A road leads here
by Caro
There never used to be a road to Kampung Buayan, one of the nine villages along the famed Salt Trail of the Crocker Range in Sabah. The people only had a jungle track that took them over hills and across rivers.
But a road arrived here in November.
It didn’t arrive with fanfare, rather it crept up onto this Dusun village in a slow crawl. When my friend Roy and I visited a year ago, there was already an earth road that ended near a sulap (hut) belonging to former school teacher Michael. That was where the villagers would catch their ride as a 4WD can reach this point most of the time. From here to Buayan, it would be a two-hour walk for the local people, and a three-hour one for me.
On that last trip a year ago, though, we had to start walking from much further away as the river was too high for the car to go across to the sulap. That added another hour to our walk – and all in all, we took over four hours to get to Buayan.
This time, a year later, we could have made it all the way to Buayan in a car although there was a point when we thought we could not. The road is newly carved out of the hillslope, and becomes a sticky mudtrap in the rain.
Still, we were making good time until we came across a 4WD stuck in the mud. It couldn’t go forward or backwards, and blocked our path as well. As it goes in these remote parts, the men of our car and the stuck car had a brief chat before they brought out the cables and hooked them to the cars. Our car reversed with a mighty roar, and pulled the other car from the grip of the mud. It took about half an hour to move the car to one side, giving us enough room to get past. The other car didn’t have proper tyres so it should have returned to town but we later realised that it tried to go on. On our way out two days later, we saw it abandoned by the roadside. I guess it must have got stuck and pulled out again, and decided not to try its luck again.
We didn’t go all the way by car to Buayan though, as Roy had interviews to do in Kampung Tiku. The car dropped us off there, and it was a short walk through the rice terraces to the house of Gilong, a farmer with nine children. He was chilling in an open space in front of his house, with his children enjoying the last day of freedom before school reopens the next day. Roland, who would be starting kindergarten, was fast asleep in a corner while his older brother scaled a tree to pluck us fresh langsat. His sisters were shy and peeped at us from inside the house.
Gilong is an unassuming man with a robust entrepreneurial spirit. He tills a padi field which provides the family with enough rice for the whole year from its once-a-year harvest, and also owns a small rice mill. They have a well-kept sulap where they run a small store and warong on the weekends. Life is still back-breaking, though, as they do everything for themselves.
The lack of a cash economy makes life tough, and it always shocks me to hear that they cannot afford the things that we throw away because it’s so cheap. Sugar, for one.
“Oh no, not sugar. Sugar is too expensive,” Gilong said as he was listing out the items that they buy from town. Salt, cooking oil, gas, petrol – things like that. But not sugar.
I asked about the new road. He looked blank for a moment, and then said they have not used it because they do not have a car or motorcycle. It’s expensive to get a seat in the 4WDs which ply the route – about RM30 one way.
It’s also too expensive, he said, to use road transport to send their goods for sale in town. The villagers still prefer to float their rubber sheets on a raft down the Papar river to a jetty for collection.
The road, which will be extended 15km to the last village of Long Kongungan this year, is no magic bullet although it’s undoubtedly useful. As we left Kampung Tiku to walk to Buayan, we too did not use the new road. It would have been too hot, having no shade. Like the rest of the villagers, we used the old jungle track shaded by dense trees.
The walk is about an hour. About 17 schoolchildren from Kampung Tiku still use the jungle trail for their school run every morning, setting out about 630am.
The road is still novel enough for the villagers to talk about it. People still ooh and ahh when a mud-splattered car arrives.
“She arrived all the way here in a car!” Irene, the kindergarten teacher, told us with a beam as she hugged her eldest daughter who had returned after finishing her training as a nurse in the city.
Even I, a visitor, had to wrap my head around the idea of cars in Buayan. In my head, Buayan is still the pristine quiet village in the middle of the jungle. And so, it startled me when we first arrived to see two cars parked outside the teachers’ houses.
The newest teacher, Joseph from Johor, told us he has been able to use the road since he was posted here at the end of last year. It might otherwise have been even more difficult for this city boy to adjust. The teachers seem happy that it’s easier to travel to Kota Kinabalu where they spend their weekends.
But cikgu Mona, who has been here three years, had mixed feelings.
“It doesn’t feel like Buayan anymore,” she said. Though a city girl, she requested a posting here because she liked its remoteness and relished the weekly jungle walks to the car pickup point.
I know what she meant. Its inaccessibility had given Buayan a magical feel.
Now, instead of creating a life in this village, many people head out for the city lights. The jungle trail is also no longer well-maintained. Irene told us the villagers haven’t had time to organise a gotong-royong this year to clear the path before school started.
Still, the road is a blessing. The people no longer have to haul gas tanks on their backs home. They have better access to the town’s amenities although it remains prohibitively expensive. But perhaps at some point, they will plant cash crops to sell in town and create a sort of cash economy that is needed for modern survival.
And it can be a life-saver in times of medical emergencies. We witnessed this first hand when one of our party fell ill. We had planned to stay three days but on the second day, Lano was in severe pain. In the past, he would have to be carried out or a government helicopter summoned but this time, we could call for a car.
We still had to wait several hours for the car after a text message was successfully sent out. By and by, we spotted bright lights flashing in the far distance like an alien spaceship about to land. It was the car’s headlights in the deep darkness; Buayan has no electricity supply. The lights came closer and closer to us, and stopped in a field behind the house.
With goodbyes to Irene, her husband Julius and children, we left Buayan and were back in the bright lights of KK in 2 hours.
As with all things in life, the road is neither all bad nor all good, neither an unmitigated evil nor a full blessing. Everything good brings some loss with it, and everything bad can have something good hidden inside. The road can save lives in emergencies, and it will eventually help the people earn more and make their lives more comfortable.
But at the same time, something intangible is lost, and this loss is not lost on the people.
Buayan: part one
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