Borneo’s recipe for sustainable tourism: cultural villages, homestays — and spicy food

The aroma in Trudy’s Tan’s kitchen in Kuching, Malaysia, is intoxicating. It’s a blend of the familiar and the utterly new: garlic and pepper with Terung Iban, the sour eggplant found in Borneo. It’s Gula Apong, also known as Nipah palm sugar, caramelized with fried potato wedges.

“When you eat our food,” she says, “you feel the love.”

Malaysian food is an overload of flavors — sweet, sour and spicy, often at the same time. 

It’s not unlike the region’s tourism sustainability efforts, which are far-ranging and diverse. For example, Tan offers cooking classes at her cafe, Supreme Indah, where she also features the work of local artists and their workshops. The idea is to show visitors how a Southeast Asian destination can balance the demands of tourism with sustainability.

Eastern Malaysia is becoming a sustainable destination to the beat of its own gendang. Kuching, the capital of Sarawak on the island of Borneo, isn’t shouting about its commitment to sustainability. It’s living it. You see it in the way local chefs like Trudy embrace the bounty of the rainforest, in the preservation efforts at the Sarawak Cultural Village, and in the hospitality offered in traditional longhouses.

Trudy Tan, the proprietor of Supreme Indah, a cafe that offers Malaysian cooking classes in Kuching

In Sarawak’s cultural village, a glimpse into the past

One of the best places to see sustainability in action is in its famous cultural village. It’s an award-winning living museum on 17 acres that showcases the diverse ethnic groups of Sarawak. 

Visitors can explore authentic replicas of traditional houses, including Bidayuh, Iban, and Orang Ulu longhouses, a Chinese farmhouse, a Melanau tall house, and a Malay house. 

But the cultural village isn’t just a static display. It offers daily cultural performances, allowing visitors to experience the music, dance, and traditions of Sarawak’s indigenous people. In one of the longhouses, called a nangamanka, Chief Dom explains how his people lived traditionally. The longhouse is a multifamily dwelling with communal areas. The strongest warriors slept in the rooms closest to the doors to protect the community from invaders. There’s a sleeping area for bachelors and rafters for storage of the traditional trophies of war: human heads.

“Our purpose is to show people how we used to live,” he says.

Cultural preservation is a key to sustainability in Borneo. The cultural village offers a glimpse into Borneo’s fascinating past. But it’s also a look at Eastern Malaysia’s future, in which it preserves its cultural heritage for future generations.

A homestay with a purpose

Making rice cooked on an open fire in a bamboo shoot at Saloma’s Village Stay.

Homestays offer an even more intimate way to experience life. Saloma’s Village Stay, in a remote part of Borneo’s mountains, offers an opportunity to live alongside a local family, participate in daily activities like farming, and learn about their traditions. 

“Basically, you’re living with us,” says Saloma, the proprietor. (Among the Bidayuh, people only have one name.)

Saloma takes guests to a rice paddy on a steep hill. The slopes have been planted with pineapples, but nature is also providing the ingredients for her next meal — wild ginger, edible ferns, turmeric, and pandan. Saloma emphasizes the authenticity of the experience.

“Whatever you see here is real,” she says. “We’re not doing it for tourists. This is how we live.”

Guests sleep in a longhouse made of bamboo. There’s a single bathroom, no air conditioner, and the food is simple: rice dishes with foraged plants, Tilapia, and of course, lots of spices. This form of community tourism not only provides income for the Bidayu tribe but also encourages the preservation of their culture and sustainable way of life.  

“When people say ‘sustainability,’ they think of sustaining a way of life,” she says. 

Cooking Sustainably in Kuching

A guide points at a cassava root in an open market.

Tan creates an immersive experience focused on sustainability at her café. It starts with a visit to Kuching’s market, where visitors explore the exotic fruits and vegetables that you can only find in Borneo.

The market is an experience unlike any other in Southeast Asia. There are the smells you would expect — fried chicken, fermented durian, fresh fish. But there are also completely unexpected sights, like edible ferns, exotic chilis, and snake beans, which look like string beans but are about twice the length. All are integral to the Eastern Malaysian kitchen, but many are unavailable outside the island.

Guests collect the ingredients and then bring them back to Tan’s studio to make lunch. The idea is deceptively simple: Lots of garlic and onion fried in palm oil with coconut milk, spices and whatever you brought from the market. There is, of course, an art to it, but the secret to Malaysian cuisine may be to add lots of spice to whatever is available. Oh, and don’t forget the rice.

Here, too, there’s a sustainability lesson. Tan says food waste is a huge issue, and the Malaysian way of cooking ensures there’s almost zero waste. She donates leftovers to a local soup kitchen. 

But to her, sustainability means more than eliminating food waste. Her space doubles as a gallery for up-and-coming artists.

“It’s our way of supporting the artists and the community, and we’re doing it on a small scale,” she says.

Sustainability is incremental in Kuching

That’s the thing about sustainability in Borneo. Instead of sweeping initiatives that promise carbon neutrality by a certain deadline, Sarawak is working to create a more sustainable framework, one business and one museum at a time. The changes are incremental.

You may not see Kuching on any top 10 lists for most sustainable tourism destinations yet, but that’s fine. The point is that eventually, as more and more tourism operators embrace sustainability goals, it will give the entire destination a lift. And no place on Earth deserves it more than Borneo.