Because Borneo is so full of tourists it seemed best to do the thing that I don’t like doing, and arrange all my accommodations in Sabah in advance. So I booked myself stupid to make sure of getting to the places I wanted to get to, and got four nights at Mt. Kinabalu National Park, then five nights at the Danum Valley Field Centre, followed by two nights at the Kinabatangan River, two nights at Sepilok and two nights at Poring Hot Springs. There really are a lot of tourists on this island, and all the tourists themselves seem surprised at [View Full Entry]

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You’ve got to feel a bit sorry for the tourism department of Brunei. The country has a reputation for being very expensive and most tourists only use it for a logistically-required stop-over of a day or two when travelling overland between Sarawak and Sabah. I wasn’t any different with three days, the first and last being days for arriving and departing, so just one proper day in the country. Brunei has masses of forest left, because its so rich from oil it doesn’t need to chop it all down and convert to plantations, but a lot of the reserves are quite [View Full Entry]

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Because Mulu National Park is fully-booked up for the whole of August, I decided to go to Niah National Park for a while instead and then hopefully visit Mulu later in the trip. To get to Niah National Park from Kuching there is first a five hour boat trip to the town of Sibu. For pretty much the entire voyage up-river there were stacks of logs lining the river banks. From Sibu there is then a four hour bus ride to the town of Bintulu, through 200km of almost entirely denuded countryside and massive oil palm plantations. Outside of the national [View Full Entry]

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Today is my birthday and for want of something more wildernessy to do I went to the local zoo, Jong’s Crocodile Farm And Zoo. It can’t quite be described as The Unhappiest Place On Earth (if I may be permitted to misquote Sir M. Mouse), but it is certainly pretty unlikeable. It was first established way back in 1963 and I wasn’t really expecting it to be a nice visit, crocodile farms usually aren’t, but I like to see the less salubrious facilities on my travels (by which I don’t actually mean I “like” to see them, more that it is [View Full Entry]

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How do I sum up Bako National Park? It stinking hot and there's no water. On the last night there was no power either. It hasn't rained at Bako in quite a long time and their dam is almost empty. Sometimes the toilets flushed, mostly they didn't. Sometimes there was a trickle of water from the taps, mostly there wasn't. The streams in the forest were reduced to small puddles filled with dead leaves and little shoals of rasboras. I had a bit of a poke around to see if I could find any catfish or bettas but there appeared to [View Full Entry]

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While waiting for the accommodation at Bako to free up I went to stay for a couple of nights at Kubah National Park, a forested hill/small mountain about half an hour outside of Kuching. There used to be regular buses right past the entrance but just this year many of the important bus routes ("important" in visitor terms that is) have been canned. There used to be two bus companies that did routes from airport to city, now you have to take a taxi; there is sometimes one that runs past Semenggoh but it is regularly cancelled so you have to [View Full Entry]

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When I travel I prefer not to book accommodation and things ahead of time, largely because that would mean I'd have no flexibilty in my plans which especially in a long trip is very important. It usually works out all right except for the minor hiccup here and there, but sometimes not so much. Well I flew into Kuching in Borneo, and fell flat on my face with my plans. I am coming into the peak of the tourist season, which I knew, but August is also the month Malaysia celebrates its independance as a nation, which I did know but [View Full Entry]

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Weird happening on the flight from Palu to Makassar: the airport Customs confiscated my two DEET insect repellant canisters because they were aerosols and therefore “dangerous”. They didn’t confiscate them from my hand-luggage, note, but from my check-in bag! This was the seventh plane I’ve been on this trip alone and I’ve been on countless others on other trips and this is the first time I’ve had insect repellant taken off me. I argued till I was blue in the face that all aerosols are flammable, including the deodorant which they did allow, but of course it [View Full Entry]

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The late Douglas Adams, when journeying to Komodo, wrote something along the lines of "Everything we were told in Indonesia turned out to be not true, sometimes almost immediately." He didn't mean it literally of course, but its pretty damn close. After returning to Gorontalo from Nantu I had time to grab a shower because I smelled like a babirusa, then it was off to catch the night bus to Palu in central Sulawesi. It takes about 14 hours to get from Gorontalo to Palu and while there is a day bus its basically a waste of a day. The night [View Full Entry]

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One of the more unusual animals in Sulawesi is the babirusa, which is a type of big hairless pig with four big tusks in the males. The lower pair of tusks grow out from the sides of the mouth like a regular pig but the upper pair grow straight upwards through the snout, curving back towards the eyes like horns, hence the name babirusa which is Indonesian for "pig deer". Because babirusa are quite large creatures and tasty to eat they are now very rare over the entire island. In fact the only place where they can still be seen with [View Full Entry]

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