A Secret Nature Hideaway?

Are you familiar with the old network of salt trails crisscrossing the Crocker Range? Some of these trails are more than a hundred years old and were the only means of communication between Tambunan, in the interior, and the coastal towns of North Borneo. For countless generations, Dusun barter traders of Tambunan carried produce to the tamu at Inobong where the trails end, and returned home with salt, dried fish and other items from the coast…hence, the term ‘Salt Trails’

The Inobong-Tikolod trail; follow the stars

One such trail runs from Inobong (in Penampang) and ends at Tikolod in Tambunan. This particular trail is now being promoted by the Sabah Parks which—in 2002—established the Inobong Sub-Station.

I was among a big group of senior citizens given the chance to visit the place last week. A steep road led us to the Inobong Station. It’s on the Crocker Range but the road isn’t as steep as the one leading to the Kokol Hills where we went twice.

A small tree marks the starting point of the trail

The start of the Inobong-Tikolod Salt Trail is marked with a tree. It is 35.8km up and down the Crocker Range to Tikolod. (By road, the distance to Tambunan is twice that of the trail.) For a fee, trekkers are guided by Park Rangers all the way to Tikolod and back with night stopovers at three villages. It takes four days and three nights to make the round trip.

Two blocks of hostels and a single chalet

Two blocks of hostels and one chalet are available for paying guests. There’s even a barbeque pit at the side of a gazebo. From here one can admire a panoramic view of KK and the South China Sea—the same view that must have signaled to those long-ago barter traders that they had almost reached the end of their trek and could soon rest their tired legs as well as unload the weights off their backs.

Rain clouds over KK

Now the bad news…

The Inobong-Tikolod trail happens to be in the valley where the government plans to build the Kaiduan mega-dam. If the dam is built, all this area—along with the villages in it, all traces of civilization such as stone markers, oath stones, graves, historical and cultural sites going back several generations—would be wiped out. And what a tragedy that would be!

The people in the many villages here are subsistence farmers planting mainly rice and tapioca as staples. They are happy to be where they have been for several generations. The older residents could still recall what life was like before the war and during WW2 when many Chinese from the coastal towns made their way to the river valley to escape the atrocities of the Japanese occupation.

If the dam project is scratched, not only villages and buried ancestors be prevented from drowning but countless species of plants and animals would be preserved too.

Okay, back to the Inobong Sub-Station…

I mentioned about the visit on Facebook. Apparently, not many people know about this nature haven although it’s just several minutes outside KK! Could this have been a well-guarded secret? If it was, the cat is out of the bag now! I’m definitely going there soon. Who wants to come along? Susan? Rosemary? Frank? A friendly tiger would be good company. Don’t forget to bring your camera!

Long Ago in Tambunan

Some of you may have wondered what school was like in the good old days when text books were a luxury and library books were non-existent. Let me tell you about what it was like in the Toboh school where I taught long, long ago.

The students were housed in two wooden buildings. The floor of each block was about two to three feet above the ground and rested on sturdy stilts. There were probably two or even three classrooms in each building—I really can’t recall. A narrow verandah ran down one side of the building and every classroom had a single door which opened into the verandah.

At home in Toboh. L to R Margaret Mary, me, Flora, Veronica, Theresa, Nora

The bigger girls wore sky-blue, cotton uniforms but the younger kids were allowed to come in their everyday dresses. They all sat at a longish desk—two to three students to a desk and a rough wooden bench. There was a small blackboard in front on which I wrote copious notes and drew pictures for the students to copy. I didn’t know any better. I wanted to pass on all the knowledge I had accumulated!

One end of the building was turned into two rooms: the principal’s office and the teachers’ room. We, teachers, squeezed ourselves into a room with just enough space for a small table, a few chairs and a bamboo book rack. During recess we had coffee and local cakes brought from the nearby shop which was run by a haji and his wife who were probably Javanese.

With two of our students, Joanna (left) Maria (smaller girl seated in front)

A thin wall separated our staffroom from the office. If Sister Ann Joachim had the time to listen, she could probably hear all our conversations.

English lessons were always started with a drill on grammar. The school had thin booklets which had been manually printed on an ancient printing machine. Each page resembled comic strips. There were pictures drawn in little boxes and below each box, a verb. Copies of this booklet were distributed at the beginning of each lesson and the girls learnt to use the correct form of each verb in sentences.

On one of our long walks. Note the huge boulders.

One day the word was ‘post’ and I had to construct sentences using the various forms of the verb ‘to post’. Somehow my mind went blank and skipped back to the time my friends and I were playing with ‘put’ way back when we were in primary Four! I remembered someone had asked “what’s the past tense of ‘put’?” and we all shouted ‘putted, putted’.  Now, seven years later, I was in front of a classroom teaching these girls the various forms of ‘to post’. And I had completely forgotten if the past tense form was ‘post’ or ‘postED’!

Unknown to me, Sr. Ann Joachim had been listening! She rushed into my classroom and said: ‘I didn’t hear you say ‘postED”!



Sr. Ann Joachim loved hiking with us.





