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Published: September 10th 2009
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Poring Hot Springs are a well-loved tourist destination in Sabah, for both local and foreign tourists alike. They are also well-known to birdwatcher types. I caught a bus from Sepilok heading towards Kota Kinabalu and got dropped off in Ranau from where you can get a mini-van to Poring. There seems to be some sort of agreement amongst the Ranau drivers to fleece tourists because they tried to charge me 50 Ringgits for the twenty minute trip. It took a great deal of trouble before I could finally find someone to take me for 20 Ringgits which is still double what it should be. According to the drivers there’s no public transport to Poring, to which my response was something like “don’t be stupid, of course there’s public transport to Poring! How do the locals get around?” to which the answer was they hire cars at 50 Ringgits per person!! I stayed at the Poring Lodge about five minutes from the gates. It wasn’t the nicest of places I’ve stayed but there isn’t a lot of choice given that the accommodation inside the gates is run by the Sutera Sanctuary Lodge company which also runs the Mt. Kinabalu park accommodation (ie,
very expensive!).
The main attraction at Poring is naturally the hot springs, which are artificialised to within an inch of their lives. There’s also a butterfly garden and a canopy walkway, both with additional entry fees of course. A little further on is the Kipungit Waterfall, and a little further on from that the Bat Cave, and a lot further on from that the Langanan waterfall. Few people venture beyond the hot springs and barely anybody at all beyond Kipungit. On my first day there I saw just four people on the Langanan trail, but when I came out there were a hundred-odd visitors milling around the hot springs (and I felt like a right wally walking through them in my jungle gear, leech socks and all!). The Bat Cave isn’t really a cave as such, more a big jumble of garage-sized boulders under the overhang of one of which a crowd of bats roost. I’ve read that they are mostly greater sheath-tailed bats and fawn roundleaf bats but I could only identify the latter to my own satisfaction. Greater and lesser sheath-tails tend to roost in mixed groups and you need to have them in the hand to
bamboo at Poring Hot Springs
this giant bamboo is actually called "poring", and is what the hot springs and village are named after. identify them accurately, and while there were several sizes of bats in there I wasn’t sure what other species there might be intermingled, so I left everything but the fawn roundleafs as “unidentified bats”.
The Langanan Waterfall is quite impressive, even if you’re not the sort of person who can be bothered walking for a few hours just to see a lot of water falling off a cliff. In the wet season it must be a pretty stupendous sight. For me the main reason (well, only reason) for doing the trail was to look for birds, in particular the beautiful blue-banded pitta which is endemic to Borneo. There were no pittas on the first day but I saw some other nice birds such as the maroon woodpecker. There were no pittas on the second day either but that turned out to be a mammal day instead, with two species of tree-shrew, two of squirrel, and the most unexpected sighting in a while, a pair of small-toothed palm civets weaving their way through the branches above my head in broad daylight, presumably an in-season female being tailed by an amorous male.
Apart for the hot springs themselves, Poring is
also well-known for
Rafflesia flowers.
Rafflesia are fascinating plants, completely parasitic upon specific types of vines, they spend almost their entire existance hidden from view inside their hosts. Only when flowering do they show themselves, and just to make sure that nobody misses them they produce the largest flowers in the world. Those of the largest species,
R. arnoldi, are three feet across. The species that grows around Poring is
R. keithii which is a little smaller, “only” about a foot and a half in diameter. The other thing that you should know about
Rafflesia is that they may have the largest flowers in the world but those flowers are very short-lived. They come up out of the ground as a big cabbage-like bud, open up, and then within 5 to 7 days are turning black and rotting. Short-lived and unpredictable you need to be in the right place at the right time to see them. When I came out of the jungle on that first day I went to the park office to ask if, perchance, they knew of any
Rafflesia blooming at the moment and such was my good fortune that there was in fact one in flower
right next to the little village outside the gates. Because it was on private land the owners were charging an admission fee of 20 Ringgits, and you can’t really blame them for that. Every time a
Rafflesia booms on their property they have a short-lived gold-mine. Once I’d seen it I passed five more tourists going in as I was coming out, and as I came up to the main road there was a bus-load of 17 people coming in. That’s 460 Ringgits in about ten minutes, and it was only the second day of the plant’s flowering. In all truthfulness seeing the
Rafflesia was a bit of an anti-climax. I was led along a path through some forest to the flower, and there was a little bamboo barrier to stop tourists from touching it, but once you’re there all there is to do is to look at it, take some photos and leave. You feel like you should be doing more, because its a
Rafflesia and its amazing, but its just sitting there looking rather bizarre and fake. With an animal you can watch it feeding or sleeping or whatever, but the
Rafflesia just sits there. I think finding
one yourself while out walking in the forest would be different because there’d be a sense of discovery about it that’s lacking when you’ve just paid someone to lead you to it and point at it. Hopefully when I’m in Sumatra I’ll see the largest one,
R. arnoldi, although the experience will be the same (being led to it by a local “owner”). Still, I’ve seen a
Rafflesia now and that was one of the things up near the top of my Borneo wish-list so I’m happy.
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