Miso Walai Homestay

Miso Walai Homestay is a community-run homestay network of Orang Sungai host families along the Kinabatangan River in Batu Puteh village, a stretch of Borneo famous for its wildlife-rich floodplain forest including critically endangered orangutans. The programme grew out of a grassroots movement started by villagers here in the late 1990s to protect the last remaining forest along the river, and has run since 2000 through the community cooperative KOPEL, with more than 18 Orang Sungai host families taking part. Guests are rotated between households on arrival, so no single family carries the benefit alone.

Evenings are for boat cruises along the Kinabatangan, when proboscis monkeys and other primates are all but guaranteed as well as elephants or crocodiles. By day there's jungle trekking, cave visits, and cooking with the host family, and a stay here directly supports KOPEL's work restoring the neighbouring Pin-Supu Forest Reserve, land the cooperative once helped save from clearance.