email, website (www.flyingdusun.com) down

It seems that our website (www.flyingdusun.com) and our emails (herman@flyingdusun.com etc) will be down for a long time; this is rather annoying on several levels! Good that I have created a gmail account (herman.scholz@gmail.com), and good that I have discovered this blog site and actually started blogging...

The Schooner Raja Laut

I actually made an effort, wore shoes, black trousers, a shirt and even a tie, but true to Sabah Style I needed not have gone to such troubles even for the exclusive, yet relaxed cocktail party on the yacht Raja Laut, presently berthing at the Sutera Harbour Marina.

I have seen the classical yacht, built in Kalimantan and finished in Sabah, exactly three years ago when it was still under construction off the coast of Sandakan. I was eager to see the finished result, and you can go to my website for my impressions – all perfectly favourable, in fact enthusiastic – and for many more photographs and complete details you can visit http://www.rajalaut.com/.

Parkie Beans (Petai)

Food, food, glorious food… It is petai season here in Sabah, and those beans are amongst my favourite vegetables though not many a western palate appreciates them. In English they are also called ‘bitter beans’, ‘twisted cluster beans’ and ‘stink beans’ – and the latter says a lot about them. It is not so much that they stink when raw, but when they are being cooked there is a definitive methane gas odour in the air. But the most interesting part is when you have digested them. You can immediately tell when somebody has eaten petai from how the washroom is perfumed… Like asparagus, parkie beans contain certain amino acids that give a strong smell to one's urine, an effect that can be noticed up to two days after consumption. And like other beans, their complex carbohydrates can also cause strong-smelling flatulence (this is an understatement, but I don’t want to use gross language here). The effect is so much more interesting when you eat them with a spicy hot sambal, and that’s just how I love them! They can also be consumed raw but they are very bitter.

Botanically speaking stink beans (Parkia speciosa) belong to the family of Fabaceae, the third largest family of flowering plants (soy beans, alfalfa, peanuts etc are part of the same family). Parkie trees are up to 30m tall and produce clusters of long beans that can attain 40cm. The beans contain, when ripe, up to 20 pods with almond shaped, bright green seeds. The beans are leathery and tough and the seeds have to be peeled out with the help of a knife.

Doringin - a flower...

I thought I share with you the beauty of my Doringin (Dillenia sp) as they flower - as mentioned in my "kitchen" feature:

Music Instruments of Sabah

Who would have thought that Sabah has such a rich musical heritage with all those Sabahans recently featuring that high on Akademia Fantasia and the like! Hey, it is exactly the rich musical heritage that brought Sabahans there – the love of sound, music and song is in their blood because music has played, for time immemorial, a significant role in the lives of the locals. Sure, nowadays keyboards and karaoke sets figure more prominently amongst the younger generation but when hard pressed, most Kadazan, Dusun, Murut and Bajau will have to admit that they know at least the basics of gong play – until recently that was about the only instrument they were exposed to, next to the guitar; electronics and mass media has changed that thoroughly of late and I don’t know about youngsters nowadays. Will they still learn to play the gongs at an early age? Or will, in 10 or 15 years, still anybody be interested in gongs? However it is, at the moment many Sabahans, even the younger ones know how to play gongs. But there are so many more local instruments – instruments that have long ago yielded to the pressure of guitars and percussion bands. You can read more about them in my latest feature on my website!

Gingers in Borneo

When hearing ginger, do you think of condiments and spices? Good. Anything else? What will you think if I tell you that ginger also means ‘snake bite cure’, ‘sleeping mats’, ‘winnowing tray’, ‘salad’, ‘rice wrapped in leaves,’ ‘roof’ and ‘fresh fish pickle’…? This is ginger in Borneo! With over 1200 varieties over 45 genera, mostly in tropical climates and with Malaysia (that includes nearly 30% of Borneo) having some of the greatest diversity in gingers, you might understand me better. Gingers are extremely widely used plants here, and when I bought my first “ginger book”, the “Gingers of Sarawak” pocket guide by Dr Axel Dalberg Poulsen and published here in Sabah by Natural History Publications I found my botanical horizon greatly widened. Now I can not only say: “another ginger”, but I can throw lengthy and complicated scientific names at my tourists… ah, that makes me look terribly learned! No, the scientific names are a by-product. I have known many useful plants that belonged to the gingers family, and I can point them out in the jungle: plants with edible flowers, fruit or stems, plants of which you use the leaves to make roofs or wrap rice, and the stems to make mats, and others that are used in local medicine. When you live in Borneo you cannot but realise a certain pattern, and the booklet allows me now to do a first rough classification when I am with locals and get lengthy and complicated local names thrown at my head… but that is a personal passion of mine. What gingers can be used for, and some general information you can now find in the feature section on my website (http://www.flyingdusun.com/) – in English, French and German, nevertheless.

Lazy times…

February is a notoriously slow month, and March promises not much better for my business, which is selling rice wine for those who don’t know me. You can refer to my profile where there is a link to the “real” Flying Dusun website with plenty of information on Sabah, its people, history and culture, the places of interest and of course on lihing: Sabah’s very own rice wine, the Dusun’s preferred party drink.

However, the Dusun have spent their money in December and January, now they are saving up for Ka’amatan – our rice harvest festival – which obviously cannot go without lihing. Worse, at the moment I cannot get any pulut – glutinous rice – which I need to brew lihing. At the moment it is not a problem, we have plenty of stock, but I don’t want to fall into a production hole. Anyhow, we have plenty of time and repaired the chicken coop where we now got 20 happy chicks, and planted some vegetables in what passes for a “garden” here, behind my house. And Jeffri made “wooden” garden furniture from concrete. So to speak a concrete project. Of course we also have plenty of time to make frequent use of my new kitchen and eat very well.

Furniture in the making:

Yes, that’s popular here, and now that Jeffri made them I don’t even find them so tacky any more, how curious. They are for sales. A set (1 table and 6 chairs) as you see in the pictures is priced at RM988 – call Jeffri directly for enquiries: 0135507161.

The finished product and a close-up: