Mountain Climbing and Orangutans

I can finally climb/descend steps again without looking like a complete numpty and having to lower myself down each one whilst wincing with pain or pull myself up by the banister. I'd forgotten how much climbing up/down big fat hills hurts. I should have remembered the days following the 3 peaks challenge.... but no, we forget about the pain and carry on to climb some more and break a whole load more muscle fibres in the quads. My legs never really hurt when clambering up to Everest Base Camp in Nepal, but that was probably because I'd done a lot of training for that... But have I done any training at all to climb Mt Kinabalu? Nope. We just decided that cos we're in Borneo, we should give it a go.

Mt Kinabalu from our guesthouse:

And oh my god did it hurt. My legs and lungs felt like they were going to explode for 2 whole days. We set of on day 1 from the Park HQ (about 1500m) and to make the journey up a bit easier, you can pay to be driven the first 5km of trail (and 300m ascent) - pretty much everyone takes this option and it was especially nice to be able to skip that part on the way down! So we set off on the trail at around 1800m to head straight down a huge flight of steps - thought we we're supposed to be going up! Turns out, this is the only down section on the entire 8.7km trail so for the next 8.5km, we were climbing. The path was a mixture of enormous steps, steep slope and even steeper slopes covered in boulders to create steps. We had met an Irish couple, Bryan and Elissa, at our hotel the previous day so we passed a lot of time sharing travel stories which made the time and distance scoot along quite nicely. We pretty much had to stop at each shelter to slow the hearts down and eat some high energy foodstuffs (chocolate covered peanuts were my special favourite). We made it to the overnight stop, Laban Rata (3273m, 6 km) after 6 hours climbing and had a well needed 4 cups of Sabah tea and some biscuits! We had only booked our mountain accommodation the day before so there were only the unheated dorm rooms left - the unheated part was ok as I slept in all my clothes and under 2 blankets, but they don't tell you that these dorms are another 15 mins and 100m ascent above the main huts where the food is served. Not what you need after 6 hours climbing (although it did cut 100m off the next day's climb).

The sunset was pretty spectacular as the clouds kept passing at our height creating some weird effects with the sunlight:

We headed to bed early after stuffing our faces with all manner of food from the tasty buffet dinner. All the accommodation and restaurants in the Mt Kinabalu Park have been taken over by a private company, and as there is no option of accommodation on the mountain, you have to pay for their extortionately priced room and food packages. So we ate a lot of food to get our money's worth! After about 2 hours crappy sleep (the altitude, cold and a big group of Koreans kept me awake) we met our guide at 3.15am to climb the remaining 800m up and 2.5km along to the summit. Armed with headtorches and many many layers (finally wore clothes I've been carrying for 4 months in case we went somewhere cold!), we made our way very very slowly up more steps until we reached the granite slabs which make up the top of the mountain. Here there's fat ropes to use to haul yourself up the steepest sections and to mark the path.

The going was very slow and I kept feeling like I was going to be sick every few minutes which didn't help the progress. We could see a line of torches ahead of us and it still seemed a long way to go when it got light around 6am. We clambered up the last 100m of boulders and finally we were on the summit (4095m), 3 hours after setting off. Yay! The views were amazing as we we're above the clouds as the sun rose and the top of the mountain is surrounded by lots of large pinnacles.

We didn't stay at the top long as it was freezing but had a quick rest and some food sheltering just below the peak. And then all we had to do was climb all the way back down... we stopped for a massive breakfast at Laban Rata and then broke a few thousand muscle fibres lowering ourselves down the enormous steps for another 3 hours.  And it rained constantly for the last 5km. But at 1.30pm we made it back to HQ. By the time we got back to the guesthouse, all we could do was shower and climb straight into bed and sleep the afternoon away before dinner, and then head back to bed for a very early night! The next day was agony walking but all we had to do was sit (and sleep) on a bus for 4 hours to get to Sandakan in the East of Sabah.

