Back on Borneo
The food, spoken English and infrastructure are all significantly better – and the prices are much higher – but, all in all, the Malaysian part of Borneo is pretty similar to the Indonesian side; the familiar sounds of Bahasa and kids in stilt villages yelling hello, and the sights of orang-utans and Southeast Asian mosques are all there. So in a way it brings back memories of our four months in Indonesia in 2003, but it’s a far more developed place, sort of an ‘Indonesia lite’, which suits us OK at this stage of our traveling lives.
We’ve been in Sabah, one of two Malaysian states in Borneo, for five days now, starting in the state capital Kota Kinabalu and then moving to Sandakan on the east coast, where we’ve been based for the past few days. The surprising highlight so far was walking to a stilt village nearby Sandakan, where the locals had just finished some sort of festival and were beautifully dressed, including the kids. We walked along their board walks and were greeted very warmly by everyone – kids were running to get in photos, old ladies were smiling and saying hello, and the atmosphere was very innocent and quite lovely. The houses, very hodge-podge on the outside with sheets of tin acting as walls and roofs, were nicer on the inside, and satellite dishes jutted out from nearly every building. Our warm welcome there brought back memories of similar places in Indonesia (Bandar Lumpung in south Sumatra comes to mind), and once again reminded us that it’s often the little things like this that make travel so rewarding for us.
Yesterday we went to the orang-utan rehabilitation centre at Sepilok. Of the four of these centres that exist on Borneo and Sumatra (the only two islands that orang-utans live on), we’ve now been to three. Sepilok was by far the most developed and offered the best facilities, but was also naturally the most touristy, with about 200 people watching the morning feeding session of the rehabilitated orang-utans from platforms some distance away. (In Tanjung Puting National Park in Kalimantan, we were the only ones there, and at both Indonesian centres you can get really close to the animals). So while yesterday was the least enjoyable of the three rehabilitation centre experiences we’ve had, it’s always fun to see orang-utans, and we’ll hopefully see some more in the wild over the next couple of days.
On the way back to Sandakan yesterday we stopped off at an Australian war memorial on the site of a WWII POW camp. Even in Australia, the story of POWs held by the Japanese on Bornei is a relatively unknown story, but it’s an extremely powerful one. The memorial was very well done and quite moving, and I’m glad we went to it.
This afternoon we’re moving on to a village from where we can take wildlife-spotting river trips, and after that we’ll go to Sipadan island which is supposed to be one of the best places for snorkeling and diving anywhere in the world.
Tags: Asia, Borneo, Malaysia, orang-utans, Southeast Asia, stilt village
Nick