Through Darkest Borneo with Mayonnaise Jar and E. A. Poe

The noted writer-naturalist-golfer Paul Sochaczewski has been to more countries, real and weird, than a Medieval fabulist could conjure out of an addled brain. In a typical e-mail last week, he wrote that he would be going, he wrote “to Pangkalan Bun in Kalimantan for the Festival Keraton Indonesia X, a gathering of (some of the) 300+ sultans and rajahs from Indonesia.” Then, he wrote, almost incidentally, that he would be climbing a volcano with his son.

For this hack writer, Paul missed the point of Kalimantan. The huge southern half of Borneo, with its forests, jungles, crumbling cities, diversity, its royalty which claims ancestry to the Prophet Mohammed, where Joseph Conrad formed his early epics, is–to a foodie like myself–deserving of a more important accolade: It truly has a sauce so dragon-breathingly pungent that it makes the usual choices of Old Asian Hands seem like chocolate marshmallow sundaes.

Sitting around secluded gardens and tiled coffee tables on any Asian beach can be found Old Asian Hands. One recognizes Old Asian Hands, since they are usually freckled, lined, brown with tobacco stains, fingernails dungy and cracking, and frequently shaking with palsy, rage, drink and sudden spasms as their cigarette butts burn down to the skin.

Old Asian Hands also are identified by their memories of hot food. When not comparing the women of Asia or the politics of Asia or the beers of Asia, they compare peppers. They vie with each other, contrasting curries from Ceylon (never Sri Lanka) with rendang beef in Sumatra and with Sriracha fish sauce in Thailand. And they go on and on and on.

Although a non-smoker and a non-beer drinker, I participated sporadically in their chili discussions. We compared green Thai chilies with yellow Mexican jalapeno. Szechuan fagara beans with Xinjiang Moslem hot pots. But always in these hot-tempered discussions, somebody would come up with the hottest food, silencing others … until the next pepperklatsch.

Yes, in the old days I would partake of these burning talks. But having found the hottest condiment in the history of the universe, I have no intention of participating any longer. They can have their Ceylon, Thailand, Malaysia, Mexico…I (to paraphrase from Bergman in Casablanca) will always have Borneo.

I speak of a sauce that comes secretly across the border from Indonesian Borneo to Sabah. Perhaps transported by native carrier, perhaps on the backs of water buffalo tramping through remote rice fields, perhaps by the Punan people, who hide in the forest and appear like spirits…
But I get ahead by myself.

That comes later. Actually, I never visited Kalimantan, though I came close when commissioned to write about the orang-utan reserve in Gisoro on the extreme east of the island, facing the islands of the Philippines Moro population.

This was in the province of Sabah, notable for Mount Kinabalu, the highest in southeast Asia. And also for a plethora of Venus Flytraps, and the flora and fauna.

After Gisoro, my friend Andy and I drove up to Mount Kinabalu, preparing to climb its 12,000 feet. Fortunately, as we were driving to the base of the mountain glimpsing the primordial trail disappear through the trees and crevices preparing to ascend its mighty peak … well, either Andy or I may have felt a drop of moisture.

“Guess it’s gonna rain,” said Andy.

“Yep. Too bad. It woulda been nice to climb to the top,” said I.

“Sure would have. Better turn back,” said Andy. “We can look at the Venus Flytraps.”

Anyhow, back to the chilies. In Kota Kinabalu one afternoon, Andy and I had been standing on the main street by the port watching the fast-talking patent medicine salesmen telling how their potions would cure blood poisoning, toothaches and curses from spurned girlfriends. Seeing our interest, an urbanized gentleman from the dominant tribe, the Kadazan, approached us and inquired why we had come to Sabah. We mentioned various exotic sights to see. He looked at us curiously, then shook his head. And scoffed.

