A walk on Brunei’s wild side

MANILA, Philippines - Downtown Brunei is not exactly a bustling metropolis, but it’s modern, with clusters of shops, restaurants and even fast-food imports (McDonald’s, Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, even Jollibee) discreetly visible among the ornate mosques that tower above the city.

Yet take a few steps and you come to Kianggeh Jetty, where within minutes a speedboat zips you to a different world altogether: one where crocs laze on muddy riverbeds, mangroves grow thick and lush, and proboscis monkey groups swing down from upper branches to grab mangrove leaves.

These and other adventures are available in Brunei Darussalam, as we found out during a four-day visit sponsored by Brunei Tourism and Royal Brunei Airlines.

It’s a place of contrasts: with a population of 400,000, this sultanate offers outdoor pleasures ranging from wreck diving to lush golf courses, bird watching to palace tripping. But with forests covering 70 percent of the territory, you might want to start with the great outdoors.

“It’s wildlife at your doorstep,” our freelance guide, Sandra Tang says. Indeed, that river ride — winding along Water Village, where longboats, as they’re called, have delivered residents to and from their stilted homes since people first migrated here — transports you straight to the jungle. Follow the bend of the 18-kilometer river, and you’re soon among towering, century-old tualang trees and nipah palms.

Longboats hold four passengers and travel much faster than our bancas. Following the river tributaries, and you’re quickly surrounded by lush forests. Within 15 minutes, we stop at Eco Sumbiling Village for tea and banana fritters (a tip for tourists: load up on these; you’ll need the energy for climbing later) then transfer to another boat and head upriver some more.

Soon, we approach Temburong National Park, which contains some 50,000 hectares of rain forest. (Here’s something the Philippines can be truly envious of: lush, green, protected forests.) After registering, we’re ready to take our walk into the clouds. 

Along the way, our guide Faris, a young tribesman with a bit of hip-hop about him, points out various plants and their rumored powers. Some leaves relieve headaches, or backaches; others give you “stamina,” while others are said to cure impotency, “like Viagra times 10.”

The nature hike is somewhat arduous, ascending some 1,300 wooden steps for nearly a kilometer until we reach an elaborate aluminum platform that rises up into the tree branches: this is the park’s fabled Canopy Walk. There are actually three towers, interconnected at three levels. You climb up the vertical landing on one end (enclosed in a steel fence), cross one canopy to the next tower, ascend again, and so on.  

“I’m seen people of all ages climb this,” Faris says, looking up at the first aluminum tower. We found this hard to believe: I personally wouldn’t recommend it for the elderly, young children, or those with weight problems, claustrophobia or vertigo. A sign reminds us “Do Not Extend Any Part of Your Body Over the Railings” and “Do Not Run or Jump While Crossing the Bridge.” So cancel the jump shots: Check. The towers are sturdy enough, but can only support four people at a time; the canopy walkways only hold two at a time, so we ascended in batches.

All in all, you reach a height of about 140 feet, about 21 stories high, and when you walk across the top canopy, pulling out a camera to take a picture is a shaky operation (especially if the camera isn’t fastened around your neck). But what a view: in the mornings, you might find yourself standing among the clouds. All around are lush forests that go on forever, and in the distance you can make out Mt. Kinabalu. (Looking straight down is a mistake, though.)

After climbing down, we descended the 1,300 steps again and our guide pointed out various animals: pit vipers curled in the leaves (“Are they deadly?” I asked “Deadly enough,” Faris answered); a tiny mammal clung to a century-old tree: it was a pygmy squirrel, found only here, we’re told. Ever year, university students from Brunei are sent out the Temburong National Park with their notebooks and cameras to do research and find new species (they uncover new ones every year). We’re told it’s almost wild boar season. During that time, Faris tells us, the hunting begins: the military prefer using automatic weapons, though our guide prefers the tried-and-true tribal method: blowpipes that shoot wooden darts with poisoned tips (we do a little target practice later back at Eco Sumbiling Village — minus the poison tips).

When you’re visiting the wild, it’s important not to lose your head — literally. That was often the concern among Iban tribesmen of the Sarawak region surrounding Brunei, who, up until 1841 at least, were legendary headhunters. While in Temburong Park, our guide Faris — who’s an Iban tribesman, though he sports Dr. Dre Beats headphones and boasts that he owns five cars and three motorcycles (“two not running”) — outlines the Iban culture, which has nowadays abandoned hunting for human skulls as trophies, but is still prone to braggadocio.

