Head Hunting

Now it was time for the real adventure to start. It began easily enough with a minivan trip out of town, until the road...well...just, ended. Considerately the authorities had constructed a nice asphalt pavement right into the front porch of someone's hut (complete with linemarking). From here we all transferred into longboats for our journey upstream. Our eventual destination was the World Heritage listed Mulu National Park, which has an airport, but our chosen route would be taking us via the ominously named Head Hunter's Trail, and needed 3 days (kind of like doing the Inca Trail to reach Machu Picchu).

To save the whole ordeal taking even longer, we would be catching longboats to the start of the Head Hunters Trail. But even this would take 2 days, and we spent our first night adjacent to the river in an Iban Longhouse. Apparently these structures are the traditional dwellings of the Iban people, although I think "traditional" might be drawing a long bow, since each one now seems to be equipped with satellite TV dishes. But, the nightly sounds of the village still seemed pretty traditional, including a farm animals, squabbling dogs, and very confused roosters who seemed to be predicting perpetual dawn...

After a very rough night of "sleep" we bid farewell to our Iban hosts and continued upriver. Since it was the dry season, the water level was at it's lowest, and now even the amazing skills of our longboat drivers couldn't manage to cross some of the shallowest parts of the river. This necessitated a lot of pushing and heaving to help drag the boats upstream. After several hours of this we finally reached the beginning of the Head Hunter's Trail, left the boats behind, and changed into dry clothes. But, 5 minutes into the hike, we realised that we needn't have bothered. It may have been dry season, but it didn't seem to be making a dent in the humidity...we were literally dripping with sweat!! But, the change of clothes was thankfully helping to keep most of the leaches at bay, and only a solitary die-hard managed to find the gap between my trousers and shoes. But he paid dearly for his efforts, getting gradually squished to death by the lip of my shoe, and I only realised that I'd been bitten when I eventually took off my shoes that evening.

Finally, after 2 days in a longboat and several hours of hiking in pools of our own sweat, we emerged into the forest clearing that housed the creatively named "Camp 5" on the edge of Mulu National Park. This wasn't just a sight for sore eyes, because surrounding Camp 5 was the scenery that earned Mulu its place on the World Heritage list.Okumaya devam et