“I see no particular reason why you should have come here,” he told us. “Outside of this city, Sabah is only wild jungle. No roads are built. It would have been better if you hadn’t come at all. Or, since you are already here, then stay in the city. Out there is too much jungle. And far too many trees.”

Having made his point, he turned back to the patent medicine salesman. We pondered on the possible abominations of trees.

Then he turned to us again and revealed what he could not reveal before. That yes, Sabah did have one reason for being. And that single reason was enough to justify our journey.

“We have,” he said with dark and heavy foreboding, “the hottest chili sauce in existence.”

Well, of course we grinned. Foolishly, as it turned out. We, as American sophisticates living in Asia, laughed with a hearty guffaw. Yes, we’d heard that one before. We knew the tales, we’d tasted the peppers. And what did Borneo have anyway? Sago, cassava, rice, papaya … Never heard of no peppers here. Somerset Maugham’s tongue was never burned enough for him to write “Of Human Bandage”. Joseph Conrad never tasted peppers spicy enough to jump back and shout “Lord! Grim!”

But the man who took us aside on that main street in Kota Kinabalu was not so easily put off. He spoke not in words but in italics and underlines and whispers.

In fact, before our eyes, he was transformed into Edgar Allen Poe himself.

“I tell you, having heard from B — -, the great taster of chilies, that they do exist! That the torridity is deserving of a Latin curse! That across the wide expanse of the jungle, lying outstretched and lit by a white crest, is the blood-red oh so curséd pepper plant which, though remote, has the fervid savagery of the ancient Babylonians, an Aztec sacrificial table 10,000 feet high, within its blasted stem.”

He sighed, wrapped a black cloak around his shoulders, buttoned his Burberry raincoat and hastened off into the night.

(No, no, you’re right. It didn’t happen that way. Actually, he said: “Hey, you gotta eat Borneo chilies. Hotter’n anything you ever tried before.”)

Well, neither Andy nor I believed him, but we remained on the lookout. We were told that this sauce came not from Sabah itself (the British one-time colonialists having banned the pepper) but from Indonesian Borneo, a hundred miles to the south.

Since we were never to climb Mount Kinabalu, we decided to make another pilgrimage, this for the sacred pepper. Easier than climbing a mountain, we resolved to find the pepper on the Tenom express.

Tenom was the obvious destination, for a) it was located right in the middle of the jungle, with no roads going in either direction, and b) railroad tracks were actually laid down for Tenom in about 1890. They were supposed to continue to the coast, but through bad engineering and the usual corruption, the money ran out. So today the train runs along the coast from Kota Kinabalu, then down through the jungle, ending at Tenom, a town that goes into the mysterious interior.

“If the chilies are anywhere,” I told Andy in italics, “they will be in Tenom.”

We boarded the seven-car diesel engine train early one morning, and started peacefully chugging along at eight miles an hour. Not only is this train spotlessly clean, but it is the quietest in Asia. No restaurant car here: One loads up on papaya and pineapple and bread at the first station, Tanjung Aru. Within a minute, one is lounging in the countryside. To one side is the South China Sea, with a few islands jutting out, a few cargo boats taking timber, tankers on the horizon heading to nearby Brunei.

The other side of the train has more variety. Open lawns running into glistening rice fields. Children running outside the schools. Twenty miles on, the scenery became dense with the roots of a sadly depleted jungle. Potholed roads with sixteen-wheel trucks dragging big trees from the interior. Mangroves and casuarina trees guarded the train from the sky, with the vast empty beaches leading to the pine-brown sea.

At each tiny town — hamlets with a few palms, a main street of Chinese concrete shophouses, a mosque, a Buddhist temple and a church — the train would creak to a halt. Mail would be thrown over the side, fruit-sellers walk up to the windows, a few passengers saunter aboard, their clothing more varied than the scenery. Teenage girls in T-shirts and sarongs, old ladies in cheap cheongsams and Malay scarves, men in shorts and fedoras, children wearing starched white shirts, green shorts and Malay flat hats. They sat quietly and munched fruit and stared at us, then back to the scenery.

