The Best of the Rest of Malaysian Borneo

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Since arriving in Kota Kinabalu we have taken no less than five internal flights over the past three weeks and none of the flights have been longer than 1.5 hours. We found that flying in Borneo is relatively cheap and maybe we're getting a bit soft, but at this point we'd take an hour's flight over a bumpy 6 to 9 hour bus ride any day.

Before our diversion to Brunei, we completed our time in Sabah by visiting the Sepilok Orang-utan rehabilitation centre. Having seen them in the wild, this was a chance to get a better appreciation for these primates up close. Yes, it's busy, full of camera-weilding tourists, but it's quite well done and here we could see more than simply an orange furry blob high up in the trees. Not quite the same as our experience with the mountain gorillas in Rwanda a few years ago Rwanda (Gorilla treking), but still very worthwhile. When we finally made our way to Sarawak we also visited Semenggoh wildlife centre near Kuching. It offers a similar experience to Sepilok, but at a much lower cost and it's a little bit more informal although just as busy tourist-wise, maybe even busier.

Kuching was our base of operations for Sarawak. Unfortunately we just didn't give ourselves enough time to really do justice to Sarawak. We missed out on a lot of the cultural highlights like the longhouses, head-hunters, and we didn't make it to the caves either. Guess we'll just have to come back again some time. We did manage to make it out to Bako National Park where we did a little more jungle trekking, though it was so hot and humid we limited ourselves to the shortest trail.

Overall we had a really great time in Borneo and while we couldn't see everything (it's a big island), we're quite happy with how things turned out considering it wasn't even originally on our itinerary.

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Photos

Baby silver leaf monkey
Babies are bright orange and turn silver as they get older

Bako trails
Sweat-soaked

Comments

[Dan]

NASI
I hope you guys are eating a tonne of nasi goering. It's one of my favourite things I ever had while travelling the world. So simple, but so damn good!