SABAH
TALES FROM THE TIME BEFORE – PART TWO C
It was so long ago, another, more innocent time with fewer regrets and much more certainty. I see those months as small half smelt, half felt fragments that I do not really remember properly; as if obscured by the steam of a train in a black and white film even though the sky was often blue and the rain intense and the air a hot fug. A scented blanket of the smell of half rotten fruit with clothes that got soaked with sweat, soaked with rain and moments later were dry again.
I have told stories about it before to make it exciting; as though I was some dashing character, but I am the opposite of that. I am quiet and unadventurous and rarely know how I have ended up in places like this.
Having said that it was true that the day we crossed the junction of the Sulu Sea with the South China Sea on our way to Kota Kinabalu, pirates from the Philippines did momentarily take over a northern town in Sabah, a few miles away from where we were sailing and that on the island opposite our mooring there was a stilt village that housed migrants to Sabah which was rumoured to be a base for more pirates.
We were pretty much blind to this, as, on this, our first trip here, we didn’t visit that village and instead, while the boat was out the water, having its prop shaft mended, spent some time in the air conditioned rooms of the hotel on the edge of the city. For a short time, we swam off the beach, cleaning the salt of the sea on our skin from showers placed on the sand, for a brief moment feeling delightful coolness before the heat built again in moments.
My memories are so old and so vague that I am not sure I can convey them properly but I remember the vegetables and fruits we bought; long bunches of pak choi and bags of straw mushrooms, rambutans and lychees, mangoes, mangosteens. Pale aubergines, bitter melons; such a variety of different foods to peel and eat with sweet juice on our chins, or those dishes I loved to cook, remembering the meals I was taught to cook in Hong Kong not many months ago.
However, my favourite meal was one we bought in busy cafes in shopping centres; ferns with soy sauce and ginger and garlic and so many veggie noodle and rice dishes all costing us hardly any money.
While the owners were back in Canada, I remember I spent days in the engine room, now the boat was back on the water. I wasn’t used to a yacht with an engine room you could pretty much stand up in. Here, I changed the oil and filters and polished and cleaned until the pipes and hoses looked like out of a magazine and here the sweat streamed down my back. I was young and fit and almost strong, almost lithe then.
It was also here, that one night, my girlfriend woke to see me, through the hatch, smoking a cigarette on the deck only to realise I was sleeping beside her. I still cannot believe that I leapt out of our berth, through the hatch and chased the robbers down the boat where they piled into an inflatable and sped off, taking our petrol tank and oars from our own inflatable with them. Later when we had calmed down we listened to the chatter on the VHF, where boat after boat reported what had been stolen from them too.
Or that day on the island where we saw the huge monitor lizard on the beach; so long, so much like a dragon, we saw them often, or, while walking in the interior, we nearly got run over when a herd of wild pigs came crashing through the vegetation and the trees beside us.
My girlfriend had been keen to find the reflexology for which the area was famed and found Rose, who sort of adopted her and introduced us to her family.
We climbed Mount Kinabalu, yet at eleven thousand feet, the wind was wild and the cloud swirled around us and it was freezing cold, so we hired a sleeping bag and squeezed both of us into it, staying in the hostel for the night while students chattered the night away. In the dark of the morning the prospect of walking up the next three thousand feet didn’t appeal to anyone, so we made our way down the path and back on the bus to the city.
I tried again a few weeks later on my own and failed again. I am not sure why. It was only when we came back years later and went up with Rose’s family and this time were told we needed a guide that I got to the top.
I remember my son and their daughter giggling in their bunkbeds, about the cockroaches on the walls at the rest station, wondering if they would walk into their ears at night time. I remember the awesome sight at dawn the next day, when I reached the summit with my son, who, much fitter than me, bounded across the expanses of rock carefree; frightening me that he would tumble down.
I also remember my jelly legs on the decent where each step down each steep step became an ongoing agony. My son got fed up waiting on me and zoomed down ahead to find the others who had set off hours ago.
