Borneo November 13th…
It's been a busy few weeks. First was my PADI dive course with Borneo Divers off Kota Kinabalu - we went on a little longtailed boat over to the island of Mamutik each morning, and Dee stayed on the beach while I did the course. It's a four-day course - you get a book to read, and watch five videos with an open-book test after each, and then a closed-book quiz. There are three or four shallow water dives - in the US they'd be in a swimming pool but here we were in three or four metre water off the beach - to learn what to do if your mask comes off, if you run out of air, if you're buddy is eaten by giant squid etc. Then you head off into deep water and go look at the coral and the fish. Dee came with us on the last day, since that was mainly just dives for the fun of it - Dee already has her PADI certificate. Which means we can dive in Australia if we want.
Wonderful experience - not as incredible as the first
time I tried snorkelling, when I couldn't believe what
an incredible world there is down there. But it was
thrilling to go down, down, down and still be able to
breathe and relax - people even go diving who can't
swim, since your bouyancy is controlled by an
inflatable/deflatable jacket. (They do test your
swimming, actually, but strangely they did it on the
last day, AFTER we'd done all the diving. Mmmm.)
There were five of us on the course - a Dutch couple, a French and a German guy both working in KL for Hewlett Packard, and me. With Dee and the instructor we had a night out at the end in an Irish-Malayasian bar in KK, complete with reasonable if bland covers band, pizza and chips. All terribly Malay... (Other nights have been spent sampling the wonderful food here - seafood especially good.)
Onto the mountain, which was the main reason for coming over to Borneo (Sabah was British North Borneo until independence and joining Malaysia in 1963 or thereabouts. They still call it Borneo). It's the highest mountain in South East Asia, at 4101 metres, and you climb it from a starting point of 1800m, so it's a long schlack up there.
We started at 7.30 on the first day, and within half
an hour you reach crude steps which just go on, and
on, and on. You have to take a guide, not because you
need one but because it provides local employment,
which is good - we were going to have one just for us
because we expected to be slower than anyone else. I
remembered my experiences clibling Indonesia's Mt
Merapi behind German and Dutch hikers who were
head-down no-rests pile on up to the summit, and Dee
always reckons she's slow going up (if unstoppable on
the flats).
The book said five hours to the overnight rest huts, so we were pretty much amazed to get there almost first out of the day's climbers, in under four hours, though they were SO hard. You just end up going small step, small step, terribly slow, about the speed you'd walk down the road if you had nowhere to go and were in a state of terminal depression. Little by little. One good thing is that every 30 minutes or so there was a little shelter with a toilet and a rainwater supply (which everybody drinks, as if Borneo rainwater might not be at least a little suspect).
So up at the Laban Rata guesthouse, we celebrated with French toast and honey (everything up there has to be portered up the trail, which is rather humbling when you see these guys with gas cylinders tied to their foreheads), and went straight to bed, even though it was only 2pm. Exhausted. And besides you have to get up at 2am for the second day's climb to reach the summit for dawn. Not that we slept. Eight people in the dorm, and about four hours' sleep between us we reckoned.
More French toast at 2am (which some people found hard, but I've never had trouble eating in the middle of the night), and off at three. From Laban Rata up, it was even harder - endless steps at first, rock ledges that you edge along with a rope, then onto the granite top of Kinabalu where you can only pull yourself up with your arms on the ropes that are threaded up to the summit. All this in pitch darkness of course - we each had a head-torch which helped, people with normal torches having big problems when it came to the rope section. We reached the top just before dawn, and the view up there is amazing; it's the most beautiful mountaintop I've ever been up. All granite, and fairly new (1.5million years), you can see over 60km to the South China Sea, and the clouds curl in ribbons up the mysterious Low's Gully and over the saddle below the main peak.
Down was almost worse, as it started raining as soon as we were past our second breakfast at Laban Rata. Facing three hours of knee-crushing steps down in driving rain, I jogged pretty much the whole six kilometres, managing not to twist any ankles and cutting an hour off the descent. Dee was just behind me. The rest of our group didn't appear for an hour and a half, by which time we were already on the road to Poring hot springs where we dropped into the Japanese-built sulphur baths. Muscles still ached for a week - the second day we could hardly walk.
