Random Rambles

We do an overnight trip to Ulu Temburong National Park, which has one of the most pristine rainforest environments left in Borneo.

Brunei’s territory is curiously separated by a slice of Malaysia. To get to Ulu Temburong involves a high-speed water journey  of 45 minutes, through a network of rivers and channels  and dense mangrove islands to Bangar.

We are met in Bangar by Brian, who works for Borneo Guide – the company we book the trip with – and driven to Batang Duri.

Batang Duri is a longhouse village of Iban people, who used to be keen headhunters. And by that, we don’t mean they worked for human resources.

We stay at the Sumbiling Eco Village.

This is the cleanest river we’ve seen in Asia. Watching the river for three hours, we see one single plastic water bottle. That’s it. No people = no garbage.

The park’s claim to fame is an elevated walkway above the forest canopy.

We get a great view.

The structure itself is impressive. It’s standard scaffolding (well, probably better-than-standard) from an Irish company, Instant UpRight.

An interesting observation – every piece is specifically designed to be safe  from inception. In much of Asia – indeed, much of the third world – someone may come up with a similar idea, build an ad hoc structure, and through trial and error, eventually come up with something that’s not too fatal.

This reminds me – when we were in Angkor Wat, one of the ancient bridges is being restored. In the meantime, the army of visitors crosses over a sea of plastic docking made by Candock, a Canadian company. We say ‘Candock should use this in their publicity material’. Sure enough, we click on their website and – voila! – one splash screen features the Angkor Wat job, with an accompanying video.

Our guide took this photo as we walk back to the longboat. She thought we were cute.

The best part is racing up and down this shallow, twisty, fast-moving river in the longboat. It’s like whitewater canoeing in reverse.

It’s not Maria’s favourite part, however.

To amuse ourselves in the evening, we do rock painting. I was trying to do a proboscis monkey.

My monkey looks like it has a shiner.

This butterfly is about the size of a handspan.

Returning to Bandar Seri Begawan, we stay one night before catching the boat the next morning to Labuan, which serves as the Las Vegas of northwest Borneo. A duty-free zone, it offers cheap booze and tobacco, gambling, and probably other vices. From there, we have another three-hour boat trip back to Kota Kinabalu.

The boat has video entertainment. Among other films. we’re treated to Wolf Warrior 2. This a Chinese movie of such astounding propagandistic proportions, I’m left speechless. In brief:

• The Chinese are the good guys, providing hospitals and employment-rich opportunities in a fictional African country, protecting the widows and orphans when they are endangered by…
• …a horde of murderous rebels, staffed largely by merciless, cruel, barbaric Western mercenaries…
• …who are opposed by a cutting-edge, modern Chinese fleet off the coast and an unstoppable, bulletproof lone-wolf hero who saves the day single-handedly.

The production values are as high as anything produced in Hollywood.

Memorable scene: hero is driving in a jeep with rescued American nurse. She calls the American embassy on her phone. Chuckling, the hero asks ‘You really think the US Marines are the best, don’t you?’ ‘Of course!’, she replies, before getting a recorded message that the US embassy is closed. Implication: the Americans have run off with their tail between their legs in the face of this rabble of a rebel army, unlike the stouthearted Chinese.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Ulu Temburong

On arrival in KK, we both breathe easier in the more sinful atmosphere of this vibrant, noisy, lively town after spending five days in Brunei.

Brunei and Bruneians are nice, but let’s face it – there’s a sort of pall of joylessness that hangs over most places that take their religion too seriously.

We look forward to our flight back to Kuala Lumpur.

We fly from Sandakan back to Kota Kinabalu, planning to take a fast ferry to Labuan Island (still Malaysia) then another boat to Bandar Seri Begawan (in Brunei).

One of the many things we like about Malaysia – you can take a photo at the airport without some jabbering moron sticking an AK-47 in your guts, declaring that the crappy airport of their moribund failed state is a ‘strategic military asset’.

