I’ve always been fascinated by the SE Asian island of Borneo…it is a huge island, and quite mysterious. Recently, I picked up an old book (“BLACK BORNEO”-1942) about the travels of a Dutch exploere on the 1930’s, who claims to have crossed the island on foot. His descriptions of the native Dyak people are quite lurid, but in keeping with the times o f the 1930’s. Anyway, he makes the claim that in the deep interior, there are the remains of Hindu temples…similar in style to thosein India. So it appears that there was an earlier, advanced culture in the interior, which died out…the present - day Dyaks knew nothing of these ruins.
Anybody know about Borneo? Can you take tours to the island?
And,how dangerous a place is it? 
The Dyaks — actually, that’s Dayaks — are now known by the name Iban, which is what they call themselves. There have been a lot of environmental issues about logging and oil companies’ destruction of the Iban’s rain forest habitat. The Penan people’s culture has been almost completely destroyed by corporate invasion. The Penan are people from deep in the jungle who earlier white pith helmet explorers liked to call “primitive.” Now they live in cruddy shantytowns on the outskirts of oil rigs and logging camps.
The Indonesian government has been moving people from its most populated islands, Java and Sumatra, to reduce crowding there, to Borneo, to take advantage of Borneo’s low population density. That makes it doubtful that any of Borneo has survived contact with the modern world.
And of course, modern people looking for unspoiled areas is like a basilisk going bird watching. 
Nothing mysterious about that - Borneo, like the rest of Southeast Asia, was subject to considerable “Indianizing” influence and in fact it is inscriptions from Borneo that represent some of the earliest known records of this ( 4th-5th century A.D. ). States like the Sultanate of Kutei in eastern Borneo ( and there is still a Sultan by the way, though he is only a cultural artifact, not a real political force ) started and long continued as Hindu kingdoms. Hinduism was eventually largely displaced by Buddhism and Islam ( a few enclaves like Bali excepted ), but for a very long time it was the dominant religion in SE Asia.
- Tamerlane