24 November 2022
Bario, is located deep in the heart of Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, on the high plateau of the Kelabit Highlands and home to the Kelabit people for hundreds of years. It is a delightful place, where our airport collecting got us to.
We flew here from Miri, the gateway to small airport collecting paradise. Miri, when we woke up, was miserable with heavy rain and thick, low cloud. Not ideal weather conditions for flying into very short runways in the jungle, surrounded by mountains. I was very sceptical if our flight would go ahead, but it did ;-). The co-pilot of the delightful Twin Otter recognised us – apparently, he flew us to Long Akah & back a few days ago. The pilots were relaxed about our flight in this weather so I decided to relax as well. We enjoyed a delightful flight via Marudi to Bario with 2 other passengers.
Once we had settled on Malaysia as our main destination for this trip, Alan set to work on trying to maximize the number of airports we could add to our collection. There are some intriguing sounding airports nearby in Sarawak, namely Long Akah, Long Banga, Long Lallang, Long Seridan, and Bakelalan.
The frequencies of these flights were far less than we hoped. We could not understand why we could fly to an airport but not fly onwards from nearby airport or back straight away on the same plane. Unfortunately, with the jungle terrain, it would not be possible to fly to, for example, Long Banga and fly back from Long Lallang, even though they are only about 60 kilometres apart. There is no road or river to connect them. Therefore, our normal method of into one airport and out of another would not work. The flights are nice and cheap but this did not help when we couldn’t book them.
Once we got to Sarawak, it became clear why we could not easily book return flights straight away. Although the aircraft operating are Twin Otters with 20 seats, because of runway length restrictions they only sell between 7 to 9 seats per flight and some destinations are only served once or twice per week and quite a lot of locals fly from villages to towns.
We managed to get to Bario, which is a simply charming place. The locals are so friendly, the paddy fields are incredibly green, surrounded by delightful hills and mountains. It really is a treat amongst our many treats.
There was only one place to book on Booking.com, and we struck gold! We stayed in this The Longhouse with our hostess, Jane. This longhouse is really long – about 100 meters and shared by 24 households. On the outside, it does not look that different to a row of terraced houses with their own entrances. The magic starts when you walk in as there is a 100-meter hallway shared by all the families – it’s maybe 5 meters wide. You can easily nose around and see what a neighbour is cooking or what they are watching on the TV. Behind the communal hall are more private rooms and the exit to another long hall which is empty and only used for events. On the walls, there are pictures of the family events, ancestors, and other achievements like university diplomas or work certificates. Jane takes us on the tour around and introduces to all the habitants of the Longhouse.
There used to be 24 families living here, each having many children. Now, the youngsters emigrate to bigger cities, and there are only 15 permanently inhabited houses with ageing populations.
Western explorers had no idea until the early twentieth century that this self-sufficient mountain community of Kelabit Tribes existed. They lived peacefully cultivating their traditions. Now you can see only traces of the old way of behaviour. For example, babies, when they were about 10 days old, were presented with heavy earrings, which throughout their life caused their pierced earlobes to stretch longer and longer. A female would not find find a husband if she did not have long earlobes with heavy earrings. Now, there are only 6 women with long earlobes in the village. The younger generation cut the ears short, and now the kids are no longer presented with earrings at birth. You can not see a single man with long earlobes.
We were lucky enough to meet most of the women and listen to their stories as Jane knows everyone in the village and happily introduced us. We spent a good few hours at the village market with Jane trying local specialities: deer curry, samba – local rice with spicy anchovies, wild vegetables with garlic, and a kind of soup made of leaves from a jungle tree, topped up by a local Laksa.
Another tradition of Kelabit people (men and women) is to change their names completely a few times throughout their lives: first time when the first child is born, second time when the first grand child is born, third time when the first great grand child is born etc…
Most of the visitors come here to do well organised jungle treks. The most challenging of them, apart from the one to Marud, is the climb to Batu Lawi, the strange double-horned peak. We chose to see it from the plane 😉 by doing a there and back flight to Long Seridan from Bario. We had been lucky enough to secure seats on these flights a few days ago. We awoke to very low cloud again and lots of barking dogs and cockrells. Luckily, this cleared quite quickly, and yet again, the Twin Otter took off early, with one other passenger, and this really was the best of sightseeing flying you can imagine. It seemed like we flew through the mountains rather than above them, and the tiny village of Long Seridan was beautifully located. We would like to have stayed there but could not imagine using 10 days of our time before the next flight!
We have met the same pilots on several occasions, and they now understand why we are flying there and back with them.
If you would like to book the stay at the Longhouse please see the link below.https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063458199777
To book the flights, you need to go to this Mas Wings website.
What a lot of local people do is book a waitlist ticket and come to the airport with a hope to fly. We do not know what the success rate of this type of travelling is as we had no time to test it, but if you are keen on trying, that option exists.
Please see the current timetable of the flights in the picture below



