Posts Tagged: Borneo
Friday 18 – Thursday 24 January 2013 – Semporna & Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysian Borneo
We were up at 7am and kitted out with snorkelling gear before boarding the speedboat which would take us out to the island of Mabul in the Semporna Archipelago. Neil had made the mistake of ordering a coffee “to go” which had been served to him in a tied up plastic bag (such as you might be handed a goldfish at a fun fair) with a straw.
Mabul is the accommodation hub for the marine park and pretty much where all the boats, snorkelers and scuba divers begin and end each day. It’s a beautiful place, although the weather wasn’t really suitable for an island paradise, being about an hour from the mainland with a few other islands, such as Sipadan – the most famous, around 25 minutes away by speedboat.
Over the course of the day we were taken to three separate dive sites; ‘Stingray City’ (where there were no stingray), ‘Lobster Wall’ (where there were no lobsters) and another place, which I’ve forgotten the name of but I’m sure the same rule applies, all of which were a short ride from the island and on the edge of the reef.
Dive 1 was difficult. Everyone was finding their feet (or flippers), particularly Miriam who didn’t realise that she wouldn’t be able to breathe through her nose, and we didn’t really get into the swing of diving down the 3 or 4 metres to see the coral and its inhabitants a bit more closely until dive 2. We did, however, see plenty of life down there. A few turtles and some other odd creatures too.
After a short break back on the island, we got back on the boat for the second dive. This one mainly consisted of the instructor finding a 50m fishing net caught in the coral (which was indiscriminately catching small fish, big fish, a turtle and even me at one point). He started rolling it up and saving fish and turtles (I had to save myself) until he realised that the owner of the net was nearby (and potentially heavily armed!) and hurried us all back to the boat before someone got themselves harpooned.
The final dive, which Emily and Miriam decided to skip due to the parting clouds and potential for a suntan back at Mabul, was incredible. We saw alligator fish, sea snakes, turtles (one of which must have been about 4ft from beak to tail), stingray, manta ray… All sorts!! Neil and I took great pleasure in rubbing this in as much as possible when we saw the girls again.
When back on dry land, the girls decided that they would go up to Kinabatangan for a river cruise (where they would see Pigmy Elephants), Neil decided to stay in Semporna for an extra day to do a fun dive the next day, and I decided to take a 10 hour bus journey north-west to Kota Kinabalu.
I arrived in Kota Kinabalu (or KK) at about 5:30am dazed and disorientated, despite a reasonably good nights sleep on the coach. After a 15 minute wonder, I resorted to takin a taxi to my hostel rather than trying to be a proper traveller and walk / hitchhike / use public transport. It was a old on really as I discovered some time later that the bus station is actually about 19km from KK!
I spent the day generally realising, once again, that being in a foreign city on your own is not the most fulfilling of experiences.
I did achieve one thing though – I booked my climb up Mount Kinabalu (4095.2m above sea level) and bought some supplies; some ‘structured’ sport socks, “Power Bars” (chocolate peanut butter, vanilla crisp and banana flavour) and a head torch for the predawn summit climb on Tuesday morning. The next day, I got the minibus up to Kinabalu National Park.
You start the climb at around 8 or 9 in the morning, when you are paired up with a mountain guide. As I was on my own, I managed to group up with a couple of girls from Melbourne (Jules and Shannon) who were starting at the same time as me. Our guide was called Geoffrey (or so we thought until the next day when we realised his name was actually Jepri) and he had been climbing the mountain twice a week for 20 years – over 2000 times!! He had started out as a porter, carrying supplies up to Laban Rata, the rest house at 3300m.
As there is no other infrastructure there, i.e. no roads, cable cars, etc) all the supplies for the rest house must be carried up by hand. These guys can carry up to 50kg up the mountain and back down again in the space of 1 day, day after day after day. As a tourist, you take the absolute minimum when you climb the mountain – a small back pack with a bit of food, some warm clothes for the top and a bottle of water – and you wear either running shoes or mountain boots. While climbing (sweating, aching, swearing, wondering why on earth you would put ourself through such pain) these guys pass you by, almost running up the mountain, carrying 40kg on a board on their backs with a strap round their forehead to support it and, generally wearing flip flops or Crocs. It really puts your own struggle to shame!
We finally reached Laban Rata after a 5 or 6 hour climb (the world record for climbing and descending the entire mountain being 2 hours and 37 minutes) in time for dinner before sunset. We were very lucky as the mountain had been shrouded in clouds for weeks, right up until about midday on the day we climbed. By 5:30 we had a great view all the way down to the coast and a big group of us settled on the balcony to watch the sunset. Among us, my two Aussie cling buddies, four Dutch people that I had got the minibus from KK with, a Kiwi couple and Christo, my Estonian room mate, who kept everyone laughing throughout.
The sunset was incredible (someone mentioned the line from Forest Gump “sometimes the sunset was so beautiful you colder tell where the earth and ends and the sky began”, but that definitely wasn’t me) and was punctuated by a sharp drop in temperature as soon as it disappeared over the horizon.
Bed time, ready for our 2am wake up call to watch the same star rise reappear over the opposite horizon.
2am came much quicker than planned, and after only 3 hours of decent sleep. The next three and a half hours are a blur, but they involved being cold, eating breakfast, still being cold, climbing the mountain, warming up, climbing further, being out of breath, not being able to climb fast enough to stay warm, getting to the top, freezing half to death.
When I reached the top, I was on my own and it was pitch black all around. I cold see millions of stars, being so far from the light pollution of the M25. By the time the sun came up, the peak was packed with maybe 50 people and the mountain we had all climbed slowly came into focus. “Moonscape” is the only word I can think to describe what that looked like.
Jepri ushered us down from the peak at about 7:30 and we started our descent. The easy bit, right? WRONG! My left knee is in pieces! I have no idea how many steps there are up that mountain, but coming back down them was agony. The only thing that made it any better was the smugness I felt watching the other poor souls on their way up, two of which were doing the entire climb and descent in 1 day! Nightmare!
We finally reach the bottom, after much complaining and had a rather lacking buffet lunch as a reward. Not the heroes welcome I was hoping for! Although, I suppose when up to 60,000 people climb the thing each year, our heroism is somewhat diluted.
The rest of the day consisted of me truly getting into the mindset of being a traveller and not having a job. I lounged, slept, showered, read, ate, lounged, chatted, lounged, read and slept, and I didn’t rush any of them, for the first time since I came away! I might be finally getting the hang of this!
The next day, some fellow hostel mates and mountain climbers and I (one of which was the girl we saw attempting to climb the mountain in one day, which she did, somehow) took a trip 45 minutes down the road to the opposite side of the National Park to the Poring (meaning “Bamboo” in the local language) Hot Springs, who’s sulphurous waters are supposed to heal aching muscles. It was grea to soak in a hot bath (as opposed to the clod showers I’m becoming used to) but I didn’t really notice any miraculous healing unfortunately!
The end of my trip to Borneo has come. I would never have come here if it weren’t for Miriam and Emily, but it was definitely worth it (despite the gaping hole in my bank account!) – so I’m very grateful to them for that. It’s been a great adventure and quite off the beaten travellers track which is nice! I am now on a plane to Jakarta, to catch a flight to Bali, where I will sit on the beach for a week and try to spend as little money as possible to make up for Borneo.
I’m almost a third of the way through my time in South East Asia now and I feel like there’s so much left to do in comparison with what I have achieved so far. I need to learn to surf, to scuba dive and to stop being such a wimp when it comes to street food and hawker stalls before I get to India!
Bring on Indonesia.
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.
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.