(Historical footnote: Sandakan airport is the original site of an airstrip that the Japanese built with the slave labour of Allied POWs before murdering them.)

As it happens, in KK the boat tickets are sold out. We fly instead.

On arrival, we don’t see any money exchange. This is the first airport we’ve ever seen that doesn’t have ATMs and a dozen prominent money-change places vying for business.

They have a nice mosque, though.

Luckily, we changed money in KK, so have funds for a taxi into town. Someone tells us later that there is a money exchange ‘upstairs’. 

This seems to be a theme in Brunei – it can be difficult to find out simple things. We plan to take the boat back to KK, but can’t find information about purchasing advance tickets. So we spend an hour travelling out to the ferry terminal. Which is closed.

Fortunately, a young (Chinese-) Bruneian woman kindly offers us a lift back to town. She’s very chatty. She spent four years in London studying petroleum engineering and now works for Shell. (Shell seems to have a monopoly on the extraction and retailing of oil & gas in Brunei.)

Brunei is a pocket-sized, oil-rich sultanate. It’s very orderly. They have sharia law here.

It’s prosperous, but not ludicrously so. (We’re looking at you, Gulf states.)

It feels as if some small, decent-but-dull town won the lottery. Everyone is doing OK. But it’s still, well, decent and dull.

We like this café sign, featuring a proboscis monkey. Note the road sign in Roman characters and Jawi, a form of Arabic script for writing Malay.

Speaking of non-alcoholic beverages, we are abstaining from our daily sundowner while here. (Not out of virtue – we have no choice because Brunei is an alcohol-free country.)

How well-off is Brunei? A personal anecdote – in Ottawa, the embassy of Belgium (population 11,350,000, headquarters of the European Union) moved from 395 Laurier St. East because it was ‘too expensive to maintain.’

The property was then taken over by the High Commission of Brunei (population 423,196).

Everyone drives here. Gas is cheap. Surprisingly, taxis are expensive, especially by Asian standards.

It’s safe and unthreatening. Everywhere are affirmations of loyalty to the Sultan. He’s fairly benevolent, for an absolute muslim monarch. Not like his brother Jefri.

Distributed throughout the broad avenues and modern buildings are old-school wooden houses common in Borneo. They probably date from the pre-oil wealth days.

You’re never far from a mosque in Brunei.

We visit Kampong Air, the water village that lies across the Brunei River.

It’s supposed to be the largest in the world.

The fare to cross the river is one Brunei dollar. A Brunei dollar is approximately one Canadian dollar.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Bandar Seri Begawan

As mentioned, we originally plan on taking the speedy ferry to Brunei. The ferry is sold out. Same for the next day. We have an upcoming return flight to Kuala Lumpur, so time is important.

We buy an air ticket for the same day. Royal Brunei airlines offers the cheapest available seats.

When we check in at KK airport, we discover that our seats are business class. We enjoy the amenities of the first class lounge at the airport and wide, comfy seats on the plane.

Thanks, Royal Brunei airlines! Too bad the flight is only 25 minutes. A trans-Pacific flight at this level of luxury would’ve been awesome.

From the Kinabatangan River, a bus takes us to Sandakan. We almost skip this town. Lonely Planet says:

‘Sabah’s second city has long been a major trading port, but these days the grubby city centre feels provincial compared to Kota Kinabalu. The main draw here is not the city itself but the nature sites of nearby Sepilok.’

Glad we didn’t. It’s actually an interesting place. We learn it’s pronounced  ‘San-DA-kan’ and not SAN-da-kan’.

This was once the main town of Sabah. Before WWII, this part of Borneo was run by the North Borneo Company.

(Even stranger was the governance of the other chunk of Malaysian Borneo, Sarawak, which was run by the ‘white Rajas of Sarawak‘ until 1941, when the Japanese arrived.)

By the end of WWII, Allied shelling destroys the place in an effort to dislodge the occupying Japanese. The administration of Sabah moved to Kota Kinabalu.

