Lost in Borneo

Right now where were we? Ah yes, we had set of for Borneo after a second encounter with bed bugs... we managed to avoid them after this but we did spend part of each night before bed feverishly checking for evidence of their presence!

We landed in Kota Kinabalu ahead of schedule and without much of a plan as to what to do... we had plans to climb the mountain of the same name as it was reputed to be easy... the websites boasts that a 90 year old Italian grandmother had made the ascent... whether she survived to make the descent is not disclosed. Well we had pretty much decided to go for it when two things happened:

1) We found out that the Malaysian government has leased the rights to the climb and the accommodation to a single company... meaning that the climb with accommodation was going to be 2 or 3 times what we had expected at around £300 each which put it out of our reach really... unless we ignored the budget and just did it anyway.

2) An unwritten rule of internet cafes was broken. When using skype or something similar... you are required to understand that the person on the other end has a volume control, and the whole thing works through magic... you don't have to shout loud enough for them to hear you... Well thanks to flagrant disregard for this rule... we, together with the surrounding suburbs, were able to share in the experience of a fellow traveller who was 'farkin knackered' and who's 'legs feel like they're gonna drop off innit' ... apparently she had made the trip already... over the collective grinding of other patrons teeth we were able to discern that 'we was walking for 12 hours man' and 'it's fuckin dark up there and freezin' which was enough to persuade us that our money would be better spent doing something else... preferably in the warm and possibly looking at fluffy or glittery scaly things.

With that out of the way we headed East to Sepilok where by a happy feat of not being able to read the map (we knew who had it.... but not how to use it) we found ourselves not only where the Orangutan rehabilitation centre was... but also at the jumping off point for the jungle river camps that we were considering as alternatives to mountain climbing... well that's that money spent then :)

At the rehab centre they have a stage 1 area where the orangutans are released within a large area of forest, but there are regular feedings at two posts and they can come back to get fed if they wish, one of these areas has viewing areas open to the public but there are no guarantees that you'll get to see any Orangutans... well we got very lucky with a couple of mothers coming back with babies holding on together with a couple of younger males jostling for dominance and chasing off the wild monkey troop that come by for the free food as well. We returned the next day hoping for more of the same but a torrential downpour put paid to that... although we were treated to the site of an Orangutan holding his hand over his head in an attempt to ward off the rain, determined to get his feed despite the torrential downpour with an expression that said he wished he'd stayed in bed that morning.

With ourselves and our stuff again wet through we set off to the deep jungle to stay in a river camp. It wasn't quite as rough as we had anticipated however as our accommodation was more like ski chalets than rough mud huts. We went for two days and were up at the crack of dawn to board our boats and go in search of Elephants, monkeys and monitor lizards! We were again so close but yet so far with the elephants... we saw tracks and heard the wards being used in nearby plantations but we couldn't track them down. We did see proboscis monkeys, a pregnant, and truly wild Orangutan, Vipers, Macaques, Horn bills... oh and lots of jungle obviously. We saw the sun rise over the river and on a trip with a lot of nice skies we saw what felt like the whole milky way.... there's not much in the way of light pollution in the deepest jungle :)

We went another night walk... this was more wild and we encountered a sleeping kingfisher... did you know some birds just sleep on a branch? We didn't. We 'found' a whole load of leeches... but not much else... possibly due to the enormous scream given out by one of our party when a confused moth repeatedly bumped into their head torch.

Next stop is Kota Kinabalu again before catching a flight south to Kuching, we have two stops left after that, we are reaching the end but we're feeling excited about what's to come.