There's not much to do in Sandakan and even less when it's raining so we had a lazy-ish day yesterday but did manage to leave the room long enough to visit a restored colonial house on a hill overlooking the town. And have tea and scones in the adjoining English Tea Rooms (complete with croquet lawn!). We've now moved about 30 minutes down the road to a newly built jungle resort - very funky wooden huts with outdoor bathrooms and sliding walls to let the breezes in - www.paganakandii.com. It is near the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre, which we visited this afternoon and saw 2 orangutans and their babies, and a lot of monkeys. The orangutans are all rescued from across Sabah and are gradually trained to survive in the wild via a series of feeding platforms set further and further into the jungle. Tourists can watch the animals come to feed at the first platform and it's not too zoo-ish as they would be fed there anyway and we're just allowed to pay to watch!

Chris would like to be a Sultan

Brunei is an odd place. So much money and so few people - the population is only 375,000. Strange little place, but nice enough to spend a day or two wandering the streets of the capital, Bandar Seri Bagawan (BSB).

We passed through the border into Brunei with minimal hassle as our helpful landlady in Miri had organised for a man with a car to give us a lift to BSB - we breezed through both Malaysian and Brunei immigration without ever having to even leave the car. Brilliant. We later spoke to some people who had saved some money by using local transport - they had taken 5 buses and it took 5 hours. We sat in the back of a car for 2.5 hours and ate Mentos whilst watching the towns flash past. Money well spent.

As Brunei has so much income from oil and gas, they haven't had to chop down their rainforest (yet) to make money from palm oil etc etc and immediately after crossing the border this was evident. The buildings all looked the same as in Malaysia but there was a lot more forest visible even from the main highway through the country. There was also a definite improvement in the state of the roads and the cars on them too! Thank you Mr Sultan.

We splashed out on a nice hotel in BSB (with a pool - bliss in the midday heat in a city) as there's not much budget choice. It was in need of some new wallpaper and telly, but at least we had a telly. And it had HBO which meant that we had something to do in the evenings... Brunei is a dry country (excepting local rice wine apparently) so there is no nightlife at all. Streets were pretty much empty after prayer time...

We spent a day and half exploring BSB - did lots of wandering around the streets and along the waterfront and trying not to break expensive (and hideous) glass sculptures in the shopping mall.

We visited the Royal Regalia Museum which houses a load of stuff given to the Sultan on his coronation and jubilee. What does one give a sultan? Well, lots of gold or glass or gem-encrusted models of things from your country it appears. Queen Lizzie had given a nice vase with acorns and other British things etched on it. Not quite so extravagant as the Saudi gift of a model of a giant mosque made out of gold. Just what one needs. Unfortunately we weren't allowed to take pictures of the mad gifts so here's a pic of the outside of the building:

From there, we strolled back through the town to the waterfront and found the boardwalk to the Kampong Ayer (water village). BSB has a number of water villages which consist of houses, schools and mosques on stilts over the river connected with rickety old boardwalks (with no railingsI may add and the water did not look appealing even in the Bornean heat...). We did a loop through the village and although the houses looked worn out and like they were about to topple into the water, they all have electricity, water and satellite tv!

We made our way around to the mosque just after sunset so got some nice photos in the dusk and dark when it's all lit up by weird green lighting. There is a man made lagoon in front of the mosque which creates some nice reflections and provides a home for the replica royal barge which is occasionally used but mostly just floats on the lagoon looking pretty and expensive.

As Brunei is split in two by a little piece of Malaysia, to avoid numerous border crossings, it's advised to travel onto Sabah (the northern part of Malaysian Borneo) by sea via Labuan Island. So we caught the afternoon ferry to Labuan (after quite a long windy local bus ride to Brunei's port) and emerged from the ice box of the ferry back in Malaysia (our third time filling in the immigration form yawn). We spent the night in Labuan so had a chance to explore the town and buy some duty free chocolate before getting the morning ferry to Kota Kinabalu (I remembered to leave my fleece accessible this time...).

