Archive for the ‘travels’ Category
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
I’ve been taking it easy in Kota Kinabalu, the capital city of Sabah. A friendly and sunny town with a few islands off the coast to simply relax, soak the sun and waste time away. After to being to many of the best dive sites in the world, I realised it was probably time to buckle down, lay out the cash and start an open water dive course here in KK - it’s rather cheap too!
But of course, I can’t simply just stay in one city for so long without getting a tad bored. Then again, moving around costs money, and since I’m trying to conserve the bills I tried to do some totally shoestring maneuvers yesterday and still have some fun. And fun I had. Got up ridiculously early (before the sun had risen) and caught a cheap bus to the Kinabalu national park. Somehow, sneakily, I managed to skip the entrance fee and went for a 6 km hike up Mount Kinabalu. I’d heard getting to the summit was quite expensive and I wasn’t prepared to fork it out, but this turned out to be some tourist propaganda spread by the tout army. Regardless, I didn’t have enough on me to pay the guide.
It was barely 12 noon by the time I had returned down to the park entrance and was starting to feel the aches in my muscles from the walk. I’d heard stories of some hot springs about 40km (read 2 hours) away which sounded relaxing. This tale needed some spice, so instead of waiting for a bus I stuck my thumb out onto the highway and hitched my way to the next town. That was awesome. Met some locals who worked at the national park, and went through some teensie towns and maybe even picked up some avian influenza in the live chicken market. I was forced to catch an expensive bus from my drop point to the springs, and did so only because I had made the effort to get there. The hot springs in the town of Poring should have been called “the hot springs of Boring”. What a waste of time. No big pools of steaming hot sulphurous water, but tubs which had to be filled with from a tap for maybe an hour. Needless to say disappointment and annoyance got the better of me and I left. By now it was 3pm, and I had money to either make it to the small town (Ranau) or from Ranau to Kota Kinabalu. I took the plunge again and hitched to Ranau from the springs after walking down the highway for half an hour. I hadn’t realised how far away the town was and came out lucky.
In the end, not such a bad day. Exhausting, but not a failure. Ultimately I really just discovered what I already knew deep inside. Travel isn’t just about the destination, but the journey. How do you get somewhere? How long did it take? What adventures did you have and who did you meet. I did all of that yesterday, and it was fun and fulfilling.
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Monday, January 21st, 2008
The last week has been really excellent. I left Kuching, the capital of the Sarawak province with two British girls - Sarah and Zoe. Determined to experience a more authentic impression of the cultures on the island we headed inland to the jungle town of Belaga. It is so inland that the only way to get there is by boat via two other towns, Sibu and Kapit. 3 days of tiring travel and we arrived at a calm and relaxed two street town by the banks of the river. The locals are hospitable and friendly; the food tasty but still the same unvaried options from the rest of the country - noodles, rice, fried noodles, fried rice, fried chicken etc.
By chance we met a local, Andreas Bato, who happens to be a tour operator as well as a Malaysian film/tv star. We ventured into the jungle with him, visiting four different tribes (Kayan, Kejaman, Kenya and another I’ve forgotten). The indigenous tribes, the Urang Ulu, live in unique accomodation known as longhouses. These are very long buildings (up to 300m) with a room for each family. One of the houses we visited has nearly 700 occupants! It was interesting to see how the tribes blended with modern Malaysia. The micro economies of the long houses are capitalist, not socialist as I expected with the people living together. Younger generations of the tribes usually work at the logging camps or with the government, whilst the older generations look after the infants and continue about a very relaxed way of life in a traditional style - crushing rice, harvesting jungle crops and hunting animals such as deer and wild boar in the dense tropical jungle. We were given shows of traditional musical instruments, the sape (guitar-like) and the nose flute, and failed miserably when trying to play them. Also, we tried on the traditional dresses and learned some dances which may have been about war, welcoming or something else. I was amazed at the friendliness of the families and how happy they were to have us in their homes. We ate food from the jungles and lived like the tribes!
Andreas also organised for us to go on a jungle trek. Not your standard trek. We used an old hunting trail which was over grown with dense rain forest and had no clearly defined paths. Our guide carved a path using his sharpened machete, and became increasingly agitated when we were nearly attacked by flying wasps the size of golf balls. We finished up at the river where chicken wings over a hot fire was lunch, and then a swim at a creek nearby. On return to the long house we had the opportunity to visit a longhouse not visited by tourists in four years, to pay respects (literally, pay) to a family in mourning - the main attraction being Zoe’s ginger hair.
Saying goodbye to Belaga was unfortunate, more time would have been nice to spend with the wonderful people there - but time pushes. We stopped over at the Niah caves to see the bats, and then pushed through Brunei to make it to Kota Kinabalu in Sabah, where I am now.
