Sarawak travel guide

Sarawak, the ‘land of the hornbill’, is the largest state in Malaysia, covering nearly 125,000 sq km in northwest Borneo with a population of just over two million. Sarawak has a swampy coastal plain, a hinterland of undulating foothills and an interior of steep-sided jungle-covered mountains. The lowlands and plains are dissected by a network of broad rivers that are the main arteries of communication and where the majority of the population is settled.

In the mid-19th century, Charles Darwin described Sarawak as “one great wild, untidy, luxuriant hothouse, made by nature for herself”. Sarawak is Malaysia’s great natural storehouse, where little more than half a century ago great swathes of forest were largely unexplored and where tribal groups, collectively known as the Dayaks, would venture downriver from the heartlands of the state to exchange forest products of hornbill ivory and precious woods.

Today the Dayaks have been incorporated into the mainstream and the market economy has infiltrated the lives of the majority of the population. But much remains unchanged. The forests, although much reduced by a rapacious logging industry, are still some of the most species-rich on the globe. More than two-thirds of Sarawak’s land area, roughly equivalent to that of England and Scotland combined, is still covered in jungle, although this is diminishing.