OK, chicken noodle."
This arrives ten minutes later looking moist and actually fairly appetising, to the obvious chagrin of the other guests.

Later, I spy a letter on a notice board inviting tenders to run the canteen dated a few months ago and I surmise that our man has won the contract and having done so has not the slightest clue what to do.  He presumably wants to sell food and make money and the visitors, having no other choice, are keen to buy it.  But, his lack of understanding of what tourists actually want is almost total and the communication gap near unbridgeable and this seems to be the story of so much of Sarawak's tourist industry.  I want to tell this poor man - "look, tourists want snacks and lunches to take with them on walks and a price list and pictures of the things you can cook."  But I know it will not register, he is the wrong man and is probably doomed to fail, concluding that tourists are mean and have no appetite.

This lack of communication is also evidenced by the bus journey here from Bintulu.  I bought a ticket for "Batu Niah", but no one at the point of sale, on the bus or at the drop-off, felt it necessary to explain that by "Batu Niah" they really meant "the Batu Niah service area", actually twelve kilometres from the town of Batu Niah and fifteen from the National Park.  Tourists have been getting off these buses at the service area possibly for decades looking desperately for the National Park and yet nothing has changed, other than that there is now an established going rate for charging the benighted backpackers for a lift to the park gates.  Sometimes here it's like looking across a canyon at the people on the other side and trying to work out whether they're laughing, praying, crying or dancing.  Fucked if I know, but if all else fails just stay calm and keep smiling.

Similajau National Park

From Bintulu I travelled by taxi the thirty-odd kilometres to Similajau National Park.  Much of the journey is dominated by what I guess is a large oil refinery with a sinister grey cloud sitting above it, like an upside-down pyramid pointing to a bright flame at the top of a pencil-like chimney.  The National Park itself is a long strip of coast with sandy beaches fringed by forest which, from the look of the logos around the place, appears to get some funding from Shell, perhaps as compensation for the sinister cloud next door.

The Park offices are smart and air conditioned and staffed by smiling young women in green polo shirts.  I book a room for the night, which requires the completion of several forms.  This is done, in mandatory Malaysian bureaucratic style - like a new procedure introduced two minutes ago with no training.  It must actually take a lot of concentration to repeat this pantomime several times a day, week in, week out.

Finally, key in hand, I make my way to my hostel, which looks modern and clean and faces the beach, about two hundred metres away through a patch of woodland.  As is so often the case in Sarawak appearances can be deceptive.  My room is large and was no doubt cleaned after it was last used several weeks ago, but is now littered with the aftermath of a vicious air battle between two armadas of flying insects.

In the afternoon I cross the suspension bridge that leads to the National Park trails along the coast.  These are splendid, allowing one to stroll along paths and boardwalks in the shade of the forest and discover remote beaches with smoothe yellow sand.  Swimming is prohibited, most likely because the staff don't have the language skills to explain what to take care of.  I'm hot and sweaty and I decide "sod it" and take a skinny dip anyway.


Back at the Park HQ in the afternoon I meet a number of other travellers, mainly white and European and all clutching the mandatory Lonely Planet Guide which brought us here.  There was a young East European woman who dismissed most of the places she had been as "nothing special", as if the world existed solely to tickle her jaded palette.  She herself was, I have to say, quite good-looking, but "nothing special".  Also a Canadian woman who was travelling with her three year old daughter around Southeast Asia for several months, so they could "get to know each other".  Tired, under-stimulated and separated from her two older siblings and her dad, I'm sure the poor little mite was having a whale of a time circumnavigating her mum's ego.  Then there was the mum, dad and teenage daughter from the English midlands who spend their summers travelling on a shoestring, dawdling and taking photographs.  Also two lugubrious young Poles throwing themselves enthusiastically at Borneo with smiles on their faces.

