A year away

Here's my second try at getting this post up. First one bounced - too big. This is the second post in an attempt to keep you all up to date with my travels in Borneo. I received only one comment about my Peninsular Malaysia post - did anyone read it? C'mon you guys, at least let me know you saw it? If the writing is too dry, let me know and I'll try to liven it up a bit, or switch to a photo-blog format. Anyway, Borneo. So I flew from Penang to Kuching and spent a day planning my next move and checking out the city. It's a small place by the river and pleasantly peaceful compared to the bigger cities of the peninsular. You can see the image of the lady standing in front of the green house as an example of the many traditional Malay houses in the area. The next couple of days I checked out the well-recommended Bako National Park in the hope of seeing Proboscis Monkeys (which we didn't) and Semenggoh Forest Reserve to see Orang-utans (which we did see). A few pics are attached.

Moving on from Kuching I arranged to go on a 4 day/3 night longhouse trip into something like the real heart of Borneo. The plan was to stay at an Iban longhouse for a couple of nights and out in the jungle for a couple of nights. The trip was awesome and included eating, drinking and dancing with the longhouse residents, and eating a range of exotic animals hunted by our guides. We ate barking deer, civet cat, turtle and porcupine, as well as local-caught river fish and frog cooked over the campfire, fried cicadas, heart of sago palm and wild pineapple. The leeches were pretty savage! The trip to get to the long house took most of a day - 5 hours in a van on the road followed by 3 1/2 hours on an incredibly rough dirt road freshly cut through the forest that was barely passable by serious 4wd vehicles (we had to get out at one point and let the trucks attack the hill without us inside!) Upon arrival we ate and drank into the evening and next day headed out into the jungle for some hiking and swimming, animal eating and sleeping. Take a look at some of the photos, I think they speak for themselves. I will post more pics next post.

Well it's been almost a month since I last updated my blog so I suppose I owe my loyal followers a bit of a recap. After 2 weeks in Sydney I flew to Singapore and spent a couple of days there seeing the sights. Singapore is a nice place and lives up to its reputation as clean and organised. I had heard it was expensive but even after spending a bit of time in Aus I'd describe it as very expensive. I have never been anywhere else in the world where the non-happy hour price for a pint of beer is upwards of $20 (that's almost 20USD) in a normal bar Anyway I stayed at a cool hostel and hung out with a group of Aussie guys from Perth, who I would bump into twice more in Malaysia. The city is very much a mixture of old and new and the old is smazingly well preserved for the most part.

Little India, Singapore

Old buildings

Old guys

The famous Raffles Hotel

Me and the Aussie guys

River by night

New building on reclaimaed land - huge!

Kind, gentle rule of terror

After the sights and cleanliness of Singapore I headed over the border by bus into Malaysia, first stop Melaka. Melaka is a pretty relaxed kind of town with a few interesting relics of Dutch and English occupation/influence. I stayed in a decent hostel in Chinatown for RM15 (~3USD) and met a bunch of interesting travellers. The single most interesting thing in the whole town for me were the ruins of St Paul's church on a hill overlooking the city. All that remains are the walls of the church but you can walk in and around the ruins, and they have installed a whole lot of large stone headstones from English and Dutch cemeteries - some over 300 years old and all with very ornate crests and family seals etched into the stone. I've included a couple of pictures below.

Stern warning...

Melaka

St Paul's Church

Gravestones

Oldest Chinese temple in Malaysia

After a couple of days in Melaka I took the bus to KL. A few days in KL included the obligatory tourist things - visiting Chinatown, Little India and waiting in line early in the morning to get one of the limited free tickets to go up to the observation bridge between the Petronas Twin Towers. KL really seems to be a city on the move - it's modern and has a good subway/monorail system that's been wedged into an already packed city. The Petronas Towers are cool, honestly more for their design than for the view from the observation area. The Saturday night market in Little India was a good time - absolutely wall to wall stalls for a few hundred metres, with cheap and fascinating food and drinks. A few dollars will leave you absolutely stuffed with a wide variety of foods from fried rice to hamburgers (needless to say I stuck to the Asian foods more than the American ones. Not craving burgers as yet!). Malaysia is certainly a place where you can get good food for a cheap price - I dont think I spent more than $8 in the whole time I was there, sometimes as little as $0.80 or so for a simple plate of chicken rice or noodles.

Petronas Towers

Sweet building in KL

Little India

Next on the itinerary - the island of Penang (or more correctly, Pilau Pinang - Pinang Island). The early morning bus from KL dropped me at a station waaay outside the town and catching me off guard it took me awhile to get my bearings and locate a city bus to the city centre. Getting off in the main tourist street (again smack bang in the middle of Chinatown) I found a good hostel and after a bit of a wander around, some dinner and a few beers at one of the backpacker bars I turned in for a night of traffic-interrupted sleep. Next day I checked out a tiny National Park in the NW corner of the island and was lucky enough to see a few cool lizards, one of which I got some marginally OK photos of. Unfortunately I wasn't fast enough to capture the big one on film, but I swear it was more like a croc than a normal lizard. Welcome to Malaysia - these giant creatures could be wandering around anywhere! That night I was lucky enough to meet a young American couple who where nice enough but had basically ditched their homeland in favour of living in Asia - as someone said to me later, it's kind of ironic that these kids are so opposed to having to live in the States (they take quite a lofty attitude about how corrupted everything/everyone in the US is and how they are above it and can't/won't deal with it anymore - at the ripe old age of 20) but don't take the time to think that the only reason they are able to just up and leave is because of the relative privilege they were raised with. Ahh, hippies, what a special breed... The next day I checked out the E coast of the island including Snake Temple - the temple didn't have any snakes inside it - but at least it was free. The little Snake Zoo next door was more than willing to take my 5 ringgits and show my some snakes (scam?). Their collection was pretty impressive and included a monster python of about 8m/125kg that was allegedly caught in Borneo - you don't want to be around those things when they're hungry! The zoo had some nice lizards and a few cool turtles that were free to just wander about and that I got to see up close - they are really interestingly awkward creatures and not the least bit concerned by me being there. I wasn't brave enough to have my photo taken with snakes draped all over me, although clearly I'm the only one who was fearful - dozens of photos of babies in strollers and little kids literally covered in snakes made me slightly concerned about the sanity of their parents! That night I befriended the owner of the local Reggae Bar (there seems to be at least one in every city in Asia), a jovial Malaysian Chinese guy. After way too many rounds of beer (about half of which were on the house) I had to admit defeat. After a second dinner with the cute Japanese girls who were also drinking with us I passed out, this time more or less oblivious to the traffic noise. Or maybe it was late enough that it had died down.

A beer by the roadside

The next with a good solid headache I took the 3 hour ferry ride to Langkawi Island - the beach paradise dutyfree playground and one of Malaysia's most promoted tourist destinations. After chatting to an English guy on the boat with similar plans (another Tom, as it turned out) we found a hostel just behind the backpacker's beach in a funny little building with maybe 5 foot high doorways and checked out the town and beach for the afternoon. The next day we rented motorbikes and explored the island. It was a nice way to get around and the price was very reasonable. Especially considering that gas in Malaysia is barely 2/3 of the price in the States (and less than half of the NZ price) the little bikes very very cheap to ride about for a day. We went up to the highest point and surveyed the island from the cool elevation and checked out as many beaches as we could - there are certainly some beautiful beaches that have yet to be developed - it would be nice but probably unrealistic to think they'll stay this way.