June 14th, 2010
Sepilok, Sabah, Borneo
Part I
And so it begins, as with all worthy resolutions procrastination is the key to success and as such this blog is coming to you (or rather me as I suspect my adoring audience will in fact be limited to myself and possibly the occasional insomniac web trawler) one week into my travels.
I’m currently in Sepilok, Borneo using wifi in our hotel café where I suspect the tablecloth exists solely to grant privacy to the mosquitoes feasting on my legs however given I am now in the vicinity of a real shower that does not in any way involve brown river water I am content to allow the mosquitoes their privacy. Hard to believe that only one week ago I was enjoying a resort style accommodation in Singapore and that two weeks have passed since I bid farewell to Hong Kong with suitably ridiculous attire and dancing.
The first leg of our trip is Borneo which will be Sabah, Brunei and Sarawak before heading to Bali. So far I have swum with enormous sea turtles , been caught utterly unprepared for a tropic shower that lead to walking around downtown kota kinabalu in a plastic poncho that was only wet on the inside from being put over wet clothes as a last ditch effort to avoid getting more soaked only for it to stop raining and have me wander about resembling a garbage bag with a condensation problem, learnt never to attempt to use the toilet on a bus being driven along a windy road at speed (especially when said toilet is pitch black), watched the sunset over the kinabantagan river and pondered coming back in the next life as an orangutan after observing the serene life of fig eating.
We started from Kota Kinabalu which is one of the larger cities in Borneo but in terms of tourism, mostly functions as a launching pad for expeditions to other parts of Sabah. We exhausted most of the things to see on the first day including the interesting museum of Sabah and the signal hill lookout (which is not the highest point in KK so do not start wandering up random streets trying to find it as you may end up like us being chased away but some rather unwelcoming pitbulls), day two saw us taking the ferry over to Tunku Abdul Rahmen National Park which has a number of pleasant islands to laze around the beach and snorkel or get completely soaked in the not entirely unexpected tropical shower (the deep grey clouds should really have given it all away) and end up in the aforementioned plastic garbage with condensation attire in down town.
Given that travelling to Borneo is really about the nature (although hopefully not the frightening large horned beetle/cockroach hybrids that the museum showed were in abundance in Borneo) we headed to Semporna to try our luck at diving Sipidan. We took the overnight bus, giving us ten hours to slowly freeze in the artic air conditioning whilst hurtling along the mountain roads. Arriving at 4am in Semporna we discovered you need to have a permit in advance to dive Sipadan. However we instead dived Mabul and Kapalai island with Scuba Junkie and our great instructors Paul and Vlad (who almost had me sold on Bermuda as a possible post travel abode until he mentioned the GIANT COCKROACHES that reside there). The dive sites had an abundances of coral, fish and small marine life such as nudibranches (however you spell that), most exciting were the giant turtles that seemed remarkably unperturbed by our presence.
As an entire day had been spent diving in the crystalline waters off Mabul it seemed reasonable that we should forsake clean water for a few days and head out to Kinabatangan River for a jungle safari.
