The tuak had me feeling really good on the short walk to Sooyau's place. Sooyau felt even better and walked the whole way with his arm around me. Nine years ago 30 people, mostly from England, came to Nanga Bangkit and built a hanging bridge over the Sungei Bangkit (Bangkit River). The school was on one side of the bridge and the long house on the other. Sooyau's place was at the end of the bridge on the longhouse side of the river. The perfect location.

Sooyau's place was two stories, about four rooms. We didn't see upstairs. He built it himself, I'm sure with some help from friends and family. All the lumber he cut himself. Everything is fairly rough but solid. The floor is concrete. In the middle of the shop half of the room is a huge table for customers to sit at. This is nice. In the longhouse people rarely use chairs or benches. They almost always sit on the floor.

The shop didn't have a lot. He'd only been open a month. Some warm drinks like beer and soda, potato chip type things in small bags, toys in plastic packages. We bought some "cuttlefish crackers" that didn't taste too bad. I would have bought a beer if it was at least a little chilled.

Sooyau lives there with his wife, daughter, and grandfather. His wife was nine months pregnant and the prettiest women I saw on our visit.

We didn't stay long because Tuai had said they would make dinner for us at 7 p.m. Before we left, we arranged with Sooyau to meet him at 8 a.m. for a hike to the waterfalls. (He also offered to take us to the "mountain," but he warned us, "The Mountain is Very Tired," meaning we would be very tired if we tried the marathon hike. So we settled on the falls).

Tuai's wife cooked most of the food we had brought. On the floor in the middle of the dining room they had several glass dishes containing beans, corned beef hash, peas, and a couple of unidentified things. (Joan: I hate corned beef hash and tried to tell Richard when we were shopping back in Song, but he threw it in anyway). There were also two large plastic bowls of rice. They gave Joan and me spoons but Tuai and his wife ate with their hands. They served plenty of food.

One of the unidentified dishes turned out to be pig. I didn't know which part of the pig, nor did I want to know. It did not have a meat like color or texture and it was very chewy. Tuai kept offering it to us like it was the best dish they had. It seemed impossible to turn down so I tried to take as small a chunk as possible. Thankfully it was mostly bone. Other than that, the food was fine and plentiful.

Tuai asked our occupations. I always tell people I'm an engineer. If I tell them I'm in computers, they often start telling me about their problems with their favorite word processor or something. I hate this. No one at Nanga Bangkit has a computer though, so I should have said that. Instead, I said engineer.

Tuai then told me, of course, about the engineer who visited once. He went wild boar hunting and fishing in the hills and one day fixed Tuai's generator. He thought that was pretty great, this guy fixing his generator. I just smiled. There was nothing I would have loved more than to be able to fix something for these people but I didn't have a clue how to fix a generator. Now I back pedaled." Mostly I work with computers," I said. He didn't understand me but he didn't dig out a broken generator either. At least not then.

After dinner Tuai's wife showed us her weaving--for sale. Our guide book said the women at Nanga Bangkit were excellent weavers. It's true. I felt some pressure to buy because we had invaded their home and lives essentially uninvited. They were cooking and cleaning for us and we slept on their floor. But the rugs looked great and the price was great considering the time it takes to make one of these. We purchased a middle-sized rug from her. It was a great buy and it made us feel like we were returning some of the favor they had done for us by boarding us.

The rest of the evening was quiet. We watched television and talked a little. Thankfully we sat on Tuai's soft chairs. (Oddly, most people in the longhouse sat on the floor in front of their chairs, not on the chairs themselves. Sometimes they went so far as to lean back on the chair while sitting on the floor in front of it. I guess that made them last longer). The corners of my body were starting to hurt from all the floor sitting. A bunch of kids sat on the floor in the middle of the room staring at the TV. The shows were in Malay so we didn't understand anything but from the looks of them, I don't think we missed much.

We looked around Tuai's living room. The room was fairly large, maybe 15 feet wide and 30 feet deep. They had a nice couch and two chairs around a coffee table at the front of the room. They had a nice doily cloth over the coffee table and a thick piece of plastic over that. Most of the flat surfaces, except the chairs, had these plastic coverings. (Joan: the place looked like the homes of some of my Filipino relatives--lots of little doilies covered by plastic).

The chairs and coffee table took up only a small part of the end of the room nearest the door. The stairs were on the left wall as we entered. The rest of the wall had more couches and chairs lined against it. They never used these however. In fact, some of the cushions were removed and stacked in a corner for some reason.

The far wall and the right wall we lined with dressers. The dressers had windows so you could see inside. They had nice china sets in some of them. Mostly they had folded weavings inside. At least one shelf of one dresser was full of woven rugs like the one we bought.

On top of the dresser they had lots of pictures of the family and a few Catholic religious symbols like crucifixes and pictures of Jesus. Some of the family pictures had an odd sort of old-fashioned look. They looked a little like black and white photos and a little like cartoons. It took us a while to figure out that they were touched up photos. It turned out that just about everyone had similar pictures where the photograph is painted so that the hair, clothes, and faces are strangely perfect. All the texture is removed. Their hair was just black. You couldn't distinguish individual hairs. The clothes also were just one color - you couldn't distinguish any folds or pockets. When we saw wedding pictures in other households, it was hard to tell they were of different people.

After the kids left they brought out two thin futons and some pillows. We spread the rolls along one wall and put sheets on one of the futons. That one turned out to be ours. Tuai and his wife slept on the other.

A stairway leads to an upstairs loft and I'm not sure why they didn't sleep up there. We never saw the loft.

Before we went to sleep, Tuai's wife lit a gas lamp and put it across the room from us. Tuai walked out with a flash light and turned off the generator. The lights went out. He came back using the flash light. This is their nightly ritual. He sat the flashlight on the coffee table (the only piece of furniture not against a wall). I realized a little too late that this is for bathroom breaks. It's very dark out there. I stumbled and had to guess where to pee when I got up in the middle of the night.

Neither of us slept great. It was too hot. Through the thin walls we periodically heard the neighbors for awhile before we dozed off.

Next: Sooyau leads us through the jungle.

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