The photo below is a view of one of the entrances to Clearwater Cave. You can get an idea of the scale by noticing how tiny the 3~4 foot wide concrete footpath, stairs and railing in the lower right corner.
The answer is in the photo below. At some point in this boat's history the owners obviously decided to do away with the advanced steering system and replace it with a manual one. I really didn't think about it at the time but looking back now I think these guys managed to scrape together enough money to buy a derelict hull and bolt a new(ish) outboard to it. Hey Presto - people will now pay us to ferry them up and down river!
I'm reasonably sure this photo was taken on the Melinau because the river is so narrow (comparatively). All-in-all it took me a day to get up-river from Miri to Mulu. Sometimes it takes longer if the boats get delayed, the river's low or you can't find a longboat to charter. Through my contacts in Brunei, I had everything arranged for me in advance so my boat changes were planned and I was expected.
Clearly the boat had seen better days. The windshield and side glass had long since disappeared. I wondered if in fact they had been plexiglass that had turned yellow and opaque. Note also that there is no-one steering up front! As you'll see in tomorrow's photo, even this wire and pulley arrangement was no longer in service, the steering mechanism having been superseded again. But despite the engineering modifications, the boat floated and it got the job done.
This is all well and good until a log escapes. You might not be able to see it in the image below, but at 100% you can see there is a cable that runs down the outside of both sides of the log raft. Dead center of the photo there are two men in a small boat trying to push a log that has slipped outside the cable back into the raft.
Three riverboats sit at the jetty near the mouth of the Batam Barang in Sarawak. With the survey over and the equipment shipped out from Kuala Belait, I had some…