Borneo, Malaysia

Jungle boys - here I come! A huge island, Borneo is covered in beautiful, wild, tropical jungle, except unfortunately for 60% of it where the jungle has been destroyed to be replaced with very lucrative palm oil plantations (used in household products like Palmolive). Really very sad. Even with the plantations, when the trees stop producing (after approx. 25 years) the tree is not cut down but injected with a chemical which will slowly kill the tree and the rotting carcass will fertilise the soil and give nutrients to the new trees planted nearby. I guess the chemicals also leach into the soil and are absorbed by the new plants!!!

Since the destruction of the jungle the number of native Orang Utans have drastically reduced in number, but UK voluntary organisations set up here, have managed to rescue and increase the population....god knows where this increasing population is going to live though if the jungle is already too small!

Well unless someone can come up with another way for the locals to earn so much money, I guess they have to earn a good living somehow if they want to live a western lifestyle, which of course is the "only civilised and best way to live!"

Anyway Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah, is a small city, with great markets especially the night market where you can get deliciuos plates of local food for 50p.

Went to meditate in the national mosque....love it.

Got a boat across to some small islands with beatiful beaches and good snorkling....so many fishes...got eaten by the black ones though, vicious little things. Saw some huge comodos, over 1,5m long (something between a huge lizard and an aligator) in the jungles there, and cheeky wild long tailed monkeys who stole your food from the beach.

My guide book said Mount Kinabalu was an easy climb all 4100m of it!...so off i went only to be horrified at how very wrong the guide book was...will be writing to them!!! Well as I thought it was going to be a breeze, I decided that I would walk 5km up hill to the start point....whereas everyone else....who were obviously better informed than me and had been training up for this, decided to get minibuses to the start...now I know why!!! By the time I got to the start point I was completely whacked out! Then began the 14km up steep rocky mountain paths through the jungle with the last 3 hours worth in the dark up steep barren sheer slabs of granite using ropes and feeling dizzy from exhaution and lack of oxygen! But sooo many stars!!! and electric thunder storms in the distance!! Incredible. I was really not prepared for this kind of excrutiating pain though! And at the top it was bitterly cold...but the sunrise was the most spectacular sight ever....electric reds and oranges and as the sun rose over the other peaks it lit up the vastness and the barreness of the huge slabs of granite falling steeply away from us. And way down below in the distance pockets of clouds and further down still the thick green jungles covering the other mountains and hills across the island. It was so still and silent up there, like time had stood still...and that I had reached heaven.....was erally incredible. The climb down was worse thoughthan the climb up and my legs wer no longer working I had to haul myself down using handrails where I could and crawling the rest, using my hands as much as possible. If I stood up and tried to walk my legs would just give way! quite frightning. Eventually made it down ....and straight off to the Poring Hot Springs!

These hot springs were a complete disapointment...grubby tiny tiled bathtubs which took about 3 hours to fill by which time they were cold and full of flies. But anyway they had a good canopy walk...which I managed to crawl along...where part of the walk was over the tops of the trees at a height of 40m, walking along a thin plank of wobbly wood suspended in a rope net....quite exciting!

Then off to Sandakan...the old capital....small but friendly place. Went with the 2 lovely Swiss mountain boys I had met up the mountain...they actually thought they WERE Orang utans which was quite embarrassing especially when they leaped onto the front desk at a posh hotel where we were organising our tour to the jungle and started picking flies off each other!!! Hi Andy and Tom. They like to give themselves human names you see, but they did teach me a bit of Orang language.

I took them to a Indian restaurant, on leashes of course! And the South Indian owner there asked me where in India I was from...when I told him Gujrat...he asked if the two white guys I was with were also from Gujrati!!! Ummmm let me think about that one!

The jungle trek was amazing though....we went on a boat cruise up the river, saw snakes coiled up on trees and climbing branches....pythons and yellow striped snakes....saw the famous indiginous Proboscis monkey with the funny nose...many of them leaping from tree to tree, long tailed monkeys, many birds like kingfishers, hornbills and barbets, even an orang with its baby..high up in the tree, they are very shy you see. And sorry for throwing you into the crocodiles Tom, but I was rather impressed at the way you wrestled them all barefist and then leaped back into the boat, without so much as a slight rise in your pulse rate!

Night trek through the jungle was pretty quite, didn't see much except a frog, a leach, a couple of huge spiders, an ant or two, a sleeping barbet, a sleeping kingfisher....great....also bumped into a man I used to work with at Stents...good friend of Julian Creepy Crawley....In the middle of the Borneo Jungle...cant get away from him!!!

Anyway did a trip to some famous cave where there were tonnes of cockroaches, bats and swifts, but famous for its birds nests. Not just any old birds nests, these were special ones that cost a fortune! This is because people boil up the nest and drink it and it makes you very horny....eat your heart out viagra! Dont tell Pfizer about this though or they will be exploiting this place too! Well surprise surprise the nest drink all strated in China...where the emporer had to drink it, as he had so many concubines to please....

So then onto the Orang Utan centre in Sepilok. They were just stunning. 11 of them came swinging through the jungle right up close to get their bananas and sugar cane. they just swung around so freely but they were very quite and very shy always keeping their back to you except while they were swinging. So playful too. It was hard to beleive I was seeing them in their true home not in some zoo. Sooooooooo cute. I was almost in tears!

Then goodbye to my 2 Swiss orangs....and headed back to KK. But what an adventure this turned out to be....Got a taxi from my hostel to the long distance bus station, before the taxi even acme to a stop, 8 men came screaming around the taxi. Apparently there are many privately owned buses all going the same route so they fight each other for customers. Here there were 8 buses lined up to go to KK. One man opened the door of my taxi grabbed my bag and ran off, the others grabbed my arms and started dragging me off in 7 different directions. In shock ( at having so many men after me for the first time in my life!!) I instinctively ripped away from them all and ran after the man who had my bag. Upon reaching him, I leaped on him, wrestled him to the ground, poked him in the eye, kicked him between the legs and snatched my bag, then leaped onto the nearest bus, where the driver was out taking a leak....hopped into the drivers seat...stuck the bus into gear and drove off with the others still running behind.

So I drove the bus back to KK through the stunning scenery of the jungle covered mountains , picking up local hitch hikers with their chickens and goats on the way. Had to refuse the Orang utan because I didn't think city life in KK would suit him very well.

Back in KK, got the only train on the whole island I think, to a small village called Tenom at the end of the train line. The train was quite an experience..was a bit like stepping into a wild west wardrobe. The plain hard leather covered filthy green seats and filthy dirt covered walls...and wooden hinged swinging doors, no fans 35 degrees hot, chugging along the 100 year old line, through the jungles and along the river where peple go white water rafting.

Not much to see in Tenom, people not too friendly either, it really was like being in the wild west...dusty empty streets blazing hot sun, John Wayne music playing in the distance...an eagle flying up ahead in the midday sun.

So back to KK with all my ailments (cyst in the eye, aching legs, soar throat etc etc) to rest for a couple of days before flying back to KL. Gutted because I was planning to see some fishing villages one day and go white water rafting the next! Never mind.

Borneo is so big I only managed to cover about 5% of it if that...will have to come back and explore other parts at some time.