From Poring we went to Uncle Tan's, three hours east across the island, via a clinic in Ranau to get some antibiotics for an ear infection that had been getting worse since the diving. (Solved now, I think.) Uncle Tan runs one of the two 'budget' jungle camps in Sabah, and for about twenty-five quid takes you by minibus and wooden boat up the Kinabatangan river to the real heart of the jungle. We'd had good reports about Uncle Tan's ("great food", "very basic but better animals than the other one"), and two Australian women who we'd seen elsewhere were also waiting to go, so we headed off almost as soon as we got to the ramshackle roadside HQ. There we'd been given a photocopied form to sign, with things like "I accept that the accommodation may be extremely spartan", and "I understand that in jungle there may be uneventualities". Three hours down the river, the six of us were dropped at a broken jetty and told to "walk straight, walk straight", and the boat disappears off down the river, leaving us alone in the middle of the jungle. We walked, and the path split, so we guessed at the sort-of straightest path, and walked... elephant footprints and spore covered the track at one point, mud obscured it frequently. Finally we came to the camp - four benches and a table covered with a tarp, and a half-dozen covered raised-platforms with mattresses on the floor and a mosquito net above them. And this is the middle of the Borneo jungle. Both Dee and I were pretty horrified; we hadn't been ready for quite this little, though as we said afterwards, it's no worse than some other places we've been. Just that's it's "Borneo jungle" I think, and that the insects were already arriving in quantity by the time we arrived at twilight. The Australian women seemed to be impressed there was this much, but then they turned out to be field biologists who spend their whole careers up the Murrimbidgee river dart-gunning koalas. We were distinctly unsure about the whole thing. But there was no way out until morning, so after an excellent meal we hazarded a journey to the toilet some 100m off along a track into the dark jungle, put our own mosquito net over our mattresses, and tried to sleep in a night alive with strange calls and insect noises.
Surprise surprise I slept like a log, Dee only slightly less so, and when we got up the whole place looked a whole lot more interesting. There was a 6am trip up the river, and we saw crocodiles slipping under the water, hordes of macaque monkeys in the trees, and a wild orang-utan high up in the branches with his back to us. Then, best of all, we found a troupe of big coffee-and-cream coloured proboscis monkeys, and watched them leaping around, all huge stomachs and Jimmy Durante noses (on the males). Amazing things.
So we went on a walk with the biologists that morning, lazed around the afternoon in hammocks, spent another night (made a recording of the night noises), and left the next day after the morning boat trip. Got a good few insect bites, so hope those malaria tablets do their job. It's six days on now, and neither of us are feeling any ill effects...
Then we went on to Sepilok B&B, about 25km from Sandakan
on the NE coast, up by the Sepilok Orang-utan
Rehabilitation Centre, where they reintroduce orphaned
orang-utans to the wild. We went in to watch the
feeding of the recently-reintroduced orangs - amazing
to see them. I went to a centre in Sumatra when I was
there some years back (there are five centres, I
think, altogether) and had seen four or five come up
to get their milk and bananas. Here there were a good
dozen swinging in from the trees, and hordes of more
aggressive long-tailed macaques trying to grab the
food from the orangs or the feeders. One orang plunged
off a rope into the growth below, and clambered up to
the viewing platform right by Dee and me, and sat,
rather embarrassed and covered in twigs, about a metre
away. We just stood very still and quiet, until one of
the hopelessly unecological local tourists attempted
to come over and stand by it to have her picture
taken, which of course scared it off. It drives you
crazy the way Malaysian/Japanese/Taiwanese tourists
behave, but as the park points out, it really does
help the cause of conservation in these countries
where it's still a major priority to get as much
forest as possible cut down to make way for the
profitable palm oil plantations. It's tragic as you
cross the island - the first three hours crosses
stunning rainforest as far as you can see, mountain
ridge after mountain ridge. Then suddenly there's not
a proper tree in sight - for the last four hours you
seen nothing but ordered palms stretching even further
into the distance. You can almost see the dust from
the soil erosion.
We discovered that it's only a tenner to fly back across the island rather than do the seven hour bus jouney, so we flew back to KK and connected without pause to Kuala Lumpur. Hightailing it in a bonkers cab to the main bus station, we rushed onto the last daylight bus up to here - a good 14 hours of travel in a row, but picturesque and fun. Between Sandakan and KK the plane flew right by Mount Kinabalu, so we got some good summit pics from the plane to augment the ones we took on the top.
And that's about it for now - we laze for a week now on Pangkor in the sun.
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