The Sungai Kinabatangan was yet another place we only learnt about on our travels.. we don't do much research until we arrive at a place so only get set on going somewhere if someone highly recommends it.. which is exactly what happened here. This is basically a natural reserve located alongside the Kinabatangan river where you have the opportunity to spot Orangtans, Pygmy Elephants, Probiscus Monkeys, Macaque Monkeys and a whole host of other birds and wildlife so we were keen to go and see if we could see anything ourselves. We'd been recommended the Sakuru Greenview B&B so after hitching the remaining 42km to Sakau from the main road because the minibuses were ridiculously expensive, we checked in and immediately booked ourselves on the afternoon sunset boat trip along the river. Our wildlife spotting started ... read more

This blog is about a beautiful island towards the top of Kalimantan where the sand is pure white, the sea is crystal clear, turtles play around in the surf every single day, the coral is pristine and if this isn't enough you can venture out to visit jellyfish lagoons and manta rays gangs in neighbouring islands.. and best of all you have it all to yourself as there are no other tourists there to take away your pleasure.. pure bliss! From our scariest bus ride in our previous blog we will now announce our new top worst bus ride leader.. even beating the Worlds 2nd Most Dangerous Road bus ride in Bolivia... The bus ride from Sangatta to Berau is a killer and definitely one that would have put a stop to all other bus rides ... read more

After a reasonably nice trip on the Penli ship, with the only drama being Sophie getting locked below deck for a few hours while tickets were checked and being subjected to a million questions by the locals who surrounded her while she waited, we docked in Balikpapan, Borneo at 3am keen to discover this island that seems so undiscovered from back home in the UK. We were still with Tamil & Marusha thinking that staying in a group would lead to a better deal than just the 2 of us (something we would come to regret) and were all agreed that we'd hot tail it out of Balikpapan up to Samirinda as soon as we could because this was the first day of the Muslim Idul Fitri holiday and things were going to start closing for ... read more

In keeping with tradition our journey from Flores to Sulawesi was.. err.. interesting to put it mildly. Like we said in our last blog we'd decided to make use of the Pelni Ferries that travel all across Indonesia to get between the 2 destinations. We had no ideas on what it would be like but when the ship pulled up we got quite excited. We'd joked about it being like a cruise liner and it really was... well the ship was... the journey itself was probably as far away from a cruise as you could be without being on dry land! Although there is the option of 1st - 4th class on these boats there was no way we could afford 1st class (around $US80 a ticket) and the 2nd - 4th classes are separate sexes ... read more

After having such a bad end to our week in Bali we really hoped that things would improve for our time on Lombok. We had been told from quite a few people that the locals on Lombok were much more friendly and not so greedy so we were quite looking forward to a more relaxed time not having to argue over every Rupiah. In our haste to leave Bali we'd picked a really rubbish ferry time, this meant that not only did we get no sleep for the 3 hour journey across the water, but we also arrived at around 2.30am which is a really bad time for onward transport. Of course we were approached by the usual taxi & bemo divers as we ate out curried egg and rice breakfast (strange how good it tasted ... read more