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In my final days in Borneo, I made visits to the Kota Kinabalu Wetland Centre (formerly known as the KK City Bird Sanctuary) where I saw a lot of common Bornean wildlife; to the Lok Kawi Wildlife Park (also known as the Lok Kawi Zoo) where I saw a lot of uncommon Bornean wildlife; and to Pulau Manukan (also known as Isle of the Damned) where I saw very little of anything.

The Lok Kawi Wildlife Park is south of KK. Quite a way south actually. There’s no public buses going out that way so the only two choices if you don’t have a car, as most tourists don’t, are to take a taxi for around 100 Ringgits or (as I did) to use the very handy shuttle bus operated by Innotravel which only costs 60 Ringgits return and includes the 20 Ringgit entry fee as well. The downsides to it are that it only runs four days a week and it leaves the zoo at 12.30 so you only get about two and a half hours there. As the zoo is 280 hectares that works out at a viewing rate of almost two hectares per minute! In actual fact part of the grounds are taken up by a botanic gardens which I would have visited but time was too short. As it was I just made it round all the exhibits in the allotted time, but didn’t get much leeway for general browsing or even talking much to keepers. I’ll say first up that I certainly wouldn’t call Lok Kawi a bad zoo, more of an average zoo that could be much better. Some of the cages are terrible, most so-so, a few very good. I get sort of annoyed whenever I see a fairly new zoo that has been built from scratch with lots of available government money, but which has been done in a really superficial way.

Rather depressingly, the first thing you see as you enter the zoo is the elephant riding arena where big fat tourists ride on the back of a very small Bornean “pigmy” elephant. The Bornean elephants were one of the animals I most wanted to see at the zoo, even though I'd already seen them in the wild, along with the Sumatran rhino, Western tarsier and Bornean clouded leopard (none of which I'd managed to see in the wild). Disappointingly all of these main species were housed poorly. The elephants were in a too-small enclosure and of the twelve at the zoo one was being used for rides and the bull was being kept permanently chained inside a concrete stall with no yard at all because there were three baby elephants in the main area and they didn't want him in with them. It was very sad to see him the way he was. The rhino was in a small almost-unshaded pen with at least 23 sambar deer, way too overcrowded, and I couldn't see the value at all in having such a critically-endangered animal being kept here alone like that. The clouded leopard was in a small dark cage. The tarsier was in what basically amounted to a glass-fronted box; it was of course asleep but come nightfall it must have fits trying to jump around in the space it has. According to one of the keepers I talked to, most of the animals here are confiscated (such as the clouded leopard, which was being kept illegally as a pet in Ranau) or were donated by locals, although that doesn't explain some of the surprise exotics such as the zebra!

Pulau Manukan is an island about twenty minutes off the coast of KK. The reason birders go there is to see the Tabon scrubfowl (imagine a big brown chicken and you've got it). Most normal people go there for snorkelling. Around the jetty there are just masses of tropical reef fish -- monos, parrotfish, damselfish, garfish and all sorts of other piscine denizens of the shallows. It almost made me wish I liked the ocean. The girl at the desk (the island is part of a national park) said there was only one trail on the island, the Jogging Track. Or, as the sign at the trail called it, "jogging trek" which conjured up some interesting images. The trail was paved all the way but cluttered by fallen trees, vines and even at one point a slipped hillside, none of which the island's operators obviously had any intention of clearing. Maybe "jogging trek" was right after all. At the end of the track I found a rough path heading up the hill through the bush, so followed it and discovered that it was a Summit Trail (I found a directional sign halfway along). It went right across the top of the island back to the headquarters, but again no attempt had been made to keep it clear. There were several very large water monitors along the route and right at the end, where else but right behind one of the headquarter buildings where I'd started from, a Tabon scrubfowl.

The next day, just one week shy of having spent two months in Borneo, I flew out to Singapore.

If you're wondering about the title of this blog entry, economic mixed meat rice was the cheapest thing on the menu of an eatery I frequented in KK. It sounded "interesting" but I never tried it for fear of the unknown.

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