While here, the Japanese commit the customary atrocities, including the infamous Sandakan death marches. There is a nearby memorial.

The post-war town is mainly Chinese-run business and Malay restaurants.

We visit the house of Agnes Keith, an American writer who lived here with her British husband.

It reminds us of some of the other residences of writers we’ve visited, such as Ernest Hemingway’s place near Havana and Halldór Laxness’s house near Reykjavik. Some people lead such fascinating lives.

We visit the local museum, where they have a special exhibit about Martin and Osa Johnson. These larger-than-life explorers from the thirties (the nineteen thirties, of course) spent a lot of time in Borneo. Look for their film ‘Borneo’ on YouTube for an interesting take on Borneo of the time. In fact, it describes the Kinabatangan River, where we’ve just come from.

Like most places on the coast, fishing is a local moneyspinner.

We enjoy a sundowner at the local Sheraton.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Sandakan

Another illustration that everything is connected to everything  else.

A famous symbol in this part of the world is the Rafflesia flower, known for its size and its stink.

It turns out that the Sabah variety, rafflesesia keithii, is named after Agnes  Keith’s husband, who was Conservator of Forests in North Borneo.

We awake next morning to a deluge of rain in Sepilok.

Sepilok is an orangutan rehabilitation centre, where they prepare orphaned or otherwise unready orangutans for release back to the wild.

The orangutans live in the surrounding rainforest. A feeding platform provides visitors with a view, if you’re lucky.

As we stand waiting for the first orang to arrive, we agree ‘If I were an orangutan, I wouldn’t come anywhere near here.’ The hundred or so people on the viewing platform just could. not. stop. talking.

Finally, a lone orangutan appears along one of the ropes leading to the feeding platform from the forest. She promptly climbs down, scoops up a bunch of bananas, and departs to enjoy them in private.

We get a better view from the ‘nursery’, where young orangutans exercise and socialize with others of their kind. (The photos are blurry because they’re taken behind a glass enclosure a dozen meters away.)

All good things come to an end. Volunteers lead the young ones away.

From Sepilok, a van picks us up and whisks us to the Kinabatangan River. We stay at the Nature Lodge Kinabatangan.

We stay two nights here.

Interesting folks on these excursions. We meet several people with fascinating backgrounds and delightful stories to tell.

We have monitor lizards as neighbours again.

(The electric fence they’re crawling under is to keep elephants out of the property. We notice electric fences around the palm oil plantations around here and wonder what they’re for. Now we know.)

We take several cruises along the river.

On one cruise, we see wild orangutans in two different locations. (Orangutans are solitary – you usually see them alone. Both of these sightings were of an individual moving around their ‘nest’ high in a tree.) No photos because they were quite far away, but to see wild orangutans in their natural habitat – as opposed to in an environment like Sepilok – is a thrill.

Also see proboscis monkeys, endemic to Borneo.

Fun fact about proboscis monkeys:

‘The monkey also goes by the Indonesian name monyet belanda (“Dutch monkey”), or even orang belanda (“Dutchman”), as Indonesians remarked that the Dutch colonisers often had similarly large bellies and noses.’

We also see elephants.

Crocodiles. (Sorry, we weren’t going to try to get any closer.)

This is a young crocodile. We have a closer photo, but the vegetation  here shows clearly how cute and teeny-tiny he is.

Macaques, too.

This is a fuzzy shot of a stork-billed kingfisher. They’re much more beautiful in real life.

Day 2 is similarly fruitful in sightings.

Also on day 2, we take a walk through the rainforest.

Why is everyone wearing trousers and long sleeves, you ask?

Because the forest is full of leeches.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Sepilok

Borneo is full of wonderful creatures. I hate to say this, but they’re probably doomed. If there’s an orangutan alive outside of a zoo in 50 years, it’ll be a miracle.

