Last week in Borneo: Sepilok, Klias river & KK

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July 18: Sepilok orangutan park. Thank god the park only opens at 9:30am and the first feeding is 10am. No getting up really early! Those are civilised and not super early hours. Two orangutans come to the first feeding. These are as close as wild orangutans as we'll see in Borneo. They come in swinging and hang around for a little bit. Quite a sight. We do a small walk around the park. Loads of butterflies but unfortunately leeches as well. The park is really close to the jungle resort so we get to leave for a bit, go for lunch and a beer. At lunch, a Chinese tour group of about 6 guys were staring at my feet. I couldn't work out why until the said "Leech!" I had a little leech attached to the side of my foot happily sucking away. So gross! And even grosser that I didn't realize it was there. We hang out at lynch for a while then return for the 3pm feeding. Two more orangutan show up this time plus a pig-tailed macaque and we stay a while to watch them. We booked for a night walk at 6 and see flying squirrels, orangutans, some jungle creepy crawleys and lots of highly poisonous pit vipers. The vipers are all over the jungle which is a bit frightening to think we walked through it so much.

July 19: Short flight back to Kota Kinabalu K for a relaxing afternoon. I decide to get a haircut which turns out to be hilarious. The shampoo girl washes my hair in the stylist chair with a squeezy bottle, makes loads of suds and never spills a drop on me. The shampoo takes about 20 minutes. When they're ready to do my cut, some guy pops out from behind the counter and without a word to me just starts cutting. He trims my hair in about four and a half minutes then without a word goes back behind the counter and sticks his iPod back in. Funny! I love going to salons in foreign countries.

July 20: We're up early to go white water rafting. At the pickup time, the Proboscis river company calls to let us know that we can't go rafting cause the Beaufort train is broken. Ookaaay, but they'll pick us up a 2pm to do the rest of the trip which is to head to the Klias river for proboscis monkey spotting from a boat, then do a second cruise after dinner for fireflies. We kill time until 2 in KK by going to an Internet place so Pete can back up his photos to DVDs. At 2, we are back on track and get in a minivan for the river. When we get to the jungle 'resort' (they all call themselves resorts but this place is a riverside restaurant with some huts) there are loads of Chinese tourists with screaming kids. Crap. The proboscis river ride is good with lots spotted but there are 4 boats full of noisy tourists who scare the monkeys away so you can't really observe them for any period of time. The staff at the resort are very accommodating to us, reserving a separate table for us away from the tours for dinner and making sure we're happy which is really nice. After dinner we get a quiet boat to ourselves for fireflies, which are magical. The trees look like they have flashing white twinkle lights on them. They are so sparkling and lit up it is really impressive. After this, they let us know we can't go rafting the next day...the train in still broken and the river is flooded which doesn't make for great rafting. We stay anyway as we want to do the boat trip at dawn. What we only the realize is that once again we're the ONLY people staying the night here. No wonder they're taking care of us so well.


July 21: Alarm at 5:30. Our morning boat ride is at 6. We have the river completely to ourselves at dawn. It's glassy and the morning jungle birds are singing. Beautiful. We are out for an hour and a half, spot silver leaf monkeys who spook and run quickly. Flying foxes spar overhead on their way back in. Macaque monkeys don't care whether you're there and hang around so we watched them for a bit. Saw a few groups of female proboscis monkeys with babies. On one sighting, we spent 20 minutes with the engine off and observed about six of them feeding with the little ones jumping all over the place. Super cool. The morning gets even better when we have a fantastic breakfast with the resort to ourselves. Fresh brewed coffee (not instant!!), French toast, crepes, poached eggs and sausages. The best breakfast we've had in Borneo. And with such good service. A perfect morning. Back to KK and we have an afternoon to kill. I have a manicure, of course. Nice one too! Only 40RM = ￡8. Our last meal in Borneo is at Texas restaurant near the waterfront. We have dinner then stay to smoke a shisha while it pours with tropical rain. It has rained every single day we've been in KK. Not that it's a big problem when it's so warm out and there's a bar to sit at.

