Travel Logbook

Bangkok, Ko Tao & Krabi, Thailand: 4th-23rd June.

I went back to Bangkok and spent a few days wandering around the shopping malls. After watching England's dismal performances in the Euro 2000 qualifiers I left to go diving on an island called Ko Tao. Jim arrived in Bangkok a couple of days after me, but he was flying to Bali to meet some friends so we went our separate ways. I spent a week on Ko Tao and did seven dives. Ko Tao has the reputation of being the best place to dive in the Gulf of Thailand but in truth it was nothing special. There were a couple of good sites, and the night dive I did was fantastic with some huge barracuda swimming around. The best dive I did was one where we came across a really friendly turtle who swam around and between my buddy and me; he seemed as interested in us as we were in him.

After Ko Tao I went back up to Bangkok, just to watch the new Star Wars film when it opened on June 18th. Well worth the wait! At the start of any film in Thai cinemas you have to stand to pay your respects to the King; the national anthem (which he wrote) plays and hundreds of little pictures of the King fly across the screen and form a mosaic image of his face. It's hard not to smile at this sycophantism but the Thais take their King very seriously so it's best not to.

My next stop was the town of Krabi in southern Thailand. The beaches there are absolutely beautiful but it was low season and the place was nearly empty. I was bored silly so I left after two nights, and took a bus to Malaysia.

Georgetown & Perhentian Islands, Malaysia: 23rd June-9th July.

I crossed into Malaysia on the 23rd June and spent a few days in Georgetown on Penang Island. Although there is not really much to do in Georgetown, it is a pleasant place to spend a few days as the town has a fascinating Chinese atmosphere about it. In the middle of town I found a bar devoted to Liverpool FC. The motto was "You'll never drink alone". I made friends with an English couple called Matt & Ros and we found a bar with a guy who played old Beatles, Rolling Stones and Bob Marley songs on acoustic guitar. His brother joined in for the Elvis numbers...

After Georgetown I crossed the country to the east coast, heading for a couple of small islands called the Perhentians. I stayed in a beautiful little bay called Mira Beach, about an hour's walk from the only village on the island. I had made the journey from Penang with an English Exeter City supporter called Martin. The list of activities on the island included diving, snorkelling and laying on the beach. Martin found the first two too strenuous so restricted his activities to the last one. I did another seven dives, and although the visibility underwater was not brilliant, the diving really was enjoyable. There was lots of large marine life including huge groupers, stingrays, humphead parrotfish and titan triggerfish. There were also plenty of black-tip reef sharks and turtles. On one dive my buddy, divemaster and I were circled for about ten minutes by two, metre-and-a-half-long, kingfish.

In the village they serve the best milkshakes in the world. Especially good are the Snickers shakes. I spent seven nights on the Perhentian Islands and it would have been nice to stay longer but I find it hard to just lay on a beach and do nothing. Martin, on the other hand, eventually left after 27 days; rumour has it he did actually venture away from the beach and went to the village, although this is unconfirmed...

Taman Negara, Kuala Lumpur & Melaka, Malaysia: 9th-16th July.

Next stop was Taman Negara National Park, in the centre of Malaysia. I spent two nights in the park, the second of which I spent in a hide a couple of miles from the park HQ. The night-time jungle sounds were fantastic although we didn't see many animals.

Next I travelled to Kuala Lumpur, or KL as it's known. Not much to do here except wander round the shops not buying anything and go to see Star Wars for the third time. KL does have the world's tallest buildings, the Petronas Twin Towers, and they are a very impressive sight.

From KL I made the short journey to Melaka, a town that has been ruled successively by the Portugese, Dutch and finally the British. The Dutch built some fine colonial buildings and the ones that the British didn't blow up when they took over give the city lots of charm. There is a very atmospheric Chinatown as well. Every night there is a bewildering Sound & Light show where some muffled and crackly voices recount the history of the town while various historic buildings are lit up by colourful spotlights in an attempt to illustrate, unsuccessfully, what's going on.

Singapore: 16th-20th July.

Singapore has a reputation for being extremely clean, extremely expensive and extremely boring. I didn't find any of these criticisms to be particularly valid. True, it is cleaner than other SE Asian countries, chewing gum is banned and you're not aloud to take durians on the underground. Of course it's more expensive than the rest of SE Asia but not prohibitively so. The only thing that is ridiculously expensive is beer. I found an Irish pub and thought I'd have a nice cool pint of Tiger beer after a sweaty day of wandering round Singapore's endless shopping malls. It cost me the equivalent of 5 quid. The food is wonderful and quite good value. There are lots of museums, shopping malls and apparently an interesting Chinatown, although by now I was thinking, "You've seen one Chinatown, you've seen them all..."

