At this moment in time I am sitting at a computer terminal at a hostel in the heart of Kota Kinabalu, the largest city in the Malaysian province of Sabah on the island of Borneo. Borneo is incredible, the people are friendly and almost everyone speak english to some extent, making travel extremely easy (this is true of everywhere I have been in Malaysia) but the culture is different enough that its an adventure just walking around.
I don't have too too long to spend writing as I have to pay for this terminal but I will leave with a few highlights of the past 10 days in Malaysia.
- Met up with Meagan, a friend from way back home in my Tim Horton's days. We made it to the hostel from the airport when she realized that she had lost her passport, all her plane tickets, and her ID card to allow her to work in Korea. We spent a stressful couple hours looking around Kuala Lampur before returning to the hostel and having the taxi driver show up not too much later with the passport and everything intact.
- Was hassled by a man selling bootlegged DVDs in a night market after having just remarked on how considerate people were when you said no, they just left you alone. Not so this fella, I thought I had a perfect out when I said I was travelling and didn't have a dvd player, when he volunteered to find me a dvd player and tv to watch my movies on. Eventually he gave up, but only to reappear 20 minutes later as we were leaving. He didn't stick around that long, but I apparently need to learn a lot more about dealing with people in markets.
- I missed my flight from Kuala Lampur to Kota Kinabalu and had to buy a brand new ticket.
- I travelled to Danum Valley Field Centre, a station out in the largest continuous forest in Sabah (a state in Malaysian Borneo) where I found my camping facilities to be quite nice, however I was alone in the woods. And when you are camping alone in the rainforest where there are bears and elephants, and leopards, and cobras, etc, etc, you really do feel quite alone out there. Oh, and 2 of the 4 bathroom stalls were homes to the largest spiders I have ever seen in the wild, easily the size of my fist.
- While travelling to breakfast my first full day I spotted some pig tailed Macaques (see photo below), and made the mistake of trying to see if what I was looking at in the forest was a monkey or a log. Apparently my obvious staring was taken as aggression and I was charged. Luckily my first reaction was to sprint the opposite direction, as these guys have been know to attack people and are considered quite aggressive.
- I saw a wild Orangutan!
- Also saw, a bearded pig (which blocked my way to breakfast one morning), red leaf monkeys, samba deer, mouse deer, 3 different types of centipedes (all very large), a malay civet, the emperor cicada, a massive hornbill, the largest monitor lizard I have ever seen, and heard some gibbons. Not a bad haul.
- Realized that I paid less for my entire week, including food, guides, internet access, accomodation, and taxi to get to and from the centre, than I would have for 1 night in the lodge an hour down the road.
And now I am done, because I have hit a half hour and I need to go get some food from the market. Tomorrow to Kuala Lampur, then South Africa, then to Madagascar!
I will talk to you in a while.
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