Next morning I spent some time at breakfast with two local Chinese journalists.  We talked about democracy, or the lack of it, and corruption in Malaysia, the UK and Italy.  Serious, intelligent young women with a thirst to change things in their country, while making the inevitable compromises which living in a place like Malaysia demands of you.  While discussing tourism in Sarawak they asked me what all these white folk were doing here in an out of the way national park.  I showed them my "Lonely Planet Guide" and explained that if you use the Guide to tour Sarawak in more than about seven days you just inevitably seem to come here.  They didn't seem entirely convinced and remained incredulous at the strange ways of foreign tourists.

Looking for Borneo

After failing to get to Belaga up the river Rejang I went back to Sibu in search of a bus to Bintulu.  This was my first experience of long distance buses in Sarawak and it was easy and pleasant.  The only difficult part was actually finding the long-distance bus station, which in common with every major town in Sarawak, it turns out, is several kilometres from the centre.  There are several competing companies offering big air-conditioned coaches, with three armchair-like seats in each row, and the two hundred kilometre journey cost me twenty five ringgits (about £5).

As the bus left Sibu I pulled the Lonely Planet Guide from my rucksack in search of where to stay and what to do in my journey north to Bintulu and then Miri.  To be honest the Guide doesn't tell me much about the country I live in, it's more of an inventory of interesting things for outsiders: beaches, National Parks, restaurants and nightlife and "authentic" things to "experience" and take photographs of.  It doesn't have a lot to say about Bintulu, not even a map, although it has a population of about 180,000, but it does give the name of an OK sounding hotel on the riverfront, called, aptly enough, "the Riverfront Inn".  It also contains the interesting factoid that "Bintulu" means "place of gathered heads" in some long-forgotten or possibly fictional ancient dialect.

When I arrive at Bintulu bus station I walk over to a waiting taxi and say authoritatively "Riverfront Inn, please" and spend the next fifteen minutes frantically pumping an imaginary brake pedal as my suicidal driver hurtles us into town.  My prayers are answered as we pull up outside the hotel rather than die trying.  Bintulu is neither a Sodom filled with drunk Hawaian-shirted roustabouts and Chinese prostitutes, nor a collection of smokey wooden longhouses with shrivelled heads hanging up outside, but yet another ordinary Sarawakian town.  What is that exactly?  Well, a few grids of steel and concrete blocks in various states of repair, many cracked and mould-stained, with an array of shop signs in Chinese, Malay and English, such as the "Homey Guesthouse" and "Lee Hing" the greengrocers.  Interspersed between the blocks are empty spaces, usually with billboards containing a picture of a new hotel or row of semi-detached houses, also nineteen fifties looking churches, simple mosques and Disneyesque Chinese temples.

Like most towns in Sarawak Bintulu is also sited on a river, the main means of transport and communication before the highway was built in the 1960s.  On the far side of the river are the other essential components of a local town or city - the Malay kampungs or villages and the tribal longhouses and small ferries ply to and fro throughout the day.  The river itself spews muddy brown water out into the nearby South China Sea, as well as logs and debris.  From time to time vast barges are towed downriver from the interior by sea-going tugs, labouring under the weight of their cargo.  I'm reluctant to call this the "rape" of Borneo's rainforest, but they are certainly harvesting one hell of a lot of timber.


The Riverfront Inn is cheap and pleasant, although my room smells of stale tobacco smoke.  Next
morning, cool and naked in the air-conditioned room, I peek out from behind the curtains at Bintulu, simmering quietly in the morning sun.

Kapitulation

With time on my hands following my return from Raleigh International in Sabah, I've decided to spend some time exploring Sarawak.  Sue had arranged a weekend of luxury at the Marriot Hotel in Miri, so I resolved to join her by getting boats and buses from Saratok.  My plan was to travel by boat up the River Rejang from Sarikei to Belaga, where I would get a four wheel drive taxi to the main Sibu-Miri highway.

On Sunday 21st July I got a lift to Sarikei then a ferry to Sibu, where I changed for a boat to Kapit. The Kapit boat was packed with people returning home after the weekend.  The ferries on the Rejang above Sibu are battered steel tubes with two stonking diesels at the back which hammer the boats through the water at an ear-splitting thirty knots.  Inside the passenger compartment has a similar atmosphere to a meat cold storage warehouse as the a/c units are always set to "max" for some reason.