Illegal logging and palm oil plantations strip the rainforest that once covered virtually the entire island. This activity will never stop because it benefits powerful people in all the countries involved. Corruption is rampant.

(I chuckle when ethics relativists say ‘We’re just as bad in Canada. Look at the Duffy scandal, for instance.’ The misappropriation of a mere $90,000 – and only Canadian dollars, at that – pales in comparison. The current prime minister of Malaysia is said to have transferred a fortune into his personal bank accounts. To the tune of US$700,000,000. That’s right. Seven. Hundred. Million. Dollars. U.S.! He’s still PM, any local media reporting on it is immediately shut down and the journalists charged with ‘threatening national security’.)

After their betters have cleared the way with new roads, simpler folk often move in, a baby on each hip, to slash, burn, and to poach the now-available wildlife.

Borneo reminds us a lot of Madagascar, where exotic nature and wondrous fauna attract well-heeled tourists in the final stages before the island is reduced to barren hills and parlous overpopulated villages.

I was going to mention this a few entries back, in regard to the luxuriousness of private health care, but decided it sounded too misanthropic. But what the heck, I’ll say it anyway. I sometimes have a fantasy in which 75 % of the Earth’s population are taken up in some sort of Rapture scenario. Then those of us left behind could all live like Scandinavians!

We arrange transport from Kota Kinabalu to Mount Kinabalu.

(Note: this entry contains no original photos because we accidentally deleted the photos from our camera. We offer grateful attribution to the entire online universe.)

Departing at 6:30 AM from Kota Kinabalu, we get a van ride to the park.

It’s 4,095 metres high.

(In reality, we never see the mountain this free of clouds.)

Unlike other climbing we’ve done, this trail is steep. CRAZY steep. We’re in pretty good health, but I’m soon puffing like a steam engine. We fight for every metre of ascent. The thinning air doesn’t help.

All supplies for the lodge up top is carried up by porter. They pass us as if we’re standing still.

There was an earthquake on Kinabalu recently – 2015 – that killed 18 people. You still see parts of the mountain face that have collapsed.

We persevere and make it to the Laban Rata lodge for a meal and a sleep.

We meet up again with Nico and Annabelle, a hybrid Italian-German couple who travelled up with us in the van. (Interestingly, they speak fluent English with each other. Not surprising, since Nico attended Cambridge and Annabelle, who works for IKEA, spent 8 months in Australia at one time.)

We awake at 2:00 AM, have a quick breakfast, and head upwards again in the dark. At a near-vertical incline again.

After an hour, I reach my limit. I can scarcely take twenty steps without stopping for a rest. I look up at the near-vertical headlamps twinkling above us, turn to Maria and say I don’t think I can make it. Thankfully, there’s no argument and we turn back to the lodge. Silver lining: we get to go back to a warm bed for the next few hours.

Everyone says that going down is harder than going up. We disagree. Sure, it’s tough on the knees, but at least there’s no energy-sapping scarcity of oxygen.

Reaching the bottom, we undergo  a minor odyssey trying to get to Sepilok, our next destination. In theory, it’s possible from the outskirts of the park to flag down a bus travelling from Kota Kinabalu to Sandakan and ask to be dropped off at the Sepilok junction.

We rendezvous with Nico  and Annabelle again. Together with Blake, a pleasant woman from Oklahoma currently teaching English in China, the following happens:

