A magazine for travel agents says, "If a destination award for wilderness travel were to be handed out, Borneo would be a top contender. This is still the spot to find one of the globe’s greatest rain forests,bone-through-the-nose tribes and the largest population of orangutans in the world."

I’m just back and I agree, although I found many tattoos and some hunted heads but no noses pierced by bones.

Sir James Brooke, a British adventurer who became the Rajah of Sarawak, supposedly ended headhunting in Sarawak and Sabah, states in Eastern Malaysia that share Borneo island with Indonesia’s Kalimantan and the Sultanate of Brunei. But a journalist visiting in 2001, when Dayak men killed at least 500 Madura tribespeople, interviewed a chief who said:

"I just stabbed and slashed and cut off their heads. I don’t know how many I killed." He showed the reporter the heads stored in the basement and tacked on the walls of the tribe-owned Rama Hotel.

There are other hazards as well. Terrorists in Sabah have kidnapped tourists for ransom. Brunei has sharia law that applies to Muslims and non-Muslims alike, bans any reference to Christmas and allows execution by stoning and the severing of limbs for stealing.

All this added spice to my upriver expedition to tribal longhouses and orangutan country while avoiding estuarial crocodiles, pit vipers, articulated pythons, dengue-infected mosquitoes, banded hornets, elephant ants and 1,700 species of parasitic worms that love human bloodstreams.

Just two hours driving out of a coastal city and you’re in one of the greatest, animal-filled rain forests on Earth. This is why people visit Borneo.

Sarawak

I began in the very safe city of Kuching. With 600,000 residents, the capital of Sarawak has air-conditioned malls, elegant hotels and as many restaurants as Hono­lulu. Its gorgeous convention center is always booked two years out, unlike ours.

And it has a cat museum. It’s a must-visit place, cat lover or not.

The "white rajahs" (Brits) ruled here for 100 years, Chinese settled in the seventh century, Indians in about 1850. The architecture reflects the area’s diverse history. There is a turreted fortress, Chinese temples and South Indian mosques.

The Main Bazaar is where tourists find Iban, Bida­yuh and Orang Ulu tribal handicrafts to take home. All very traveler-comfy.

Most people come here to see the Semenggoh Wildlife Center’s orangutans, which have been repatriated from private zoos and petdom, roam free but go to feeding stations until they can manage for themselves. They are not group-living apes, but I’ll tell you later about a better place to see them.

Tourists come here mainly because tribal longhouse communities still exist deep in the jungle and visitors are always welcome. These collective villages each hold up to 300 people who live by hunting and growing rice and vegetables, and they receive a government subsidy for cooking oil and boat fuel.

Rules about thievery or messing with another man’s wife are strictly observed. The penalty for bad behavior is to be banished into the jungle.

It’s equator country, hot, humid and wet. Very thick and green. If you get lost in the jungle, the village headman will sound a gong, and a search will commence. I suggest you hire a guide going in, as I did, from Borneo Adventure. Ask for Lemon or Paul.

Longhouse life is dying out as city jobs beckon. Even small villages have high-definition televisions, smartphone coverage and medical service from doctors who swoop in via helicopter. Travel to interior villages is by shallow-bottom longboat with a 15-horsepower outboard on narrow waterways with many swimming-pool falls. Monkeys abound (macaque and proboscis), but so do crocs and snakes, so some caution is required.

You need not totally rough it. You can, for instance, reach the Batang Ai Resort (run by Hilton) by a three-hour bus trip and 30-minute boat trip across a reservoir and have all the amenities short of tennis and golf. For the hardy, an additional 90-minute longboat takes you to the Nanga Sumpa longhouse complex of Iban people. No air conditioning or bar, but mosquito nets and river fish that will eat the dead skin off your feet, leaving the good skin intact.

A stop at the thriving market village of Seria on your way back to civilization is recommended.

Incidentally, English is widely spoken throughout Malaysian Borneo.

