PA’ UKAT, Malaysia — You can always find romance on the road, and I’m not talking about some of the Malaysian bars I’ve been to on this trip. Candles add a touch of mystery to evenings in strange places, especially during dinner.
I’ve had some memorable ones. Quaint cafes in Paris. Decks of sailboats in Polynesia. Even beaches in Cambodia.
I just never thought I’d have a candlelight dinner with descendents of headhunters.
But here I am in the middle of Borneo, in one of the most isolated places on Earth, dining with a family from the second-smallest ethnic group in Malaysia. The Kelabit don’t head-hunt anymore. They stopped in the early 1900s when their youth decided they’d rather work for Shell Oil and live on the beach than lop off people’s heads.
While most Kelabit (pronounced Kell-AW-bit) are now educated, well traveled and speak English, in many ways they live the same way they have for centuries.
We ate by candlelight, not for ambiance but by necessity. There is no electricity here. In three days trekking the Kilabit Highlands, I saw no power lines. None. The region’s lone Internet cafe is solar driven.
It’s easy to reach Pa’ Ukat. Just fly from Denver to Los Angeles to Taipei to Kuala Lumpur to Miri on Borneo and then to the village of Bario. Get out, put on leech-proof socks and trek through ankle- deep mud and thigh-gnawing leeches 6 ½ hours to a crude shelter.
Take a rain bath during a downpour that would capsize Noah’s Ark, sleep on a wooden floor and trek eight hours to Pa’ Ukat. Actually, Pa’ Ukat is only an hour’s hike from Bario, but the detour I took will sound better at my Pearl Street wine bar.
The meal was worth the leeches. Pa’ Ukat is at the back of beyond. It sits about 4 miles from Kalimantan, the Indonesian side of Borneo, in a gorgeous green valley at nearly 5,000 feet. It’s rimmed by limestone cliffs and mountains stretching through late- afternoon mist. A narrow river snakes through the valley lined with rice paddies and fields of pineapple, papaya and tapioca.
W.M. Tonybee, a Canadian who taught primary school here in the ’60s, called the Kelabit Highlands “a Shangri- la where the climate is ideal, food is plentiful and the girls are beautiful.”
It still holds true today, particularly the food. Bario’s famous pineapple makes Hawaii’s taste canned. The Japanese think the area’s rice is the best in the world. Even the local salt is considered healthier.
I dined with the Kelabit family in their home, what they call a longhouse. It’s just what it sounds like. It’s a long house with up to 17 families living in rooms attached to a “common room,” a wide hallway stretching up to 300 feet. The Kelabit, despite moving on to university degrees and stodgy jobs in Europe, still maintain these homes after hundreds of years. Many longhouses don’t have electricity, making cooking and dining a mysterious challenge.
My host was Kerab Aren, 46, a well-groomed chili farmer wearing a white polo shirt and mod glasses, and his smiling wife, Sinah. James, their sixth-grade son and the only one of four kids sticking around Pa’ Ukat, hides shyly while his mother cooks by candlelight.
When Aren was younger, he used a blowgun to hunt food. Wild boar. Deer. Porcupine. Nothing was safe from his poisoned darts 50 feet in.
Now he just has a neighbor cut throats, but the cooking is still at its most base element. A load of firewood gathered in the jungle is piled over a raging fire where a pot of rice is boiling. Sinah chopped green beans and water buffalo in such dim light you wonder if a finger would find its way into the vegetables.
She stir-fried the food over liquefied natural gas and served it on the matted kitchen floor as we all gather around. The candles cast the kitchen in a warm, quiet glow. The fire crackled. I heard villagers singing Christian hymns in the church next door.
After blessing the meal — Australian missionaries converted the Kelabit to Christianity in the 1940s — Aren says, “Eat it all.” My mom used to tell me that when I was a kid, but I always ignored her. Then again, she wasn’t a descendant of head-hunters and didn’t get our mac and cheese with a blowpipe. I eat every grain of rice.
I had no problem. The water buffalo, slaughtered the day before, was a little chewy but rich with just enough chili spice for a kick. The odd- shaped four-sided green beans and ginger were really garden fresh. Brinjals, a Malaysian vegetable, tasted like eggplant. The dish of canned sardines, onions, ginger and garlic worked despite the mishmash. We end it with a big, heaping bowl of fresh papaya straight from the nearby fields.
While trekking through the jungle, I was dying for a pizza from Basil Doc’s, my favorite pizza joint in Denver. I don’t have that craving anymore.
The Post’s John Henderson writes about food while on the road covering sports and travel. Jhenderson@denverpost.com or 303-954-1299.
