Blogs from Sarawak, Malaysia, Asia - page 8

Delicious breakfast at Lime Tree then collected by Rainforest Trekking for a visit to Semongoh Orangutan Conservation Centre. It was a bit rainy and as there is loads of fruit around at this time of year we only saw 2 orangutans - the Matriach of the group, a 44 year old grandmother and her newest offspring. They were enjoying some fruit and mum decided to make a hat out of a few handy leaves. Bub tried to follow mum's lead but with limited success. So cute and we felt happy to see these and even happier that the others in the program must be doing well enough in the jungle not to have any need for the prepared fruit provided. We saw some groovy pitcher plants and headed to a local village to embark on the ... read more

Salia left early this morning to head for Bako National Park. I met up with Sarah who I had met in Singapore and we got a local bus to Semenggoh Nature Reserve to see the Orang-utans in their natural habitat being fed. This was a pretty awesome experience as there were so many. We saw the main man himself, the rather large male king of the jungle. He had to cross the road from one side of the jungle to the other and we had to stay far back due to the fact he 'likes' people. Sarah, myself and a group of others from her hostel got a small boat over to the other side of the river for dinner in a large food court. Salia left us early after dinner as she wanted to do ... read more

After 2 days of jungle trekking along the headhunter trail we got to Mulu national park, and the infamous Deer cave, both the 2nd largest cave in the world and home to millions of bats. When we walked into the cave we could see small black patches on the ceiling which were actually thousands of bats. The cave is very impressive in itself aside from the bats, but the bats add a new dimension of awe. Deep in the cave were areas where the floor was deep in bat poo, an amazing fertiliser apparently but it can't be removed due to the cave's heritage status. This leads to a smelly cockroach infested floor. Luckily a raised pathway has been installed. The cave is also very fragrant the further you go in, due to the high volume ... read more

This morning it was time to move on from Kuching and explore further into Borneo. Unfortunately the adventure was not as we expected. We were originally going to take the bus through the Malaysian province of Sarawalk to get to Brunei, but it was going to take 15 hours and we didn't really have the time to do that, so for $108 (for both of us) and the saving of a day of travelling, we flew on Air Asia to a town further down the coast of Borneo, called Miri. We were wanting to go from Miri to a place called Mulu National Park, which had some pretty cool caves and razor sharp rock formations that looked cool too. Unfortunately, we did not do enough planning in advance to realize that we couldn't do the park ... read more

This morning we had planned to go to Bako National Park, but Elysia's eye was causing her more trouble so we decided to go to the hospital instead (fun fun). It was still extremely painful, sensitive to light and blurry. We just wanted to make sure that we knew what was going on and that there was no permanent damage being done to the eye. This time Elysia told the doctor what kind of medications that she wanted (she wanted dexamethasone to help clear up the inflammation), because it wasn't going away. At this point we were thinking that all the doctors were probably wrong and that it was likely a viral and not bacterial infection in her eye. But we were desperate to get her eye better so that she could see more of the ... read more