---

Monday 11 January - Wednesday 13 January 2010

So then from mainland Malaysia we flew out to the Borneo side of Malaysia - Sabah, to Kota Kinabalu after being advised against travel there because of the monsoon. There was no monsoon there when we arrived, except a bit of rain which there was in KL anyways. Its funny because all the flights to and from Borneo were really cheap and when we had booked them we had wondered why - and then all was revealed.

We arrived at night time with no accommodation so we stumbled upon a nice hostel after viewing 2 other not so nice ones (one which had a bunch of cats roaming around everywhere - and I'm not a huge fan of cats). We ate in the Rainforest Cafe and I ordered chicken curry, malay style, and it was the tastest chicken curry ever - delicious!

The following day we roamed around the main street - and it all seemed pretty dead and we were too hot and bothered to walk any more so we went back to our hostel ready for the tour we had booked.

Our tour took us out of Kota Kinabalu for 2 hours and we went on a water safari to stop the Proboscis monkey which are very unsual looking creatures, in particular their noses (I'd suggest to google them now and look at a photo of one because I might be a while putting photos up on my blog). The monkey can only be seen in parts of Borneo and is quite a rare species. It was really exciting spotting them in the wild, and near the end of the day we saw loads in a tree - a male monkey with his several wives (because they usually have many).

After a buffet dinner which was really good, we saw fireflies lite up a set of trees in the dark near the camp we were at. Really beautiful! Me and Narj attempted to capture one but they just didnt get close enough - although a little girl in our group managed to catch one in her hand which was still lit. It was a really good tour!

Now the whole reason why we wanted to come to Borneo in the first place was to see the orangutans, so we couldnt leave without seeing them. As we didnt have enough time to visit the santuary and spend a few days there we went to a nearby nature reserve instead. We managed to see 3 cheeky and extremely cute baby orangutans in the trees there - very very exciting! Wish we could have gone to the santuary....maybe next time.

Then off we went to the airport to catch our flight to Singapore.....

---