July 22: We only fly to Manila at 1:30pm so we get an easy morning to pack and go. Here's a weird run-in we had at the check in counter at the airport: we're in line at the bag drop counter and while we do some last minute zipping and checking of bags, we let some space in the line. A Malaysian dude from another line swoops into the gap so we make a bit of a fuss. He goes ballistic completely unprovoked! "Fuck you! This is my country! Queue up!" I was stunned. I wanted to yell back "We LOVE your country so don't be a dickhead!" Ha! We've met nothing but really nice Malaysians, almost always smiling so this guy comes out of nowhere. I've really loved Borneo and Malaysians. Hotel operators, restaurant staff, taxi drivers, dive guides...we've had some really good luck where we've been. We will definitely be back for the diving, jungles and beaches.

The flight to Clark in Manila is only 2 hours. Easy. But getting from Clark to our hotel in Makati takes considerably longer. Once we're off the plane we have to catch a 300peso bus (the taxi would have been 4000pesos). The bus takes a little over 2 hours + another hour stuck in Manila rush hour traffic in a taxi from the bus drop off point. So we saved 2500pesos but probably took an hour extra. But we got a taste of Manila rush hour. Insane. 10 lanes across of cut throat bumper to bumper traffic that almost never lets up. There were still traffic jams at 10pm. On the taxi to the hotel, I spot a Tony Romas. Mmmmm ribs. We head there for dinner. Love their ribs. Off to bed with full bellies for our short flight to Boracay tomorrow.

Our trip so far -Kota Kinablanu, Kuching, Semporna, Sandikan

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July 5: Up at 4am. We are so tired! Arrive at Tune Kuching hotel at about 8:30am. Pete is so out of it that he dropped his camera at the hotel and is wide angle lens broke. Tragedy but at least the camera still works. Drop our bags and set off to find the Bako park tourist office to see if we can stay in the park. We can't. :( We grab a cab and are there in about 40 minutes for 40RM. Then a boat to the park. Arrive at the mangroves where the tide was out and the mud was covered with mudskippers and wee crabs. We do 3 of the shorter hikes since we're pretty tired from getting up so early. We spot our first proboscis monkey proudly on show in a tree near the HQ buildings. The first hike was short but straight up to a viewpoint. The second was the busiest trail as it's on the map as the 'best' trail to see the monkeys - we did see a few. The last trail was to mangroves and we ran into about 30 macaque monkeys on the way back. Got some great shots and video. Feeling tired and lazy after our park day so we ate in chinatown for about £5 and went back to the hotel to crash at 9pm.


July 6: Bako Park again. This time the longer waterfall trail.

July 7: Sleep-in free-day in Kuching. Breakfast at the After 2 Kiosk where we can get dim sum buns. Found a good bookshop in the Tun Jugah center called Popular Book Co. So picked up the next 2 'Dragon Tattoo' books. Did some general looking around for a wide angle lens for Pete but no luck. Wound up back at After 2 for beers. The cafe was over the road from a cinema so we figured sitting in A/C would be good for a couple of hours. Saw 'Knight and Day' for 5RM each. Cheap! It was better than a UK cinema experience which isn't really hard to beat anyway. Then had dinner at the Living Room for thin crust pizza and a bottle of sauv blanc! Cool restaurant with a really chill back garden area. Hooray!

July 8: Back to KK. Arrive around 2pm and head out to find the Mt K office and look for a lens for Pete. Turns out climbing mt k is about £200 per person and it's booked up until the 25th of July which we don't really want to hang around for. We'd rather spend the money on diving. Tour books say you can do the climb on your own for cheap but it turns out the 'cheap' parks passes are sold to tour companies who sell them on to tourists like us for 100-200% markup. Forget it. (im kind of relieved anyway since mountain climbing is not my thing.) So next we go shopping for a wide angle lens. Pete picks one up for £70 cheaper than the one he bought in England. Result! Off to Texas for internetting and beer.
July 9: Free day in Kk. Turns out not so free as we spent from about 9am to 1pm reserching and booking flights around the philippines. It wasnt as easy as we thought to get the route we wanted but we booked flights to boracay, malapascua and Bohol (Cebu city), Palawan and back to Singapore via manila. We do a little shopping later in the afternoon where I pick up a couple of cute tops for £20. Ate super cheap BBQ pork on rice for dins.