I spent four nights in Singapore and then bought a plane ticket to my next destination; Kuching, in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo.

Kuching, Bako National Park & Niah Caves, Sarawak, Malaysia: 20th-25th July.

Although there isn't really very much to do there, Kuching is a pleasant town to spend a few days. There is a nicely redeveloped waterfront area where you can sit in the evening and watch the sunset over the Sarawak river. The highlight of my stay was a visit to the Cat museum, supposedly the only one in the world (Kuching is Malay for cat). Cats through history, famous cats, cats in Hollywood, cartoon cats; they're all here.

I made a day trip to Bako National Park, a small park located on a coastal peninsula north of Kuching. Here you can walk through muddy mangrove forests and watch Proboscis monkeys feeding in the trees. I managed to get too close to a large group of monkeys, who where screaming and shaking the branches. I didn't know whether to run or hide, so I crouched down behind a rock and watched them. Next thing, a big male monkey with his comically pendulous nose and beer gut came bounding out from the other side of this rock, took one look at me and turned back the way he'd come. I must have been about five metres from him which was too close for comfort but I'm sure he was more frightened of me than I was of him.

From Kuching I took a night bus to Niah. From here I visited the huge 80m high Great Cave. Inside you can see the poles that mental people climb up to harvest the Swifts' nests that are used to make bird's nest soup. More insane people live their lives deep in the cave digging up batshit that they sell as fertiliser. Beyond the Great Cave is the Painted Cave, where there are some pre-historic cave paintings; unfortunately they are very faint and the anti-vandalism fence means you can't get close enough to really see them.

After Niah I flew from Miri to Kota Kinabalu in Sabah.

Kota Kinabalu, Sepilok, Kinabatangan River, Semporna & Poring Hot Springs, Sabah, Malaysia: 25th July-5th August.

In KK I met up with a Dutch girl called Mireille who I'd first met in Kuching. We were both keen to go diving on the island of Sipadan, one of the most famous, and reputedly best, dive sites in the whole world. We had got the number of a company that ran day trips to Sipadan from a town called Semporna. I rang the company, North Borneo D&SS, but they told me that the weather had been too rough the last few days to make the trip. So instead of going straight to Semporna, Mireille and I went first to the orang-utan sanctuary at Sepilok.

At Sepilok they take in injured and orphaned orangs and rehabilitate them so they can be returned to the wild. It is one of only four orang-utan sanctuaries in the world. We got there in the morning for the 10am feeding. The orangs must have some kind of built-in time keeping device because two turned up about ten minutes before the staff arrived with the bananas. There was a mature female and a big male with well developed cheek-flaps. When the staff arrived, a mother came out of the trees carrying a baby orang under her chest. The orangs deftly removed the fruit from the banana peels without using their hands. After the orangs had finished, a troop of pig-tailed macaques cautiously came up to the platform and picked at the left-overs.

From Sepilok we wanted to visit a jungle camp on the Kinabatangan river. The jungle camp package was 150 ringgit (25 pounds) for a return trip up the river, then only 15 ringgit a night for accomodation and all meals once you were there. You could book this trip from a guesthouse in the nearest town, Sandakan. But the people in our B+B at Sepilok told us they could take us to the jungle camp for the same price, and save us having to go to Sandakan. By the way, they said, there's also some caves on the way you can visit and an Australian War Memorial as well. For some reason it never occurred to me that this was too good to be true. So we paid our 150 ringgit each and they took us to all these places, then took us to a boat jetty by the river. We expected them to take us upriver to the jungle camp, but they told us to leave our bags in the car. We then made a cruise up the river where we saw some snakes and lots of proboscis monkeys and macaques feeding in the trees. Then we went back to the car and they took us to another stretch of the river, introduced us to a woman and told us she'd take us to the jungle camp. For another 150 ringgit. We'd been had. They claimed it was all a mis-understanding and that they had explained to us that there was an extra charge for the visits we'd made. What could we do? The B+B boys had our money and we wouldn't get to the jungle camp unless we forked out more. I suppose 25 quid isn't a huge amount of money to lose but when your daily budget is about a tenner, it makes you pretty angry :-(

Once there, the camp was very enjoyable. It was set on the edge of a small lake, and there were boats you could paddle out in to look for orangs and monkeys. There were lots of hornbills around, fish-eating snake-birds and three or four big monitor lizards that patrolled the camp looking for food. On the second day we found a wild orang-utan in a tree just outside the camp. In the morning Chris,the guy who ran the place, took us on a guided walk through the jungle, and in the evening we had another boat trip up the river to see more proboscis monkeys and another bat cave.

