Back in Malaysia

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So I have been in Kuala Lumpur for the last wee while. I haven't been doing much, in fact for the first week II barely left the hostel except for food. I've just been catching up on internet stuff – like the Mammalwatching blog, which I couldn't get in China!! – writing blogs and reviews, uploading photos, all that sort of stuff. I did go and see the new Hobbit movie too of course, in a mall that was so big it had a roller coaster in it! Seriously, an actual roller coaster! Also it is too hot to do much and it has been raining for the second part of almost every day. I don't usually like Kuala Lumpur, it is my least favourite city in Asia (or my most hated, to put it in a more accurate way), but it is actually nice being here after China. Here I can walk into any shop at all and ask a question in English and the person can answer me. I can read all the signs. There's nobody spitting on the floor in the train stations. There are no bait-balls of people getting on and off transportation. There is no visible fog of lung-eroding pollution hanging in the air. Life is pretty easy at the moment.

I have seen some common city birds here and there. There is a male koel – a crow-sized cuckoo – in the trees outside the hostel which has been calling persistently all day every day (and half of every night it seems like) but has also been persistently stubborn in allowing me to see him! It is weird with birds how they will completely ignore everything in the vicinity, no matter how disruptive, but as soon as a lone birder appears the bird immediately hides or flees! I had seen the koel twice – flying away as I tried to find which tree the call was coming from – so it is on the trip list but I still hadn't managed to get a perched view of him. This morning while I was plaiting my hair on the little balcony, the koel was calling away as usual. But this time he flew right past the building from one tree to another, and then a female koel flew out of the same tree and landed in a tree directly opposite me, maybe twenty feet away. The male flew back to his original tree, a couple of pink-necked green pigeons flew in the opposite direction and then the female koel followed the pigeons. So I did get to see the local koels properly before I left after all!

I have made a trip to Zoo Negara and seen a few wild birds in the grounds whilst there (tailorbirds, glossy starlings, bulbuls, etc) and a visit to the Batu Caves where I saw crab-eating macaques for the mammal list.

I'm not sure I'd heard of the Batu Caves before yesterday but they are on the outskirts of the city and easy to get to (they have their own LRT station with trains running every half an hour!). One of the guys in my dorm room had been there the previous day and, knowing of my interests, told me that you can get a guided tour of the caves to show you the bats. I had a google and found that there are several bat species in the caves, the most likely of which to see would be the long-tongued fruit bat Eonycteris spelaea. I had never thought I'd be able to pick up any new mammal species in Kuala Lumpur, so I was definitely going! I dropped off my passport at Ever Fine Tours for them to put a Burmese visa into (I'll come back to the Burma thing a bit further on), and then took the train to the caves. The caves are halfway up the face of a big gobstopper of rock, and so being Asia they have built a great long staircase up to the entrances and then scattered Godzilla-sized gold statues all around the place. The stairs are covered in crab-eating macaques prowling around ready to attack anybody silly enough to be openly carrying food. You can buy monkey food there too, which doesn't help the situation. I kept a look-out for any tour counters but saw none, so climbed all the way to the top of the stairs where there were two huge caverns, both open to the sky either in part or fully, and hence useless for bats. They were filled instead with feral pigeons. I went back down the stairs, seeing the entrance to the Dark Cave on the way but it was gated up. I thought it must only be opened for letting tours in and out. Down the bottom I asked around and got no straight answers. I was starting to get really frustrated and annoyed because of the heat and everything. Eventually I found a security guard who told me the tour counter was the green hut at the top of the stairs on the left. I went all the way back up the stairs, pretty much ready to punch any monkey in the face who dared to look at me sideways, and found the hut empty with no signs (which is why I hadn't noticed it before). I asked the guy in the little shop next to it. Turns out the Dark Cave is open six days a week. The one day of the week it is closed is the day I was there.

The next day I returned to the caves and went straight up to the green hut. It was still empty. I found out that the tour counter is actually inside the cave entrance itself. The tour cost 35 Ringgits and was really good. The cave isn't a huge complex or anything, it's quite a simple cave, but the girl doing the tour was super-enthusiastic and bubbly and obviously enjoyed doing it, unlike some tour guides where they have done the walk and speil so often they end up ruining the tour for all the participants. The cave was filled with the squeaking of Eonycteris (being a fruit bat the sonar signals are easily audible to human ears) and I saw some flying around in the better lit areas (it is forbidden to shine the torches upwards). It was sad seeing the graffiti on the cave walls along the way – people really are jerks at heart – and that is the reason the cave is now open by tour only. The girl leading the tour had a little flip-book of pictures and diagrams to illustrate what she was talking about, and I was very excited to see that there were Liphistius trapdoor spiders here (more excited than about seeing a new species of bat!!). This type of spider is a sort of living fossil; unlike other modern spiders it has a segmented abdomen. The species here is Liphistius batuensis, thought to be endemic to this one cave system, and they are endangered because of collection of specimens for the pet trade, a demand driven by their uniqueness. I have wanted to see a Liphistius for a long time but I had no idea where or how to look. Unfortunately the part of the cave they live in was not part of this tour. There was an extended tour which did include that part of the cave and on which it was possible to see them (or at least their web-nests on the walls) but the next one wasn't for another week. Outside the cave at the end of the tour the girl showed me where there was a young Wagler's pit viper, in the trees right outside the entrance.