Sabah

Malaysian Air flits you between the western state of Sarawak and the eastern state of Sabah in a blink. Oddly, you need your passport. Each state is autonomous and makes the most of it. Many citizens say they wish the states each had their own army. They barely tolerate the federal government on the mainland.

Like Sarawak, Sabah is heavily Christian, even though Malaysia officially is a Muslim country. The majority Dayak (natives) of Borneo took to Western missionaries better than to Arabian imams.

There are several draws at Sandakan and Kota Kinabalu — the two main towns — for tourists. First is the sumptuous Sheraton Four Points Hotel on the opening to the Sulu Sea in Sandakan. Second is the safarilike Batang Ai Resort way up the Kinabatangan River. Third is to climb to one of the 12 peaks of Mount Kinabalu. And last, but definitely not least, is to visit the Sepilok orangutan and sun bear sanctuaries.

Sepilok is where you’re most likely to see orangutans close up, maybe right on a trail. Don’t try to pet one. It can rip your arm off with little effort. It’s a very powerful and unpredictable ape.

Companies offering "Special Interest Tours" can arrange all those events for you. It’s unwise to wander around outback Borneo on your own.

I fell in love with the Abai Resort, a bungalow affair build across the river from a fishing tribe village. There was much discussion among Abai villagers about whether to open the resort. They finally agreed because of the promise of jobs, especially for young people who have been abandoning village life. Monetary donations from the local builders were also persuasive.

Abai village is the staging point for daily boat adventures farther upriver to look for pygmy elephants, monkeys, snakes, crocodiles, strange birds and fireflies that turn stubby trees into nighttime Christmas trees with simultaneously flashing lights as they seek mates, breed and die.

The whole areas is a camera buff’s delight.

If you crave pleasure after the sweaty jungle-and-river life, the Shangri La Rasa Ria Resort in Kota Kinabalu is your respite. It has every possible pleasure on a 6-mile-long beach.

Brunei

If alcohol is your pleasure, savor it at the Shangri La because your next stop via Royal Brunei Airlines, Banda Seri Begawan, is — like all of Brunei — alcohol-free by way of strict sharia law.

They tell me some small Chinese restaurants there will sneak you rice wine in a water bottle, but I wouldn’t chance it. The penalty is jail and caning. Drug possession brings the death penalty.

Brunei is a tiny sultanate on Borneo’s north coast. It could have owned most of Borneo, but the earlier sultan found it too expensive to govern and offered all but his tiny spit of land to British and Dutch colonists. But Brunei has almost limitless offshore oil, so the sultan’s largess for citizens knows few bounds.

It’s not very Muslim, but the Golden Arches and Colonel Sanders’ smiling face greet you everywhere. No airplane leaves the ground without a long prerecorded Islamic prayer for a safe flight. Gold-papered mosques are plentiful. And there’s a 7-mile-long "water village" of 14,000 people living in houses built into the bay on stilts. You find stilted schools, fire and police stations, and a satellite TV dish on every house. Travel is by motorboat and stilted boardwalks.

Toilet waste and sewage? Well, like much of Borneo, it goes right into the river or ocean.

I’m tempted to say "skip Brunei," but that might be only because my Mega Borneo Tours guide seemed so unknowledgeable and hard to understand through his many missing teeth. And that so much seemed to be "closed for renovation." Make sure you skip the Museum of Technology, which my guide passed off as a substitute for the Museum of History. It isn’t.

One travel option in Borneo is to take a long jungle trek and live off what you carry or buy from widely spaced villages. Because I’m pushing 80 years old and at the fading edge of my physical abilities, that wasn’t for me.

But any 60- or 70-year-old can easily handle the shorter jungle treks to observe plant and animal life, and the narrow, powered canoes for the upriver trips.

Bring a rain jacket, a change of shoes, a sun hat, bug spray, diarrhea pills and patience.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and Borneo’s jungles have been a-building for 140 million years.

Bob Jones is a MidWeek columnist who frequently travels and occasionally writes for the Honolulu Star-Advertiser travel section. Email him at BanyanTreeHouse@gmail.com.