Tuesday 15 & Wednesday 16 January 2013 – Sandakan, Sabah, Malaysian Borneo

We arrived in Sandakan, Borneo on Tuesday morning after a 3 hour Malaysian Airlines flight from KL. All three of us slept through the entire flight, waking only for the anchovy and prawn curry for breakfast. From the airport, we took the RM2 bus from the Airport bus stop, which is nowhere near the airport, to the Sandakan town bus stop, which is nowhere near Sandakan town.

The girls had booked a room at a hostel in Harbour Square which took us a while to find but is luckily nothing like the rest of the town, where rubbish seems to be piled high. The hostel was even nicer than Harbour Square itself. It’s huge, with big clean beds and hot showers, and even windows in the bedrooms. Luxury!

As soon as we got there, we set about trying to work out what we would be doing for the next 7 days, before the girls return flight to KL. The possibilities are Sepilok Orang-Utan Sanctuary, an overnight trip to Turtle Islands, a jungle cruise on Kinabatangan river, snorkelling in the Semporna archipelago or climbing Mount Kinabalu, the second highest peak in South East Asia. We decide that the priorities are Orang-Utans and turtles, and we know all about Sepilok, so we set off (with our new friend, Neil) for the Turtle Islands jetty for some more information.

Turns out that Turtle Islands is expensive and without much guarantee of seeing any turtles, whilst our various Lonely Planet guides tell us that turtles are common in the Semporna archipelago (or the Tun Sakaran Marine Park) and we just need dorm room beds and some snorkelling gear for that. We decide to go for Semporna and book up 4 beds in a hostel on the waterfront called Scuba Junkie, despite the fact that none of us can Scuba dive (yet), and try to work out how we get there. A 5 hour bus ride from Sandakan Long-Distance Bus Terminal (even further away from Sandakan than Sandakan town bus stop) it seems.

That evening, it started raining. Really raining. Much heavier than I have ever seen English rain, I would think. But of course it’s warm, not depressing like in England.

The next day we (incl. Neil) were off to see the Orang-Utans of Sepilok, alongside 4 coach loads of British pensioners 2 weeks into a South East Asian cruise. After a brief chat from an English guy working for Orang-Utan Appeal UK, you get to watch a 23 minute video presented by one of the guys who used to be on Newsround (disappointingly, not Lezo) about the work they do at Sepilok, i.e. rehabilitating kidnapped, orphaned and injured Orang-Utans back into the wild, a process that takes up to 10 years and costs between RM5000 – 8000 (£1000 – 1700) per year. You are then taken through to a viewing area about 15m from the first feeding platform for the Orang-Utans 10am breakfast. It was still raining at this point.

We were warned that there’s no guarantee that you will see any, and if you do it may just be 1 or 2, but we must have been very lucky. We probably saw up to 7 or 8 different Orang-Utans, as well as maybe 10 or 15 baby and adult Macaque monkeys. It was pretty incredible, but it was still raining.

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Following that we made our way down, in the rain, to a rainforest visitors centre type thing that had a few trails mapped out. We set off and quickly discovered that most were concreted or gravel, so not particularly authentic. Miriam decided that we had to go and see the Sepilok Giant, a huge tree in the centre of the mapped out area and about half way along a 4-5 km trail. We almost missed it at first (probably because of the rain) but the trail to the Giant was a little turn off the main path that descended down the side of a hill off into the rainforest. We clambered over trees, roots, mud, streams and all got leaches climbing up our legs in the process until, through the rain, we saw the Sepilok Giant. It was pretty awesome. Definitely the biggest tree I’ve ever seen. We all had some photos (that didn’t come out very well, because of the rain), stood there in awestruck wonder for a while and continued along the path. (Shortly afterwards we came across an even bigger tree that must have been the actual Sepilok Giant, but we were so bored of trees (and the rain) by that point that it was difficult to get excited again.)

PICTURE TO FOLLOW

We made our way back to the visitors centre, via a canopy walkway, rope bridge and lots more rain, and jumped in a taxi (that definitely wasn’t a taxi, but just a guy with a car who wanted to make RM40) back to Sandakan town, in the rain. Once back in the hostel, just as the rain decided to stop, we each had a shower to dry off.

Tomorrow we get the 5 hour bus journey to Semporna for snorkelling in the archipelago, apparently one of the top 10 dive sites in the world. It’s a shame I haven’t learnt to dive yet but it’s going to be so much cheaper when I’m back in peninsular Malaysia or Thailand that it’s not worth doing yet.

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