So we've now spent 3 nights in KK and it's an unremarkable town really - it's pretty much all been built in the last 50 years so no nice buildings to look at and it's pretty similar to all other Malaysian towns. We had a bit of a 'travel fatigue' day yesterday (not good when we both lapse at the same time) so hid in our room faffing with long overdue admin tasks and internet things. We perked up today and visited Manukan, an island about 20 mins off the coast - beautiful beaches and some of the best snorkelling I've ever done from a beach.

We're heading off to Mount Kinabalu National Park tomorrow to have a stab at climbing the thing. My legs and lungs are not looking forward to it but hope the views will be worth it!

Just call me David Attenborough

It’s our last night in Sarawak before we get the bus tomorrow to Brunei (another stamp for the passport!). From Kuching we caught a 45 minute flight north east to a small town of Bintulu, to base ourselves from to visit the Niah Caves on the way to Miri. We stayed for 2 nights in the swankiest place we’ve stayed for a long time – actually looked like a hotel and had the best shower ever and a tv! Our room was the best thing about Bintulu – in hindsight we should have just stayed the night and caught the bus the next day, but we thought we’d check out what the town had to offer for a day… hmmm not a lot. We wandered around for about an hour and the most exciting thing that happened was some Indonesians wanting their picture taken with us! We decided to visit the nearby botanical gardens and zoo – well, it amused us for a couple of hours but was weirdly deserted and in a bit of a state of disrepair. And the animals, especially the birds, were kept in very small cages which didn’t make us feel too happy about the place. At least the tiger had a big area to roam around in. They did have a few hornbills – indigenous to Borneo and was kinda nice to see them up close as in the wild you usually only see them flying way above your head.

All in all, I wouldn’t really recommend Bintulu for your next holiday destination. So we were quite happy to jump on the bus to Niah the next morning – although we got rushed onto the bus before we could buy breakfast so by 12.45pm when we we’re able to get food, I was starving! The bus journey took us past many many palm oil plantations and some jungle. We arrived in Niah junction which is about 11km from the national park. We hired a man and car to drive us to the park, and lo and behold, about 5 minutes down the road, the road was flooded and impassable. The driver attempted to tell us that we had to get out and walk (with ALL our stuff) through the puddle and then we’d get through from there. But then we reached an even more flooded point where they were using boats to cross! Fortunately a man at the big fat puddle told us that the national park was closed as the caves were flooded to waist height. Oh dear. So we walked back through the puddle and the man and car were more than happy to take us back to the bus station, and take more of our money of course. Gah. Fortunately, this was all in the morning so there were more buses stopping at Niah to carry on to Miri where we were heading next anyway. Eventually we found ourselves a bed for the night in a very friendly backpackers place with loads of cats and kittens running around. Miri is also another stopping over town, so we filled a day wandering around the town and visiting the air-con shopping plaza in search of new flip-flops (failed) and a cheapo mobile phone to get us back connected with the world a bit, and mostly to book hotels etc without having to rely on having wifi access to use Skype. We visited the pride and joy of Miri – their themed and landscaped town park – before catching the afternoon half hour flight to Mulu National Park, on the border with Brunei. The flight was an event in itself - we were supposed to be flying on a Fokker-50 but there were only 6 of us, so they put us on a Twin Otter flying bus instead! It was good to see the landscape from above - can really see how much of the land is now being logged or used for palm oil - there's stil a lot of jungle, but it's definitely shrinking...

Mulu National Park is most famous for it’s caves (Deer Cave was featured in the BBC Planet Earth cave episode) and what lives in caves…bats. On our first afternoon in Mulu, after dumping our bags in the dorm room, we walked for about 45 minutes through the jungle to the bat observatory. On most afternoons between 4 and 6pm, the bats that live in deer cave come flying out in amazing patterns like smoke across the sky. They head over 80km to the coast each night to feed on insects washed down with seawater. And we were lucky enough to see them – they hadn’t come out the previous day and everyone had just had to sit for over 2 hours looking at the cave mouth – it was a pretty spectacular sight watching 3 million bats leave their cave.

