Monkeying about in Borneo

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Air Asia turned out to be pretty good actually and just after 2 hours after leaving KL we touched down in the north of Borneo.

After finding ourselves a place to stay we tried to investigate any sort of night life, however Borneo is still not on the main backpacker trail (which is nice) and so not much goes on here. It reminds me slightly of China, where Westerners aren't a regular occurence and little kids stop and stare and say hello then run off giggling - quite funny! However, unlike China there is not as much of a language barrier!

The two main reasons we came to Borneo was for the Scuba Diving and the Sepilok Orang Utan Centre. I saw a documentary on tv a couple of years ago about the centre, and how they help to introduce orang utans back in the wild. I thought then that if I was ever in Borneo how I'd like to 'pop in', never thinking that I'd ever actually do it! We turned up for the 3pm feeding, where some food (ie bananas) is put out onto a platform and slowly the orang utans make their way through the jungle swinging on ropes. We actually went to the centre twice, as they advertised that they have rare rhinos there, however it turned out that on our second visit they had been relocated to somewhere else in Borneo, so we were a bit disappointed. We looked at the feeding again, which wasn't that great as there were about 3 times as many tourists there so you couldn't really see anything. After that we went for a little jungle trek, more of a nature walk really, but was quite good all the same. We made our way back on the path and when we were nearly back at the entrance 2 orang utans had wandered out of the jungle and so we stayed and looked and played with them for about half an hour. Unbelievable, from what turned out to be quite a disappointing day to actually interacting with these semi wild animals was unbelievable.

After visiting the Sepilok Orang Utan sanctuary the next thing to do was investigate that trip to Semporna where all the diving leaves from. Our heart's sank when the travel agent said that all accommodation was booked up in the town due to the Koreans coming over on their holidays. However, being veteran travellers now, or so it seems sometimes, we thought we'd wing it and so just jumped on the bus for 7 hours in the hope that we'd find something. Luckily when we got there we found accommodation quite easily and also a couple of companies that would take us on a fun dive.

There is no accommodation on the island of Sipidan now so you have to take a two hour speed boat trip out to it. Sounds very James Bond-y, however, in reality after 1hr 30 mins I was looking a little green in the face as the sea was so rough, spent quite a lot of the day feeling sorry for myself and just lying down. I did two dives (instead of the 3 I'd payed for) and the first was definately the best as there were so many turtles and sharks just swimming around us, along with some fantastic fish.

Unfortunately we only had 6 days on Borneo so didn't have chance to do any proper jungle treks or to go to Turtle Island, which I'd have liked to do - maybe next time though but for now I can tick it off the list.

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