Sabah: Not the same old banana

One day early last year, while leafing through the morning papers, I came upon a full page ad, which leapt out of the page, grabbed hold of me, and never let go until it had its way with me! It was an advertisement for Air Asia. They were offering bargain basement rates to Kuala Lumpur and Kota Kinabalu (KK), an opportunity that would be hard to pass up by someone with Ilocano blood flowing through his veins. That same day, I got a call from the rest of my family who, descended from the same Ilocano ancestor, had seen the ad and simply could not resist the siren call of El Cheapo fares. So it was decided that 10 of us would fly to KK for the Labor Day weekend. With rates like these, we’ve adopted a new motto: "Have passport, will travel."

Sabah, or North Borneo as it was once called, is located on the northern tip of the island of Borneo, one of the largest islands on the planet. Prior to the 16th century, Sabah was part of the Kingdom of Brunei, which in its turn was successively under the orbit of the Sri Vijayan Empire of Sumatra, the Majapahit Empire of Java, and finally the Parameswara Empire of Malacca, until it achieved its independence. In 1658, the Sultan of Brunei, now free to bestow power and pelf on his own, gave the northeast coast of Borneo to the Sultan of Sulu in return for his help in settling a civil war. Alexander Dalrymple, an officer of the East India Company, concluded an agreement with the Sultan of Sulu in 1761, which permitted Dalrymple to set up a trading post in his fiefdom. From then on, the British were in Sabah in fits and starts, until in 1881, the British North Borneo Chartered Company (BNBCC) began administering the country as a commercial enterprise. Thus, ever so gradually, did the Sultan of Sulu lose Sabah.

In 1946, the BNBCC relinquished its landholdings to the British Government. The devastation inflicted by the Second World War had been so complete (only three buildings were left standing in Fort Jesselton) that the cost of rebuilding would have bankrupted the company. North Borneo thus became a British crown colony. Seventeen years later, in 1963, North Borneo became part of the newly independent Federation of Malaysia. The state was renamed Sabah, while its capital Fort Jesselton was rechristened Kota Kinabalu after the legendary mountain, which informs the geography of the state.

If one were to fly to Sabah blindfolded, one would think he had never left the Philippines. Everything is so similar: the climate, the flora, the fauna, the tribes, the languages, and the people. Similar however does not mean the same, and this truism was thrown into bold relief when I returned to Sabah after a 16-year absence.

On my first trip to Sabah during the late ‘70s, my first impulse was to flee. Being the true-blue city boy that I am, whose lifeblood races at the mere mention of New York City, Sabah was way too bucolic. Its capital KK was very much a sleepy backwater then, with hardly any entertainment (two pitiful TV stations and maybe three cinemas showing titles from God knows where), just a handful of tourist attractions (mainly its beaches and Mount Kinabalu), and only two international hotels. The city did boast a yacht club, except it had no yachts!

Coming back, I learned to my amazement that KK now boasts two million tourist arrivals annually, easily surpassing the Philippines. It has numerous hotels ranging from cheap to luxurious, and has a great number of organized tours to destinations around the state, most of them within a three-hour drive from the city. Food is another great attraction as it is good, abundant, and cheap, especially the seafood. And, it now has several dozen channels on cable, shopping malls, several movie theaters, a sprinkling of Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf cafes, and a proper yacht club with very real yachts.

There are no vast palaces or architectural wonders in Sabah, no ancient ruins of past civilizations. There are no great museums, no world-class art. What Sabah offers is serenity and a pristine environment in which to enjoy nature and all that it has to offer. KK, with its many parks and roundabouts, has the pleasantness of a small English town, albeit transported to the tropics. The state is bordered by the sea on its western, northern and eastern flanks, so there are beach resorts galore. Right across from KK, separated by a mere 15-minute boat ride, is the Tungku Abdul Rahman Marine Park. The park consists of five islands which, to the eternal credit of the Sabah government, have been protected from environmental degradation and overzealous development ever since it was designated as a preserve. In the 16 years that had elapsed since my last visit to Sabah, this park has become the natural linchpin of the state’s tourism infrastructure, and made Kota Kinabalu a resort city within easy reach of the major cities of East and Southeast Asia.

Coming to Sabah has dredged up things deep in my memory, which I had almost forgotten, living as I do in Manila. In contrast to our capital and its bay (memorably described by Prince Charles as "an awful, smelly, polluted harbor absolutely clogged with filth and rubbish"), the water that borders KK is so clean that you will see fish all around. It gets even better when you go to the Marine Park and experience wading ashore and being greeted by thousands of fish of various sizes, shapes and colors that are tame enough to feed. Then there is the existence of wildlife. If you live in Manila, you can be forgiven if you think of wildlife as something you see only on the National Geographic and Discovery Channels. In Sabah there is, among others, the proboscis monkey.

After a two-hour drive south of KK to a lodge by the Gerama River, a flat-bottomed boat takes the tourist into the island’s interior and its mangrove forests. For miles on end, one will see no evidence at all of human habitation along the river’s banks. There are no houses, no domesticated animals, no telltale plastic bags, no discarded bottles or waste – just clean Coca-Cola-olored organic water, nesting birds, small crocodiles (very small), and the almost caricaturish proboscis monkey. The latter live in trees along the banks of the river in groups of up to 10. Each group is led by an alpha male with a harem, their offspring, and some minor males. We saw many groups in the four hours that we were cruising along the river, but I couldn’t really appreciate the sightings until I made a closeup of one of the shots that I took. I can now say with great authority that the proboscis monkey looks just like Alice the Goon, the long-nosed she-male who keeps trumpeting "I love Popeye, I love Popeye, I love Popeye!"

The trip along the Gerama River ends an hour after sunset when the fruit bats start flying in search of food. I saw no sense in making the river trip last this long until our guide shouted and pointed at the dark ahead of us. Then we saw a spectacle that only nature can provide: up in the distance, we saw a tree festooned with what seemed to be faint Christmas lights. As we got closer, we realized, to our gleeful astonishment, that the tree was home to thousands of little fireflies. And we saw more and more and more as we headed to the lodge where dinner awaited us. What a treat! I used to see fireflies in Manila when I was a kid, but pollution and the pressures of overpopulation have made short shrift of that.

My trip to Sabah was in painful contrast to a short trip to Baguio after Christmas. The Baguio of my childhood, with its scent of pine, its afternoon fog, its quaint wooden houses, its colonial aura, its gentility, is gone. Daniel Burnham’s beautifully planned hill station has been replaced by an overbuilt, overpopulated, polluted city which, in its ugliness, compares very nicely with every town in this benighted republic. What a letdown.

Filipino tourists, especially Ilocanos like me, are always searching for destinations where they can get good value for money. And so, gentle reader, I say to thee "Get thee to Sabah. That’s in Melehsia, truly Ehsia."