Borneo to Bali

My hotel in KK was many things—cheap and friendly, mostly—but it was not really that on-the-ball as far as having a clue what to do with a tourist. And so I left in the morning and carried my luggage to the nearest taxi stand. Because asking at the front desk resulted on in my obviously incorrect assessment that the hotel had never encountered a tourist that might need to go to the airport before.

I left my bag at the AirAsia luggage drop and sniffed around the discount terminal—with its disappointing options—for some coffee.

Sniff turned out to be the right word. The KFC was open this early, but someone must have vomited in the nearby bathroom. The workers had set up a fan directly across from the registers, but I didn't think I could hack breakfast with the stink of vomit in the dining area. I fled to passport control and found coffee behind the departures barrier.

Air Delaysia lived up to its nickname but still got me to Kuala Lumpur in plenty of time to catch the flight to Bali. Though their free-for-all boarding was a mess. But they redeemed themselves by singing Happy Birthday to a passenger.

Back to Nature for a Night

I was in for a long evening, heading on a tour bus to see proboscis monkeys and fireflies, two hours back towards Sarawak in southwestern wetlands of Sabah.

I'd booked the trip yesterday after talking to several travel agents long enough to realize that they were all trying to book me onto the same trip with Only in Borneo Tours. I checked out their web site, then went to their office and asked for the online booking discount. They were fine with that.

Yesterday had been kind of a wash-out. I'd spent some time arguing with the front desk at my hotel. They'd given me a single room that included wifi, knowing full well that the wifi didn't reach the single rooms. I went up the ladder through four people until a woman made a call, and I was moved to a slightly larger room with an actual signal.

And then I got lost. In my room. I mean I had another one of those moments where I had to struggle to remember where I was. Not just what city, but what country and what part of the world. For a brief second, I thought "I'm near Bangkok, right?"

Sort of.

I'd spent the evening at Kota Kinabalu night market. It was a market. At night.

Obviously, I needed this trip out into Sabah. I was starting to lose it.

Brunei to Kota Kinabalu

My plan for the day was to catch a Bandar Seri Begawan city bus to a boat to the island of Labuan, then catch another boat to Kota Kinabalu in Sabah, Malaysia. I was following these instructions, more or less, in reverse.

Easy, right? Anyway, there were three local buses and one express bus from the Bandar bus station to the port, so I shouldn't have any problems although the distance was 25 kilometers. I thought. I didn't set out to catch the express—it left obscenely early and I couldn't think of any reason to go on the first boat out. Plus, I wanted that excellent free breakfast at the Brunei Hotel.

But when I ended up waiting 45 minutes for the bus, and then had to change buses once, I started to see the merit of the early express bus.

I was still on the bus when the ferry I'd been planning to catch left. On to Plan B! The final ferry of the morning was the 10 o'clock to Lawas, Sarawak, where I'd have to catch an onward bus to Kota Kinabalu.

Grass and Humidity

I was allowed onto the new air-conditioned bus bound from Miri to Brunei half an hour before the 3:45 departure time. The bus wasn't even half full. We left promptly and cruised quickly to the border, where all of us passengers were stamped out of the Malaysian state of Sarawak. We reboarded and drove to the other side, where we all got off the bus again.

We were all stamped into Brunei, then moved into a small, older bus. An Irish passenger who lived in Sabah groused "This isn't a 40 ringgit bus."

But I'd read about this…there are rules about Malaysian buses going into Brunei. Never mind that the Malaysian bus was vastly superior to this Brunei bus. Rules were rules.

The crappier bus headed out along the Pan-Borneo Highway, a perfectly paved road that runs parallel to the coast, passing through small towns that looked like suburbs of Houston, complete with lawns, garages, fences, joggers, oil derricks and Shell signs.

Rain kicked in just before we arrived in Brunei's capital city after dark. This was the tropics, the weather reminded me.

At 7:30—the bus freezing from the overpowering air-con—we pulled into the drizzle of Bandar Seri Begawan, passing Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. Ah, that was near my hotel! I'd seen it on my map. After circling round the block past the bus terminal, the little bus pulled up nearly in front of my hotel, Brunei Hotel, which I'd booked into for two nights on my bank points.

The Road to Brunei

"Ugh. Rain."

My alarm woke me up at six. I hit the snooze. I hit it again about four more times, and by the end, the rain in Borneo's Mulu National Park had stopped.

But I hadn't gotten up early enough to pack, clean up, go on the 0700 canopy tour, and still make the 0900 taxi to the airport. Or maybe I did. But after yesterday's 20+km total trekking, I didn't feel inspired to go up to the canopy, as I had in Ghana. I felt inspired to go to the national park lodge and get my free pancakes that came with my room.