We spent three nights in the Jungle Camp then headed for Semporna. When we got there we went straight to North Borneo D&SS, but found they were booked out for the next day and couldn't promise us that they had any spaces even for the day after. So we spent the following day loitering in the town, and quickly discovered that there was absolutely nothing to do in Semporna. The boat came back from Sipadan early that day and we were told that the weather had been too bad so they hadn't reached the island. That meant we had no chance of getting a place the following day because all the people who hadn't got there that day wanted to try again the next. We couldn't face another day in Semporna so packed our bags and planned to get a bus back to KK the next morning.

But then at 11pm the phone in our guest house rang; it was North Borneo, telling us that one person had cancelled and so there was a space for the following day. But who should have it, me or Mireille? Then an English bloke in our dorm, called Mark, repeated an offer he'd made earlier to give up his place as he'd already had one day on Sipadan. It was a lesson in generosity for me, certainly, as here was a guy I hardly knew giving up his chance to go back to Sipadan just so that someone else could experience it. We gratefully accepted.

Next morning though there were long faces in the North Borneo office. Bad weather, no boats would be going to Sipadan. The odds of getting good weather the next few days were too long to justify hanging around in Semporna, so we boarded the bus for KK. We decided en route to make a stop at the hot springs at Poring. These were indeed boiling and it was nice to relax in the hot water. However, what I should really have done was gone there after my next adventure...

Climbing Mt. Kinabalu: 5th-7th August.

I arrived at Kinabalu park headquarters late afternoon on the 5th August. Mireille continued on to KK as she had to catch a flight to Singapore so didn't have time to climb the mountain. Next morning I went to the park office to pay my entry fees and get a guide. I was put into a group with a German couple and a Canadian girl called Nikki. We started out at eight a.m. from an altitude of just under 2000m, aiming for Laban Rata resthouse at 3300m. The route was 99% uphill, with none of the annoying up and down trails that you get in Nepal, where you lose as much height as you gain and can finish a back breaking day at the same height you started from. On the way we passed big fly-eating pitcher plants and went through rhododendron forests. The weather can be freezing on the mountain but we were lucky to have a clear, warm day. We reached Laban Rata around lunch time, then hung around playing cards until it was time to go to bed, early, at about 8.30pm. The next morning we started the climb to the summit at 3.15am after a bleary-eyed breakfast. We were joined by a Norwegian bloke called Erik, because his guide had fallen over during the night and given himself concussion! The sky was clear and the stars were bright. The full moon had an amazing white halo around it, something I've never seen before. OK it wasn't as impressive as an eclipse but I had to make do with it. I reached the 4101m summit at 5.45am, just in time to see the sun rise spectactularly through the clouds in the east. It was bitterly cold at the top but very clear, and we could see for miles in all directions. Below the summit we could see the dark chasm of Low's Gully where those British Army blokes nearly died a few years ago. After 30 minutes at the summit I started back down.

It took about four hours to get back down to the park HQ, by which time my legs had all but seized up. Nikki and I got a mini-bus back to KK along with Erik and a couple of English girls we met on the climb. That evening we all went on the celebratory beers in Shenanigan's Fun Pub. I must have had a few too many because I managed to leave my bag with all my valuables behind when it closed at two in the morning. Things went from bad to worse as when Nikki and I got back to our guesthouse at about three, the gate had been locked and no amount of doorbell ringing, shouting or telephoning would wake any bugger. We had to go across the street and sleep at a 24 hour cafe until the guesthouse opened up at 6.00am.

After a day's R&R in KK, I headed back to Semporna for another try at getting myself to Sipadan. I'd promised myself I would only go back there if I had a firm booking with North Borneo; I tried contacting them from KK with no luck, but I went anyway.

I arrived in Semporna at about five p.m. and went straight to North Borneo's office. They told me that they were having their boat serviced the following day, could I wait a day? I didn't have much choice... That night I got talking to the owner of a restaurant built out over the harbour off the jetty, a man called Joseph. I asked him why his restaurant was lit by oil lamps when everywhere else in the town had electricity. The poor guy seemed close to tears as he told me how his electric had been cut off by the local authorities because he is an active member of the opposition party. Never mind, he said, the tourists like the oil lamps; they give the place more atmosphere!

Next day Joseph took me to see the stilt village where the Badjao, or sea gypsies, live in little shacks built over the water.

So the following morning I went down to North Borneo's office once more, and again was told that the weather was too rough to go to Sipadan. Realizing when I was defeated, I vowed never to deal with North Borneo Dive & Sea Sports ever again, and got on a minibus back to KK. From there I flew to Manila.