Bario reflections

The Kelabit highlands are not really jungle but more like the NZ west coast 30-40 years ago. Access is more limited though. The flight in is 45 mins and then you land on a new tarsealed plane strip and walk a dusty road 2km to what is almost a town centre. It's cooler than coastal Sarawak (about 23 deg. cel.) , and the landscape is like the West Coast of New Zealand, or maybe east cape up north, except you have more rice paddies then sheep (yes, they do have sheep up there! and oxen). In addition to the world reknown rice, they also have amazing pineapples that taste soooooo good, and the equivalent of pikopiko is a really popular food. And the people are really warm and friendly.

 

The area consists of a main valley with about 4 villages, and another 9 or 10 villages within 2 days walk, plus the nomadic Penan people. Villages consist of the traditional longhouse (with 6-18 families) and more recently, separate smaller houses. Power is from generator or if you are lucky, solar pannel, and it runs from 7-9.30 in the evening. There is piped water and a rubbish dump, but who knows with respect to the sewage. Roads are few, and the main family transport unit is the motor bike which takes up to 5 people, or a 4wd (normally touist lodges). Nevertheless, people are well fed, healthy, fit and educated, incredibly smart (and well educated) and insightful. Many speak 3-plus languages. Aside from the lack of a dentist, they are healthier and (at least outwardsly) happier than many in NZ - and certainly more active in the latter years in life!!!. This is the area where the british sarawarkian resistance to the Japanese during world war two began, and an ex-missonary outpost (hence all locals are Christian rather than Muslim or Chinese). Kelabit have their own language, and are a very distinct people in many ways. Meals are scrummy - rice or noodles, fruits and veges from the forest or garden, and wild meat - deer (although the numbers are declining), pork (wild boar), fish, or chicken.

 

So far, the highlands have avoided the roading plans of the government that has facilitated clearing of jungle for palm oil, timber and oil in other parts of Sarawak. There are however many threats to the traditional lifestyle.
Cumpolsory boarding school (in Bario and Miri) has taken children off their home lands in the formative years, and led to mass migration of people away from the traditional subsistence lifestyle and into the cities. This of course  makes things more difficult for the older generation who want to stay in the highlands - there's more work to do.

Other threats are from Governmental (mis)management. The recent privatisation of a subsidised state airline service means a huge 4-10 fold hike in freight prices, which means financial gains from exports will be decreased - there's no plans to replace the freight plane that crashed a couple of years ago either. Everthing enters the area via a combination of plane, 4WD, boat and foot. Fuel costs NZD 4 per litre - the same as a hawker-stall dinner for 2 in the cities. Illegal logging had encroached onto traditional lands, and the government has plans to build a road into the area (which will make transport costs cheaper, but bring drastic changes to lifelstyles and livelihoods).

There's little government assistance here - unless you count the failed 6 000 000RM (that's 3Mill NZD) hydro scheme that never produced the power promised (i.e., it worked as well as locals expected), then cracked and flooded the valley. The war with Indonesia in the 1970's has also affected things with migration of Kelabit tribes from the border area to saftey in the Bario Valley. The effect on local politics is evident in subtle ways - the rebuilding of the orignial valley longhouse closer to rice paddies, and it's renaming as Bario Asal is an indication of this. Aside from the occasional Malay military jaunt along the jungle tracks (sorry, 'Patrol' if you can call 5 guys with one rifle that - the police have more arms here), there seems to be an easing in the tension with Kilimantan.

 

So, Bario is an interesting place but I think tourism (in it's infancy) is a mixed blessing - it provides an alterntive income source, but it has the potential to cause division within the community between those doing well from it, and those not. I expect it also has the potential to further erode culture as it itself becomes a 'tourist' attraction. The infancy means that there's little information, and the 'newness' of the industry means that locals aren't particularly geared up for different levels of expectations of tourists, which adds to the southeast asian tourist anxiety, i.e., that they are potential  targets for being ripped off. It's hard to let that go, and perhaps a little unfair to the locals that we automatically project that on them given how friendly they are.

 

I think if the proposed road comes, tourism will be mass-tourism which will ruin the nature of the community that attracts the tourists in the first place. Without tourists, the current urbanisation of the indigenous population will most likely continue, and the cultural sustainability is also likely to be questionable. This really is a time when the broader community needs to make a stand on how they want things to develop, but even then, they likely have little power in malaysian government decisions re. roads and resource utilisation. In case you were wondering, there is one national park (Pulong Tau) and a transboundary conservation initiative with Kilimantan, but there is apparently illegal logging, so it's questionable how much protection this brings. National park development has also sidelined local input, and doesn't appear to consider potential models of buffer zone management of allocation for livelihoods. Parks management is also by private companires here in Sarawak, which is potentially worse for livelihoods than diorganised local tourism.