The next day (yesterday) I visited Kuala Selangor. This is a little town about two hours out of Kuala Lumpur, and my reason for going there is the mangrove forest nature reserve, Taman Alam. There are a few mammals there (including smooth-coated otters which you have to be lucky to see) and lots of birds. I had last been there in 2006 and then I stayed at the town, but this time was just a day-trip. I had a look on Wikitravel for where the bus leaves from Kuala Lumpur and the directions on there were dead accurate. Basically you go to the Medan Pasar bus stop just near the Masjid Jamek LRT station and catch the number 141. Even the fare was correct on Wikitravel (7.30 Ringgit). The first bus is at 6.30am apparently but I caught the 7am bus and got to the Kuala Selangor bus terminal at about 8.45am. Wikitravel says the buses run every half a hour but on the return trip I was waiting for over an hour and a half for a bus, so I don't know. I thought the last time I was here I had stayed in a hotel just round the corner from the terminal and walked to the nature reserve in the mornings (about a kilometre or two away) but I couldn't see any hotels and I didn't remember the lay-out. I asked a few people and they all said I needed to take a taxi. So eventually I did to save time, and it cost 8 Ringgit. At the turn-off from the highway to the nature reserve there is a little cluster of hotels and restaurants, and as soon as I saw those I remembered what had happened in 2006. I had arrived at the bus terminal after dark and asked around for a hotel, and everyone kept pointing me in the same direction. I ended up walking along the edge of the highway in the dark with all my gear until I reached this point, which turned out to be quite handy because it was just outside the gates (there's just a short road, maybe 500 metres between the highway and gate). Alternatively you can stay inside the park itself for as little as 30 Ringgit, a choice which would obviously give you more scope for wildlife watching. The reserve is open 9am to 6pm, but the otters are most likely to be seen at dawn and dusk as they pass through, and if you are staying inside the park you could also go spot-lighting; I know there are leopard cats there, and I think there are probably pangolins as well.

So, I got to the reserve at about 9.20am, just when they were opening up the ticket counter so good timing really. I stayed until noon, then went out for lunch, and came back in for a few hours before heading off to look for silvered leaf monkeys. The reserve is on the edge of the Selangor River and the Malacca Strait but you can't actually see either of them because of the mangroves. From the entrance there's a track leading to a circular raised dirt track, in the middle of which is a man-made brackish lagoon. There's a couple of watch-towers, and also a raised walkway through mangrove forest which is in bad shape. The sections of wooden railings have mostly collapsed and fallen off, but luckily the walkway itself is made of concrete so will last a long time. I wasn't expecting to see much in the way of new birds here, but my target was milky stork which have been reintroduced here from birds bred at Zoo Negara in Kuala Lumpur. In 2006 there was a huge pre-release aviary (still there now, but derelict) and although I saw a couple of free birds I think, I couldn't “tick” them because they'd only just been released. Now there is a proper wild breeding population so I can count them on my list!

It wasn't long before I saw some milky storks, with a flock of seventeen flying in circles in the sky seen from the first watch-tower. I saw a few others in flight later on and also a lesser adjutant in flight. Lots of other birds all through the forest here as well, including a female koel, ashy tailorbird, ruby-cheeked sunbird and mangrove whistler. There were some water monitors around too naturally, and quite a few many-lined sun skinks.

I was keeping my eyes open for smooth-coated otters, although there wasn't much hope outside of very early morning/late afternoon. In 2006 as I was coming into the park for the first time there was a lady coming out who had just seen a whole family party which was a bit annoying when I ended up not seeing any! I have never seen any species of otter wild before, but I was hoping to see the smooth-coated otters which live at Sungei Buloh in Singapore whenever I get down there, and I'm hoping to still get to Langkawi at some point for small-clawed otters (Junglewalla Tours tell me they see otters on 50%!o(MISSING)f their mangrove eco-tours which sounds promising). I finished the mangrove walkway (never seems to be many birds in there, but I saw mangrove whistler which was good) and climbed up the is-it-safe-? watchtower just nearby (it is a little rickety and it sways when you're on it which isn't comforting!). An ashy tailorbird was hopping around in the tree next to the tower and I got a good photo of it. A couple of white-rumped munias were feeding in the grass below and a white-breasted waterhen ran across the path. A pack of three dogs then ran along the path so I stayed up in the tower a while longer because I don't trust dogs out on their own! A crested serpent-eagle was soaring around amongst the Brahminy kites and swiftlets. When I came down I went to where the munias had been to see if I could get a closer look but they had gone, then I took the track that ran back towards the entrance. On the outer side of the track (i.e. on the other side from the lagoon) is a creek which is hidden from view most of the time by the long grasses along the edge. Just by the tower, on the junction of the track, is a spot where you can look straight down one section of the creek, which I naturally did to see if there was an otter down there – and there was!!! I was just a little surprised, especially given that the time was quarter to midday. The otter was periscoping (i.e. lifting its head and body straight up out of the water to see things better), then it went behind some of the grasses, then it appeared again, lifting itself high to scope me out. There was a little tree in the way so I took one step sideways to get an open shot and the otter dived with a big splash and then took off up the far bank through the grass (I couldn't see the otter itself, just the grass thrashing wildlly as it escaped). So I didn't see it for long but it is my first wild otter so I am really happy, and I still hope to get better views in Singapore if the otters are still reliable there (fingers crossed). Wildlife-watching is a funny thing, there is so much luck involved. I saw the otter in precisely the one spot where I could see it (as opposed to it being in any other spot where the creek was completely hidden, which was most of its length); if I had spent longer or shorter up the tower I wouldn't have seen it, if I hadn't spent time going to see if the munias were still there I wouldn't have seen it, all sorts of lucky variables come into play. In short, if you are going to Kuala Selangor but you only have one day there, don't give up hope you might see the otters whilst there!