We had a ‘cave day’ the next day and visited all 4 of the show caves. In the morning we walked for over an hour along treacherously slippery wooden plankwalks and steps to meet up with the rest of the group who had got the boat – we felt and looked ridiculously hot and sweaty compared to them! But we got to see another cave on the way – small enough to have to duck through and not very well lit so headtorches were required. Following our guide, we visited Wind Cave and Clearwater Cave – the latter still has the river running through it and creates a a clear blue pool near the cave mouth which is great for swimming – I was so hot I contemplated jumping in even though I’d not brought my swim things! Clearwater Cave system in the longest in the world – over 150km long and they’re still discovering new bits.

Huntsman's Spider - about the size of a big hand... eek

We bailed out on the walk back and got the boat – a wonderfully breezy trip down the river past local villagers bathing and fishing. After a well needed lunch, shower and rest, we headed to Lang and Deer Cave. We had a really helpful guide pointing out all sorts of plants and insects along the way – never ever would have spotted the stick insect without an expert!

Mating millipedes:

Lang Cave is pretty small but full of amazing stalagmite and stalactite formations – reminded me of Cheddar Gorge (but without the west country accented commentary and a lot hotter). They saved the best for last as Deer Cave is by far the most amazing cave I’ve ever seen – there’s only a few limestone formations, but the place is HUGE. It has the biggest cave mouth in the world – somewhere between 174 and 220m (my two guidebooks differ in their opinion!) and is 2km long and is pretty much around that height the whole way along.

I couldn’t really get a sense of scale of things until now again a person pops into a view and suddenly you realize quite how massive it is. Unfortunately the place stinks as there are between 2 and 3 million bats that make the ceiling of Deer Cave their home and that makes for a lot of guano… Although the guano provides food and nutrients to a lot of insects (including cockroaches that clamber all over the piles on the floor – they are thankfully a lot smaller than the cockroaches that appear in our bathrooms now and again).

Chris and a pile of guano cleared from the paths:

We walked for about 30 minutes into the cave and at the far end, the roof caved in and created what’s known and the Garden of Eden – a jungle filled patch in between Deer and Green Caves.

We had hoped that the bats would start their fly-out whilst we were still in there but nope. As we visited during the rainy season, there were some amazing sights of the water dripping through the roof backlit by sunlight. We decided not to wait to see the bats fly out again, and so headed back along the plankwalk serenaded by frogs and insects (one of which was so loud I had to cover my ears at one point!). Needless to say, I slept very well that night even though we were in an 18-bed dorm.

We caught a late afternoon flight back to Miri, so Chris braved the canopy walk in the morning whilst I kept two feet on the ground and did a small jungle trail. I was very glad that I didn’t pay the £6 to do the canopy walk as even Chris was a bit wary in places – it’s up to 35m off the ground and only 2 planks of wood wide. Eeeeek. Nice views though apparently!

Some bugs from my walk:

We’re back in Miri now for one night and heading to Brunei tomorrow – country number 7 – and we’re treating ourselves to a 3 star hotel complete with pool… mmmm…

Consumerism and the Jungle

Writing this sitting on my bed in Kuching, Malaysia Borneo and it's raining. Again. After having had near perfect weather in Thailand, Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore, it's rained a heck of a lot since we arrived in Borneo. But it is the rainy season so what should we expect eh?

We left the Cameron Highlands feeling refreshed from the cool air and boarded the most luxurious bus ever for the 4 hour journey to Kuala Lumpur (commonly referred to as KL) - wished we'd had that bus for some of our longer journeys!

