Thursday, June 05, 2008
Borneo 3 June
So, I just got back from Borneo, had a fantastic time, went diving off Sipidan Island, also spent two days diving Mabul and another at Sibhuan. The diving was fantastic, from mandarin fish at Sibhuan to tiny shrimps and garden eels at Mabul the oceans are so full of life it's like diving in an aquarium.
My favourite part of the dive is often near the end when you are just hanging out in the shallows hovering above the coral with the sunlight filtering down waiting for your decompression time to pass and watching the schools of pretty fish enclose you in their midst then lazily drift off again.
Sipidan was amazing from looking down to see a massive school of black tipped reef sharks circling below to floating past shelves of coral glittering in the suns refracted rays, a snoozing turtle tucked into each shelf, Jaques Cousteau was right to rave about the megafauna in this part of the ocean.
The town of Semporna itself is nothing much to write about but it has a shop that arguably sells the best Murtabaks in Malaysia... mmmm.
I went on a three day jungle trek which was also fabulous, saw so much wildlife, 4 different kinds of hornbill, kingfishers, warblers, eagles, and a buzzard. At night we saw bats and owls as well.
We saw long and pygmy tailed maqacs, proboscis monkeys with their unfeasably large noses and permanent erections, from behind they look like they are wearing fur coats comboed with white bikinis (Stella Mcartney take note, fur is in for some!). they leap from tree to tree with an apparent disregard for gravity, we were also lucky enough to catch some gibbons high in a tree and an orange fur ball we speculated to be an orangatan.
We stayed up one night to watch the civet cats prowl around the camp site, the got into the can of condensed milk after the camp boys had gone to bed. Monitor lizards and wild boars also came to visit, and of course the macaqs stole banannas off the children, half a loaf of bread and anything else they could get hold of, in fact we slept in wire cages so the animals couldn't get in. I was in the monitor lizard cage.
We saw a flying fox in flight, two kinds of scorpion, two different millipedes, a freaky long legged centipede, a big furry grey tarantula, a hammerhead worm and at least three leeches (euurgh), two crocodiles, 5 different species of tiny frogs, and a patridge in a pear tree, (o.k I'm lying about the patridge).
Unfortunately without a decent camera, and more importantly a good telephoto lens I soon abandoned any attempt to photograph the wildlife and just enjoyed seeing it rather than missing sometimes fleeting glimpses of things while hurrying to capture a moment one ironically hadn't allowed oneself the opportunity to enjoy. I see too much of this in my travel companions. One girl after expressing that she thought the day had been o.k. but not great, while looking retrospectively at her footage at days end commented to me that perhaps after seeing the pictures the day had been more special than she realised at the time, I refrained from comment.
Before heading to Borneo there was a big Hindu festival here in Melaka, which much like the vegetarian festival in Phuket, involved blokes getting heavily pierced and women dancing with pots of milk on their head (O.k so they didn't have the pots of milk at the Phuket festival) supposedly in a trance of excstatic holy meditation. All very interesting.
Off to Phuket next week and preparation for the Japan faze, I am looking forward to this, though chances of a job in Osaka are looking unlikely, it looks like it will be Tokyo, which will be amazing and crazy I'm sure.
My favourite part of the dive is often near the end when you are just hanging out in the shallows hovering above the coral with the sunlight filtering down waiting for your decompression time to pass and watching the schools of pretty fish enclose you in their midst then lazily drift off again.
Sipidan was amazing from looking down to see a massive school of black tipped reef sharks circling below to floating past shelves of coral glittering in the suns refracted rays, a snoozing turtle tucked into each shelf, Jaques Cousteau was right to rave about the megafauna in this part of the ocean.
The town of Semporna itself is nothing much to write about but it has a shop that arguably sells the best Murtabaks in Malaysia... mmmm.
I went on a three day jungle trek which was also fabulous, saw so much wildlife, 4 different kinds of hornbill, kingfishers, warblers, eagles, and a buzzard. At night we saw bats and owls as well.
We saw long and pygmy tailed maqacs, proboscis monkeys with their unfeasably large noses and permanent erections, from behind they look like they are wearing fur coats comboed with white bikinis (Stella Mcartney take note, fur is in for some!). they leap from tree to tree with an apparent disregard for gravity, we were also lucky enough to catch some gibbons high in a tree and an orange fur ball we speculated to be an orangatan.
We stayed up one night to watch the civet cats prowl around the camp site, the got into the can of condensed milk after the camp boys had gone to bed. Monitor lizards and wild boars also came to visit, and of course the macaqs stole banannas off the children, half a loaf of bread and anything else they could get hold of, in fact we slept in wire cages so the animals couldn't get in. I was in the monitor lizard cage.
We saw a flying fox in flight, two kinds of scorpion, two different millipedes, a freaky long legged centipede, a big furry grey tarantula, a hammerhead worm and at least three leeches (euurgh), two crocodiles, 5 different species of tiny frogs, and a patridge in a pear tree, (o.k I'm lying about the patridge).
Unfortunately without a decent camera, and more importantly a good telephoto lens I soon abandoned any attempt to photograph the wildlife and just enjoyed seeing it rather than missing sometimes fleeting glimpses of things while hurrying to capture a moment one ironically hadn't allowed oneself the opportunity to enjoy. I see too much of this in my travel companions. One girl after expressing that she thought the day had been o.k. but not great, while looking retrospectively at her footage at days end commented to me that perhaps after seeing the pictures the day had been more special than she realised at the time, I refrained from comment.
Before heading to Borneo there was a big Hindu festival here in Melaka, which much like the vegetarian festival in Phuket, involved blokes getting heavily pierced and women dancing with pots of milk on their head (O.k so they didn't have the pots of milk at the Phuket festival) supposedly in a trance of excstatic holy meditation. All very interesting.
Off to Phuket next week and preparation for the Japan faze, I am looking forward to this, though chances of a job in Osaka are looking unlikely, it looks like it will be Tokyo, which will be amazing and crazy I'm sure.
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