Leaving Borneo

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Last couple of days in Borneo, so just a short post because nothing really happened. Next I will be in India, so that will be exciting. I've added some squirrel photos to the last post (Mt. Kinabalu) and a not-very-good siamang photo to the first post. I didn't take many photos on the Malaysian stretch.



Mt. Kinabalu has a nice cool temperature, perfect for someone like me who does not like heat and humidity. Kota Kinabalu is the complete opposite - meltingly hot and humid. The reason we came here with some days to spare was because Mr. Andy wanted to go to Pulau Manukan, a little island off the coast, to go swimming and snorkelling. Unfortunately for him, Typhoon Sarika was sweeping through Vietnam and the Philippines, causing high winds and lashing rain in KK.

The island trip was out, but later in the morning we caught a taxi out to Tanjung Aru Beach to look for parrots. Blue-naped parrots and long-tailed parakeets are both found here - I easily saw both on my last trip to Borneo - but today they were nowhere to be seen. Despite the heavy rain in the morning and the weather forecast saying there would thunderstorms all week, the day actually turned out to be fine and sunny. We debated going to the island for the second half, but decided we wouldn't have enough time to both snorkel and look for megapodes, and we didn't know if the weather would hold, so we left it.

Mr. Andy's flight was the next afternoon. If the weather looked good we might go to the island or if not something else. The weather was good - but instead we went to the KK Wetland Sanctuary, which is a mangrove reserve just above town. The tides were not in our favour - the mudflats between the mangroves were still under water so no waders were to be seen - but we saw a nankeen night heron (his first night heron), a couple of purple herons, some little egrets, a blue-eared kingfisher, and a handful of common passerines. Really there wasn't much around. In the trees outside the entrance as we left, we saw plain sunbird, orange-bellied flowerpecker, and dusky munia. That last one meant that Mr. Andy's last bird in Malaysia was a Bornean endemic.

After Mr. Andy left for the airport I moved house, into a ten-bed dorm at Borneo Backpackers. We had been staying in a flash room at the Capital Hotel, which was the first "skyscraper hotel" in KK (built back in 1967 when the town was called Jesselton), because Mr. Andy needs comforts which I don't. And I basically did nothing much the next day, and then the morning after I flew out of Borneo via Kuala Lumpur, bound for India.

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