Day 210 (21.10.07) After a great night's sleep, we all woke pretty early to find that to our huge disapointment England had lost the rugby, oh and that every move we made was extremely painful! After our big climb the aches had truly arrived and any walking hurt - stairs were agony! After packing, we joined Anna and Kathryn for some breakfast at the cafe before catching a minibus back to Ranau where we were going to use the internet and catch the bus back to Kota Kinabalu. There are a lot of other things to do at Poring including the canopy walkway which we were planning to do, however a tree had fallen in a recent storm which had destroyed half of the walkway (and we weren't sure if we cold manage the walking element ... read more

Day 203 (14.10.07) We arrived at the Sepilok bus station with plenty of time to spare as due to the celebrations of the past few days the ticket booth had been shut and we weren't sure we'd be able to get tickets. We bartered a little as they told us the price on the ticket was local price and we'd have to pay another 6 dollars which we luckily managed to get down to about 1.50 dollars. We set off towards Sandakan where we hoped to be able to visit the tourist information office and find out about a possible visit to Turtle Island where you can spend the night and watch turtles laying eggs - it sounded amazing. When we arrived in Sandakan (at another cunningly located bus station which required another bus trip to ... read more

Day 200 (11.10.07) After not enough hours of sleep we were up at 6am as suggested and knocking on the owners door! He soon told us that there were no tickets to where we wanted to go for about 2 days as it was the end of Ramadan and lots of people are travelling to be with their families. Bugger! We didn't have the time to wait 2 days for a bus and had visions of being stuck here so grabbed a taxi to the bus station (another one conveniently located about 6km out of town) in the hope of being able to grab a couple of spare spots. No luck unfortunately but we did manage to get some tickets for the night bus later in the day, a good result which meant that we would ... read more

Day 196 (07.10.07) We packed up and said goodbye to Daniel's Lodge before making our way down to the bus station. What was supposed to be a 4 hour journey ended up more like 6 hours as we wound our way towards Kuala Lumpur thorugh wooded hills and lovely scenery. We eventaully arrived in the capital and followed James (from the moto day) across town to a place he'd stayed on his last visit to KL. We checked into the Hostel Cosmopolitan, a great little place, and went straight back out in search of some food to settle our rumbly tums. On our walk we caught our first glimpse of the Petronas Towers the iconic KL sight. We'd wnated to be able to explore a little more today but with the long bus journey and the ... read more

Day 191 (02.10.07) As we were leaving early in the morning we had had to set the alarm to get us up - tha lazy days had meant that the constant 6am wakeups were a long and distant memory. Up packed and ready to go down to the beach we went to reception to get our valuables from the safe. Unfortunately, unbenownst to us, the reception was not to open until 8am - the same time as our boat! Oh dear. Feeling pretty bad (not that bad as there was no sign to day it would not be open) Mark went and woke one of the owners and got him to come and open the safe or us - result! With 5 mins to spare we got our stuff and went down to the beach to ... read more