Humbling Bidayuh hospitality

Few may have heard of Kampung Sadir, Padawan, about an hour’s drive south of Sarawak’s capital, Kuching — and it may be for the better. I, who tout my expertise in Borneo matters, was short of trying this experience, launched a few years back by local Saloma Lisa, a Bidayuh from Kampung Sadir. Strong with a degree in mass communications and experience backpacking around the world, she decided to invest her best knowledge of what travellers love into her own family home when Saloma returned. After some well-thought renovations, the delightful Saloma Villagestay (salomavillagestay.net) is a collection of charming bamboo-made and furnished rooms set on top of her family home.

Starting wasn’t easy — the villagers struggled to grasp the concept of “inviting someone to stay in your own home,” and Saloma faced some difficulties. But with her family on her side, the project soon took momentum and shaped into one of the most authentic experiences travellers can have in Kuching. We hear a lot about “homestay,” but accommodations are often subpar, or the proposed activities are not cut.

This is not Saloma Villagestay’s case: this is one blissful place where hammocks swing by enclosing sprouts of rainforest, insect, and frog sounds fill the starry nights, and you can lounge in a comfy armchair before being called downstairs to enjoy the family’s authentic homemade Bidayuh delicacies. And there’s more.

Staying with Saloma usually includes a short 20-minute trek to a nearby waterfall where you can swim and a night walk to spot the nocturnal critters and insects that come to the village. The next day, after a hearty breakfast cooked in the family’s kitchen and consumed on their big veranda surrounded by trees and the sounds of the river nearby, guests are chaperoned to the village and then driven to a pineapple plantation on a hill slope.

This is where the guide — usually Saloma or her brother Gregory, who both speak English and are fountains of knowledge on the local life and nature — helps guests find and collect wild ferns such as Midin for the highlight of the stay: a real, hands-on bamboo cooking experience. The views alone from the pineapple farm are incredible: a barrage of hills clad in a thick viridian mantle of trees close around towards Indonesia’s Kalimantan border.

After collecting the ingredients for lunch and a short drive, it’s a 15-minute walk along a jungle path to the farm where the cooking happens. It’s a beautiful spot by a river bend, shrouded in vegetation, and next to a river whose big rocks create a perfect bathing pool where guests can dip and refresh. A hammock lavishly swings between trees over a bamboo platform overlooking the river. What one needs more than this for a perfect day out?

The cooking area is set on another wooden platform created to host big groups. Guests sit on weaved rattan mats and participate in the cooking by a fireplace, enjoying blissful jungle moments with a soundtrack of sloshing water and insects chirping. All the cooking ingredients are collected from the pineapple farm or the nearby forest — an expert local farmer helps, of course — including local pineapples that are as sweet as sinking your teeth into a jar of sugar.

Today, we cook Ayam Pansuh, the traditional chicken dish prepared by filling a bamboo stalk with meat, jungle leaves, and water and cooking it by the fireplace. Then we add a local twist of pineapple curry, fresh pineapple salad mixed with spring onion, lime, chili, and onion; the tangy tempoyak, a fermented durian paste; Midin, the favourite local ferns; and sticky rice steamed inside the bamboo stalk we must crack in half to scoop the grains from. It’s all lip-smacking good. We all sit on the floor to eat together, some using forks and spoons, some their hands as the local custom dictates. Did you want to go local? Well, there’s nothing more Bidayuh than this.