I pulled on my clothes and dragged myself over to the meeting spot at 0700. There was Silvia, the park ranger that had led the night walk my first evening here.

"I can't make it. Sorry," I mumbled.

"That's okay," she said. "You know it's too late to get a refund?"

"No problem." I hadn't expected to get one, notifying them at the last possible minute as I was.

I went back to Racer Cave (my room) and packed up, showered, stopped by the lodge for my pancakes and Nescafe (you pay extra for real coffee), then got my bag and left my key at park headquarters. I walked over the suspended bridge, over the river and out of Mulu National Park.

Bats and Caves and Batcaves

I awoke to a barking frog in my shower.

I couldn't find it, as it shut up every time I got anywhere nearby. I grumbled and headed out to my day's excursions—two "show caves" and the evening bat exodus. The hills of Gunung Mulu, or Mulu National Park, are combed with caves. Some of them are for spelunkers only, while others are for soft adventure. The show caves have been tamed with walkways, lights, and railings, so that tourists can walk safely without destroying the environment or slipping.

Several long, flat boats motored us tourists up the river, stopping at a small village for those who needed supplies (or souvenirs). Then, we continued on to dock and walk up to first Wind Cave and then Clearwater Cave.

The caves are moody and dramatic. The whole experience reminded me of being in Carlsbad Caverns or in one of the Virginia caverns. Lots of stairs were involved, but my calves could use the exercise.

Mulu Park and Barking Frogs

Flights are cheap in the Malaysian part of Borneo. Really cheap. And that's good, because there are plenty of places in Borneo that you can't get to by road.

One of these places is Mulu National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site that is full of caves and cool plants and animals. You can get there by a multi-day combination of boating and hiking, or you can take a puddle-jumper out of the city of Miri in Sarawak.

When I was trying to figure out where to go in Borneo, I didn't think about flying anywhere at first. That seemed silly and cost-prohibitive. But then I started reading about the caves at Mulu—which seemed like a must-see once I'd read enough—and flying was back on my radar.

Of course, there is a catch. Accommodation is limited and not at all cheap in comparison to transportation. Or rather, it is, if you're willing to sleep in a basic dorm in the back of someone's house, but the online information wasn't clear on this point, and I couldn't really visualize how Mulu worked based on the bits and pieces I read.

A Day in Cat City

"You didn't have to go see orangutans," said the Malaysian grandpa at the hostel breakfast table, there with his extended family. "We're right in front of you!"

He was a character, this one.

I was at loose ends in Kuching, Sarawak, in Borneo. I'd been planning to go see proboscis monkeys in Bako National Park, but yesterday I'd learned that there was a water shortage at the park, so no overnights were allowed, and the monkeys didn't come out in the heat of the day.

Little Wookies

The downside of staying in a smaller backpacker's lodge was that they didn't have a morning excursion going to the Semenggoh Wildlife Centre today. No one else had signed up.

No problem. I'd just wandered down the street to the much bigger lodge—Singgahsana—and booked onto their morning tour. And that's how I found myself listening to Curious George Rides A Bike en route to seeing some orangutans. A mom in the van was reading to her daughter.

Curious George barely got anywhere on his bicycle before we were at the park and offloaded onto hiking path. I followed a huge group of people into the reserve to see the morning feeding of the reserve's semi-wild orangutans.

"Wow, they are like short wookies," I thought, watching the orangutans sturdily meander onto the feeding platform. I watched for ages, until the orangutans left, aside from a shy mother and baby, who came down a tree on the other side where the ranger met them.

I had really started to enjoy my trip recently. And I wasn't sure I wanted to go back home anymore. Home is full of challenges, much harder than problems you encounter on the road.

This IS my comfort zone.

Here are more photos of orangutans and of the later part of the day when I went wandering around Kuching.

The Process: Planning

Here's a sample of how my haphazard RTW trip comes together. These are some of my notes for Singapore and Borneo, culled from online and guidebook sources at the last minute.

Singapore to Kuching

Really, the world will be a better place if we all drop the gum-jokes when we mention Singapore. And any sort of dog-eating joke in reference to Asia? Give it a rest.

Taking great care not to make any remarks implying that I had some hot info about Singapore due to its partial-gum-ban (hey, we can give caning jokes a rest too), I packed up and headed back to the airport for my AirAsia flight to Borneo.

I was flying to Kuching, a city in the Malaysian state of Sarawak. Borneo is the island, and there are parts of three countries on the island—Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei. The Malaysia bit consists of two states, Sarawak and Sabah. I was flying into Kuching and out of Kota Kinabalu in Sabah ten days later.