Except for a few old maps and posters, the school possessed no teaching aids at all. There wasn’t even an old printing machine! We printed all our materials, including test papers, at St. Martin’s, where there was a hand-cranked machine. To get there we were forced to depend on the goodwill of the parish priest who drove the mission’s lone vehicle: an old and cantankerous Land Rover.

At one time we had to make the two-mile return trip on foot because our ‘driver’ was busy elsewhere.  

In those faraway days, there was no rushing for the canteen during recess because there wasn’t any in the school. The nearest shop was the haji’s and it was a five-minute walk from the school. The kids didn’t go hungry, however, because the convent cooked huge pots of dark coloured grains (wheat?) for them and recess meant queuing up for a bowl of ‘mush’.

Toboh was really remote then and the school had very little. We made do with what was available. Of course it helped that we had excellent role models. The white missionaries had been there since the 1920s. They had put up with all the inconveniences and had been quietly educating the local folks.

Once Upon a Time in Tambunan

My very first job! I had just turned eighteen and my exam result was till pending. As I was the second in a houseful of siblings, staying on in school was not really an option. If I left school there would be one child less to support. Besides, I could start earning and help ease Papa’s burden.

Years later, I was to learn that I had been offered a chance to continue my schooling. Twice some big shots came to see Papa to talk about a scholarship offer and a place across the sea where people could 'cultivate' their brains. I was, after all, the first kid in the kampong to pass the Cambridge School Certificate. I guess those people wanted to ‘reward’ me for obtaining a Grade One. Ha!

But on both occasions Papa had said, “No, no thank you. We won’t allow her to change her religion.” End of story.

The village church. (Pic from Google Images)

Meanwhile, the headmistress of this girls’ school in Tambunan was looking for five new teachers to teach in her primary school. That was how I found myself transplanted in this remote place so far away from home.

It was remote because in those days the only way to get there was to take the train from Jesselton to Tenom—we still called KK ‘Jesselton’ —then take a taxi from Tenom to reach Keningau. Another taxi or Land Rover from Keningau would take one to the never-heard-of-place: Toboh.

Pic from Google Images



Toboh was on a plain in the middle of nowhere! There was a quaint church where the altar was placed dead centre (was it?), a rectory, a convent/clinic, a boys’ school called St. David’s and the girls’ school where I was going to teach, Immaculate Conception Convent.

There were four of us new teachers. We were given a pretty house to live in. It came with a puppy, a kerosene stove, a Scrabble set; and a ghost resided in the tree towering behind the house. There was no running water but electricity was available in the evening until around midnight, from a noisy diesel-run generator.

Our water had to be carried from a well, some 400 metres from the house. We were up at dawn so we could have our bath and wash our clothes at the well before the village woke up. It was cold but the water was surprisingly warmer than the air.

Our ‘supermarket’ was the weekly tamu. Duck eggs were ten cents each and chicken eggs were maybe 12 cents. Watercress bundles as thick as my thigh—I was quite skinny then—also cost ten cents. We learned to eat strange ‘snake’ gourds and got our proteins from canned stuff. There was hardly any fish at the tamu and I don’t even remember buying meat! We did all the cooking on the single kerosene stove.

For countless nights, I had to put on socks before burying myself head-to-toe under the blanket but my teeth still clattered. The wooden floor was icy-cold so I wouldn’t even get out of bed until I had to get ready for school. Needless to say, I lived in my sweaters.

Pic from Google Images

After an exceptionally freezing night, I’d wake up to see a blanket of white on the grass. Snow? Don’t be silly! Of course it wasn’t snow. Just a million webs spun during the night. Tiny spiders were cocooned inside, not quite safe from the teeth-clattering cold.

School was directly across the field from the teachers’ house. The headmistress was a white nun. She assigned me to teach mainly Primary five and Primary Six because she said my English was ‘better’ than my friends’! (All lessons were taught in English.) My oldest student was Paula and she was eighteen just like me.

The girls were wonderful kids and were courteous and super-polite. Some teacher must have made the rule: No farting in the classroom! However, some girls couldn’t ‘hold in’ the gas and so they farted while asking for permission to leave the room. Right under the teacher’s nose.

Sometimes when the Primary One teacher called in sick, I had to play ‘substitute teacher’ to this class of very enthusiastic tots who came to school with uncombed hair and with snot running down their noses. The cold contributed to their ill-health and some of them had to walk bare-foot across the shallow, rocky rivers and across paddy fields before they could reach the dirt road which led to the school.

Those were the days before TV, computers, cell phones and Mr. Bean. For leisure, we had a battery-operated record-player, a tiny radio and Scrabble. We walked miles and miles, across rivers and paddy terraces, up steep slopes and down treacherous valleys. We traversed the longest village, Sunsuron, and beyond. We climbed up the hill to see the progress of the new Jesselton-Tambunan road, still uncompleted, and dreamt of hitching a ride on a JKR lorry to go to Jesselton.

We didn’t get any special ‘elaun kesusahan’. My salary was $180 per month. I had enough to eat and could even send money home. But that was a long time ago… when going to Toboh meant a two-day journey from Jesselton!