Thursday 3 September 2009

Into the Wild

If it’s not one adventure for Mr. Happy and MerBear, it is another.

Since we moved to Malaysia, we seem to have more friends then ever before. Our most recent set of houseguests just arrived from London – UniMate and IPgal!

Their first day in town, we tried to do some shopping. But we came across some roadblocks.

So we happily drank tea instead.

Rather than sitting around KL drinking tea all day, we decided to hit up the jungles of Borneo. We booked flights to Sabah in East Malaysia. The lodge we reserved for our first night is about an hour from the airport, so we took our bags and went directly to the Orang Utan Sanctuary which is only thirty minutes away.

We turned up at 11, but the feeding wasn’t until 2, so we walked over to the Rainforest Discovery Center.
We took a nice stroll through the park.

And got a little look at some of the wee wildlife.

When we returned to the Orang Utan Center, there were some mawcaw monkeys on hand to greet us.

The Center feeds the Orang Utans twice a day and tourists can watch from a special viewing platform.

The viewing lasts a half hour.

We then took a cab to the Labuk Bay Proboscis Monkey Sanctuary.

The Proboscis has a large nose and it’s nickname is – The Dutchman.

They live in communities and it was fun to watch them interact. They are very playful with one another and enjoy getting into short fights. They were a lot like human children with Dutch noses.

We spent the night at the Sanctuary staying in the newly open Nipah Lodge. We had a lovely chalet.

The lodge is built on an elevated platform inside the rainforest.

And spent some time relaxing.


The next morning we moved to The Last Frontier Lodge. This is about 1.5 hours away. They proprietors agreed to provide us with a transfer and told us to meet them at a chicken farm.


This was great. 'Cause otherwise, I guarantee, we would have never visited a chicken farm.



We’d heard great things about the Last Frontier. The only drawback…

The 587 steps to reach the place! It felt like we were climbing to the moon.

Before.

After.

It was exhausting, but well worth it. Mr. Happy immediately made friends with the local wildlife.UniMate chose a less cuddly friend.



The Last Frontier is run by Gert and Jason, they took GREAT care of us.


All of our meals and tours were included. Our first tour was a boat trip. We shipped out from a slightly collapsed dock.

The boat trip was fantastic.

We saw so many monkeys.

Proboscis.

Monitor Lizards.

Eagles



Pit VipersEgrets.


It was really special to see them in the wild. And then we saw the most amazing thing…


ELEPHANTS!! It’s unusual to see the elephants as they usually stay away from the tourist areas. We had to delicately climb through an electric fence to reach them.


It was pretty exciting.

And then my camera died. I didn’t bring a charger. Luckily, we had UniMate and IPgal there!

The next day we went on a jungle hike led by our Philippino guide BunBun.

Mr. Happy had to stay behind with his ipod because his back was hurting.

I arrived back at the lodge tired and sweaty.

My man is so squeamish…. At any rate, it was time to refresh ourselves! These were all for IPgal.



Later, on the afternoon boat tour we found the elephants again!!

We got so close to them we could almost touch them!!



We did it!




We loved our stay here and we were well impressed with Jason’s cooking abilities. The food was fantastic. You’d never believe you were in the middle of no where. If you want to stay at the Last Frontier Lodge, book early. They only have four rooms! Trust me, you will be well looked after! On our last morning in Sepilak we decided to go investigate the Gomantong Cave.

Mr. Happy loves caves and we heard it had been featured on the famous BBC series Planet Earth. We own the series, but have yet to watch it. Perhaps, if we had watched it we would have skipped the cave. We heard that it’s covered in tons of bat guano and the home to thousands of bats and MILLIONS of cockroaches. Well, that’s allll true.

[Ed. note - just learned that the cave is home to THREE million bats and the mountain of guano (bat dung) reaches 100 meters]


In fact, the Gomantong Cave, has the hightest concentration of cockroaches in the WORLD.

The walkway was quite slippery and you were unable to gasp the handrail because – I may have mentioned – there were cockroaches EVERYWHERE.

IPgal had one go in her shoe! She freaked out. Time for three more Stellas?

This was one of the more scary adventures we’ve shared since we lived in KL. And oh, dear reader, if you could only smell through these photos...unpleasant. But we had fun!



Afterward, we paid 25RM and laid out by the pool at the lux Sapah Hotel until our plane took off that night. It felt like we had crammed several weeks worth of activities into four days. Well done gang!

No comments: