Living the longhouse life

Five days after I landed in Kuching, I found myself on the Senandung Merah express bus roaring past the outlying towns of Serian and Semarang. A bumpy three-hour ride later, we alighted at a building 10m off the dirt road in Ran, a little hamlet 61km from Semarang.  

A longhouse homestay is surely the high point of any Borneo tour. But I wanted something closer to Lonely Planet than your run-of-the-mill packaged tour. When Mac Earldon Mike Maxwell, an Iban native whom I befriended, offered to take me to his longhouse in Ran, I naturally jumped at the chance.