Apart for the otter other mammals I saw were numerous plantain squirrels and the ubiquitous crab-eating macaques. I didn't see any silvered leaf monkeys in the reserve but I knew they were easy to see just up the road at the top of the hill where people go to feed them. (In the morning most of the leaf monkeys and macaques leave the reserve for the feeding area and then come back in the afternoon). It is just a short walk, and sure enough there were loads of both species of monkeys up there. I've seen silvered leaf monkeys before in several places but I think this is probably the only place on this trip where they're found and I wanted to see them again. I don't really like seeing monkey-feeding areas, it seems almost degrading seeing the monkeys begging for hand-outs. I prefer to see them in the forest, but if they aren't in the forest then what are you going to do? It was interesting seeing the two species feeding together. Macaques are always ready to bare their teeth and threaten to bite if you don't hand over the food; they are the brawlers of the monkey world. The leaf monkeys look much more delicate in comparison with their long legs and skinny body, and their permanently surprised expression suggests they wouldn't hurt a fly. They really were more refined, standing upright with hand held out, then taking bits of food gently. Several had babies with them, which are bright orange in colour (the adults being a dark blackish-grey).

Today I am off to Bukit Fraser for a few days. I've been there before as well so most of the birds won't be new, but I am hoping to see some new mammals (hopefully including slow loris which is almost my nemesis mammal!).



And to finish this post: Burma. I was always planning on (probably) going to Burma on this trip but it was going to be later. But after I got to Kuala Lumpur, thinking about how I was going up to Thailand, I suddenly decided it made most sense (to me at least!) to go via Burma: i.e. fly KL to Yangon (= Rangoon) and then Yangon to Bangkok. I went to the Myanmar Embassy to see what I needed for the visa and discovered they had outsourced their visa service to a company called Ever Fine Tours. So I went there and found that it is a same day service (!!!) and literally all you need is your passport, two passport photos, a photocopy of your ID page in the passport, your flights in and out of the country, and to fill out a very simple one-page form (eye colour, hair colour, that sort of thing). It costs 140 Ringgit. Simple as anything! I had a look on Air Asia and found a flight from Yangon to Bangkok for 4.64 Ringgit. In case you think that is a typo, it cost NZ$1.70, AU$1.60, US$1.40, 1 Euro or 0.87 UK Pounds. But get this: after the addition of airport tax, fuel surcharge, baggage allowance, and a ridiculous 19 Ringgit credit card fee the cost of the flight ended up being 155 Ringgit!! It is still pretty cheap in real terms, but what an outrageous increase! Then I got an inbound Air Asia flight from KL to Yangon which was 80 Ringgit before tax, and 199 Ringgit after the taxes (and the credit card fee was only 8 Ringgit). So there wasn't much of a difference between the two flights in cost in the end. How bizarre. I think it must be something to do with it being an outbound flight from Burma. By the time I'd sorted flights and booked the accommodation in Yangon it had suddenly become the weekend so I needed to wait till Monday to finalise everything.

I fly to Burma on the 26 December, and out to Bangkok on 16 January, which makes about three weeks in the country. I have a plan for the route – Yangon (including Hlawga Park), up to Bagan (by the Irrawaddy River), east to Lake Inle, then to Kalaw (forest birds) and up to Mandalay after that (solely for the zoo), then down to Bago for Lake Moeyungyi, and finally back to Yangon. Mostly I will be trying to find birds; I'm not sure what I will find in terms of mammals, I sort of think maybe just a few species of squirrels. I really have no idea what to expect in Burma. It will be interesting, that's for sure. I have read some trip reports, some of them from tour companies who see several hundred species in a couple of weeks, so I sort of have an idea of where things are (although I certainly won't be seeing that number of birds!!).

I know there's internet in Burma but how widespread it is and whether I can get onto blogs and forums will be a mystery until I get there and find out. It's possible I may be MIA for a few weeks....

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