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Published: September 29th 2009
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We gave up on Bako and emailed the Forestry Department to see if we could stay in Kubah. Its basically the closest National Park to Kuching and due to the popularity of Bako gets bugger all in the way of visitors. If you read the travel guide most of them do push Bako as the number one destination.
Well we had come back from our stay in the longhouse and decided to book the accomodation at Kubah. Again it was something silly like £2 per bed per night to stay in a twelve bed hostel in the forest so we were esctactic. Well I say we, Dan seemed not to be that keen on going out into the wilderness again. Ever since the midnight flash flooding in the mountains on our horse trek in China he'd been much happier in the city than in the the wild.
After convincing him I would end up going insane if I had to spend another night in Kuching we got the times of the bus and headed out with our food supplies, bottled water(by the gallon) and a spare set of clothes.
Kucking is not a great place to use public
transport. There are numerous transport companies all trying to avoid making any regular stops at any of the tourist spots, don't aski me why, but i think it could have something to do with the minivan which charge a lot more to take you to the same places!!
So ther we are patiently waiting for the first bus to drop us somehwre near Kubah, we waited for hour, obviously timetables are not important here and we have pretty much had to cope with that since we left China. Laos was the same, people just turn up when they fancy, they get paid anyway and most tourists get pissed off and then take a minibus. Well not us, its a rip off, and the bloody bus would sure as hell turn up the minute you sat your butt in the minivan!!
Whilst we were waiting we did get chatting to a few people, telling us food to try and assuring us they were waiting for the same bus!! We also hooked up with another Westerner, who interestingly was in his late 60's and on a trip of a lifetime. More importantly he had already been to Bako ( the
Park we were so disappointed that we couldn't get accommodation at) and he told us that the place was awful, there were people dropping like flies because of the real flies all over the food in the canteen and that there was no water at all for toilets or bathing. He said it would make a nice day trip but not to bother staying there.
We chatted away exchanging stories until about one hour later we kicked of the bus and we realised we were infact still 3.7km away from the park entrance.AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bloody useless, the public transport to the park does not in fact go to the park, infriggingfuriating.
Weighed down with all our food, bottled water and clothes it would take us ages to walk there , uphill in the searing morning heat. Undetered I decided I was going to hitch and Dan could come if he wanted!! About a minute later 3 very nice students from the local poly pulled up in their runaround and managed to stuff the three of us in the back, wile two of them shared the front passenger seat and drove us the final distance to the park
headquarters. Fantastic!!!!!!!
The reason we had so much stuff with us , was that there are no food or drinking water outlets at all in Kubah and we were stying over for two nights.
We registered at the park office and were taken to our home for the next two three days, it was a massive, gorgeous solid wood chalet in the forest. There were three rooms and twelve beds but we were told that we were the only guests in the park!!!!Nobody else was booked to stay for at least another week. It was great we had a lovely lounge area to ourselves, two bathrooms, a kitchen , with stove , fridge,toaster etc , everything we would need to make our own meals and even a barbeque outside our front door.
We got ourselves packed had some breakfast and headed off to attempt our first trek through the forest. We aimed for the climb that would give us the best vies and were so happy when we reached the top, I cannot explain to you the pain of trekking in 95% humidity, when we stopped Dan litterally had sweat dripping from his nose onto the decking
of the observation tower and I noticed I had sweat glands in my triceps!!!As usual the views were terrible, just mist and clouds, we haven't had much luck with that type of thing on this trip!!But the trek through the forest was challenging and very steep! We decided to do another trek when we fished the first one and that was quite easy going at first and then it became pretty obviously that people don't walk it that often, every time we walked we lost sight of our feet sinking into the terrain below. Hot and sweaty, very sweaty work, no major uphill stuff until the return leg, but huge fallen trees to traverse, big drops down onto rotten vegetation and thigh high forest floors certainly made it thirtsy work.
So after 3.5 hours fast trekking we hed bakc for much needed showers and sleep. After instantly falling asleep upon sitting down we set about making the usual simple meals based around packet noodles(my favourite!)It was absolutely blissful at night, so quiet and pitch black and it was just us, not sure Dan was as happy as me, but hey ho.
Awoken at 5am by Dan and the
cockroaches that were crawling over his ears, was not what I expected, but i figured we needed to get up early anyway so we could start our summit walk whilst it was still dark and avoid the worst of the heat and humidity. After trying to pack his bag with snacks and water for our climb he actually found 5 huge cockroaches that had snuck in there for some darkness during the night. Drama as you can expect. Anyway set off about half an hour before day break (the clearing of cockroaches has slowed us down) and began to walk in the pitch black darkness. I wouldn't do it alone and actually being just two people it didn't make us feel good hearing all the creepy nosies from the forest. We may not have seen any animals in the jungle but we certainly heard the buggers!! Our chosen summit trek was mean to take at least 7 hours and we managed to complete it in 3.5hrs, so we were very happy, if stinking and yet again we had no luck with the views from the summit. In fact as we approached the summit we actually saw the mist and clouds
envelope us and it became very cold and eerie, just us and this cloud and not being able to see ahead of yourself!!!
We saw amazing vegetation , sweat bees, weird, weird insects, giant leaves and colossal trees on our trek.
After completely zonking out in the afternoon we decided the best way to avoid a repeat of the cockroach incident was to sleep in the lounge with the lights on!!Thankfully we didn't have repeat performance!
Kickout was at eleven am and after being greated yet again by my first name(by the ranger) we set off to do the waterfall trek, back up park of that bloody steep climb we had done the day before), the swaet bees were the worst threat and also loosing your footing and apparently being crushed to death by all manner of falling objects including rotten trees! At one point the path was completely blocked by all these massive trees which had just become and collapsed. Then when we got to the waterfall, there was just a trickle, there was more water on Dan and that why he was attacked by the bees and wasps, eventually we just sat in the bottom
of the river, which must be huge when the water levels are high(there are signs everywhere warning of flash floods and what to do if you are caught out whilst trekking). So it was us, a couple of biscuits the sweat bees and an empty river bed. Tragic!!
We left Kubah and embarked on our next trek, the 3.7km down the valley to the main road to get a bus bakc to Kuching. Luckily and strangely the bus turned up about 10minutes later, we were the only passenger and the guy drove the rust bucket like a maniac, not all things change!!!
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