From Miri to Mulu

You can fly from Miri (a coastal city near the western border of Brunei) to Mulu National Park in less than an hour. By boat the journey takes more than five hours. These speedboats, which resemble airplanes without wings, carry about 100 people and countless boxes and packages lashed to the roof. We got off at Marudi, a town on the Baram River, and had time to eat lunch and have a sarong sewn into a tube (RM 2) at a local shop that sold a little bit of everything imaginable. The shopkeeper asked if we were going to Mulu. She has lived her whole life in Marudi and never been to Mulu.

We got on a different speedboat (second from left in the photo) and went on until we changed to a longboat. The second speedboat made stops at numerous remote villages, and we saw an old woman with stretched earlobes, her heavy brass ear pendants, seashell shaped, lying against her shoulders. The custom has almost completely died out now, and she was the only person with elongated earlobes I saw on the entire trip. In Dennis Lau's wonderful book of photojournalism, Borneo: A Photographic Journey (1999), lots of the people in the pictures from Sarawak practiced this custom. I didn't see her until she was getting off the boat, so no chance to ask for a photo.