The next day Rose insisted I have reflexology for my sore muscles. I winced in embarrassment when she had no qualms about pulling my pants down to massage the muscles down there; it was almost as if my mother had decided to survey and assess my groin! I am not sure if the massage made a difference but do remember it was very painful and that soon I was walking again without hobbling.
The first time we went to Sabah, Roses family took us to a party in a stilt house where, as the man in our couple, I had to drink and drink of the rice wine that we shared in a big upright pot. You had to drink down to a layer of palm leaves and then it was topped up again. My girlfriend saved us both from humiliation when I refused to do a Scottish act to complement the acts and dances everyone else was doing. I Just cannot, cannot do things like that. She sang ‘Donald waurs’s yoor troosers’ and got a huge round of applause. Here, when we were very inebriated, we were introduced to the chief of the village on the island from which the robbers had probably come to steal from our yacht. He was very friendly and pleased to see us and told us if ever we needed anything to let him know.
The second time there, we stayed with Rose’s adult children. I think it might have been Godfrey and Doris but I am very bad at names. They are indigenous to Sabah and tried to explain the rules of Malaysia, if you were Malay or Chinese or Indian in origin or if you were native to Sabah and I wish that I remembered what they were but do remember they were not very happy with them.
It was good staying with them. Their young daughter worked every night till late and on the weekends went to a Chinese school to get better and better at her education. It was a startling insight; this huge determination by her and her parents for her to succeed and better themselves. Sometimes she looked so, so, tired and so sad and uncertain. It made me think of our son who felt no such compunction at his school at home in Scotland.
We often went out to eat; trying a different cuisine each time with me and Godfrey competing to work out who would pay for the meal. It became a thing where we were both so determined to thank each other that even before the meal was half eaten we were looking to see how we could sneak up and pay for everyone; I never fully understood what I was doing but had a feeling it was expected.
They took us up to their village in the hills where they had a house and where their family came from. They showed us their crops and their paddy fields and we ate fruit in the cool calm of inside, made even cooler by the height we were above sea level.
Rose told us the story of her childhood which I cannot quite remember now, much to my shame, but when her children were young, she survived by scavenging the scraps from the fields and lived in terrible poverty. Now she had a clinic and they had houses and a car and Godfrey worked for the Government. One of their children was also working in Kuala Lumpur. We met up with her on our way home and went to markets for food with her and slept in her house.
They came to visit us in Scotland for a week when Godfrey was studying in England for his PHD. They stayed for a week but I fear we were not as hospitable as we should have been. I do remember taking them for a drive round the Highlands and them taking pictures of each other on a single track road and I do remember they bought lots of souvenirs from a tourist shop and I do know I have lost contact with them and doubt I will ever return to Sabah again or see them again. They were very kind indeed to us.
I think I would like to go back again one day. I would like to remember and go back to the innocence where life had not soured so much and I would like the energy I once had. I would like to return the island that we looked on from our yacht and look at the monkeys and the hornbills. I would like to hear the birds and insects and see the slow swagger of the monitor lizards but much more; I would like to have the energy to walk out of my house, here in Cardross with Wendy, to walk over the hill to Renton and to do such a thing, just on a whim. Somehow in the ten years I have been here I haven’t done this. Life and gammy legs and young children got in the way.
Does that matter? No; of course not. I delight every day at my life with Wendy, her children, the dogs, the rabbits. Hugs, kisses, chatter, mini adventures, work; of course work, sometimes this seems as surprising and as exciting as being able to say I once spent some months on the island of Borneo.
Sorry about the quality of most of the photos - they are pretty old!
Another Sunday I hope to talk of when we spent time there again, maybe I will also go back to Luzon and the rice fields in the mountains too.
To learn more about my life and life with a mental illness do read my memoirs START and Blackbird Singing. Available from Geilston Press. Best got from Amazon at the moment.