Book now to see 140 million years of rainforest before it's converted to cooking oil. The extinction rate is alarming. The room service is 24 hours.
Two days ago, I finished investigating how one Malaysian family made $21 billion destroying the world's oldest rainforest. The timber machine they built runs so smoothly now it doesn't even need them anymore. Sitting in my Singapore office, I found myself doing what any reasonable person would do after documenting ecological collapse: browsing luxury resort websites to visit the rainforest before it disappears completely.
The numbers are compelling. Sarawak loses 423,500 hectares of forest every four years. That's three hectares in the next 20 minutes. The remaining 5% of primary rainforest has maybe a decade left. From Singapore, it's just a two-hour flight to witness what took 140 million years to evolve.
I need to see it myself. Not as an investigator this time, but as someone trying to understand how we can mourn something while participating in its destruction. These five resorts promise that chance—to experience one of Earth's oldest ecosystems from within the very system dismantling it.
1. Borneo Rainforest Lodge, Danum Valley
Getting to Borneo Rainforest Lodge apparently requires commitment. Four hours from Lahad Datu airport, mostly on former logging roads that now serve a different purpose. The resort's 31 chalets sit in Danum Valley, one of the last fragments of undisturbed lowland dipterocarp forest in Borneo.
Prince William and Kate stayed here, which tells you something about both the clientele and the conservation value. The resort exists because this particular valley was too remote to log profitably in the 1980s. Now it's protected, funded by tourists paying $500 a night to sleep where loggers couldn't reach.
They offer guided night walks to spot clouded leopards, a canopy walkway for gibbon viewing, and a spa using traditional forest ingredients. The website mentions their conservation programs extensively. What it doesn't mention is that Danum Valley is surrounded by palm oil plantations. Drive an hour in any direction from paradise and you hit monoculture.
2. Mulu Marriott Resort & Spa
Mulu Marriott Resort & Spa sits five minutes from Gunung Mulu National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site famous for having the world's largest cave chamber. The resort's 188 rooms are built in traditional longhouse style over the Melinau River. Marriott calls it "authentic luxury."
The park exists because everything around it was allocated for logging by 1974. It's preservation by accident—the caves made the terrain too difficult to extract timber profitably. Now millions of bats emerge at dusk for tourists to photograph while 150,000 plant species quietly persist in what's left of the forest. The Mandara Spa offers traditional treatments. The breakfast buffet gets excellent reviews. From your river-view suite, you can't see where the park ends and the plantations begin. The positioning is deliberate.
3. Aiman Batang Ai Resort & Retreat
The boat ride to Aiman Batang Ai Resort crosses a lake that shouldn't exist. A hydroelectric dam created it in the 1980s, flooding 85,000 hectares of rainforest and displacing thousands of indigenous Iban people. The resort now celebrates traditional Iban longhouse architecture.
From here, boat tours promise sightings of Sarawak's last wild orangutans in Batang Ai National Park. They survive in terrain too steep to log. The resort offers cultural performances and traditional crafts demonstrations. The performers' grandparents lived in longhouses now at the bottom of the lake. TripAdvisor reviews praise the infinity pool's views of the drowned valley.
4. Permai Rainforest Resort
Permai Rainforest Resort markets itself as the accessible option—just 40 minutes from Kuching airport. It's where Sarawak's capital meets what's left of its rainforest. They offer tree houses, jungle trails, and a high ropes course. The boundaries are visible from the canopy walk: virgin forest abruptly meeting development, like someone drew a line and said "preserve this bit for the tourists."
Proboscis monkeys, endemic to Borneo and found nowhere else on Earth, still inhabit the mangroves here. For now. The resort website emphasizes its eco-credentials, its minimal impact design. What it can't mention is that twenty years ago, the whole region looked like their small preserved area. Now they maintain a fragment, a living diorama of what was.
5. Borneo Highlands Resort
At 1,000 meters above sea level, Borneo Highlands Resort stays cool year-round. The 18-hole golf course offers what they call "challenging play amid pristine rainforest." They carved it from that same rainforest, but the landscaping is apparently immaculate.
From the viewing platform, guests can see primary forest, secondary growth, and palm oil plantations spreading like a rash across the landscape. On clear days, smoke plumes mark active clearing. It's a panoramic view of deforestation, available from your balcony. The resort's management speaks enthusiastically about eco-tourism being the future. They're planning to add another nine holes.
The spa uses organic products. The restaurant serves fusion cuisine. Somewhere below, pesticides from the golf course run into streams where endangered species drink.
Booking Your Escape
These resorts exist in a strange space—they profit from the very thing their existence helps destroy, yet they also preserve fragments, employ locals, fund conservation. The contradictions stack up like cleared logs.
The Penan people lived here for 40,000 years without building a single resort. They knew every tree, used hundreds of plants for medicine, moved through the forest leaving barely a trace. Now their children attend schools where they learn to forget while tourists enjoy "traditional healing therapies" at spas built on their hunting grounds.
I'm planning my trip for next month. The irony of flying from Singapore to witness environmental destruction from an infinity pool isn't lost on me. But the alternative seems to be letting it disappear unwatched, unmourned. At least this way, someone's paying attention, even if that attention comes with a spa treatment and a wine pairing.
These resorts promise luxury in Earth's second-oldest rainforest while there's still rainforest left to luxuriate in. The forest has survived 140 million years, ice ages, asteroid impacts. It won't survive us. But for a price, you can still witness what's left.
Time is running out. Breakfast is included.
