Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure.
— JK Rowling, British author
If Frank Sinatra left his heart in San Francisco, I left mine high on a hill at Ba Kelalan.
It was at Ba Kelalan that I first became a believer.
When I stepped foot on this mountain village in December 1985, it was a sleepy hollow and home to the god-fearing Lun Bawang.
It was different at the turn of the 20th century when the community, then known as Muruts, were Borneo’s most feared headhunters.
They believed in a crocodile spirit which was offered “heads” in a communal funerary ceremony over an effigy of a reptile on a mound of earth.
At neighbouring Bario, the Kelabit believed in supernatural giants who could hop from one mountain to another and sketch their own image on rocks.
The Lundayeh of Kalimantan believed in a famous giant — Yupai Semaring — and a street at Long Bawan has been named after him.
But with the arrival of Australian evangelist Reverend Charles Hudson Southwell in 1928, the tide of change steered the highlanders through calmer waters.
My journey to this 3,000ft-high Central Highlands started after Sarawak cabinet minister and former pastor Datuk Joseph Balan Seling showed me a video which featured a unique event.
In the film, there was a gathering of about a thousand Lun Bawang at a large field in the middle of the night.
Smartly-dressed villagers in white, with their hands raised, were looking up to the sky at strange dancing lights.
It was like a scene from Steven Spielberg’s 1977 Hollywood blockbuster “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”.
This was the story I was looking for and so I embarked on a 1,000-km journey to meet Agung Bangau — a charismatic preacher.
My story in the New Straits Times about “UROs” — unidentified religious objects — and about how Agung was taken up into the clouds by angels, stirred a great deal of public interest.
However, much to my disappointment, the event was not about aliens but a gathering of born-again Christians.
Even so, visiting Ba Kelalan was a life-changing experience because I had arrived at God’s Green Acre.
The Ba Kelalan experience would eventually lead me to write a medley of multifaceted stories about the unique mountain people.
Today, almost 40 years later, Ba Kelalan continues to be an enigma because it is a “Shangrila” in its own right.
Hidden in a mist-covered valley surrounded by lofty mountains, Ba Kelalan is a cluster of eight villages of wet rice cultivators.
From the hill top village of main village of Buduk Nur on the Sarawak-Kalimantan border, Ba Kelalan is a quaint complex of bamboo groves, buffaloes and crystal-clear streams.
On a chilly night, visitors may notice skies with millions of stars which appear for a moment, only to disappear in a split second by a passing rain cloud.
It was here on Sarawak’s highest mountain that Agung built a Christian retreat on a saddle of the 7,950ft Gunung Murud.
It was through Agung and Ba Kelalan’s founding fathers that motivated the villagers to haul equipment on a 10-hour-long trek to build their mountain retreat.
One of the pioneers of Ba Kelalan is prominent pastor Tagal Paran who practically established Buduk Nur and was also a prime mover of the project.
Well into this mid-80s, “Pak Tagal” as he is known, established a 4,000-acre apple orchard and even a horse-breeding farm.
In recent years, he helped build a small hydroelectric dam to provide electricity to light up the only street in town.
Pak Tagal’s greatest contribution was through two sons, lawyer Datuk Mutang Tagal, who was the Member of Parliament for Lawas, and his brother, the late Datuk Dr Juson Sakai Tagal, the assemblyman for Ba Kelalan.
Like his father, Dr Judson was a visionary with big dreams. He was an assistant minister in the Chief Minister’s Office and became Sarawak’s deputy speaker.
In 2003, Dr Judson proposed the formation of Formadat, an organisation devoted to promoting the culture, traditions and sharing the land of their ancestors of the Lun Bawang, Kelabit, Saban and Lundayeh of Kalimantan and Ulu Padas in Sabah.
However, he was killed together with six others in a helicopter crash while making an aerial survey to look at a proposal to build a hydroelectric dam in the Ba Kelalan vicinity in July 2004.
Three months later, the grieving 15,000 highland community honoured their countryman by establishing Formadat.
But after the demise of Dr Judson, his dream of bringing greater glory to his village began to fade away.
No one was willing to support Pak Tagal to foot the bill for the only street lights along Buduk Nur’s wooden shop lots.
Yet, the people still hope that Dr Judson and the Highlanders’ sacrifices will be remembered!
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the New Sarawak Tribune.