• We successfully flag down a Sandakan-bound bus. 😊
• But it’s full. ☹
• They pick us up anyway. 😊
• We have a four-hour bus ride to look forward to sitting on the stairs. (It’s a multilevel bus.) ☹
• But as soon as we get on, a torrential downpour begins. At least we’re dry. 😊
• About 15 minutes later, the bus breaks down. Totally. ☹
• Nico makes friends with a taxi driver who drives us into Ranau, where he’s sure he can use his contacts to fix us up with a hired van ride on to Sepilok. 😊
• Despite his attempts, we draw a blank. No drivers available. ☹
• Our taxi friend finally convinces someone to take us to Sepilok. 😊
• After we stow our luggage and cram ourselves into the van, he turns the key. Nothing. ☹
• We can’t even rent a van and drive ourselves. We head out to the main road, to the bus stop. As luck would have it, our original bus comes along and picks us up! 😊
• At around 10:00 PM, we’re dropped at the Sepilok junction. There is no other transport at this hour. We have a two-and-a-half kilometre walk in the dark to Sepilok, with all of our luggage. ☹
• This is not a great hardship after the punishment we’ve had on the mountain. Setting off – we all have lights – we soon arrive at Nico and Annabelle’s booked guesthouse.😊
• We look for our guesthouse, Blake looks for hers. We can’t find them. It’s now nearly 11:00 PM. ☹
• We ask a man outside his property about the whereabouts of our lodgings. He drives us in his car to our respective guesthouses and we all arrive at last. 😊

As a coda to this tale, while we drive along a dirt road, we spy a large black snake crossing the road in our headlights. The snake takes its time. I’m about to jump out and shoo it away when it moves on. I ask a guide the next day what it might have been. He thinks it was probably an equitorial spitting cobra, even though it was night (these cobras are diurnal, apparently) .

Here’s a link to an amusing encounter that an expat family has with one of these puppies.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Mount Kinabalu

Time passes. We grow up. We grow old.

I love regaling people with the story of how I trekked up Mount Kenya, the second-highest mountain in Africa, in 1987. Easy as pie. I was more than thirty years younger, of course.

It was hard to throw in the towel on this ascent, but what the hey, this is not an endurance test. As I mention in an earlier post, you gotta know when to fold ’em.

Flew from Kuala Lumpur to Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah – one part of Malaysian Borneo (the other part is Sarawak).

Kota Kinabalu seems to have two major industries: fishing and shopping. There seem to be more enormous shopping malls than can be justified by the local population. At the market, both are combined – shopping for fish.

This ray for sale resembles an F-117 stealth aircraft (see below).

Because it’s Chinese New Year, every restaurant in town is brimming with families devouring mountains of fish and shellfish. We eat seafood as well while we’re here.

Our mission is to arrange travel to Mount Kinabalu and points East.

That done, we walk the waterfront in search of a place to enjoy a cold beer with a sea view.

The town is very modern.

We visit the Sabah Museum on the outskirts, a good introduction to all things Sabah. For example, at the northern tip of Borneo is where Magellan‘s fleet, on their voyage to circumnavigate the globe, was said to have stopped for 42 days to repair their ships.  Huh. Who knew?

(I can’t vouch for the truth of this. The museum also calls Magellan a Spaniard, when he was in fact Portuguese, of course.)

Sight or Insight of the Day – Kota Kinabalu

This is Oreo VII. He lives downstairs from our guesthouse.

Everywhere we go, we run into black and white cats who are mellow beyond words and love the attention that we lavish on them. We immediately dub them ‘Oreo’. This one is the seventh to wear that moniker.

…at least according to Wikipedia. From Ipoh, we arrive in Kuala Lumpur by train. (To get in the mood, we re-watch the heist movie ‘Entrapment‘ while in Tanah Rata.)

Still haven’t been to the Petronas Towers – tickets are difficult to get. Maybe when we return here from Borneo in a couple of weeks…

We take a monorail (!) from the station to our guest house. We stay in the Bukit Bintang area, well known for its nightlife and street food.

KL is different than when I was here thirty years ago.

Nice collection of stuff at the superb Islamic Arts Museum of Malaysia.

We visit the bird park. Rainbow lorikeets amuse us by bustin’ serious moves.

Palm cockatoo, from New Guinea. This one loves his rock. He can even fly around his cage carrying it.

Leaving for Kota Kinabalu in Borneo. Check out my new lid: I left my trusty Tilley hat in a KL taxi.

Air Asia is our airline of choice. Mainly because it’s cheap. KL is their home base.