We stomped through the crazy heat and humidity to find ourselves a room and got a cheap, windowless room slap bang in the middle of Chinatown for all of £10 a night including our very own bathroom (which has now become the height of luxury - KL was the last place we stayed with our own facilities - we're hardcore travellers now grrrr). We spent 3 days in KL exploring as much as we could whilst melting in the heat and consuming copious amounts of ice tea and juice. We did all the touristy things - went up to the skybridge between the Petronas Towers, visited the top of the KL tower. Good views to be had from both, but you're only allowed 10 mins up on the skybridge after spending 20 mins in a queue and watching a Petronas promotional video (with no mention whatsoever about researching renewable fuel sources - evil oil companies gah).

We were in KL a couple of days before Chinese New Year which while we were in the city was really interesting to see everyone buying all their supplies and the streets filled with lanterns and dragon dancers, but then we stupidly had to get a long distance bus on New Year's Eve. Mistake. We managed to get tickets and only had to wait an hour but the bus station was soooooo busy and noone was telling anyone actually where to get the bus. When we finally found our bus, loads of people with tickets for later buses were trying to get on and we were lucky to make it through the crowds in time. And then we sat in traffic on the motorway with everyone else escaping the city for NY. Argh. Anyway... we made it to Melaka - 2 hours down the coast from KL. Spent NY there which was cool to see all the stalls, fireworks and decorations. We had a bit of a nightmare leaving Melaka, which Chris wrote about in his blog (http://www.rootfest.com/) so I won't reiterate.

We then spent 3 days walking the streets of sunny Singapore. We again did all the touristy things and spent a heck of a lot of time in shopping malls as they are everywhere in Singapore. I don't think that an island the size of Sinagpore has quite the need for so many malls with basically the same shops in, but we're glad as they are all air-conditioned which is very welcome in the midday heat! We were blown away with how expensive Singapore was after spending 3 months in cheapo countries - we thought Malaysia would be a bridge between Thailand and Singapore, but it's almost as cheap as Thailand. So, we found ourselves paying £50 a night for a room with shared bathroom and bunkbeds! But they had the most comfortable pillows and mattresses we've had for aaaaaaaaaaaages so it was kinda worth it. And the hostel was about 30 secs from the MRT (tube) which was really handy - London really has some lessons to learn from Singapore when it comes to public transport....

We spent a day on Sentosa Island - Singapore's beach area complete with imported white sand! It was quite strange to jump on a monorail in a shopping mall and arrive at the beach - kind of sums up Singapore! One of the islands off the coast is supposedly the southernmost point of continental asia - not sure how they justify that when Singapore is an island and this point is an island too but hey ho we visited it anyway...

From Singapore, we jumped on an Air Asia flight to Kuching in Sarawak in Malaysian Borneo (very confusing - Borneo is the island of which Malaysia has the top half (minus Brunei) and Sarawak is the western part of the Malaysian bit). We spent 2 nights in Kuching and did a bit of wandering and a bit of relaxing and rain avoiding - there's not loads to do in the city and we're a bit city-ed out at the moment. So we escaped the city for 2 nights and visited Bako National Park - just north of Kuching on a promontory in the South China Sea. The journey there involved us trekking across the city to find the non-labelled bus stop in the rain, an hours spine crunching local bus journey in the skankiest bus ever, and then a 1/2 hour boat journey through crocodile infested waters (not kidding) and very rough sea to be dropped off on the beach near the park HQ. We were quite knackered from all of that, and it was raining so we did a cheeky walk down the beach that afternoon kitted out completely inappropriately (waterproofs and humidity = bad bad idea and ridiculous sweatage). We did see a load of macaques and also a group of proboscis monkeys which are pretty rare and a couple of pit vipers took up residence for a day near our chalet! We did a longer walk yesterday to a waterfall and even wearing less clothes we sweated a ridiculous amount and were completely shattered after 5 hours walking.

We're now back in Kuching for a couple more nights while we decide where to go next!