The Wilds of Borneo - part 1

I have returned from the deep, dark jungles of Borneo in one piece and now feel the need to let you all know about my experiences there. My friend Jayne came over to Bangkok for a few days before the two of us departed for Malaysian Borneo together.

Now, I like to think that part of my role is to educate as well as rant, so in the interest of knowledge expansion, here is some information on Borneo for those who may be (until now at least) a little ignorant about it. Borneo is the third largest island on the planet (fourth largest if you count Australia, which doesn’t seem to make it on the official lists for islands, presumably because it’s also a continent) and is partly owned by the Indonesia (the larger southern part) and Malaysia (the smaller northern part). The Malaysian part is further split into two semi-autonomous regions: Sarawak (the western part) and Sabah (the eastern part). We only visited Sabah during this holiday.

We flew into Kota Kinabalu (KK), the capital of Sabah, on our very cheap Air Asia flights (about A$200 return) and were struck by how modern the city looked. We were expecting something a bit more basic.

The sunset on our first night in Kota Kinabalu

We only spent a day in KK (where we met up with Amy, one of the other teachers from school) before we headed up to Mt Kinabalu, which is the highest mountain in South-East Asia at over 4000 metres. Jayne and I had toyed with the idea of climbing it (it’s a very popular climb), but decided we couldn’t be bothered. It was nice to see it and do a bit of walking around the area. Unfortunately, I was feeling rather unwell on this day so I didn’t get to do much walking. We spent the next day at a place called Poring, where there are some hot springs in the National Park. Why so many people felt that the 35 degree air temperature was too mild and what they really wanted was to soak in some 50 degree water was a bit lost on me, I confess. Instead, I enjoyed a refreshing dip in a nearby waterfall and also had a swim in the cold pool, rather than sit in one of the hot spring baths.

Mt Kinabalu at sunrise

From Poring, we got a bus to Sandakan, luckily managing to avoid getting rorted by a very sneaky local woman who tried to tell the bus driver she was our tour guide and then overcharge us for our bus tickets. There we met up with Marianne, another teacher from school (we bumped into several teachers from school during the 2 weeks, but Amy and Marianne we actually planned to meet up with). It’s fair to say that Sandakan (and indeed every town we subsequently visited in Sabah) was rather uninspiring: small, dull, basic places that transformed into deserted streets lined with closed metal shutters at night.

Not far from Sandakan is a place called Sepilok, which has an orang-utan sanctuary. One of the big issues in Borneo at the moment is that a lot of the natural rainforests are being decimated in order to make space for palm plantations. Palm oil is one of the most profitable industries in that part of the world, so in true human style, companies are tearing down the rainforests and planting thousands of palm trees instead. Of course, this means that a lot of the local wildlife is losing its natural habitat, including the orang-utan. Hence, this sanctuary was set up to care for and rehabilitate orphaned or sick orang-utans. I quite enjoyed seeing the orang-utans. By the way, orang-utan is a Malay word which means “jungle person”, which is kind of appropriate because they are almost human-like (I think our second-closest relatives species-wise after the chimpanzee) and they do live in the jungle. They are very cute and quite fun. Here are a few photos out of the many that I took.

There is a special feeding platform where they come for a mid-morning snack

And there are special ropes to provide easy access to the feeding platform

Apparently this is quite comfortable if you're an orang-utan

After the orang-utans had finished feeding, as soon as the last one had left the platform, about a dozen macaque monkeys immediately raced onto the platform to scavenge the left-overs. They were also very playful and rather amusing. The baby one was particularly cute.

From Sepilok, we headed into the jungle proper and stayed at a jungle camp for a couple of nights. We did several excursions out and about to look for wildlife, mostly by boat along the river. We saw quite a lot of stuff, mainly monkeys and birds. We did see a mother and baby orang-utan in the wild, which was very nice. We also saw many proboscis monkeys, named because of their big and rather hideous noses (by the way, the Malay name for proboscis monkey actually translates as “dutch man”). Here are some more photos.

