New Year’s Eve in Borneo
Chris Rowthorn
Chris was born in England and grew up on the east coast of the United States. He moved to Japan in 1992 and immediately fell in love with the country. After doing the obligatory few years as an English teacher, he landed a job at the Japan Times, which eventually led to a job at Lonely Planet. He has worked on Lonely Planet’s Japan, Tokyo, Hiking in Japan, Read This First Asia, Malaysia, Singapore & Brunei and South-East Asia. He has travelled widely in Asia and escapes whenever possible to Thailand or Nepal. When not travelling, he lives a quiet domestic life in Kyoto with his wife, Chiori, commuting to the public bath and eating at yakitori restaurants.
IN December of 1996 I travelled with two friends, Anthony and Denise, to Sarawak’s Gunung Mulu National Park, on the island of Borneo. After exploring the caves and peaks of the park, we joined an English couple to attempt the colourfully named Headhunter’s Trail, a backdoor exit from the park that involves travelling overland through the jungle to a tributary of the Medalam River. Our guide for the trip was a young man of the indigenous Iban people called Mr Larry. After leading us for three days through the jungle, we were met at the river by Mr Larry’s father, Mr Siga, who bundled us into a riverboat for the trip down to his longhouse where we planned to stay the night. As we made our way downriver, it dawned on us that it was 31 December, New Year’s Eve.
The first sign of what was to come came in the form of a dull roar emanating from the longhouse, which was as yet invisible beyond the riverbank. As soon as we pulled alongshore, we were met by several men from the longhouse who appeared to be astonishingly drunk. We tried out a few of the Iban greetings that Mr Larry had taught us but they just stared at us, swaying back and forth and saying nothing. Ignoring their cool reception, we climbed the riverbank, packs in hand, and made our way across a field to the longhouse. It was an impressive building, built on stilts and stretching a good 150 metres from end to end. People were milling about, including a circle of men placing bets on a cockfight. In addition to the scheduled combatants, an army of regular chickens joined a motley assortment of dogs in patrolling the longhouse grounds.
Mr Larry and his father ushered us up the steps of the longhouse as gangs of curious children stood by to watch. We crossed the veranda, the common area of the longhouse, which resembled nothing so much as the world’s longest bowling alley. A row of lookalike doors fronted onto the veranda, each of which led to a single family dwelling. Since Mr Larry was our guide, we would stay in his father’s house. It turned out that Mr Siga was chief not only of this longhouse, but of two others nearby – making him one of the highest-ranking Iban in Borneo. The chief’s house was very well appointed indeed, with a stereo, a TV, a few comfortable chairs and a display case filled with family pictures. It could have been the living room of a middle-class family just about anywhere in the world; unless of course you looked out the window and saw the teeming rainforest spreading in every direction.
As soon as we sat down, Mr Larry produced a plastic bottle containing a murky white fluid. ‘This,’ he said proudly, ‘is tuak, the drink of the Iban people.’ Cups were filled and, after a welcoming toast by the chief, we took our first sip. While I had imagined it would taste something like Kentucky moonshine, it was actually quite good, like a sweet sake without the paint-thinner aftertaste. As we drank, the bigwigs of the longhouse filtered in one by one, eager to meet the exotic visitors from abroad. Many of them spoke surprisingly good English, including one man who introduced himself as Alfred. Soon after sitting down, he embarked on a long and somewhat convoluted speech in praise of Bill Clinton. Being a Democrat, I told him that I agreed with everything he had to say. With that, Alfred turned to me and with a great smile on his face announced, ‘You and me, we drink together!’ And to seal our new friendship, he lifted one giant hamhock of a hand and smacked it down so hard on my leg that I toppled over and spilled my tuak all over the floor.
Soon we were ushered into the dining room. My new friend joined us, whether invited or not we couldn’t tell. Mrs Siga served up a wonderful meal of river fish, rice, local vegetables and, of course, huge pitchers of tuak. As we ate, we were repeatedly urged to ‘Take rice. Take rice.’ I would later come to regret not having taken enough rice.
After dinner, as we sat around the table, we were asked to sing a song. We looked at each other in horror – did we know even one complete song between us? After a brief discussion, we settled on the inevitable and launched into dimly remembered Beatles classics such as ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Yellow Submarine’. Our hosts took this as well as could be expected, given our wretched singing voices and poor grasp of the lyrics. (If I recall correctly, we simply repeated the refrain of each song over and over until they could stand it no longer and cried out ‘New song please!’) Regardless of our trouble with the lyrics, we couldn’t help grinning madly at each other – here we were having a Beatles singalong with the Iban people in the middle of Borneo on New Year’s Eve.
