Our new blog!….Hi everyone, we are starting a blog, and I have started it appropriately with a letter that I recently sent home to my family. I cut out some of the family mumbo jumbo, but you can see that it was quickly written and without much thought, I’ll try to do better next time. These are the adventures of two Lonely Planet Photographers trying to push each other to shoot better and see the moments. Our blog is called Postcards and I think it is an appropriate name. My husband Sky and I love to travel and we have begged, borrowed and taught English to be able to afford our adventures through Nepal, Korea, Japan, Malaysia and mini adventures through Mexico and Thailand. We have a list of countries that we want to go to longer than Santa’s naughty list. Hopefully in the next couple of years we are able to go to all of the countries that we want to. We are currently sluming in Kuala Lumpur, awaiting a job and a visa in Oman, our supposed next destination. I hope to make lots of stellar pictures and stories both with our time left in Malaysia and in our new home. Postcards is a good name cause we’ll try to give you a sense of where we are in each blog entry with some pics and a bit of a story; the same concept as a postcard, but free.
Our adventure started with us reluctantly renting a car. I say reluctantly
because 2 days earlier we had returned to Kota Kinabalu having driven straight
back from the east coast 6 hours in a 600cc car, after offering a ride to a
German couple….and ALL their bags. Two Americans, Two Germans and an obscene amount of bagage should not be able to fit in this car, but it did, and we drove over Mt. Kinabalu in 1st and 2nd gear all the way back. The German couple were seriously nice, so it was worth it. So, back again to rent the cheapest car on
the lot, and they gave us the same one. Then off to the store for provisions. I
stood at the store for 30 minutes choosing a pb&j…should I go with Goober,
the only American brand, or should I go with something Malaysian which is most
likely going to be nasty? The goober says “America’s Favourite!” right on the
jar. I thought to myself, “If that was an American opinion, favorite would be
spelled right.” So goober it was, and raisin bread, plus a bottle of rum per
Skyler’s request. Then we were off.
It was a 3 hour drive, but we managed to find it alright…and boy was it
secluded. The Rungus people are one of the something like 34 tribes in Sabah.
They have their own language, food and clothes, and that is what we expected to
see. Unfortunately they no longer walk around in their tribal clothes, and
instead they just wear dirty old clothes which is not very interesting or
photographic. They showed us to our room and told us that there was another
couple visiting them too, from New Zealand. The house that they live in is the
most interesting thing about these people. Their house is called a “longhouse”
and it is called that because it is literally a really long house. It is made
of logs and bamboo, no windows, no screens, just sticks. It is pretty much just a really long porch with a series of about 10 rooms in a row. When a father and mother had a house long ago, and a son got married, they would simply build 1 room on to the house. Each family lives in 1 room, and every time a son or grandson got married, they built on another room and soon enough, well you get the picture. So the longer your house was, the bigger your family. To this day many Rugnus families still live in these really long, wooden houses and they can be seen
all over the country side.
After we took a look at our room, we were called over by the owner
(grandfather) of the house who was sitting with 5 men of the house. He wanted us to have a beer with them in celebration of their newly built, outdoor eating area. We were obliged and quickly started conversation with them. 2 of the men spoke
English and they translated for the others. They told us that later in the
evening we could try their rice wine, and so Sky offered to give them a taste
of our Rum…..what a mistake! When we pulled it from the car they all passed
the bottle around staring at it like a kid on Christmas morning, they had never
heard of rum. They laughed at the character on the bottle, a pirate with a
parrot. Fast forward to 4 shots later and they were all asking for more,
smacking their lips with the finish of every shot repeating loudly “RUM, it’s
RUM.” The worst part is that they kept forcing us to drink and we kept saying
as politely as possible, “We usually don’t drink it like this,” to which they
replied “Don’t you want to be my friend? We are being friendly!” We were some
of their favorite visitors, I’m sure of this. They taught us how to say cheers
in Rungus, and after Sky mistakenly asked about a nearby fruit tree, they told
one of the grandchildren to get us a fruit from it. It was a giant, stinky type
of durian. He jumped to the grandfathers request, climbing the tree like a
monkey and then all of the family stood at the bottom shouting which fruit he
should pick. The taste was horrible, but after the kid climbed the tree and
picked just the right one, we had no choice but to eat it. Plus they kept
saying, “Our traditional fruit, don’t you like our traditional fruit?” I could
still have night mares about that food, which is banned in almost all hotels in
Malaysia due to it’s repulsive smell that sinks into the fibers of the room.
And FYI, it does not go well with shots of rum.
By dinner time, the rum was gone and the men of one Rungus longhouse were very
happy. As for the dinner, another interesting and barely edible affair, we ate
our small portion with a grin on our face and excused ourselves to our rental
car; Goobers never tasted so good, and it’s now this American’s favourite. haha
With second dinner finished, we headed back to the longhouse, and boy was it
dark. Creeping back in, (hard to do with a house made of bamboo), we were
invited to another circle with the men now sitting on one side of the porch and
the women on the other. The women were talking and sleeping and the men were
busy, you guessed it, drinking rice wine. “We told you there would be rice wine
and my friend went to the other village to get it.” Oh no! The faulty
electricity in the longhouse went out just then, further suckering us in to
their now lantern lit circle, and we could only stand 3 or so rounds of rice
wine….oh gosh, that was a long night in the longhouse. We finally snuck away
and went back to our room, 2 foam mattresses covered with mosquito nets, but we
slept on one. It was a long and uncomfortable night
.
The next day the New Zealand couple said that they needed a ride to the tip of
Borneo, and although we planned 2 nights with the Rungus people, we took the
out and gave them a ride. A long 50 minute ride to the tip of Borneo that made
us wish we were back with the pirates of the longhouse! In that very 50 minutes
we decided that we were never going to get old and grumpy, cause this older
couple complained about just about everything in Malaysia in 50 minutes. We
didn’t plan to see that area, but it was a pretty drive and we made it back to
KK in the same day. Overall, it was not the trip that we planned and we did not
really get any useable pics, but it was quiet an adventure that we will
remember for a long time.
Posted on September 21, 2009 by Yellow Street Photos
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