TOUR 2

Expedition Into the Past: The Heart of the Borneo Rainforest

This is a river expedition to a beautiful forest unmarked by man, carried out with largely traditional methods, and utilizing as much as possible from the river and jungle. See also "Further Information".

Day One

Arrive by express boat at Kapit, quaint backwater town, to be met by your host Tan Teck Chuan ("Chuan"). In the evening, visit a nearby Iban longhouse to get introduced to longhouse life. Stay overnight in a one-star hotel, complete with air-conditioning if electricity is available!

Day Two

Depart early by Express boat with Chuan for a four and a half hour ride to a logging camp on Balleh, a major tributary of Rejang River. Enjoy packed lunch at camp. Sit in back of a Land Cruiser for three and half hours along logging trails to a Kenyah longhouse on the Balui/Rejang River system, a completely different watershed. Meet your guide and his family, dine and sleep in his house, after some Kenyah entertainment, singing or dancing. (Electricity is available up to about 11 p.m, last chance for battery charging, etc.)

Day Three

The Adventure Begins!

Start early up the Balui river in Kenyah longboats -- two guests, two guides, and three dogs to a boat. The guides will wear their traditional feathered hats and chawats, and guests are welcome to do so as well (with a lifejacke). The guides will carry their traditional blowpipes and parangs. Photo opportunities abound!

Traverse numerous rapids to arrive at lunch well inside a beautiful tributary, whose watershed has never been inhabited, farmed or stripped by the logging "Kompeni". Be prepared for water splashing into the boat in the rapids.

Watch guides catch fish with hand nets and then eat the fish and rice off leaves on the sandbank. Continue on, poling and pulling up rapids interpersed with placid pools to a suitable camping spot. Here your guides will build "Base Camp", a shelter and sleeping platform made of saplings and leaves. Others will search for tracks and sounds of wildlife, and other useful jungle products. Dine on the delicacies brought back by the foraging and hunting parties which are cooked on a fire sparked by striking a special rock over tinder extracted from a particular palm. Sleep under the shelter. (Do read "Further Information"!)

Day Four

Penetrate further upriver towards the Ulu (headwaters). Bring your bedroll. Visit the sites of two epic battles from Kenyah lore. If weather, water level and time permit, active guests may walk with their guides and peer over the misty peaks of Indonesian Kalimantan. This is the ancient migration route for the Kenyahs, where they dragged their boats from the Ulu of the Eastside to the Ulu of the West. Ghosts abound, no one will want to sleep here!

Other equally enthusiastic guests can accompany the guides and dogs who will be hunting pigs with spears. Others may watch or help with the fishing or go swimming (rumours of six metre crocodiles are probably exaggerated). Whatever you do there will always be the sounds and occasional sights of wildlife, monkeys, gibbons, numerous birds, pigs, deer, and maybe the Orang Utan, Rhino, Clouded Leopard! Who knows! Certainly we will never see these beautiful beasts if we don’t go to look! Your guides will be delighted to identify calls, tracks and elusive sightings.

If the weather still looks clear after the third call of Tebuk, the woodpecker (about 3 p.m.), find a good spot to sleep under the stars. If rain clouds are gathering, sluice back down the rapids to Base Camp, with its relative shelter during a downpour. This is the Rain Forest!

On a suitable night, the guides will prepare a leafy hide downwind form some favourite spot for sighting deer and pigs, and just possibly a Clouded Leopard. This outing requires stoic, patient silence, without the use of volatile insect repellants!

Day Five

Morning as before and depart after lunch for an exhilarating roller coaster ride, shooting the rapids back to your guides’ home in 3 to 4 hours. Good video material but watch the splashes! Eat off plates and sleep at the longhouse.

Day Six

If conditions are suitable, rise well before dawn for your Land Cruiser connection, in order to be on the high ridge road at dawn when the sun horizontally lights the high jungle canopy, and craggy limestone bluffs standing a thousand metres clear of the swirling white mists of the valleys, a magical sight never seen until the logging roads cleared the ridges for a panoramic view.

Arrive at the logging camp for lunch and take express boat, or speedboat, to Kapit, with its astonishing city, big-city bustle and sophistication, and the one-star luxury of the same hotel you stayed in before.

Day Seven

Depart early in Express boat to Sibu for Plane connections.

Pricing information is available at chuan7d@tm.net.my.

The Further Information section contains useful advice about travel in the interior. Please read it before continuing on!

For more information,
please contact
Mr. Tan Teck Chuan
at chuan7d@tm.net.my.

All text and photographs are copyright of Kapit Adventure Tours. Please do not reuse without prior permission.