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Published: August 14th 2009
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my new travel buddy
now if I could just think of a name for him..... 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 difficult and/or expensive to access. I did like Brunei though so I’m going to return there for a few more days on my way back down from Sabah to Sarawak.
Its very easy to get from Miri in Sarawak to Brunei’s capital Bandar Seri Begawan (known ubiquitously by the ugly abbreviation BSB), but you have to like bus travel - it takes four of them over the course of the day! When coming from BSB to Miri there is apparently one combined ticket all the way, but Sarawak doesn’t like its own buses going into Brunei so when travelling
from Miri to Brunei you need to do a few changeovers. The first bus goes from Miri to the border immigration point at Sungai Tujoh. For almost the entire way the landscape on either side of the road was just black ash, all the land burned off presumably to make way for oil palms. They didn’t even appear to have cleared the trees first, just set the whole damn place on fire. There was the charred corpse of a monkey by the roadside at one point. White plumes of smoke were still rising from the scorched earth all along the way. It was incredibly depressing.
Things are taken very seriously at the Brunei border point. Everybody was required to stop individually in front of a thermal-imaging screen to make sure nobody had swine flu. I’ve picked up a cough in the last week or so and I’m always worried I’m going to get detained and quarantined. Once past the health check everybody had their bags searched. Not the casual flick-through for suspicious-looking hobo types but a thorough and complete emptying of every single bag for every single person. After that the second bus takes you into Brunei to Kuala
Berait, then a third to Serai, and finally the last one to BSB. And then I jumped on a speedboat for a 45 minute trip up-river to the little town of Bangar, which confusingly for me is also called Temburong! There was palm forest (wild nipa palm forest, not oil palm plantation) all the way along the river, and then the town itself appeared to be surrounded by rainforest. Certainly a big change from Sarawak. I stayed at the Youth Centre, even though my youth days are well and truly gone. It’s a very flash sort of youth centre with air-conditioning in the main room, hot showers, everything like that, and its only $10 for a dorm bed (and I think I was the only person in the whole building).
The next morning I went to the Peradayan Forest Reserve, about 15km out of town. The bit of the reserve that visitors can go to is called the Bukit Patoi Forest Recreation Park. There’s just one trail there, basically going straight up the side of a hill, although mostly boardwalked and stepped so quite easy, then it hits a big stone cliff-face covered in mosses and herbs, curves up
the side onto the top of the plateau and stops at a look-out. There used to be more of the trail but its been abandoned and is now overgrown. I found another old trail up there as well which followed the line of the plateau edge, where I spent part of the day. There’s no public transport in Bangar so you have to go to Peradayan by taxi, which costs $30 return, but you can pick your own hours at least. Because I only had the one day I set off at 6.30am and arranged a pick-up time of 8pm. I didn’t really see a whole lot during the day as it happened. In the morning the air was filled with the sound of calling gibbons and hornbills but the forest was so thick that there was no way I would be seeing them unless they were sitting in the trees right above my head. So I saw no gibbons and only brief non-identifiable glimpses of flying hornbills through gaps in the canopy. It wasn’t until near the end of the day that I finally got a good look at one of the reserve’s six species of hornbill when I
Henckellia taeniophylla
excited? This plant is (apparently) found only in this one area and nowhere else in the world. I think its cool. spotted a rhinoceros hornbill perched on an open branch. Among the few other birds I saw were a fabulous pair of striped wren-babblers, surely one of the most outstandingly-attractive birds of the trip (much nicer than their pictures in field guides).
While at the reserve I found a sign by the rock wall telling me that this area was the only known home of a plant called "Henckellia taeniophylla". There was a photo on the sign of what the plant looked like, and I found that plant nearby and photographed it myself. I thought that was pretty cool. Unfortunately there is no such plant named Henckellia taeniophylla! There is a genus of plants called Henckelia and there is a genus of orchids called Taeniophyllum, but nothing combining the two names (even if they weren't both misspelled) - and none of the members of either genus look like the plant I saw on the sign anyway. There is an endemic Henckelia in Brunei (H. coodei) but that doesn't look like the plant that the sign was showing me either.
The next morning I took the speedboat back to BSB and went to the bus station to get the bus
to the ferry terminal for Sabah (yes, its another one of those travel days everybody loves). It was a bit like when I arrived in Miri to get the bus to Brunei - rather than ferries to Pulau Labuhan throughout the day as my pre-trip-gathering information had claimed there were only two in the early morning which I’d missed, and four in the late afternoon, two of which had already been cancelled. So I had to sit around in the terminal’s waiting room for four hours (hence the term “waiting room” I guess). The boat goes first to the island of Pulau Labuhan where Malaysian immigration is, and then there’s another ferry from there to Kota Kinabalu, state capital of Sabah. Of course I’d missed the connection; I really don’t know why travel companies don’t tie their schedules together for the benefit of their customers. However for those people like me who are morons and don’t catch boats on time, there are also speedboats that go from Pulau Labuhan to the adjoining mainland to a town called Menumbok, from where (again, if you are in time) there are buses to KK. So that’s what I did, and I ended up
in KK at a charming establishment called the Gaya Hotel where the only thing missing from my 15 ringgit room was the chalk outline of the previous tenant. After one night there I moved to Lucy’s Homestay where I have to have a dorm bed but at least because it’s a small place I’m not worried about my stuff being stolen from my room. Today on my first day in Sabah I went to a giant mall called 1Borneo because I heard they had an Oceanarium (it has everything else after all, from hotels to a helipad) but it turned out the Oceanarium was still under construction. Just down the road from 1Borneo though was the real place I needed to visit, and that was the offices for the Danum Valley Field Centre where I managed to sort out my stay there from the 19th to the 24th. So yay for me. Now I just need to try and arrange time at Mt. Kinabalu and the Kinabatangan River, both of which currently look hopeful, so that’s good news!
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Andy
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haha how cool call him Dean Sanders, or Proby the Probocis monkey, or Toby. though not sure you'd want toby traveling round with you