July 10: Wake up super early for a flight to Kapilai dive resort. After a flight to Semporna and a 45 minute boat ride out, we arrive at the resort around 10:30 and are diving at 12:00. Nice! Got 3 dives in that day. The first reef dive was great. They've sunk wrecks around the reef and we saw batfish, parrotfish, eels, loads of butterflyfish, giant cod and grouper, pufferfish, boxfish, you name it. Second dive at Mabul island was full of turtles. They were everywhere. Third dive was on our own on the house reef. More of the same. We are schedueled for Sipidan tomorrow 5:30am start. Our room is huge with a big balcony over water. We open up all the shutters and windows so it feels really airy. Nice big bathroom too. Best part of our 'floating' bungalow is the huge green turtles that grazed under our balcony every night. We went to sleep to the sound of the ocean and the turtles coming up for air. The resort is first class. Food is good and the dining room has a cut out section down to the sea where there are tons of lionfish and blue spotted rays having their dinner.


July 11: Up at 5am for Sipidan. First dive is at 6:17am. Unbelievable day of diving. Dozens of shark on the first dive at 25m. Turtles everywhere as well. The amount of fish is amazing. Huge schools of batfish, bannerfish, angelfish. As we come up to the reef, as massive school of bumphead parrotfish move through our dive group. It's like a rush hour highway of huge parrotfish. So glad pete has pics and video of it all as the abundance and beauty of so many fish is hard to describe. The next 3 dives at Sipidan are just as exciting but not as dramatic as the first dive. Was very difficult to get out of the water when I still had 70-80 bar left and could have stayed in for 15 more minutes. The reefs at the end of each dive in just 5m of water were amazing. Gorgeous, colourful coral, loads of fish and turtles just hanging out. Even the photos and video won't do it justice.
July 12: More diving! This time a sleep in until 7am. 3 dives on Danawan, Mabul and Siamil islands plus we did a house reef sunset dive. Our guide is San-San who is really good at spotting the micro stuff + he has a magnadoodle slate so he writes down what to look for. The first dive is a sandy reef where we see a sea moth (didn't know they existed!) and an octopus really flashing its colours. Our next dives he finds us a flamboyant cuttlefish and I spot a horned cowfish. We also see loads of turtles and the othe usual suspsects on the reef. On our sunset dive, San finds a mandarin fish for Pete. He is so small and beautifully colourful. Got lots of pics.


July 12: Our last dive day :( but we still get 3 dives in as we're not flying out right away. Our early house reef dive isn't very exciting as we were just trying to go for depth and somehow after seeing so much great stuff in the past two days i think we've become harder to impress. We do see the biggest potato cod ever and lots of harlequin sweetlips. But the odd batfish, titan triggerfish or moorish idol just isn't as exciting after yesterday! Our second boat dive to Mabul was great but we missed seeing a few things due to a very beginner diver with no skill or buoyancy control who would just kick up sand and ruin all the spotting for everyone. She kicked a ribbon eel that we all wanted to see. She was a total liability and were happy to see the back of her. Our third and final dive of the trip was back to the house reef which turned out to be fantastic. After not seeing a turtle all day, we had one last one to see us off. He was coming in for a sleep. We also spotted a giant banded sea snake, loads of eels, a small clown triggerfish, all the usual beautiful reef fish and a pair of differently striped butterflyfish which are my favourite. So long Kapilai, we miss you already! So we wouldn't have to cut our diving short due to flying, we tranferred to Singamata resort. Basically it's the low-rent backpackers version of Kapilai. No big beautiful rooms with big bathroms. Singamata is shared bathrooms in small but tidy rooms. Our first dinner was a laugh in comparison too - fishhead curry! Ewwwww.

July 14: Lazy day at Singamata. We find the floating hammocks and chill out reading. Pete started the second dragon tattoo book yesterday and is almost finished already.
July 15: Another lazy day. Started out nice enough weather but soon turns stormy by lunchtime. The rain is so heavy that it fills up large plastic garbage cans in just a few minutes. It's still warm enough though. We spend the day reading, watching movies on iPods and snorkeling.
July 16: More laziness at Singamata. Hot sunny day. Pete and I are both engrossed in our 'Dragon Tattoo' books. Joseph has been watching movies on the ipods for 2 days now. We're all chilled and happy.
July 17: Leave Singamata on 10:30 boat to head to Sandikan and Sepilok orangutans. Arrive in Semporna and do ome internetting and get some lunch before our 2:30 bus to Tawau airport. We get caught in a MAJOR mid-day tropical rainstorm. Mega thunder and lightning. We are drenched!We only had to walk about 3 block but got so soaked we actually had to towel off and change our clothes before getting on the bus. Arrive at the Sepilok Jungle Resort in plenty of time for dinner. We can't get over how tired we are considering we've only been lazing about in the heat for the past few days. I can now understand how tropical third world countries are very s l o w and sleep a LOT! We eat and get to bed by 9:30. Party animals!