Four hours later, we plunged into the jungle. The accursed jungle, which Borneo people call, with onomatopoeic justification, the ulu.
Only the trains can crawl through the ulu, since roads would be quickly overgrown by the vegetation. The exuberant Kadazan passengers were replaced by the more morose jungle-dwelling Murut people. The train was now cruising in the huge Crocker Gorge, rising two hundred feet from the Padas River. We could see a few flat rafts and boats paddled desperately in the brown flowing street.

On the banks far below, an old man stood with a three-foot lizard he had just caught, waving the poor reptile to us on the train.

“A strange pet,” said Andy.

“A momentary pet, destined for the cooking pot.”
We both considered the ephemerally of reptilian life, but then moved on.

This was the scenery we expected in Borneo. The forest primeval, beautiful, impenetrable. And somehow comfortable. Yet we found, like Gertrude Stein, that “there was no there there.” Tenom was a square block of concrete shops around a dismal park. Three tiny shops, a dozen poolrooms, a few Chinese and Malay restaurants, and one hotel perched irrationally seven hundred feet up a hill. With a picture-postcard view of the tiny town and the surrounding jungle.

Nobody stays here, so the main diversion of the staff is watching the train arrive in the afternoon. And departing in the morning.

Again paraphrasing from Bogart on the peppers, “We must have been misinformed,” since they did not exist in this town and the plantations outside had only wild coffee.

A few days later, though, our mysterious E.A. Poe amanuensis was judged correct. By following our noses, we discovered Pungent Paradise. And frankly, our noses almost fell off in the process.

Coming back to the capital, we had been told that on Saturday — only on Saturday — one section of the Kota Kinabalu market would have the celebrated chili sauce. The whispers around the city rumored that an expedition of illegal refugees from Indonesian Borneo was expected near the capital, and they would be carrying this, their only treasure, to sell.

That Saturday, we planned our strategy. The concrete market that leaned precariously on the port was massive. We plowed through rambutans and dried beef, sticky rice, dry rice, green rice, brown rice. We sauntered through basket shops and bamboo shops and through the fish market and … and then we had it.

Rather, noses had it. It was a smell that severed our nostrils like a yakitori master severs a chicken. Our quarry was over a hundred feet away, yet our eyes started to tear, our noses to run — and with the enthusiasm only a hot-pepper man can exercise — I started to run too, with Andy close behind me.

There it was. A great barrel, which Poe would have called a maelstrom of steaming blood-red pepper juice, sizzling, smoking, stirred by an untainted lady in a ramshackle shawl and hat.

We approached, like Dante’s hero approaching the River of Flames. Upon our miming request, she spooned out for us — in a large Hellmann’s Real Mayonnaise jar — our real Kalimantan chili sauce, which we covered (lest it escape), then taped, triple-taped it, wrapped in zinc foil, and smuggled on to the plane and into an unsuspecting Hong Kong where we lived at that time.

That sauce lasted us for eight long months. It took only one drop — a single bead of the brew — to light up any curry. The secret was not only the hottest jungle peppers in the world, but that when the peppers were crushed with mortar and pestle, they were crushed with a dull mortar and pestle. So the skin, the seeds (the seeds being the secret of the sizzling heat) remained virtually whole, while concoctions of garlic and bits of onion were added.

Never have any people had hotter, more satisfying peppers. The steam was demonic, the taste was of pitchforks rammed into the tongue, the eye ducts became reservoirs, the nasal passages opened like the Grand Canyon. Our satisfaction was complete.

And today, when I see and hear those Old Asian Hands talking of their spicy memories, I can only cry and laugh. When speaking of pepper sauce competitions, it’s a jungle out there. But we, Andy and I, had been to the jungle. And our eyes, remembering those rapier-sharp aromas of yesteryear, sparkle and weep together.