Consider Sabah, one of two states that comprise East Malaysia, on the northern tip of Borneo.  When I was a kid poring over atlases in the library after school, Borneo was the end of the earth, a land of mysterious and terrifying headhunters and fevers, from which few returned.  Today you can take packaged river cruises in the Indonesian part of Borneo, to the south, and venture into its dark heart where headshrinkers may even still be removing neuroses by removing heads.  Contrast that with Brunei, the third nation on this island and one of the richest and most modern in the world, and somewhere in between these extremes you will find Sabah and its poorer sister-state, Sarawak.

They are all poised on the edge of the jungle, my experience of which has been a slippery and sweaty hike, climbing over and under fallen and rotting tree trunks while trying to keep a wary eye out for the leeches that reach out from leaves and branches, waving in the air and ready to catch a lift on any passing blood-bearer and wriggle through his clothing or fur to the succulent skin beneath.  They don’t hurt at all, and I am not particularly squeamish, but when I found one on my arm while I was in bed that night, I panicked and did not sleep well after that.  You see, when I picked it off - and they are very hard to grip - and threw it away, I didn’t see where it landed.

Modern life in the West has been likened to a jungle; a tangled, out-of-control biomass, struggling ever upward toward success and sunshine, roots deep in past decay, with the strong and the parasites living together in uneasy, messy equilibrium...or do I carry my metaphor too far?  The jungle is the gordian tangle of corporate and government tendrils (ever made a credit card purchase and then seen some unknown entity’s unreadable name on the statement?), and the leeches are the endless nickel-and-diming that feeds the CEOs’ retirement funds (how dare they charge me a fee to make a bank deposit?)
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Well, the jungle - both jungles - are here in Sabah too, and the best way to escape them completely is to find a clean and cheap place to live, with decent roads and services (and there are plenty of those here), cut up your credit cards and throw away your cellphone.

If you are not prepared to go that far however, the country offers what it calls its “Malaysia: My Second Home” plan (http://mm2h.motour.gov.my).  This is a welcoming incentive program whereby certain foreigners can reside here, extending their visas more or less indefinitely.  Sadly, this site reflects the world-wide jungle mentality in that its requirements for the applicant almost all centre around money, investment and insurance.  If you have a nestegg, a home to sell or sufficient income of some sort, the requirements are not onerous, but if it happens that you are an impecunious teacher/writer/composer like myself, vastly wise, compassionate, and with a cosmic sense of humor but living on a small pension, yer outa luck, see? 

Standing quietly in the jungle - the real jungle - you can hear leaves falling all around you, and if you are cynical enough you might be put in mind of all those niggling little fees, all those little green dollar bills floating in their millions every minute into those retirement funds.  If you could hear all the leaves - the real leaves, in all the jungles - the real jungles, it would be a mighty roar that would overwhelm you with its majesty.  If however, you have been deafened instead by the thundering rustle of all those other greenbacks, you create sites like mm2h that fail to ask of potential residents any important questions.  Australia does the same with even more stringency; they all do, I suppose.  It’s a jungle out there.

But maybe none of that bothers you, and you can meet the requirements of mm2h.  In that case you have access to a peaceful and prosperous land where cocoa grows on trees (I hadn’t known that!), where hurricanes hardly ever happen (this is The Land Below the Winds, after all), and where the living is easy - mostly.

As in all Asian countries I have visited there are the struggling poor making their dollar a day as labourers, maids and beggars.  One old woman used up her English vocabulary by saying to me, "Give me one Ringit".  If you don't give, you feel guilty; if you do, you wonder if she is faking.  This is one gambit you can't win, so it's best to give I suppose, and if she is a faker the guilt be on her head.  It's really wrenching when they use children to beg, sometimes punishing them if they don't collect enough.  This is a serious problem for anyone coming to a 3rd world country for the first time, and you never quite get used to it.

There is a lack of hygiene even in parts of Kota Kinabalu, the capital city, a place which is in most other ways quite modern.  It is disconcerting to catch a whiff of sewage while waiting for your meal at a streetside cafe, and maybe even more disconcerting to find a fine, exclusive (and enclosed) restaurant a few doors away.  The same contrasts exist in western cities too, of course, but there the bad bits are better hidden and more efficiently segregated.  On the other hand, there are modern malls and merchandise in the larger centres of Sabah, and life here does not need to be very different to what you are used to.

There is government corruption, but not as bad as in Indonesia they tell me, and the natives of Sabah sometimes feel neglected by their leaders on the Peninsula.  That may be because Moslems are in the minority here, in a country that is officially Islamic.  Still this state is renowned for its various ethnic and religious communities, both indigenous and imported, living in harmony.  My wife and I were even taken under the wing of an extremely generous Sikh family in Lahad Datu, who have fed and boarded us without stint.  The national language is called Bahasa Malayu, very similar to Bahasa Indonesia next door, and reputed to be one of the easiest languages in the world to learn.  A gentleman explaining to me the complex mix of original peoples, let it slip that most individuals here learn 2 or 3 languages, and that even in a small area there are many local dialects, "so to speak".  I don’t think he recognized his pun.

And the countryside, ah, who could imagine such green, such misty distances, such diversity of plants and animals?  The north-east of Sabah is said to be among those areas having the greatest variety of species on the planet.  During our two outings on the Kinabatangan River near Sukau, we lost count of the families of macaques and monkeys in the trees; the unknown flowers and fruits growing by the water, some edible only by the proboscis monkeys whose three stomachs can accommodate foods that would otherwise be poisonous even to them; the rhinoceros hornbills; the monitor lizards; the crocodiles - well, ok, only one each of the latter two, but you get my point.  So what do we do, us short-sighted humans?  We plant neat rows of oil-palms in plantations that stretch to the horizon and leave only a narrow lane of original forest along the river for the wildlife.  There is a herd of some 60 elephants in the area who are forced to go up and down this thin stretch in search of their livings, held off from the plantations by deep ditches.  As you float blissfully down the river, you have no inkling.  Oil-palms are attractive plants, and flying over penninsular Malaysia last year I was amazed  by the endless fields of those pretty green and frondy circles covering the land.  What effect must they be having on animal habitats?