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Sumatra

We left the island of Penang, Malaysia on an epic 7 hour ferry ride across the Straights of Melaka for the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Before we had even left Malaysia, the sights, smells and atmosphere of the Indonesian way of life was thrown into our faces. No rules, no boundaries. Chain smokers, old men spitting, jumping the queues, and Indonesian women making fun of two tall whities crossing the border. In fact, the Indonesian women seem to be infatuated with us - photos, blowing kisses, screaming “hello sir!” just to get a response back. And they fall into more riotous laughter when they receive an unexpected response in Indonesian. At the Sumatran immigration, we took our own back and skipped the hundreds of people in the queue by claiming we didn’t have a visa (which we did) and we needed to get one (which we didn’t). This meant we got all the way to the front of the queue, so we feigned ignorance and got our stamps.

Leaving the port we found no less shocking. A thousand people trying to harass us and we found a minivan with Lara and Dave to the remote jungles of Bukit Lawang. We obviously got ripped off a bit (at least it cost us more than the public bus), but it paid off because we arrived in the small village in the middle of a torrential down pour. Quite possibly the biggest storm I have ever had to walk for 5 eternal minutes for, across a bridge over a thundering river then through some alleyways of mud and septic sauces. It took 3 days to dry off, as we trekked through the jungles playing with the Urang utans, Thomas Leaf monkeys and watching the Gibbons trapeze through the tree canopies at an incredible speed. We slept in the jungle, had excellent food and spent hours solving riddles that the guides gave us. Swimming in the fresh water streams and waterfalls were a nice way to cool down, just like the tubing trip we took back down to the village. Bukit Lawang is a beautiful little town which has still not recovered from a crippling flood a few years ago. Quiet and serene, until a big Indonesian company weekend trip invaded and played some Mosque mix-tape karaoke style for long periods in the night.

Local buses in Indonesia are quite the experience. Cramming 20% more people than a bus can comfortably fit, playing extremely loud Indo-pop music, cruising (bumping) along the Trans-Sumatran highway for 200km (6 hours), weaving in and out of traffic (a few near head on collisions) can give new meaning to the term adrenaline and squished at the same time. By the end of the trip I think I knew what it felt like to be paraplegic, with no feeling from the waist down.

By now we’re recovering by the shores of Danau Toba, the biggest lake in South East Asia. It’s calm, cool and has an anaesthetising atmosphere.

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Malaysia - A Thousand Shades of Green

Yikes, it’s been a frightfully long time since my last update. Let me recap on what I’ve been up to. My scuba course in Kota Kinabalu (KK) was excellent. There was me and two Malaysian naval officers who didn’t really know how to use their legs and fins, but they learned okay. We dived around the reefs of the tropical islands surrounding KK and saw more than I would have guessed. I could have been placed in the middle of a scene of Finding Nemo - clown fish, a sea turtle, swarms of barracuda, moray eel, sergeant majors, crabs, pipe fish and more. So much more!

White water rafting was next - that was fun! Racing through the rapids of the Padas river we were thrown about everywhere and capsizing and went body rafting (going down the rapids on your back). As Australia Day’s go, it was pretty good, aside from having to take a friend to the hospital for CT scans after a really bad concussion in the rapids.

I flew back to Kuala Lumpur and met with Jared. KL is a pretty neat city, very Asian, but somehow very clean and functioning. The Petronas Towers and the KL Tower are enormous, and stand out in the city skyline like stairways to heaven. Just outside of the city are the Batu caves, a religious site for Hindus built inside the caves and at the top of a long staircase. The rest of KL was uneventful really - just hanging out by the Chinatown where every third stall repeats itself (watches & wallets, pirated dvds then jeans). It also rained harder than I’ve ever seen before, and we got savaged by ruthless bed bugs at the cheapo hostel. Live and let live.

Getting to the national park, Taman Negara, was an adventure. You know the like - buses not taking us where we needed to go, then waiting a few hours at the local bus station in small highland villages under curious pairs of eyes. After a few bus rides and a wonderful longboat ride through the jungle rivers Kuala Tahan approached as the gateway to the park. Floating restaurants on the river and little huts to sleep were the only attraction of the local town. The most exciting thing about the park, aside from being an awesome jungle, is the longest tree canopy walk in the world. We got to play with our balance swinging in between the trees 50 metres above the ground. Being the monsoonal period, it rained and rained some more. The river level went up by about 5 metres whilst we were on a night river safari and that was fun. We saw deer and birds and otters playing by the river bank.

Have now arrived in the Cameron highlands, the altitudes of the Malay peninsular famous for its tea plantations and agriculture. We’ll be here for the next day or so until we head to Palau Penang, and then on to Sumatra!

Selamat Malam!

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Shoestringing Sabah

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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The indigenous tribes of Borneo

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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Singapore and Sarawak

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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