Borneo

Borneo

I celebrate Christmas day 2010 with my family before heading off to the airport. I catch my flight to Borneo not long after midnight.

There is a fire in the control tower at Kota Kinabalu which causes me to arrive 5 hours later than scheduled so I can't visit Gaya Island as I intended.



The next morning I take a brief walk up in the wild park land behind the hotel we were staying at before heading off with our tour group to Mount Kinabalu. For lunch I discover that a medium size bowl of soup is intended for 3 people but I manage to finish the bowl anyway - my personal challenge for the day.

Mount Kinabalu, 4095m

We do a couple of small walks in the afternoon. The lush vegetation is sometimes referred to as rain forest and sometimes as jungle.

At 8.30 in the morning after breakfast we start our 2 day hike. The walk is long and arduous, mostly up a steep path. It seems like every kilometre we come across a sign that indicates we have only progressed another half kilometre. Fog obscures a lot of the view but occasionally we come across lovely flowers, a nice view or lively squirrels and bush rats. This makes all the effort worthwhile. (Or so I tell myself.) I reach our accommodation around sunset.







We wake at 2 am to climb to the summit. This is undeniably worth all the effort because the view is spectacular.




Then it is a long trip down the mountain. At the end my right knee is very sore but thankfully it held up okay for most of the walk.





Afterward we go to Poring Hot Springs which is a bit ordinary but there is a nice normal swimming pool which I found refreshing.

We then head off to spend two days at a river jungle camp. We take numerous cruises and many photographs of McCack monkeys, proboscis monkeys and a few orangutans in the distance.





We also come across a herd of pygmy elephants. This is a delightful surprise. I didn't know there were elephants in Borneo.




Around the lodge there are monitor lizards, wild pigs and some sort of native bear. Some of the others see a wild cat.

night time river exploration

New Years Eve we have party which is fun for a while but when the stakes are raised on the drinking game we are playing, I decide to go to bed even though it is only a quarter past nine. But at 20 to 12 I can't sleep and I hear the music and I get up to rejoin the party. We see in the new year and dance and sing karaoke for another two hours.

In the morning a lot of our group are feeling pretty ordinary as we got up at quarter to six. We leave to see the orangutans in Sepilok. We see them feeding at 10 am. It's great to see them up close but we all decide to sleep in the afternoon rather than return for the afternoon feeding.






I wake around 4 pretty groggy and at a quarter past five we head back to the orangutans to look for flying squirrels. We see a couple gliding way up high between the tall trees. We also see a venomous viper coiled around some branches.

We return to Kota Kinabalu and spend the day out on Manukan Island enjoying the water. I walk to the end of the small island and back again. It starts to rain at the end of the day when we are returning.