Entikong–Tebedu: At the Edge of Borneo, a Border That Divides and Binds

 

Indeed, we are brothers and sisters, and no border can truly separate the people of Indonesia and Malaysia in Borneo.
Doc. Rmsp.

By Masri Sareb Putra

ENTIKONG, Indonesia. The asphalt ends beneath red and white arches adorned with Dayak motifs, etched into concrete like ancient tattoos.

On the western spine of Borneo, Indonesia’s Entikong border post faces Malaysia’s Tebedu checkpoint across a narrow strip of no man’s land no wider than a football field.

For the thousands who cross daily, this place called Sempadan is less a boundary than a heartbeat in the island’s shared soul.

The Gate That Wasn’t Always Grand

When Entikong opened on October 1, 1989, it was little more than a wooden shack and a dirt track. Colonial cartographers had sliced Borneo in two a century earlier; the new gate merely formalized the wound. Renovated in 2019 with soaring roofs and ibis-wing eaves, the post now greets travelers with the pride of a nation determined to turn a scar into a signature.

On a misty November morning, buses from Kuching idle beside motorbikes from Pontianak, their engines humming the same tropical lullaby. The air smells of diesel, rain, and restless hope.

A Literary Reunion, Briefly Unbordered

Two days earlier, in the upland town of Sekadau, the Institut Teknologi Keling Kumang, Borneo’s first private university founded on Dayak values, had hosted a cross-border writers’ forum.

Under the motto Nulli Secundus Gentis Educandis (“Second to None in Educating the People”), poets, novelists, and oral historians swapped tales of harvest festivals, ancestral myths, and river spirits that still whisper beneath the roots of kapok trees.

Among them was Dr. Patricia Ganing, a Miri-based scholar whose essays read like love letters to the island, and her husband, Clemens Joy, a singer whose baritone can hush a rainforest. They spoke of belonging that transcends the checkpoints, of identity that flows like a river finding its own course.

I had planned to head straight to Pontianak after the event. Instead, I offered to drive them the 150 miles to the border. Some detours, I’ve learned, are detours of the soul.

The Drive That Defied the Line

The road west unspools through oil-palm plantations and patches of secondary jungle, the air heavy with the scent of wet earth and fruit ripening in silence. Patricia spoke of a childhood spent crossing this same frontier on foot, ferrying salt and cloth for her grandmother. Clemens hummed a Dayak lullaby older than any passport.

We did not discuss politics or the brittle treaties that once divided rivers and ridges. We talked instead of grandmothers, kinship, and the comfort of shared stars above an undivided sky.

At dusk, the border lights flickered on like low-hanging constellations. Immigration officers stamped documents with the weary precision of people who know the paperwork changes nothing essential. Patricia hugged me so tightly I felt the tremor in her shoulders. Clemens pressed a cassette tape into my palm, an analog relic in a streaming age.

“Play it when you miss us,” he said.

A Boundary, Not a Farewell

As their taillights disappeared into Sarawak, I lingered beneath the archway. A Malaysian guard offered a nod; an Indonesian vendor sold me coffee in a plastic cup. Same beans, same bitter kick. The line on the ground is real, visas, currencies, anthems, but it is also porous, permeable to memory and melody.

In the quiet that followed, I realized something simple and vast. Sempadan is not where Borneo ends. It is where the island remembers it is whole.