Six degrees. This is what 6C looks like here. Bracing.
Out and about I was, seeking a landscape location for my hi jinx.
Hardly significant you'd think. But in what followed I was able to integrate some Silat tongkat moves I just discovered.
'Silat' is the traditional martial art form of Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam.
It uses weapons but the basics is learnt wielding a stick. There are sticks, and then there are sticks -- but the Brunei branch of the Silat family employs my kinda stick length -- the biangan (approx armpit/hiking stick height).
The 'flow' approach to its use is two handed grace within a fascinating system of defence.
Rather than being an ideologue, I know what I like --and straightaway I was sold on the Borneo way of the stick.
Tongkat: long staff.
The other weapons you don't want to know about as they take no prisoners. But in stick mode 'tis wonderful and generally benign.
The form is often performed accompanied by music (such as a small gamelan orchestra) and with the stylised choreography is featured in events like weddings. Often enough by women too.
While I knew about Silat -- the training I've seen was very similar to Filipino Kali -- using short sticks at close quarters and a rush to explore bladed weapons.
But this Brunei hybrid has that longer staff and deploys it very creatively ..as in awesome.
And with BOTH hands. That's the clincher. I'm a two-handed snob.
What this means is that I'll be integrating my biangan studies with Tonkat adaptions.
It's liberating. What a fab journey it is following the stick.
