Tales from the Mild Man of Borneo Part 2

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.

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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

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