Adventures in Malaysia

We got to the airport 3 hours before out flight. Sadly on our way back we did not take the more luxurious airline. Instead we had connections all the way back. We flew to Taipei with Malaysian Airlines, and to Vancouver with Air China, and then Air Canada to Calgary.

We enjoyed a medley of fresh fruit from the market that we purchased the day before.
Angelina and I hopped on our bus to Kinabalu National Park, with a quick pit stop at Mt. Kinabalu to bask in its majesty. We made an additional stop in Sukau where we walked along Sabah’s longest river. Here we saw, orangutans, macaques, red and silver leaf monkeys, elephants, crocodiles, otters and proboscis monkeys. We would love to talk about the trees here as they were quite lovely, but our collective knowledge of trees is rather limited. We just know that they were incredible. We also got a chance to visit the Gomantong Caves which are home to millions of Swiftlets. Swiftlets are small birds that look like black sparrows and their nests are prized for bird nest soup. It’s kind of gross, but the whole concept behind it is the male Swiftlets saliva has a glutinous substance that apparently has medicinal and aphrodisiac qualities. A kilogram of Swiftlets nests can be sold for anywhere from $1000 – $10,000. Too bad we didn’t have any extra room in our bags to bring some home to sell.
The entire Kinabalu National Park can take days to tour, but we could only spend several hours, and brought our own lunch of local fruits. Quite possibly the coolest part (and most frightening) was the canopy bridges we walked along. We saw hundreds of animals in this lush World Heritage Site.
We headed back to our hotel after we were finished the tour, so that we could sleep well before our flight home.

Today we took a short flight from Gunung to Kota Kinabalu. When we got there we checked into our little quaint bed and breakfast, and headed to the docks. We went fishing with the locals in the morning and afterwards, they took us to the local market (Gaya Street Market) which is only open on Sundays. We bough fresh mangoes, pineapples, durian fruit, lychee and mangosteen! I bought wooden salad tongs! After our whirlwind purchasing we headed back to our hotel to rest for the night as we wanted to save energy for the next day.

We woke up this morning to a cold breakfast of fruit from the forest. After we packed our bags, and waived farewell to our hosts, we all got on our coach and headed to the Gunung Mulu National Park. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and has the largest cave chamber and network of caves in the world. We had to catch a helicopter to access deep into the park which was about a 30 minute flight from Miri Airport. This had to be one of the coolest things we have ever done in our lives. We literally saw hundreds of bats while exploring the caves. Although there are hundreds of caves, we only visited a relatively small number of them as it would have taken days to do them all. The two main caves we visited were called Deer and the Sarawak Chamber. After a brief lunch provided by our tour guide we explored more of the national park.
We were both really tired after our adventure so when we returned to our hotel we just went right to bed.

Here is a great link for Mulu National park! http://www.mulupark.com

On our way to the airport we picked up Pewter pots and some Curry spice at the Petaling Street we also found some nice Batik. One very useful peice of travel advice here in Petaling street, be cautious of pickpockets! they are abbundent and cunning, I lost lots of money there We flew from Kuala Lumpur (in case you have forgotten) to Kuching (kaching! Never gets old)the capital city of Sarawak. When we landed we took a cab to the port where we booked our tour of Borneo. Borneo is an old term used to describe the regions of Sarawak and Sabah. After we purchased our tickets we visited the local market and purchased high quality pepper. After a little wandering around, we got on our motorized boat on the Lemanak River to visit indigenous Iban communities, where we took part in a tribal dance. Flash photography was not allowed . These lovely and hospitable peoples let us stay the night in their traditional long house which we snuck a couple pictures of. The women of the tribe gave us each a piece of Pua cloth which was much like batik. Angelina was beside hersself because we had to pay for the batik in Penang, and they were giving it away here for free! We kept this rage to ourselves. We dined with them as well today. It was an interesting assortment of food, still not quite sure what we were eating, but it was really tasty. We spent some time relaxing in the refreshing steams near the village. During our stay we purchased rubber Orangutans – rubber plants were a major cash crop of Malaysia.