They measure a longhouse by the number of doors. The longhouse we visited, called Nanga Bangkit, is relatively long at 39 doors.

The stairway we walked up from the river reaches the longhouse in front of door 39. We followed our young friend a long way to door 13, where the Tuai lives.

The longhouse was on stilts about four feet off the ground. The path in front of the longhouse was paved. As we walked down the path, the longhouse was on our right and several smaller sheds were to our left. Behind the sheds was the steep bank down to the river. Between the sheds and the sidewalk we saw lots of large mats covered with a thin layer of rice laid out to dry. Also lots of laundry on clothes lines.

For every door in the house there is also a stairway from the sidewalk up to the porch. We passed 26 of these stairways before the young man leading us walked up the stairs and into one of the doors.

We entered a long, wide, hallway that ran the whole length of the house. It must have been over 100 yards long and about 10 yards wide. It was amazingly sparse. There was almost nothing in this space except people here and there leaning against the walls. At one place nearby we saw many bags of rice and a woman working at a small loom. There was no furniture. Everyone was sitting on the floor, which was covered with linoleum. The linoleum was just rolled over the floor, not attached.

The actual doors into the individual family households sat directly across the great hall from the door at the top of the stairway. So each household had two doors - one into the great hall and another into the house.

We stood in the great hall looking around. The young man had disappeared. People smiled at us but nothing more. We must have looked a little uncomfortable because someone did give us a sort of reassuring, "it's OK" smile.

Finally a very friendly looking middle aged man greeted us. He's the Tuai. We gave him the letter. He looked at it briefly but largely ignored it. I realized later that he was very far sighted and couldn't read very easily without glasses. The letter didn't appear to offer us much of an 'in' at Nanga Bangkit. He handed each of us a guest book. We signed and read some of the other comments. It looked like they get guests about once a month and about half the guests are westerners. Most of the comments were in foreign languages and very brief. The most interesting one was written by a Scotsman named Roberts. He wrote, "Watch out for the Jungle Juice. It kicked my ass!" But other than that, the short comments worried me. Mostly they just said the minimum kinds of things you say to your host like, "Thanks for the hospitality."

But Tuai was very friendly, spoke a little English, and invited us in for some tea with him and his wife. We were in.

Each household has three rooms. The first room is like a living room, the second a dining room, and the third a kitchen. Off the kitchen is a place to bathe and wash dishes. It's a room with widely spaced wooden planks on the floor, so you can run water in the room and let it drip through the cracks onto the ground below. The toilet (a squat type) is outside among the shacks at the top of the river bank.

All the furniture in the living room and dining room was lined against the walls. The centers of the rooms were empty. We sat on the floor in the center of the dining room and Tuai's wife brought out a tray with glasses on it and a kettle of tea. Everything was silent for a while. I smiled and felt awkward. We were very hot. Sweat dripped down our faces.

Looking at them we realized we had woken both of them up. We apologized. Tuai made a show of, "it's OK, no problem" but his wife seemed less generous. She seemed a little annoyed with us the whole time we were there. She avoided us for the most part. We never even learned her name.

The tea was sweet but good. The conversation started and stopped a few times. I don't remember what we tried to talk about. Finally Tuai led us back out into the great hall. He said we could walk around anywhere we wanted so we started wandering down towards door 39.

We didn't make it.

We heard and felt a loud thumping coming from outside. A woman with an amazing row of gold-capped incisors stood just outside the hall pounding a tall pole into a trough. In the center of the trough was a small hole, about four inches across and six inches deep, containing shelled rice. She pounded on the rice until she broke all the shells then scooped it out of the hole put it to one side and with her foot she refilled the hole with unshelled rice from the other side.

We watched for a minute then I tried it. It was harder than it looked. I completely missed the hole a couple times and the pole is fairly heavy. It's about the width of the thick part of a baseball bat and eight feet tall. I kept at it, trying to change my technique to improve my accuracy. The women lit a cigarette so I figured I would continue until she finished.

Joan tried rice pounding too. She may have been a natural at goat milking (see Alaska chaps) but she's not too good at rice pounding. She could hardly get the pole in the hole at all. (Joan: It's very hard to ram a tall, heavy object into a hole near your bare foot. When I missed, I was worried I'd break the wooden trough. So I gave the pole back to Eric, who is obviously genetically inclined to this kind of work).

We passed an open door and saw about 10 kids and a few adults surrounding a TV showing an Arnold Schwarzeneggar movie. They invited us in and we watched for a while.

A couple doors down a few men sitting in a circle in the middle of the great hall beckoned us. We hesitated. An Iban beckon, with the palm down and the fingers waving at the floor, can easily be confused for a western "go away" signal. The more we hesitated the more vigorous they beckoned so we figured out they wanted us to come over. They were the first people to be really enthusiastic about meeting us, which felt really good. Also, they were quite drunk.

We sat on the floor in the circle with them. In a second we each had a glass of Tuak (rice wine) in front of us. It looks like lemonade. I really wanted to like it but didn't expect to. To my surprise, it tasted fine. Sort of like a fruity white wine. It would be easy to drink a lot. I certainly did.

Our drinking buddies were having a grand time. One told us he had been drinking for 24 hours straight. Too bad we hadn't arrived the day before. After we polished off the gallon jug in the middle of the circle, they took us into one of the households where several more guys drank tuak. Anytime my glass emptied, someone quickly filled it. I didn't mind.

All of these guys seemed between 25 and 35. I don't remember any women around except Joan. They all smoked. Most of them were related in some way - brothers, cousins or something - but they all looked very different. Each had a very distinctive look and each very different from the others. Sooyau had a thin face. Sebastian was much heavier. Another guy had an unusually flat face.

After a few more glasses of tuak, these guys were old friends. We told him we wanted to hike in the jungle some. Sooyau kept saying, "I want to follow you to the jungle." I trusted him completely, though he did make us nervous when he assured us he would not rob us on the way.

Sooyau grew up in the longhouse but didn't live there anymore. He had been a tractor driver for a logging company but recently built a house and opened a shop between the school and the longhouse. He really really wanted to show us his place. I told him I wanted to finish this one more glass of tuak but as soon as I finished, someone filled it again. I didn't mean to stall him but it must have seemed that way. Eventually Sooyau just about dragged us out.

On the way out, someone put his arm around me and whispered, "Don't tell Tuai." I'm still not sure what I'm not suppose to tell. Tuai has nothing against a good party now and then, I'm sure.

Next: Sooyau's home and shop

Borneo Main Page   Malaysia Main Page   World Trip