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Sunday, January 13th, 2008
Holidays again, what wonderful ways to spend time. I visited Singapore for the first time, spent a few days seeing the sites and taking in the city. The city/country/island is exciting - so many different cultures blended into one, which is obvious with the various ghettos such as Chinatown and Little India. The food matches - chinese, western, malay, indonesian, indian (and then a mixture of all of the above). The only draw back is the cost, Singpoare is an expensive city, and testing it all out costs money. An exciting adventure was going to the Night Safari, an evening tour of the Singapore Zoo’s nocturnal animals. I didn’t even recognise half the animals. Fishing wild cats, barking deer, tapirs and some more which I can’t spell or even pronounce were also on the list.
I got bored of Singapore’s over priced attractions and crossed the border in Malaysia a day early for my flight. I realised that the border town Johor Bahru was really quite boring and headed up the same day to Melaka, the city where Malay civilisation all started. The influence is grand, with Dutch, Portuguese, British, Chinese and of course Malay influences creating dramatically standout architecture of deep red churches and stadyhaus (town hall) buildings. The food was a bit poor, but I dealt with it. That evening myself and some other backpackers made some home cooked food for some reason, but it was a fun thing to try. I’ll be eating out from now on.
I returned to Johor Bahru for my flight to Borneo, killing time buying pirated dvds and ended up catching a bus to the airport which took over two hours - as opposed to the advertised 30 minutes. I still made my flight which was lucky.
I’m now in Kuching, Borneo - one of the mildest Asian cities I have visited. Not so busy, clean, hassle free and very relaxing. It has been very pleasant. Spent lots of time exploring the city’s museums, and spent two days at the remote Bako national park seeing wildlife. Bako is one of the few places in Borneo to see the proboscis monkeys, a native primate which has the strangest dangling appendage for a nose. It’s funny. We also saw bright green diamond headed vipers, a few birds and were followed by the mischievous macaque monkeys. Infact after lunch one afternoon we carelessly left a bag of rubbish on a seat, to find it snatched by a macaque. It called for backup and within moments we had nearly eleven scampering monkeys approaching us at all angles. One of them opened Kelly’s bag and pulled out the packet of pringles and opened it out of the wrong end with it’s teeth. We had time only to grab a few bags, and soon boots and shoes had been left at their mercy. Four of us, Kelly, Hannah, Donn and myself tried to scare them away with loud noises. Instead, the big head honcho monkey ran at us, saw-like sharp teeth exposed and hissing like a rabid animal - scaring us away. Eventually we used some branches to whack on the ground and scare them away. That was a fun adventure. 
Back in Kuching we went to the Urang Utan rehabilitation centre, Semmenggoh. Being the exceptionally lucky people that we are, we saw about twelve animals - all of which are semi wild and go to the centre only for some food. We saw big males weighing in at over 100kg, aggressive females protective of their young and some other playful apes.
That’s all to report for now, plan for now is to travel deep into the jungle to visit the indigenous tribes of Borneo for a trip to the longhouses.
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Tuesday, October 9th, 2007
Google’s warm reception for all of the summer of code mentors ended a few days ago, and I’ve found some time to get back down under and sort through the piles of emails and rss feeds which have accumulated over the past week. The summit was, in my opinion, much better than last year. Those of us who were returning had experience and knew what to expect and how to make the most of the day. The newbies brought fresh faces and new exciting stories. Not only was the summit better, but the entire summer of code program improved. Efficiency, organisation and stress levels all improved substantially from previous years - and we can only expect it to get better in the upcoming years. This is especially true to KDE, because we hope to play an ever more important role in the program. Maybe you didn’t know, but KDE was the group with the largest student allocations, with 40 students. With more confident and experienced mentors we can strive to recruit more students and mentors to improve KDE and grow our community. Of course, we shouldn’t be just trying to grow our own communities with the summer of code program, but everyones. This was partly the reason for the summit - to share our experiences not only with Google but also with the other organisations. For the most part, KDE successfully managed 40 students, 50 odd mentors and over 200 student applications, and Thiago and I took the opportunity to discuss dealing with scalability issues in the program with some of the other large organisations. Of course, there were many more interesting sessions than our own, and including methods to turn students into long term contributors and cross platform considerations.
Here you can see us (Thiago, Jason and me), the Gnome guys, Leslie Hawthorn (Google SoC organiser) and a random (on the right).
Astutely, one of the attendees noted that the mentor summit has the highest concentration of open source developers at any single event during the year - with nearly 200 representatives and nearly 80 organisations, even more than FOSDEM. This is probably true and really impressed upon me how important this event is. Let’s do even better next year.
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Friday, October 5th, 2007
I just wrote that I was too tired to upload the photos, but I did anyway.
Click here to see some more. More coming soon.
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