“Load up quick, bad weather, come very quick!” These are the last words you ever want to hear when you are a passenger in a tiny 20-seater plane flying into the rainforest. As the engines whirred into life, I wondered for a split second whether or not I’d bought enough supplies to last a trek to the nearest village should the plane crash. Risky or not, the flight into the interior of Sarawak only served to highlight the nature of the trip that was to come – remote and, at this point, reckless.

THIS ARTICLE IS AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH AND MALAY. Although known as the birthplace of Malaysia’s petroleum industry – and still reliant on oil as a leading source of income – the coastal town of Miri, in northern Sarawak on the island of Borneo, is today so much more than an oil and timber town and site of national monuments like the Grand Old Lady, or Oil Well No. 1, drilled way back in 1910.