Our trip so far - England to Kota Kinablau

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The itinerary: Singapore, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, Malapascua, Boracay, Palawan.

18 June: depart heathrow 12:05
19 June: arrive Singapore Studio M hotel around 9am. Go up to room, sleep till 2pm. Shop around for a backpack for me. Drinks at chijmes. Dinner @ sushi accross from Clarke Quay

20 June: Day in Singapore. Pack up our stuff and go to storage place but oops it's closed. Lunch at Maxwell food place. Dinner @ Clarke Quay mega expensive and puts Pete in a foul mood cause he feels ripped off. (3 beers and a shishe pipe cost S$68 so fair enough for feeling ripped off)
21 June (Monday): Day in Singapore. Take our stuff to storage. Go to buy ferry tickets but forgot passports so had to come back. Dinner in Chinatown.
22 June: Check out and up early for a 7:50 ferry to Sumatra. There's only a 15 minute connection between the boat from Singapore and the ferry to Sumatra and we missed it. It was supposed to be a larger boat with a bit of room to move about and get air. so we are told that there's another ferry we can take thats 4 hours followed by a 5 hour bus ride all on the same ticket. Seems fair enough but we wind up on a much smaller ferry with 100 Indonesians crammed in 80 seats inside the boat for a 6 hours in a stfling hot airless cabin. Ouch. The last few hours on the boat were bearable as lots of people got off at the first stop and it was way less packed. So we had more room and could move outside to ride on top for a while. It was still mainly a boat ride from hell. AND this 6 hour boat was followed by an 8.5 hour bus ride where at the transition point, we are the town curiosity. Don't know if these Indonesians rarely see white people or some other reason why we were so fascinating but they all wanted our picture and crowded around us with camera phones. One cop even came to the bus depot where we waited for the bus to get his picture taken with pete. We asked at the bus depot when the bus was coming, the guy just held up 5 fingers. 5 minutes? 5 hours? 5 o'clock? The bus ride wound up to be 9 hours in a minivan and we arrived in Pekanbaru at 1:30am. The hotel i had booked with gave away our room but there was one across the street that took us. Painful! So we were told 4 hour boat + 5 hour bus all included in the ticket but instead got a 6 hour unpleasant boat + 8.5 hour minivan that wasn't included. And the hotel lied to us about keeping a room for us. So far after 1 day in Indonesia, I feel ripped off, lied to and completely put off the country.


23 June: Try to get out of Pekanbaru - there is really nothing there. First we hit a travel agency who tell us that there are no flights to Padang and that all the flights to Jakarta are full. So we go to the bus station to find no buses until 7pm. We dont want to wait in the heat that long. We hire a guy to drive us to Padang but when the car arrives, its a 4x4 with a 3rd bench so we'd be in super cramped seats for hours with no AC in 40 degree heat. No way. So we get out of the car and think wed rather take a proper coach on the overnight trip to Padang than sit in that cramped thing for hours. Then I have a revelation. Let's go to the aiport and roll the dice on a flight to Jakarta since we've got nothing to lose since we can't fly to Padang anyway. So we head to the airport and we can get 2 business class flights on Garuda to Jakarta but no third seat. We tell them that we'll buy the seats if they can get us another seat. I guarantee we bumped someone from their economy seat so they could sell the other 2 more expensive seats. So long Sumatra, you difficult sonofabitch. We are off to Java so we can climb Krakatoa. Arrive in Jakarta and get a taxi. The driver wants to know why we'd go into jakarta just to drive out again. So he offers to drive us straight to Carita where we can get the Krakatoa tour. He also quotes us a price lower than any we'd been quoted to get there. An honest man in indonesia? Amazing! He even helps us find a beach bungalow to stay in when we get there. Beach is nice with white sand. Aso is a super nice guy that helped us out. But we get ripped off again later that night at dinner. Our bill is 210k (£18) for a few nasi and mee gorengs. We were taken for 4 times the price we should have paid. Indonesia is doing my head in.


