I had originally planned on staying in Bogor and commuting by train each morning to Jakarta for the couple of days I needed to see the essentials in the big city - the essentials of course being the zoo, the oceanarium, the bird park, the bird market and the bird reserve. However when staying there for the one night before going to Cibodas I had discovered that I did not like Bogor one little bit, so decided Jakarta couldn’t be any worse. I ended up in the backpacker haunt of Jalan Jaksa staying at a place called Borneo Hostel 31. Coming [View Full Entry]

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In New Zealand in the 1980s there was a newspaper cartoon strip called Bogor about a marijuana-smoking hedgehog. I don’t know why the hedgehog was named Bogor, but now I’ve been in a town called Bogor in Java. I don’t know why the town is named Bogor either. I flew into Jakarta on an almost empty plane from Singapore. The line for the Yogyakarta flight was full to bursting and I think the Air Asia crew were feeling sorry for us going to Jakarta because they gave everyone on board free food and water! In Java the attempted rip-offs started before [View Full Entry]

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In between Borneo and Java I thought I'd stop over for a couple of days in Sunny Singapore. I stayed at the Cozy Corners Backpackers where I usually stay because its about the cheapest place in town. I've been going there for five years now and it hasn't changed one jot in that whole time, from the broken tap to the soccer flags on the wall. Because its Singapore there are also lots of warning signs posted everywhere about what you're not allowed to do, from spending too long on the internet to downloading illegal material to washing your clothes(!). There's [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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There are several species of Rafflesia scattered around southeast Asia. I’d seen R. keithii already at Poring Hot Springs of course, but at another site just near to Kota Kinabalu grows another species, R. pricei. The site is called the Tambunan Rafflesia Reserve and its also reputed to be good for birds like the blue-banded pitta and Bulwer’s pheasant. I could have (in retrospect, should have) done it as a day-trip out of KK but the first bus out didn’t go till 10am and its an hour-and-a-half trip so I decided it would make more sense to stay in Tambuna [View Full Entry]

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On the way back between Poring and Kota Kinabalu, I stopped off for a few more days at the Mt. Kinabalu National Park. Its good there because there are no leeches or mosquitoes. The only thing that’s of the bitey persuasion are these big horsefly type jobs with a really painful stab. It’s a fly of such a size that you can actually see it preparing its proboscis as it readies itself to jab you. They usually come in ones or twos so technically shouldn’t be as much of a problem as mosquitoes but I found them much worse because of [View Full Entry]

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Poring Hot Springs are a well-loved tourist destination in Sabah, for both local and foreign tourists alike. They are also well-known to birdwatcher types. I caught a bus from Sepilok heading towards Kota Kinabalu and got dropped off in Ranau from where you can get a mini-van to Poring. There seems to be some sort of agreement amongst the Ranau drivers to fleece tourists because they tried to charge me 50 Ringgits for the twenty minute trip. It took a great deal of trouble before I could finally find someone to take me for 20 Ringgits which is still double what [View Full Entry]

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En route from the Kinabatangan to Sepilok the bus passed a few oil palms by the side of the road. And by a few I mean a few million! Malaysia is infamous for replacing forest with oil palm plantations but until you actually see it first-hand you really can’t grasp the problem. And even after seeing it its still impossible, like trying to imagine the Universe. The biggest plantations seem to be owned by the Sime Darby company. I’d passed one in Sarawak that went on and on for tens of kilometres, and where-ever roads cut through it you could see [View Full Entry]

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I think I’m probably going to make myself unpopular amongst people who have been there and loved it, but I found the Kinabatangan River to be distinctly underwhelming. For anybody who’d just arrived in Borneo and been nowhere else it must seem magical but for me, having been lucky enough to have probably been spoiled by travel, it was a big disappointment. Partly it was my fault due to a poor choice of accommodation, partly it was because I hate organised tours and activities, and partly it was because its just really not that great. My two main reasons for going [View Full Entry]

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I’d booked a seat on the first morning bus passing by Mt. Kinabalu en route to Lahad Datu. My destination was the Danum Valley, one of the last best hopes for the survival of Bornean wildlife. There are two places to stay in the Danum Valley: at the Borneo Rainforest Lodge (BRL) for which my pockets were nowhere deep enough, and the Danum Valley Field Centre (DVFC) which is a research facility that also admits “keen naturalists” (and apparently everybody else as well). The DVFC local office is in Lahad Datu and they have a mini-van to take in the tourists, [View Full Entry]

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