From Bhutan we had a couple of days in Kuala Lumpur, to reprovision and sightsee (and buy airline tickets), before travelling on to Borneo. It was my first experience with a Muslim country.
Kuala Lumpur is a fast growing, and rapidly modernizing city. One of the striking impressions of our trip is how internationalized the world has become. Shanghai, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur are all host to malls primarily stocked with western brands. The big “luxury” brands are here, but so are the surf brands (Quicksilver is huge in Japan, no really) and everything else. The biggest bookstore I've ever been in was a Borders in KL (all English language). It had a larger section on US history than on Malaysia.
Malaysia wants to be a player on the world economic stage, and rapid, planned development of its capital city is a big part of this. Using the Petronas dollars to build the towers was a symbolic aspect of this, but huge planned communities that mix office space with residential dwellings are meant to attract foreign companies eager to outsource. At least in KL, the reinvestment of extraction economy dollars is towards service sector and not just industry. There is a large population of educated english speakers here, but there is also a significant literacy gap. Street signs on the freeways are color coded so that the illiterate can navigate.
Online booking can be a godsend, but it entails certain risks. We got the unfortuante roll of the dice this time, as the hostel we stayed in the first night was crap, though it did have wireless. We left our laptop uploading Bhutan photos to flickr and sacked out.
In the morning tragedy struck. Susan, up earlier, was checking the progress of the upload but the computer had frozen. When she rebooted... the camera chip was blank. Frantically trying to fix the situation, she was damn near histerical by the time I awoke – 600 photos from a trip of a lifetime gone.
Channeling Spicoli I assured Susan “I can fix it”. But first we needed a decent place to leave our stuff. We wandered the backpacker ghetto and eventually checked into a room above “The Bollywood Restaurant”. The guys were really nice, and very helpful when they heard about our photo misfortune. Johnny, the proprietor was a semi-retired stock trader, active gold speculator, and all around good guy. His nephews and extended family staffed the place, and the next morning he hooked us up with a friend of his for a taxi ride to the airport.
Malaysia is an interesting place. Like Indonesia it had no tradition of nationhood before the sort of arbitration consolidation during colonial times. That era, and the geography have made it a melting pot. Everyone speaks many languages, and though Islam is the official religion, multiculturalism seems en vogue, at least in cosmopolitan KL. I'm a little embarassed to admit that this was something of a surprise for me. We get such a slanted perspective from grammer school onwards, reenforced by the media, and I really expected that local religious or ethnic minorities would carry a sort of second class citizenship. This is by no means the case. Freedom of thought and egalitarianism are unique assets in the West, right? I don't question the Framers wisdom in protecting the state from the influence of religion, and as so many people forget, the more important (in the eyes of those fellows in 1776) protecting religions from the corruptions of getting too involved with the state. This is certainly better – but contrary to popular media the absence of a strict wall separating church and state does not instantly bring about the destruction of all liberty.
Anyway, our time in KL was really just errand running. Buying tickets on Air Asia, buying books at Borders, buying coffee at Starbucks, doing our damndest to find someplace without a western brand to buy lunch and dinner. That's the real story here, everything is the same as home. There is some local color, and most of the women are wearing scarves over their hair, but the damn place is almost a doppleganger for Chicago or Seattle or Sacramento except for the heat.
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We were really excited during our flight into Kota Kinabalu. Borneo is a bright green out the window sitting in what look like sparkingly clear water. You can see reefs and such, and just know the tropical paradise awaits you.
We had a damn early rise to get our flight, and hadn't really slept for two nights – once because of the noise in the hostel and the second time 'cause I was all stressed and trying to save the Bhutan photos. We were so early that when we went downstairs we found we were locked in. The nephews who ran the place apparently also live there, so getting out was simply a matter of waking up one of them sleeping in the booths of the restaurant.
But we got to KK totally knackered. Initially we had designs on a nice, cheapo place, but checking about this quickly proved a terrible idea. KK is a dump, not remotely the “charming, bustling gateway” that the grossly unreliable Lonely Planet would have one believe. We needed sleep, an international phone line (Visa had decided to lock out our ATM cards), and a dearth of bedbugs. We checked into the Hyatt.
We burned almost a full day dealing with photos and visa. I spent nearly 8 hours on collect calls across the Pacific, with eTrade blaming Visa and Visa blaming eTrade. Long story short, your ATM card doesn't work in Malaysia. It should, and if you ask them they'll tell you it does, but it doesn't, even if you go into the branch at HSBC. Visa has decided that ATM fraud in Malaysia is so bad, that they have shut off the whole country, and while technically they do have a provision so you can get your specific card reactivated, nobody knows how to do it.
The second day we hopped one of the boats to the islands just off KK to do some lounging and snorkling, but ended up just lounging.
Eventually we did do something – and caught a puddle jumper to the far side of Sabah provice, and then a 4x4 to the Borneo Rainforest Lodge.
Nestled deep inside some of the last protected areas in this part of Borneo, the lodge gave us access to pristine, first growth forest.
We had two nights there, and our stay included guided walks and a nighttime game drive. It was damn hot and humid, especially since local fauna necessitated the wearing of leech socks, which add a layer of tightly-knit clothing from yoru toes to just below your knees. I can attest to both the necessity and the imperfection of this particular prophalactic. I won't get into details, but rest assured I have a “Danum Valley Blood Donor” T-shirt and a story for over beers that will make any male squirm.
It's a beautiful place, and we saw a lot. Birds out the wazoo, lizards, etc. etc. but the stars are the primates. Slow lorry, gibbons and – we were lucky – one wild Orangutan, who nearly peed on our heads.
Naturally, they had the requisite canopy walk as well.
Not wanting to miss a minute of our time in the Rainforest, we got the last 4x4 back to town, which meant we did miss the last bus out of Lahad Datu. It was a nothing little town, but did have a night market. We walked about in search of food and essentially stopped all conversations as we walked past. Susan was ready to bust a gut as people stopped eating mid chew to stare as this giant walked by. I got lots of looks and at least one startle as a girl who had been walking and talking, looking sideways, was suddenly shocked to see me towering in front of her. It was weird, and I guess I now understand what it would be like for Brad Pitt or somesuch to walk down the street back home.
The next morning we were on the early bus to Sandakan. It's a three hour trip. Seven hours later we arrived in Sandakan.
The real draw in Sandakan is the Orangutan rehabilitation center in the suburb of Sepilok. Like everyone else, we made the pilgrimage, and thoroughly enjoyed it. We spent a solid hour watching as Orangutans and then Macaques feasted from the feed left for them by the don't-call-them-zookeepers. Touristy, but great fun.
Back at our place in Sandakan, we were at a cross-roads. There are two Borneos – one is super expensive (I shudder to think back at what the Borneo Rainforest Lodge set us back), the other really cheap. Problem is, you get what you pay for (or arguably, slightly less than you pay for).
We'd planned for a month here, but not a month of Rainforest Lodges and Beachside resorts – we wanted to do the parks and the natural wonders. But these are not meant to be accessible for the budget traveller. Can it be done? Absolutely. But we were tired – really, really tired after so many months of backpacking. As our bus ride proved, Borneo would be not be easy.
Plus, it was smelly.
No really. Trash everywhere, poor drainage and no gutters combined with tropical heat – it is an unavoidable olafactory recipe.
We were at a crossroads...