And we didn’t even see a single kuala!

Sight or Insight of the Day – Kuala Lumpur

We discover medical tourism.

Maria develops pain in her shoulder. We end up going to the Prince Court Medical Center for treatment.

Turns out Malaysia is a huge medical tourism destination. Now we know why. Coming from Canada, with its Soviet-style provision of healthcare and its day-long waits in dingy emergency rooms, we’re blown away by the sleek professionalism, welcoming service, and state-of-the-art equipment available here at a reasonable price. (Compared to, say, private care in the United States.)

No need for signs that say ‘Please don’t assault our hospital staff’ either, or clientele that look like they belong in prison.

When we leave Tanah Rata, we take a morning bus to Ipoh. A very cool small city with a thriving arts scene and burgeoning interest from foreign visitors.

Tin mining was big business here from the 19th century on.

The building on the right, Ho Chin Pet Soo, was a club for Chinese mine owners. Chief amusements: opium, gambling, and hookers. Such are boom towns the world around.

The building on the left was the original home and factory of a local self-made herbal tea magnate.

We stay in the Abby Hotel, in an enormous room that has AC AND a fan, lots of space to spread out, and a great rooftop terrace from which to watch the sun go down.

The walls throughout are decorated with murals.

The Old Town is a warren of narrow alleys and colonial office buildings.

It’s like a mini-Georgetown.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Ipoh

We discover that trains are great in Malaysia. We decide to travel by rail to Kuala Lumpur.

Ipoh has a wonderfully colonial-looking station.

Buying tickets is a breeze. The train we book happens to be ‘silver’ service, as opposed to ‘gold’ service.

On day three of our stay in Tanah Rata, we tackle trail No. 9. It begins on the outskirts of town.

At the start, the trail is conveniently paved with bricks.  Eventually these give out and become a muddy track, with frequent downed trees to negotiate around.

We come across interesting botanical specimens.

There are no markings on the trail, so when it begins to deteriorate, the going gets rougher.

This plant has striking blue leaves.

Something that looks like a coffee bean.

And giant prehistoric-looking ferns. Here’s one in the fiddlehead stage.

Eventually, the trail peters out into an up-and-down titanic struggle against steep hillsides and thorny brush. 

We get so lost, we abandon what’s left of the trail and bail out at a vegetable farm.

We get lost along the road, too, despite having navigational doodads on the IPhone. Before we have to resort to cannibalism, we flag down a passing taxi (thank you, God!) and ride in luxury. We save a 13-kilometer walk, mostly uphill, back to Tanah Rata. You gotta know when to fold ’em.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Tanah Rata

We spy some pitcher plants.

These are carnivorous. Besides bugs, they also chow down on any small  vertebrates unfortunate enough to fall in. Why does this make us think of the Little Shop of Horrors?

From Georgetown, we take a bus to the Cameron Highlands.

We book a room at Father’s Guest House, a quiet, slightly Alpine-looking place off the main road in Tanah Rata.

It’s, um, high.

We walk the boardwalk in the Mossy Forest, a cloud forest north of Brinchang.

They don’t call it the Mossy Forest for nothing.

There is a lot of tea here. We visit a tea factory and plantation.

Strawberries are grown intensively. Half the area in the valley seems to be covered in plastic-roofed strawberry grow-ops.

Hiking is big, too.

Atop an observation tower in the Mossy Forest. You can see here my recent buzzcut, courtesy of an overzealous barber in Georgetown. My hair hasn’t been this short in decades.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Cameron Highlands

There are lots of Land Rovers in the Cameron Highlands. Hundreds.

Many well-aged and full of character.

This puts the germ of an idea into our heads: if we end up in South Africa again, we purchase a Land Rover from some farmer (city dwellers see them as status symbols rather than practical workhorses, so would probably want more $. Sort of like North American urbanites and pickup trucks.) Then we drive it to Kenya. And back.

Hmm…