Tales from the Mild Man of Borneo Part 1

I have seen the future and it is expensive. But comfortable.

I have had the nicknames ‘Guru’ and ‘Billy Backpacker’ given to me at some workplaces, so ingrained was my public image with the life of the unkempt traveller, my backpack and Dunlop Volleys my closest companions.

But no more. ‘Package Tourist Man’ and ‘Suitcase with Wheels Person’ are now more appropriate monikers (if I were a Superhero).

Five-star resorts, buffet breakfasts, internal flights and being met at airports with your name on a card may have been how I travelled around Borneo, but while you might be able to take the backpacker out of the hostel you can’t take the cheapskate to the air conditioned restaurant and expect him to leave a tip. Well, not every night.

There are extenuating circumstances. My wife is pregnant and admitting this takes this blog to a whole new personal level that was not its intention. So central is this fact to how I (we) travelled, what we ate, where we stayed and who I slept with that it could not be ignored in the telling of these traveller’s tales.

The Crunchy-Peanut blog has lost its wild-eyed innocence, and unless I’m very careful it could shortly descend into tales of parenting classes, nappy changing at 3am and yellow vomit running down my shoulder. Har-bloody-har. Such things happen but I avoid reading them and will not write about them (although I did take advantage of duty free to buy cheap Wallaby baby clothing – that’s not to say my wife is giving birth to a furry marsupial though).

Meanwhile in Borneo (and you thought I’d never get there)…

…We saw Orangutans. Well that’s all that really matters isn’t it? Your images of Borneo, apart from the occasional head hunting, is of Orangutans (and just by way of an aside here – I have no idea whether Orangutan should be capitalised or not. I mean you don’t capitalise ant or mosquito or fish, but Orangutans are somehow proper when it comes to them as a noun - very proper and very deserving – regal even. Maybe it’s the 96% of our DNA thing. But then again we share 90% of our DNA with slugs – or is it fruit flies? So anyway, for the sake of this blarticle, O-rangutan it is).

Our first day in KK, as the locals call it was a real eye-opener for my wife. I’d been to Malaysia 12 years earlier as a smelly backpacker (I’d lost my deodorant in Lombok), but even by that stage I’d been hardened by two months in Indonesia and a week in Singapore (which wasn’t hard at all). So I knew that Malaysia was a pretty liberal (as long as you weren’t in an opposition political party and kept your mouth shut about the ruling party), pretty developed (if you could call clogging traffic and rampant destruction of forests developed), friendly country where everyone spoke English (mostly poorly) and the local car, the Proton, was a pile of crap. But my wife realised this for herself pretty quickly when she saw young couples holding hands, women working in occasional non-menial jobs, and beer being served.

It should be said though that when it comes to Malaysia, Sabah is as Catholic as you can get in an Islamic country. Apologies for the history and geography lesson, but Sabah is much closer to the Phillipines than it is to Peninsular Malaysia and the only reason Malaysia exists at all is because it is the old British colony in South-East Asia. And it was the Brits that encouraged Chinese traders to settle the area. So Sabah has a high Catholic (ie Phillipino) and high Chinese population. So ironies of ironies the Chinese food is fantastic and the Malaysian food dubious. But you can get a beer pretty much anywhere (except the Muslim halal restaurants but even then they’d serve ‘American Tea’ in a tea pot).

Within a few hours we’d discovered the cheapest place to get a beer (in the backpacker’s area – two longnecks of Tiger for $7), the best and cheapest place to get chicken noodle soup (one of the ubiquitous Chinese Cafes - $2), and where all the markets were (meat, fish, vegies, fruit, souvenirs, and food late at night – especially whole cooked fish eaten with you hands at the Phillipino night market for $2). Unfortunately we also discovered that every band is the same (Malaysian pop and English love ballads played Phillipino karaoke style with a dude of a keyboardist), Malaysian breakfasts are inedible, and Chinese can’t swim. At a snorkelling tourist island just off the coast, Malay Chinese would don life jackets before venturing into waist high water where a very bored lifeguard would keep watch. But other than that KK was just a hub for us to get to other places.

The first place we went to were the Mulu caves just over the provincial border in Sarawak. The flight to Mulu was our first experience of Air Asia Express, the little of the Malaysian domestic dodgy brothers airlines. Actually that’s not fair. When the planes did arrive they were as comfortable as 50-seater ex-Malaysian Airlines propeller planes get, but that’s arrive with a big IF. They were usually late or never and even then were mostly empty. Indeed the flight to Mulu had 8 people on it including the pilots, the air hostess and the incredibly camp steward. For some reason all flight stewards the World over are camp and gay but in Malaysia it’s extreme – and this in an Islamic country where many states would castrate you if word got out. I guess at about $30 one-way though you can’t complain. Much.

Evidently the local or national Government is subsidising the flight in an effort to promote the caves as a tourist destination. Certainly the Mulu resort would appreciate this as it is one of only two places to stay – the other being the backpackers at the National Park. The resort by a peaceful river was nice enough and certainly the pool was appreciated. It also had its quaint customs like a flag raising ceremony each morning where they’d play the National Anthem, which, according to the brochure, was ‘given a livelier tempo to make it more contemporary, as well as to signal the dynamic progress that the nation has seen as it moves towards Vision 2020’. I think John Howard could be inspired by such an idea and slow down Advance Australia Fair as we move toward his Vision 1950.


The walk along a 3km boardwalk to the caves was an adventure in itself as obscure and highly colourful tropical millipedes, caterpillars, butterflies, dragonflies and more fought for space on the handrail and kept the Czech version of vegetable lasagne (a joke there for the Seinfeld fans) busy taking hundreds of photos for bored relatives back home.

The Mulu caves are the largest in the world, or have the biggest diameter, or largest opening, or the largest volume, or the biggest open at both ends. It all depends on who you talk to and when you talk to them. Our guide gave us all of these descriptions. But they are jaw droppingly massive. Guide books talks about how you could fit 100 jumbos in them as if the jumbo jet were some standard unit of volume in the same way as a swimming pool or Sydney Harbour has any relevance to Lake Titicaca or the Caspian Sea. Words don’t do the caves justice, which is just as well as this blarticle is long enough already.

After a few hours exploring the caves and seeing the world's greatest pile of bat poo covered by the world's greatest collection of cockroaches (enough to make it seem as if the pile was moving and glistening in the torch light) we emerged blinking into the sunlight and adjourned to a small viewing area. Like much of the trip our guide warned us not to expect anything, but to hope for the extraordinary - in this case millions of bats flying out of the case mouth in a snaking trail like massive wisps of smoke. The hoped for arrived. They poured out in a continuous stream for 45 minutes and we only left due to an impending tropical storm which drenched us in seconds and poured for hours. The river rose two metres overnight but that's nothing unusual in this part of the world, so we caught longboats to more caves, more bat poo, more cockroaches and more massive caves.

Each night at the Mulu resort we’d be subject to native dancers and dances and a blow pipe demonstration at which tourists were invited to kill balloons. Let’s just say that when the balloon men from planet Helium arrive I’ll be well experienced to man the front line.

Tales from the Mild Man of Borneo Part 2