IT is a reflection of our East-West chasm that most of my friends living on the peninsular side of Malaysia have never stepped foot in Sarawak and Sabah.

Many West Malaysians have travelled all over the globe, for education, business and pleasure. Names of glamorous foreign places and cities roll off their tongue with an envious familiarity. Ask these sophisticated well-wheeled jet-setters whether they have ever been to that part of Malaysia towards the direction of sunrise, and you will draw a blank.

Now that 2007 is touted as a Visit Malaysia Year, I want to do my bit for my home state and sell you readers the idea of a visit to Sarawak. Domestic tourism will save the country valuable foreign exchange and give Sarawak tourism a boost. But seriously, should you not know something of your own country first, before you trot all over the world for novel experience?

No, I have no intention of setting up a tourist agency, and neither have I been commissioned by the Sarawak Tourist Promotion Board to do this little advertisement for them. One must be so careful these days, and make this kind of clarification. After all, West Malaysians are more motivated to do things out of self-interest, rather than goodwill.

Let me appeal to your self-interest then. A good long visit to Sarawak with the right attitude will enrich your life, more than a week-long flirt with London or Paris can ever do.

Sure, you have heard horror stories from new graduates from our teaching colleges. They have been posted to rural schools in Sarawak, and within a week, they would flee like the Devil, and return to their comfortable homes in Damansara or Petaling Jaya, with tales of primitive quarters, head-hunting parents, and the scarcity of flush toilets in Sarawak's jungle.

Attitude and interest

That is what I mean by the "right" attitude". One would think that teaching is a noble vocation, and such trained school teachers from comfortable homes in KL should first think about their students in remote Sarawak villages. How would these deprived students and their parents deal with lack of flush toilets? How do they do their daily sanitation? How to teach them so they can have a good life like people in KL, Penang and Johore Baru?

Of course, there are those West Malaysian government officers who have been posted there and loving it. In fact, quite a number have elected to stay on in Sarawak forever! As long as there are only few such Sarawak-lovers from the West, it is alright. We do want to keep our typically pristine social ambience pure and clean in the Land of the Hornbill.

Again, back to attitude and interest. Those who are addicted to orgies of shopping, dining and nightlife should give Sarawak a wide berth. Of course Sarawak is not that primitive. Sarawakians do not live on trees, and so large cities and towns do offer the usual hedonistic epicurean attractions. But you can get that sort of distraction anywhere in the world, and the experience is pretty much the same everywhere.

Official promotion by the Sarawak state government also bandy about tourism mantras such as eco-tourism, adventure holidays, Borneo wildness, etc. They are just part of the sales pitch on the tourist market place, and that is alright. If you think you are a nature lover, Sarawak does have a lot to offer.

After all, Sarawak has one of the world's remaining tropical rain forests. The forest there has taken one million years to evolve. At one time, I travelled extensively through these forests and can vouch for their magnificence and majesty. An ancient living tree, the trunk of which will take 4 or 5 persons to encircle from arm to arm, and that rises more than ten stories high into the blue sky, is a sight to remember for life. An encounter with the plants, animals, birds and insects - including that much feared leeches - is also a cap in your social feather when you relate the experience to your city-slicker friends later.

If that is your interest, then go armed with a copy of the Lonely Planet and a great deal of insect repellent. The basic infrastructure and the tour guides are there to serve you, and allocate a week at least to get to see the most interesting places.

Perhaps the vast expanse of land and water available in Sarawak is what makes possible the most attractive uniqueness in Sarawak: the people.

For those Malaysians who think that there are only Malays, Chinese and Indians in Malaysia, they would be in for a pleasant surprise when they first stepped onto this forgotten land.

Of course there are Malays and Chinese there. But visitors who live all their life in West Malaysia will be shocked to discover that the Malays in Sarawak are certainly different from the Malays in other parts of the country. They speak a kind of Sarawak Malay dialect which is almost incomprehensible for Peninsular Malays. Though deeply religious as well, they have never embraced the kind of Islamic radicalism that has turned politics in Malaysia upside down. PAS has never established any foothold there.

Same human beings

You would think that the Chinese people are pretty much the same everywhere in the world. At least, they tend to look the same, and feel the same about steadfastly being Chinese. That may be partly true in Sarawak. But there, the Chinese are unusually tolerant of other races though. Inter-racial marriages with native people are socially accepted most of the time. Many Chinese can speak one or more indigenous languages.

There are very few Indians, though the few there are do not have the kind of social problems that have plagued the Indian community in West Malaysia.

Then there are the 30 or so indigenous communities generally classified by officialdom under the vague and insulting category of "others". In Sarawak, they are referred to as "Dayak", and a sub-category has been created to cater for the 'Orang Ulu'.

They form the majority of the population of Sarawak, and so they are everywhere. The "right attitude" is not to regard them as anthropological curiosities, human museum displays, or cultural showcase, as some people are wont to do to them. They are human beings all the same like you and me, though they look a little different and speak a wide dizzying array and their own tongues.

The Penans are world renowned of course, for being one of the last hunting and gathering tribes. But they live in the headwaters of the Great Rejang River and the Baram River. It is not easy to gain access to them. Also they are quite shy of strangers.

The other indigenous communities though, spreading over 5 thousand far-flung villages and longhouses, are best known for their hardy lifestyle, their legendary hospitality, their independence, and their free spirit. The so-called developed civilised world tend to look upon these people as primitive, but believe me, the world is a poorer place for not learning from the wisdom of the natives of Sarawak.

Eventually, first-time visitors from West Malaysia will be struck by the exemplary race relation between all the local ethnic communities in Sarawak.

There are no strangers

Once you arrive in beautiful Kuching, and start to make your tentative foray into the rural heartland, the stress and strain of living in West Malaysia will have lifted from your shoulders. The peace and tranquillity exists in the land, the mountains, the rivers and the sky. But it is also on the open friendly faces of the Sarawakians going around their business.

In Sarawak, there are no strangers, posing as the menacing, alien, and sub-human Other. In Sarawak, there are only neighbours whom you have yet to meet and befriend.

Visiting Sarawak and making friends there will enrich you in this respect. You get to realise that there is another way for people of different ethnic persuasions to live together beyond mere condescending tolerance stretched to the limit by suspicion and hatred. There, you will find that a great degree of integration has been achieved even before Malaysian independence, and the people there have willingly embraced their celebratory co-existence. Pluralism is very much alive and well there, despite the bad politics, and the odd bigots and racists.

Nowadays, the government is spending hundreds of millions of public funds to send our young people into isolated boot-camps, to encourage discipline and integration. I think that is a laughable idea and a huge waste of money. I could have told them to send these youths to Sarawak and Sabah, to live there among the locals for 3 to 6 months.

But then, my views would probably be dismissed by the typically arrogant decision-makers in KL as coming from the attitude of a provincial parochial Sarawakian anyway. So for a long time to come, Sarawak and her natural and human beauty will remain as the best kept secret of the nation.

Then again, perhaps the allure of Sarawak should remain a secret, before the massive arrival of tourists can have a chance to pollute her innocence.