on Bornean waterfalls

After a few days of side trips from Kuching we headed deeper into Borneo to stay in a longhouse with the orang asli - the indigenous people here - for a few days. We were greeted with a shot of rice brandy...at nine in the morning. If we were still teetering on the edge of sleep - having woken up early to get there - we weren't anymore.
The plan for the day was for a couple of guides to take us on a walk to a waterfall about an hour away (retrospectively we wondered on what transport). Oh, it's an hour for the guides, maybe it will take you two if you stop a lot to take plenty of pictures. Stop a lot, we did not (no rhyme intended). Take a lot of photos...although it was an amazing walk, better even than Bako, due to the fact that ten inch caterpillars and leeches found us whenever we tried to stop so we did not. Walk at break-neck speed up, and it was always up, for three hours, we did. But wait. That's not a waterfall. That's a road. We could have driven this far!? "Okay, now we're halfway." Halfway!? what on earth happened to an hour if you didn't take pictures!? Sure we stopped for a couple of minutes to take pictures of the insect-eating pitcher plants but that was a couple of minutes no a couple of hours!
Fortunately halfway was a bad estimate. We arrived at the waterfall what seemed like a quarter of an hour later. In reality it took an hour but being able to walk on a flat and dryish path made the time feel negligible compared to our uphill drag across bamboo bridges - one at a time please or we'll roll back to the bottom - slipping back a few inches each time you took a step. But even if we had been walking for ten hours the waterfall would have been worth it. The cool water refreshed our hot sticky skin (my t-shirt as a matter of interest took 48 hours to not quite dry afterwards). The waterfall was layered so it was possible to climb up the rocks to another couple of levels and at the top one, across a pool, the full force of the waterfall could be felt. Finally i understood the herbal essences adverts.
After cooling off and climbing the rocks a bit more we settled down to the bamboo chicken soup that our guides had prepared for us whilst we played in the water and we started contemplating our route home. Down the way we had just come up, back across the bamboo bridges (bridges might be an overstatement, try three shots of bamboo tied together with, sometimes, another as a handrail), back past the leeches, back on the slippery path or on the hilly road which was dry and firm and easy for walking. The shadeless road was unanimously chosen. Shirts were taken off. Shoes were taken off. And we walked up and down the Bornean hills back to the village surrounded by panoramas of the jungle. Lovely.

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