The mighty Rejang was actually more of a trickle due to the operation of the Baku dam more than 100 kilometres upriver, forcing the ferry to go aground on the shingle at every stop to disgorge its cargo of people, chickens and other assorted baggage.  For the last hour of the four-hour trip from Sibu the boat had emptied out enough for me to fight my way onto the roof and warm my bones in the hot afternoon sun as the ferry continued to zigzag from one longhouse community to the next.  At Kapit I was met by Tibor, a British Council mentor who had kindly agreed to offer me a bed for the night.

Next morning I made my way confidently to the Kapit jetty ready to get the 9.00am boat for the six-hour journey to Belaga.  "Where boat to Balaga?"  I asked in my best grammar-free English.  I was greeted by shrugs of incomprehension.  "No boat" someone said, looking at me like I was an idiot.  Finally a Chinese lady selling snacks to the ferry-goers kindly explained:  "Dam make water too low, no boat 'till 26 July."  "26 July," I moan, "but it's 22 today!"

I wandered around town helplessly for a while, stopping for a hot, sweet, coffee to formulate a plan.  According to the "Lonely Planet" Guide when the water is too low for the ferries you can get a speed boat for an affordable price.  I try this tack at the ferry jetty to be told this may be an option if I have a few thousand ringgit to spare.  In the end I made my way resignedly to the ticket counter, where I joined two strapping but confused Scandanavian girls who have given up their quest to reach Belaga and decided to go back to Sibu.  "Welcome to Sarawak" I say to myself as I buy a ticket back downriver.

Kota Kinabalu Airport

On Monday afternoon a Raleigh International Landrover dropped me and my bike at KK airport.  I gave Mel, the Volunteer Manager who drove me there, a farewell hug then trolleyed my gear to the check-in desk.

After the formalities I wandered back out of the terminal to take a last look at Mount Kinabalu, unusually clear and visible in the evening light and looking like the extinct volcano it is.  I took a few pictures, trying to capture the moment and thinking "I climbed you, but I've never seen you this well before".  Returning to the terminal building the sunset over the sea and the nearby islands was like a cosmic bruise, all yellows, purples and reds.  I couldn't take my eyes off it as I walked to the departure gate at the far end of the airport, knowing that both of us would be gone shortly.  Just one more sunset and one more memory lodged for the time being in my old cranium, like water in a leaky bucket.

I had a little time on my hands so I 'phoned Dad, talking absently while looking at the sunset and the reflections of the airport neon signs in the big plate glass windows.  He's had an accident in his electric wheelchair and has torn some of the skin off the back of his hand.  "Down to the tendons" he says, proudly.  I commiserate, forcing the pang of guilt which I suddenly feel, back into my unconscious.

I had expected to be with Raleigh International in Sabah for about twelve weeks, but issues, which are not for this blog, compelled me to leave.  I feel tired and a bit battered.  Hopefully a long sleep will help restore my joie de vivre.

Sabah Here I Come

I'm sat in our friend Jess' house in Sibu with some spare time before getting the plane for Kota Kinabalu in Sabah.  Two weeks ago I was offered a volunteer Finance Officer role with Raleigh International and despite the short notice I decided to go for it.  I'll be there for three months working at the charity's base in KK where they keep tabs on a variety of community and adventure projects for young Brits.

Right now I'm thinking "why at the age of 57 am I still doing this stuff?"  I'll be sleeping in a dorm and working with people who will mostly be less than half my age.  I feel old and anxious and a little bit excited.  I said goodbye to Sue yesterday afternoon when she dropped me off at Jess' place and I'm going to miss her.  When I finish with Raleigh I will only have 2-4 weeks left in Borneo, which will be taken up with packing and organising our return to Italy.

The plus side is that it gets me some hands on experience of international development work which might come in handy if Sue gets another contract overseas after she finishes her Masters.  But how much can a CV take?  Ah well, time to load my bags into the car.