Tales from the Mild Man of Borneo Part 1
A hint for non-budget travellers looking for an upgrade when travelling in Asia – ensure you and your partner have different surnames. It helps too if your partner is pregnant. This ensures you are booked into twin rooms and when you ask for a double you are guaranteed an upgrade to a deluxe room. Worked for us twice, though the same trick didn’t work with Malaysian Airlines – Business Class was beyond us.
The Deluxe Suite at our hotel in Kinabalu, a stop-over after Mulu, gave us outstanding views across to the stilt villages of nearby islands and that rarest of rare events, a sunset during Monsoon season. It also ensured more space to wash and hang up smalls. This is one backpacker tradition that will never leave me, indeed the more luxurious the room the more I want to spread damp underwear on every surface.
Next stop was Sandakan on the east coast of Sabah, home of the largest Orangutan sanctuary and stepping off point for Turtle Island and river boat treks up the 560 km long Kinabatangan River. At the sanctuary, once again we were warned that there was no guarantee of seeing anything and sure enough there were more Orangutans than you could point a long thin zoom lens at. While they didn’t quite outnumber the tourists there were enough young Orangutans, one large scary adolescent, one slightly frightened park staff member with a box full of bananas, and monkeys to keep us all satisfied and taking lots of photos. And it’s true – they are very human like, if humans could carry bananas in their feet, walk on ropes, and shit in midair and not wipe.
An interesting fact I learnt at an information bay along the pregnancy highway was that seasickness and morning sickness are related. A woman who suffers from severe motion sickness is very likely to suffer severe morning sickness. My wife throws up when aeroplanes turn corners on runways. She throws up in cars when reading street signs, and in boats when they bob up AND down AND up AND down. She has to dash out of movies that use hand held cameras (admittedly that’s often because Lars Von Trier is crap – he makes me sick). Her morning sickness lasted all day, and the worst trimester (three months) for morning sickness lasted five months. She lived on a diet on peanut butter and crackers and took these and powdered milk to Borneo as emergency supplies (a foolish move as it turned out, but we’ll get to that later).
Also, only days before leaving Australia one of Sandakan’s small high speed ferries travelling to Turtle Island capsized in rough seas, killing one Malay and leaving a few Aussies and Kiwis with some stories to sell that might just have about covered the cost of their lost luggage. While we weren’t going to Turtle Island (not exotic enough for us wildlife snobs) it was with some trepidation that we approached the Kinabatangan River trek, the first of four speed boat trips of the holiday. However, not only did my wife get through them all in relative comfort, but the speed boats all possessed shiny new lifejackets and everyone wore them. Anyone who has been to Asia will tell you that this is unheard of.
There's a wild orangutan in this photo - really
Accompanied by more honeymooning couples than Noosa, we sped along the river towards the Borneo Eco Lodge, a resort in the jungle about 2 hours away (Eco referring to the lack of air-conditioning and hot water). Again we were warned not to expect anything, and certainly not to expect Proboscis Monkeys (tick), Borneo Pygmy Elephants (tick), Hornbills (tick) or wild Orangutans (tick). The elephants were crossing the river as we arrived and we spent hours watching them munch on river grass and make classic elephant noises. They may be small (adults are about man size) but they make quite a racket. The Orangutans dozed and ate – which was sort of what I was doing in Malaysia too.
Borneo Pygmy Elephants doing Elephant things
For the next two days every time we stepped onto the river we were confronted by the exotic, the endangered and the delicious, which doesn’t actually explain why they are endangered. Malaysia being a Muslim country such animals aren’t eaten; endangerment usually has more to do with encroaching and illegal palm oil tree plantations. An interesting side effect of the push to ‘sustainable’ and bio fuels (especially in Europe) is a massive jump in the price of palm oil and a massive proliferation of plantations in Asia and the Pacific at the expense of native vegetation and wildlife.