The original purpose of headhunting among the Iban was as a rite of passage: teens boys were sent out into the Sarawak forests in order to hunt other humans. Collecting heads and bringing them back to the village was a proof of manhood, but also a conspicuous display of bling: Iban ladies were much impressed by the number of heads you had in your longhouse, and quicker to marry. (The Iban headhunters, Faris points out, were not cannibals; they only wanted to pick your brain, not eat it.)

Traces of Iban tribal culture remain in Brunei today in the existence of longhouses (flat housing rows traditionally built to hold up to 18 families, since they offered better protection from warring tribal attacks), harvest festival traditions, and even tribal tattoos. Faris points out that two symbolic tats are still common among tribesmen: scorpions, representing the warrior; and spiders, representing the circle of life. Traditionally, tattoos were cut with a boar’s tooth dipped in ink, and wearing tats on both your shoulders was said to protect you from demonic possession.

Harvest festival (at the end of May) involves Iban families going from home to home, where they are asked to perform a song or dance, then enjoy the food and wine offered by each. Traditionally, each guest is required to drink a cup of rice wine. Before this, a handful of rice is burned, and a cup of rice wine is thrown out the window to ward off evil spirits.

Leaving the jungle path, we came upon a group of men smiling and playing cards. Nearby, roosters were tethered to the ground. As with many cultures, card playing and cockfighting are popular among males — with some trained cocks fetching 10,000 Brunei dollars.

The longhouses built along the Water Village are still a vibrant part of modern living in Brunei. Some 20,000 people live in the stilted homes, and the villages have everything you need: government schools, religious schools, mosques, fire stations, police boats, taxi boats, gyms, hospitals, stores, petrol stations. Originally built by fisher folk as early as 800 AD (seafaring Indonesians were probably the first to land there), the Brunei Water Villages became a center of commerce, government and social life up until the early 20th century. Today, the longhouses are turned over from family to family, generation to generation. They might not look like much from the outside, but they contain all the modern amenities inside: plasma-screen TVs, modern furniture, kitchens and even karaoke systems. We’re also told most of the villagers are prosperous enough to own cars — which are parked for free along the downtown riverbanks. After all, gasoline here is very, very cheap and there are no taxes.

To understand how important the river is to Brunei’s history and wildlife, we visited the Malay Technology Museum (opened by Queen Elizabeth in 1972, before Brunei’s independence), the Cultural Museum of Kampong Ayer, and the Brunei Museum, all of which offer dioramas and stuffed exhibits charting the country’s tribal history and natural species.

There you’ll see cultural artifacts of life in Kampong Ayer, the original Water Village from centuries ago — village games like gasing (spinning top) and congkak (similar to our sungka); ornate hand-woven wedding attire and colorful fabrics made with gold thread (most of it sourced from surrounding Sarawak); canoes made from burned-out logs; life-sized male villagers extracting sago from trees.

Then there are the stuffed exhibits of exotic animals indigenous to the region: the mudfish, leopard cat, hawksbill turtle, sun bear, barking deer, mouse deer, pig-tailed macaque, cobra, hornbill, pangolin, gibbon and many more.

But we were soon to see more of Brunei’s wildlife — in the flesh.

The next morning we hopped on a longboat again to visit the proboscis monkeys. These large, shy monkeys with pronounced olfactory appendages (said to be a male mating attraction; go figure) dwell in troops of eight upwards and prefer eating the shiny green leaves of mangrove trees, which the Brunei River has in abundance. The males often urinate on the tree trunks to mark their feeding territory and emit shrill cries and high-pitched honks as warning signals. Hearing the cries, our longboat operator slid the craft into an opening in the mangroves, and we waited to spot the troop. (Binoculars are recommended.) Usually, proboscis monkeys feed early in the morning and after dark, preferring to sleep near riverbeds where the mangroves are lush. We didn’t really get “up close and personal” with these elusive creatures, who can measure up to three feet in length; but we could see them high above, leaping from branch to branch. Again, this is one of the sights Brunei offers relatively close to its downtown center. 

As we headed back downriver, we watched herons glide across the mangroves, and on a distant shore, we spotted a huge crocodile simply basking in the sun. (Later, we learned the river is full of crocs, which would have made our super-fast speedboat ride — sometimes taking corners at a 45-degree angle to the water — a lot more scary if we had known.)

And beyond the crocs, beyond the riverbanks and mangroves, we could make out in the distance the 24K golden dome of the palace of Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah: its one-kilometer-long, 1,788-room presence is a reminder that Brunei has many contrasts to offer visitors, from wildlife to the good life.

* * *

Contact Brunei Tourism  at www.bruneitourism.travel/ or e-mail info@bruneitourism.travel. Contact Royal Brunei Airlines at www.flyroyalbrunei.com/, e-mail mnlsales@rba.com.bn or call 864-0801 to 03 to book your Brunei adventure.