Meanwhile, the tuak kept flowing. Spurred on by my ingrained self-destructive instincts, I was lured into making extravagant claims to Alfred about my drinking prowess. This was like pouring gasoline onto a fire. While Anthony and Denise begged off for a post-dinner nap, Alfred dragged me to another house, which doubled as the longhouse bar. He barked something to the old man who ran the place and moments later a great jug of tuak appeared before us. This was some of the best in Borneo, Alfred informed me, although by that point the subtleties of tuak were largely lost on me. Even though we were literally hurling down glass after glass, Alfred explained that this was just a warm-up. After midnight the real party would begin, and we would traverse the whole length of the longhouse, stopping for a glass of tuak at every single door. ‘How many doors are there?’ I enquired grimly. ‘Only forty-five!’ Alfred announced with a big smile on his face.
Let me take a moment here to tell you about Alfred. He was big for an Iban – close to two metres tall and somewhere between portly and downright fat. I’d guess that he was about thirty-five, but he could have been ten years on either side of that figure. He wore a perpetual grin and I got the impression that he did whatever he pleased, whenever he pleased.
As we sat there drinking, I noticed that all the adults were leaving the longhouse. ‘Where are they going?’ I asked Alfred.
‘Oh, they go to church,’ he said.
Before long, it was clear that the only adults left in the longhouse were me, Alfred and the rheumy-eyed old man who kept bringing out the tuak. Perhaps out of guilt for skipping mass, Alfred then embarked on a long series of pious Christian platitudes. He did not, however, find it odd that while every other adult in the longhouse was off praying and singing hymns, he should be steadily downing tuak.
At around 10 pm, Anthony and Denise found their way down to where Alfred and I were drinking. They looked sober and refreshed. I, on the other hand, was extremely drunk. Before long, church let out and the adults came flooding back into the longhouse, eager to start the festivities. We left the longhouse bar to join the party on the veranda. Up and down its length, knots of people were gathered in furious tuak-drinking sessions. Being the only outsiders, we were in great demand at these gatherings and people were literally fighting each other for the honour of our presence. Alfred clearly enjoyed the prestige that came from being the chaperone of these exotic foreign visitors.
By 11 pm the party had reached fever pitch. People clustered round us, madly trying to engage us in conversation. One man wanted to talk about durians. Another wanted to introduce us to his dog. Still others simply wanted to offer us tuak, which they invariably referred to as ‘the local wine’. Presiding over this mad talk-fest was Alfred, who was clearly in his element. He took to translating everything we said for the benefit of those who didn’t speak English. However, he often lost track of who spoke what language and, carried away in a manic polyglot frenzy, addressed me in Iban, translated what he had said into English for the tribal elders and then translated that again into Bahasa Malaysian for the children who stood nearby. Sometimes he managed this feat several times in the course of one long sentence, and there were times when I could have sworn that he was speaking three languages all at the same time. Of course, being completely drunk, everything he said made perfect sense to me.
The flock of children gathered round stared at us with rapt expressions. One of the bolder little boys approached me and ventured a shy ‘Hello.’ When I asked him his name, he smiled and said, ‘Diego Maradona.’ I thought the kid was pulling my leg, but then Denise said, ‘No, they’ve all got names like that. I just met a girl named Cinderella.’ It turned out that almost all the kids in the place were named after foreign movie stars and sports players. It was, I must admit, a strange feeling to be drinking tuak in Borneo with Cinderella and Diego Maradona.
Caught up in the drinking and talking, I lost all track of time. Suddenly, the revellers struck up a rather alarming chant: ‘Get the gun! Get the gun!’ For a horrible moment, I was afraid that I had committed some terrible breach of etiquette and would be made to suffer. However, they merely wanted to fire off a few rounds to ring in the New Year. Before I knew it, Alfred had dragged me to the railing of the veranda and placed a particularly fearsome-looking shotgun in the hands of the drunkest man in South-East Asia. After a brief argument about whose watch told the correct time the countdown began, and as the hour struck midnight, I pulled the trigger. The gun kicked viciously against my shoulder, and I was momentarily deafened, but it was worth it to see the smiles on the faces that swam in and out of focus around me.
