In the depths of Sabah, moments of uncanny similarity with the Philippines

The boatman shut the engine, allowing us to silently drift toward the river’s edge where a herd of pygmy elephants had gathered to drink and graze. Our guide was talking softly, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying because he was speaking in Bahasa.

“I’m talking to them,” he explained, gesturing to the creatures at the river. “I say, ‘Good day, Mr Elephant. We would like to be your friend.’”

“Go ahead,” he urged me. “You can talk to them, too. Like you would to anyone.”

We were far up the Kinabatangan River in eastern Sabah. There were orangutans idling in the treetops, proboscis monkeys hanging out together and macaques darting and screeching through the trees. Back at the lodge one morning, a huge Asian water monitor lizard clambered onto the bank and then quickly dove back into the river. The size of it made my hair stand on end. Meanwhile, a pair of bold storks seemed to want to get into one of the rooms, pecking persistently at a glass window.

It amazed me to think how close we were to my native Philippines. The Kinabatangan River flows out onto the Sulu Sea – from the coast, you could probably paddle all the way to Tawi-Tawi.

Our guide was half-Filipino, though he had never been to the Philippines and spoke none of its languages. But in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah’s charming capital and the gateway to this animal kingdom, there is a Filipino Market where they sell handicrafts from the Philippines as well as Malaysia.

As I travel more and more around Southeast Asia, I keep experiencing protracted episodes of déjà-vu in places I’ve never been to before – a resonance of aesthetics

The Night Market also has a section known for its “Filipino Barbecue”. Although Filipinos automatically think of barbecue as pork, this outdoor eatery is popular for its grilled seafood (it is a predominantly Muslim country, after all). When I visited, the man who grilled my selections of fish was fluent in Tagalog, which made me wonder if he identified as a Filipino or Malaysian.

Despite the conceptual precision and martial rigidity of the borders of the region’s modern nation-states, in reality they remain little more than abstract boundaries. For centuries prior to and even during colonization by the British, Spanish and Dutch, the people of this vast archipelago – today divided into the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Brunei – went to and fro from island to island, and far beyond.

It has come to be commonly accepted by social scientists and historians that those of this region are all descended from a single ethnolinguistic group called the Austronesians. Countering long-held theories that the area’s islands were populated via waves of eastward migration from the mainland over now-sunken land bridges, the new theory is that we originally came from present-day Taiwan, migrating downwards to the Philippines, then westward into what is now Malaysia and Indonesia.

The theory finds some affirmation in the remarkable number of similar words in the area’s languages. I speak two Filipino languages, Tagalog and Ilocano, and I hear many similar words in both Bahasa Malaysia and Indonesia. This relatively new theory posits that Austronesians – masterful seafarers – set sail far and wide, going as far west as Madagascar, and as far east as Hawaii.

As I travel more and more around South-East Asia, I keep experiencing protracted episodes of déjà vu in places I’ve never been to before – a resonance of aesthetics. I keep noticing commonality through difference, rather than in spite of it.

Man-made divisions – like the borders of nation-states – are an imposition of modernity that mirror the separation and implicit hierarchy between humans and animals, which our guide speaking to the elephants clearly did not subscribe to.

Each evening, as night fell on the lodge along the Kinabatangan, a whole other universe would wake up. Stepping out of my air-conditioned room, I could hear an infinitude of beings – veiled to the human eye under the cover of darkness – making their presence known, each voice adding up to a resounding roar.

“What can they be thinking?” I wondered. “What are they saying?”