The next morning I woke early so refreshed but in so much pain that I lazed in bed for another hour or so (classic avoidance behaviour) before heading downstairs for breakfast. It was funny to watch, I’ll admit, but not funny to experience hobbling down the stairs like an old lady, our faces expressing the extent of our pain.
After a huge breakfast, we sauntered across the road to the resort-style complex, with outdoor and indoor pools that fed off the nearby hot springs (Poring, incidentally, was Malay for Bamboo, a description of the local Bamboo forests in the surrounding jungle, not the pouring of the hot water from the springs).
The water out of the tap was 50-degrees celsius – boiling to the touch – and the size of a small tiled Jacuzzi with a plug at the bottom. The baths were filled by a hot and cold tap (which was sorely needed with such hot water) and took forever to fill. It was relaxing, kind of like a pool party with eight individual mini-pools, although I did get a bit bored just sitting there doing nothing. Maybe because I had been walking for two days, perhaps. The complex was a hotspot (geddit? Hotspot? Hmm, ok) of activity for both locals and tourists, and we were glad we had snagged our spots as early as we had. Feeling very warm and relaxed after our sulphuric baths, I had an ice-cream to cool down naturally, and wandered back to the motel for a clean shower and some lunch.
After lunch we walked to the end of the street to see the Rafflesia flower, an enormous flower that can grow to the size of a car tyre and only grows in the wild as a fungus from a tree root. They only flower once a year for seven days, so the small town of Poring had all the signage and stalls ready to go when the flower came into bloom. Luckily it was day one of the flower blooming while we were there, so we paid our 10 ringgits and walked into someone’s rainforest jungle of a garden to see it. It was strange, like something out of Willy Wonka’s factory, and we marveled at it for a few minutes before heading back to our motel in the rain. I picked up my drycleaning at a roadside stall before checking my emails and facebook at the local internet café.
The boys in the internet café, who we assumed were actually working there, were using almost every computer and playing various dungeons and dragons-style games. It seemed we were interrupting their fun just by being there, and when I tried to pay, they glanced at me and nodded impatiently when I offered them some ringgits. The town was small and quiet, but it didn’t stop the boys playing hip-hop loudly as soon as they opened the shop from 9am, and I wondered whether they were somehow managing some online games empire from a tiny town in Borneo. It wouldn’t have surprised me.
We tasted the local rice wine at dinner, made by a crazy woman who stood over us until we tasted her creation. She’d clearly had a few already, and got her phone out to play Lily Allen and Guns’n’Roses at full volume, bopping along to inappropriate songs that clearly were above her vocabulary level. It was hilarious. It had been a lovely day altogether, perfect for chilling out and recovering from our trek, and we were looking forward to our jungle adventure.
-Sarah
Sarah