BINTULU, July 2: “The road is good,” said Dennis Lani, the deputy headman of Rumah Buli, Sungai Kelabai, Tubau.
To him perhaps the logging track from Tegulang to Lusong Laku has improved and is good enough, but for first time city visitors like the D’Drift Team, the road is in such a bad condition and driving on it is definitely “dangerous” and treacherous.
Bintulu to Tegulang is about 230 km and it took us four hours. From Tegulang to Lusong Laku, it is only 34 km, but the time spent on the road was two hours. One can imagine how bad was the road.
But to Dennis, “The road is good”. It was because he was making comparison between the road now and in March, which condition was even worse.
And Dennis was not the only who made such a comment. Even the headmaster of SK Lusong Laku, Jimmie Jonical Bilong also made the exact comment – “The road is good”.
“Before this, the road was even worse. Sometimes, we even had to get off from the car to remove the big boulders along the road or we can’t even pass through the road,” Dennis shared.
However, upon gazing at the Lusong Laku Waterfall, all the tiredness from the long and jumpy off-road journey for hours was well worth it after all.
As it has been raining since the last few days, the block waterfall today is about 50 metre wide and about one and a half building tall.
According to Jimmie, the waterfall may appear taller during the dry season when the water level of the Linau River is much lower.
It was an amazing sight to see a block waterfall gushing down among the lush greens surrounding it. The water plunging down made a constant thunderous sound, but strangely enough, the whole scene reflected an unexplainable serenity.
So to Jimmie, SK Lusong Laku may be lacking in terms of facilities, but the beauty of the waterfall somehow make things easier when pushing for better education for the Penan students there.
As D’Drift Team had decided not to stay overnight, effort was made to return to Bintulu. For that decision, Dennis who hails from Tubau, and is extremely familiar with the area as well as being an experienced off-road driver told us to pray for fair weather.
“We must also make it out of the 34km before nightfall,” he said. So it was another six hours drive back to Bintulu.
Along the way back, Dennis, being a hospitable Iban, brought D’Drift Team to his longhouse at Tubau for a short rest of half an hour.
It was a pleasant surprise to find ourselves ended up in a modern longhouse with 57-doors, which is the longest longhouse in Sungai Kemena.
An even more pleasant discovery was that the longhouse is so well built that it is as comfortable as any terrace house in town area, if not better where the whole “ruai” is laid with mosaic tiles. After some ‘tuak’ to ‘basuh kaki’ and to get rid of motion sickness, the D’Drift Team continued its journey back to Bintulu.
It was a 12-hour travelling on the road today for D’Drift Team, from 9.30am to 9.30pm where we made about 550km just within today. The brand new Isuzu D-Max 1.9L Blue Power which was filled up full still has one-third left when we reached the hotel. However, we were too tired to continue to move an inch further and called it a day.— DayakDaily
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