24 June: in the morning i work out that we're not properly in Carita but in the beachy bit called Anyer. About 1/2 hour away. We want to get closer to Carita so move to Sunset View hotel (which you can't see the sunset from!) for Krakatoa tour. Beach in Carita is busy and filthy. The tour company try to rip us off but the tour price goes from 4M to 2.5M for three of us. (£292 to £183) Pete has to get a moped pillion ride to Lubuan to go to ATM as the tour is cash only. The funny thing is that it's torrential rain. He says it was a dodgy ride but I know he thought it was good fun. Found some cheap dinner and the hotel brought beer in for us.

25 June: Krakatau tour. Boat to island only takes 1.5 hours. Volcano is amazing. Steaming and hot and we get to climb all over it. Pete wanted to go to the top and the tour guys wouldn't have stopped him. Then we go to a
black sandy beach but it's filthy with garbage. Snorkling ok but garbage in the water. Indonesians just don't care about the garbage situation. It's everywhere and they just chuck plastic wrappers and bottles out of cars, boats and in their backyards. I just don't get it. We have another dinner in Carita at our new favourite hawker. We are paying 24k for dinner now. (£2)
26 June: Get woken up at 6am by Aso to take us back to Jakarta so we can fly to Kota Kinabalu. In hindsight, we could have stayed in Indonesia longer if we stayed near the beach in Anyer and used the little silver buses we could have enjoyed cheap food and beaches. i think we were really traumatised by our first 2 days of travel in Indonesia. Oh well! Off to Kota Kinabalu. It's immediately better! KK is a bit of a tourist town and much easier to manage. At around 11pm we go out for dinner. We SMS a dive company to see if we can dive in the morning from the Texas restaurant as they have internet and computers at the tables. Staying at Summer House backpackers.
27 June: The dive place phones us back at 6;45 and we can go diving! Great day, good lunch, met some good people. We're doing it again tomorrow.
28 June: More diving in KK. Another good day. After, we head out to book our next moves and go to the seafood market on the waterfront in KK. Fantastic dinner with a whole grilled squid, a whole grilled fish and a couple of plates of noodles. A total feast that comes to the equivalent of £11. Met a cool retired couple at our backpackers that are from Sydney and travelling the world for 5 years. They've highly recommended we check out Kuching and Bako Park as well as Sri Lanka for a future trip. They also recommended a floating hostel called Singamata that we're putting on the list.



June 29 - July 4: I booked www.Manana-Borneo.com for 5 days. A bit of a leap of faith, their website looked good and it got some great write ups on the Lonely Planet website. It's cheap, on a private beach and we get our own bungalows. Perfect. Yam picks us up at 10:30 for the ride there, we stop at a market to get some fruit and we're at the 'resort' by 12:30 or so. It couldn't be more chilled. No phone, no tv, no Internet. 5 days of quiet and beach. We've had perfect beach weather coupled with stormy days where it's still 30+ degrees with amazing electrical storms and insane rain. At least we could watch with a beer in hand from our hammocks. The mornings are so calm and the sea is so flat you can't tell where the ocean ends and sky starts. The butterflys are huge and beautiful plus there are so many of them! A leaf fell on our table at breakfast and it turned out to be a giant moth. Amazing! In the 5 days we've been here weve seen kingfishers at the beach, loads of huge butterflys that make monarchs look small and ordinary and macaque monkeys in the trees right behind our bungalow. The snorkling is good too where we saw butterfly fish, anemone fish, nudibranches, gobies, brittlestars and an octopus among others. Bit of a worry when pete and i both spotted a box jellyfish at the beach. (How long has it been there?! We've been in and out of the water. Scary. ) It's been a bit of a struggle with Joseph and hygeine. He's just not grasping keeping things from getting swampy in the tropics. But we are all getting along well on our deserted island with cards, pool table, beach and snorkling. Food has been good considering its basically cooked in a camp kitchen - but the Bbq dinner was terrible with blackened meat and oily sides. We were a little worried theyd run out of beer but they never did. It's been a super chill 5 days at our own private beach.
July 4: Back in KK by 2pm. Pick up some deet and cold medication as I've picked up a stupid cold. Found a place to get a 45RM pedicure. Booked a few things at Texas then went for sushi. I'm going to bed early! We have to wake up early and I'm feeling a bit ugh.