Now that we had had properly rung in the New Year, Alfred announced that it was time to start drinking in earnest. I could hardly believe my ears. What did the man think I had been doing up until that point? Renewed supplies of tuak were brought forth and two men appeared with a miniature electronic organ and a couple of drums. As soon as they started playing, all but the oldest Iban jumped up to dance. At about this time Mr Larry reappeared. Throughout our trip, he had displayed an inordinate curiosity about Western music and dance styles. In particular, he was fascinated by the latest dance craze from South America, the lambada. Now, of course, he wanted me to demonstrate the latest dance steps from New York. This was a tall order indeed. I reached deep into my memory and brushed off a few vintage high-school prom gyrations which everyone emulated with glee. I felt like an aerobics teacher as they mirrored every horrible suburban dance step I could muster. Even now, I am sure there are Iban in Borneo who still practise my unique dancing style.
Before long, I was a sweaty mess. I begged off dancing for a while and wandered down the veranda to join another group of people busily consuming tuak. I was soon besieged by offers of ‘the local wine’, and was growing increasingly drunk by the minute. No, ‘drunk’ is far too mild a word. I was wrecked; swimming in a sea of tuak that seemed to know no end. However, the Iban clearly believed that you could never be too drunk. One young man, who was literally purple in the face, fell to the floor near where I was sitting. The people around him seized this opportunity to prop him up, force his mouth open and pour more tuak down his throat. This was greeted by great hilarity on the part of all present. I made a silent vow not to pass out, but passing out was becoming a very real possibility. The whole longhouse was slowly spinning round me and I felt a horrible nausea coming on. I knew that if I didn’t get out of there fast, I was going to make a nasty mess of the veranda floor. I made my way down the longhouse steps and followed a plankwalk that disappeared into a swamp next to the longhouse. Here, I busily set about vomiting up everything I had eaten and drunk in the last six hours.
Of course, I was not so drunk that I didn’t fear that some horrible jungle creature would pounce on me as I retched and groaned. However, it turned out that a far more insidious creature was stalking me. I felt the vibrations first – something big was coming down the plankwalk toward me. I looked up and to my horror there he stood: Alfred. He had found me. The fact that I was being violently ill didn’t seem to register with him. ‘Come, we go drink tuak!’ he bellowed. Luckily, Anthony appeared just a few moments later and somehow managed to drag him back to the longhouse. As they disappeared into the darkness, Alfred shouted over his shoulder, ‘Chris, I am waiting for you. When you come back, we drink more tuak!’
I was not tempted to join Alfred. In a thick drunken haze, I made my way back to the longhouse, peered down the veranda to make sure that no-one was looking, then made a quick dash for the chief’s house. I stumbled into the empty house and crawled onto a mattress. The whole longhouse seemed to spiral about me. For a moment, I feared that I was going to have to run outside and be sick again, but there was so much alcohol in my bloodstream that unconsciousness quickly took precedence over nausea.
Just as I teetered on the brink of oblivion, something large grabbed my arm and hauled me halfway off the mattress. I opened my eyes to see Alfred staring down at me expectantly. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Now, we go to forty-five doors!’ Even in my wretched drunken state I had to laugh. Was this man serious? Here I was, on the verge of going out like Keith Moon or Jimi Hendrix, and he was suggesting a nightcap of forty-five glasses of tuak! Needless to say, I did not take him up on his offer. As I sank back into unconsciousness, I had a grim vision of the Iban carrying my prostrate form down the length of the longhouse, stopping at each door to pour a glass of tuak down my unprotesting throat.
The next morning at 7 am, the sound of loud music woke me from a tortured sleep. ‘It can’t be,’ I thought, ‘they’re not still at it.’ But they were. The Iban had partied straight through the night. As for me, I was suffering from an apocalyptic hangover. Even the slightest movement caused rays of pain to shoot through my head. A quick New Year’s resolution was in order. I vowed to myself, ‘I shall not, as long as I live, consume another drop of alcohol. It is the bane of my existence. It is the root of all evil. It is the ink with which the fool signs his soul over to the devil. GET THEE BEHIND ME SATAN!’
Unfortunately, Satan was right in front of me. When I opened the door of the chief’s house, an Iban man rushed forward with a glass of tuak in his outstretched hand and said, ‘The local wine!’ I took the cup, and I drank it. In a lifetime of short-lived New Year’s resolutions, this was the shortest.