Our time at the Borneo Eco Lodge included a night tour along a boardwalk out the back of the lodge. Winston, in his sixties, a former soldier brought up in the tradition of British East India and all that but ‘gone native’, was our guide. Malaysia’s answer to the Bush Tucker Man, but with coke bottle rim glasses, he described in great detail how every plant could either kill you or your enemy or sustain you. The following night over a half dozen Tiger beers he casually mentioned the three people who wanted him dead, including a palm oil plantation owner and a former soldier back in Sarawak (also in his sixties), which was part of the reason he couldn’t go back there. He refused to say how many men he had killed.
Back in Sandakan we drank Pimms and played croquet at the English Tea Garden and then to come way back down to Earth visited the War Memorial commemorating the 2338 soldiers (1781 of them Australian) who died on the Sandakan death marches and the six Australians who survived.
Diving Sipidan Island was to be a highlight of Borneo for me, with a whole extra pile of animals that I shouldn’t expect to see. But just getting out of Sandakan was an adventure of sorts, albeit a boring one. Air Asia Express once again excelled themselves in confounding and annoying travellers. Our 10 am flight was cancelled and the replacement 5 pm flight was late, finally arriving at 9pm. The 11 hours spent in Sandakan airport’s restaurant with vouchers for a complete range of chicken rice or nasi goreng (chicken rice without the chicken), was not quite wasted as I read about 30 years of Nelson Mandela’s life in Long Walk to Freedom, but the long wait for the flight was one less day of diving so I wasn’t happy.
Luxury stilt bungalows for the honeymooners, gas platform for the backpackers
We got there in the end. The Mabul dive resort was one of five dive resorts on the island of Mabul, though strictly speaking three aren’t on the island at all. One is a converted gas platform for diving backpackers, and there are two 5-star resorts made up of luxury stilt bungalows. The locals mostly live on stilt dwellings too, but that’s because they’re too poor to afford any land and live a more or less subsistence lifestyle based around what they can pull out of the ocean. I doubt the resort dwellers appreciate the irony. Not that we were slumming it of course. Yet another upgrade saw us in a luxury, land-based bungalow with all the amazing seafood I could eat and plenty of other food too for pregnant women who don’t go near the stuff.
The diving was outstanding, at least would have been if it wasn’t monsoon season, which meant the wind picking up in the afternoon affecting visibility. But I still saw lots of rare and extraordinary sea life such as sleeping giant green sea turtles wedged into the reef, scorpion fish, leaf fish, baby lobsters, a blue spotted eagle ray, mornay eels and sea dragons. My dive guides were forever excited about nudibranchs. These highly colourful sea snails without a shell are world renowned at Mabul, but as far as I’m concerned they’re just colourful slugs. If it can’t bite me then I’m not interested, and fortunately at Sipidan on the second day of diving I saw plenty of sharks but just missed a school of barracuda.
Amazing $2 meals (if you like seafood)
As if we hadn’t stayed in enough resorts or had enough lounging we spent the last few days in a 5-star resort in KK. This was truly one of the most awful, and comfortable, experiences of my life. I could have been anywhere in the world. Overfed Aussie honeymooners, elderly overfed Europeans, waddling kids and busloads of Asian tourists battled for space at buffet breakfasts that could feed African nations for a week, reserved their favourite spots around the pools, and partook of activities designed to remove any thoughts of actually venturing outside the resort. While amazing $2 meals were served down the road, meals in the resort (admittedly good but you could be anywhere) were $50. Beers at happy hour were $7 for a small. And there wasn’t even a bar in the pool which is the least I’d expect of a resort. Still, the wife needed to put her feet up before the flight home – for another $10 she could have got them massaged by the pool.
The flight home was uneventful, going through customs wasn’t. I partly blame Border Patrol for making every customs official want to be a superstar, my wife blames memory loss due to lack of sleep and pregnancy. My wooden mask and sculpture passed the test, her milk powder and peanut-butter (crunchy of course) wasn’t declared. She was lucky. She could have faced a $60,000 fine and a cavity search (fortunately her major cavity was filled by my future son) but got away with a warning and a blacklisting. I expect she’ll end up on the cutting-room floor too.
Read more!
