Three days in Bako National Park Just returned from another excellent trip into the Borneo jungle. This time we were in Bako National Park, right in the south of Sarawak. We stayed in the basic hostel accommodation provided by the park, it was great to get back to a hot shower this afternoon! Bako is a stunning place, with a number of picturesque beaches, good hiking trails, forest with limestone cliffs. It's popular as a day trip location so the early and later parts of the day a wonderfully quiet. We saw lots of proboscis monkeys, some up quite close, as well as silver leaf monkeys, a flying lemur, numerous birds and a few snakes, plus more butterflies and stick insects. The day walks are all well marked, some of them with some steep climbs, all ... read more

A few days in the kingdom of Brunei We have had a very enjoyable few days in Brunei, staying in the capital BSB. We traveled here by ferry from KK, very easy and traveled first class; this only meant that we had a view. They kept the temperature unbelievably cold. Emerged after a couple of hours in jumpers to the heat of Brunei. We have spent our three days here doing a lot of wandering around the streets. It's not the shining Arabic city of my imagination but a small and pleasant place with some huge buildings. We've been on ferry boats and water taxis to look at the surrounding forest and stilt villages, spent hours in the (again freezing cold) Royal Regalia Museum, with lots of information about the sultan and a fine collection ... read more

Kota Kinabalu-Mt Kinabalu-Sandakan We finally arrived in KK at 1 am after a somewhat delayed flight with Air Asia. Fortunately had a Terry Pratchett audio book on my MP3 player to pass the time. Woke up to a bright and sunny day in KK. We didn't spend more than a few hours in the town as we will be returning there after about a week. Took a mini-van out to Mt Kinabalu National Park. We had to sit and wait in the hot van for some time whilst waiting for it to fill up, the young Russian women in front were getting quite frustrated. More Terry Pratchett helped pass the time. The van driver very kin idly dropped us right at the front door of our lodge, the D'Villa Hotel. A little tired but a good ... read more

Sossusvlei We had saved up to the end of the trip a visit to the iconic Sossusvlei sand dunes in the huge Namib-Naukluft Park. Our last week was initially marred by the comfy air mattress deflating increasingly rapidly during the night. We finally found the hole and were able to plug it with chewing gum and Elastoplasts, amazingly that worked perfectly for our final two nights under canvas. At the dunes we stayed in a campground in Sesriem Oasis, just inside the park. There’s a 60 km long drive with stunning orange sand dunes on either side leading down towards the main area for visitors. Here you can park your car and take a 4 by 4 shuttle a few km across deep sand into the Sossusvlei dunes. On our first day there we walked a ... read more

Central Kalahari Game Reserve The day after our 11 hour nothing journey we spent some time in Maun seeing if we could use the spare time to visit the Kalahari. The options boiled down to spending a lot on hiring a 4WD and camping or spending not too much more and staying in a luxury all expenses paid lodge. We decided to go for it and spend the money on the latter option. So we spent 2 nights, one full day and two half days in this lovely lodge out in the central Kalahari. It was all excellent and we're very glad that we went. We flew into the lodge, 40 mins in a 5 seater plane. We were fortunate enough to be the only guests in the lodge for the whole of our stay and ... read more