Suzan Crane journeys through the wetlands, forests and mountains of one of SE Asia’s last great hideouts for nature and wildlife. En route she stays in a longhouse with some of the few remaining hunters and gatherers and gets caught in an elephant stampede. (Originally published as At Home with the Headhunters in KLM Airline’s inflight Holland Herald, February 2005. DOWNLOAD)

I am hot, sweaty and itching like a dog with fleas. The insidious little creatures known as sand flies have marked their territory on every inch of my body. Slipping and sliding down steep muddy embankments, progress impeded by fallen trees and the aggressive attacks of prickly skinned bushes, we venture deep into the bowels of Malaysian Borneo’s primeval rainforest.

“I take you to a hidden paradise,” Jok, my Kayan driver, says as we walk further into the bush. Then I see them, barely visible amidst the dense jungle foliage: several primitive dwellings constructed of ragged tree branches and torn bark welded together by thin strips of rattan.

Intentionally eschewing the well-trodden tourist track I have collided with an extraordinary parallel universe.

Curious eyes and toothless smiles greet our arrival at the camp of this small group of Penan nomads, the most remote of Sarawak’s 27 indigenous tribes and amongst the last remaining hunter-gatherers on earth. In an archaic world where time has no meaning and people don’t know their age, daily life consists of simply finding food: blowpipes with poison darts to hunt wild boar, monkeys and mouse deer; bamboo baskets to collect sago, their dietary staple.

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