Bintulu and Samarakan, Sarawak, Malaysia

June 7th, 2008 | Posted by Sharon Joy

My Little Southeast Asia Adventure – Third Stop: Sarawak Malaysia

Malaysia consists of two separate regions, the Peninsular Malaysia, and the Malaysian Borneo. Malaysian Borneo is in turn divided into 2 states, Sabah, and Sarawak.

Flew by AirAsia from KL to Bintulu. My parents live in Bintulu, a big town in Sarawak with seemingly very few people that it almost has a ghost town atmosphere (at least to me). As if that’s not strange enough, this place has huge ass houses like everyone here is a millionaire. Our gates are even remote controlled! And dig this, the ratio of cars here to people is 2:1. Two people for one car! Hell, if we had the same ratio of cars to people in the Philippines, that would mean my family would have 3 cars. Everyone here seems to have a car that I can hardly find a cab on the streets. It’s nice to just walk around here because the town center is really clean. I keep wondering where they get the money when there seems to be no one here, and there seems to be nothing much happening and they only have one mall that is not even very big at all. Not that I’m complaining, but it just seem too peaceful it scares me LOL!

Samarakan on the other hand, almost all you can see is green. It’s all just trees, and rainforests. You can drive for hours and hours at end and the only non green you see is the dusty road and the bright blue sky. The line from U2’s song “Beautiful Day” “See the world in green and blue…” keep popping into my mind.

In Sarawak, tribal people live in longhouses, and one of these ethnic tribes are the Punans. Longhouse is the very centre of communal life in Sarawak. These communal houses, built on stilts, may contain up to 100 individual families in separate ‘apartments’ built under one long roof. So, yeah, 100 families under one long roof. I was lucky to have had the opportunity to go with my dad’s colleague when he was scheduled to visit the Punan tribe to promote community development. The particular longhouse we went to had 98 “apartments”. The 2 hours very rough road travel was well worth meeting these people.

Though it was obvious that they have started to adapt to modernized living, one can still experience the primal and basic lifestyle these tribes live. Longhouses are usually built near a river because this used to be their main mode of transport.

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