A white heron

A kingfisher

A hornbill

A proboscis monkey with baby

A typical house in the jungle

Marianne, Amy, myself and Jayne

After leaving the jungle camp we went to Gomantong Cave, which was very interesting. It’s a place where they collect the bird nests used in bird-nest soup. While the bird nest harvesting season had just finished, it was amazing to see the rudimentary equipment and extreme conditions that the people work in to collect these little nests – dangerous in the extreme. The cave itself was massive and therefore very impressive, but also incredibly smelly, as the entire ground was covered in inches of bat and bird droppings, which of course attracted thousands of cockroaches. It was far more pleasant looking up rather than down (so long as you remember to keep your mouth shut when doing so).

We then headed further down the coast to a place called Semporna, but I think this would be a good place to end part one. To be continued...

Weeks fly by

I know it has been a while since I last updated my blog. This has essentially been due to a lack of time, a lack of exciting thingsto write about, and a little bit of laziness. I have been quite busy lately, both in and out of work and unfortunately, I don’t have much time today either, so this will have to be a fairly brief update of the last few weeks.

So, what have I been so busy doing? Basically, working and socialising. There have been a lot of birthdays among the school staff lately, so that means a lot of going out for dinners and the occasional party.

Work has been very busy lately. As the year goes on, students seem to get a bit more stressed and issues that may have been fairly minor in the past can become more difficult to cope with as the stress of schoolwork builds up. I am also running two counselling skills courses – one with students and one with staff, both of which are going pretty well. We had a big International Day at school a couple of weeks ago, which was a lot of fun. There are over 50 nationalities represented by the students in the school, so having everyone dress up in something to represent their home country was quite spectacular. The students' parents put together an absolutely amazing food expo, with huge amounts of food from dozens of different countries. That was a definite highlight of the day.

A few weekends ago a group of us from school went back to Ko Samet (a small island not too far from here), which was a fun weekend away from Bangkok - relaxing on the beach and eating great food. Unfortunately, it rained a bit (even though we are now in the hot, dry season), but not enough to spoil things too much. In an effort to save some money, I decided stayed in a very cheap (and a little bit nasty) hut that was very basic. I only mention this in an effort to stem the rumours that I'm becoming soft in my old age.

Earlier this week I also went to a soccer match. It was actually a World Cup qualifying match between Thailand and Oman. The atmosphere was great, despite Thailand losing 1-0. Here are a few photos and a video clip.

Here is a video clip which shows a near goal for Thailand and the rather amusing reaction of a couple of fans – my mate Mark is the guy in the orange shirt but I think the reaction of the Thai guy he's talking to is great. (Hopefully this will work.)

I only have one week left of school in this term before having two weeks off. I know I’ve said this before, but I do love the holidays that come with working in a school. So, I’m heading off to Malaysian Borneo for 2 weeks with my friend Jayne, who is coming out from Australia to visit me. I’m looking forward to this trip. I’ve only heard good things about Borneo – some good trekking, interesting wildlife and amazing diving.

So, apologies for the lack of interesting news, but I expect my next update will be a bit more exciting. Cheers.

Maldivian aquatic life

Here are some more underwater photos from the Maldives. (I didn't take any of these.)

A typical Maldivian underwater scene - nice coral and heaps of fish.

A hawksbill sea turtle

A mapped pufferfish

A painted spiny lobster

Moray eels

A close encounter with a honeycomb moray eel.
It's quite rare to see morays out of their holes like this.

A great shot of a giant moray

Manta ray, plus a few fish

Manta ray, again. Hopefully this gives some sense of scale.

A school of bannerfish

Anenome fish, with their anenome

One of the many white-tipped reef sharks we saw.

I hope you are all impressed with my marine-life naming skills. These were finely honed on our boat after each dive.

And so, back to reality. Cheers.

Tales from the Maldives

As promised, here is my account of my time in the Maldives. I feel it only to fair to warn you, if you are prone to envy, you may want to reconsider reading this, because it may well provoke some tinges of jealousy. But, for those of you brave enough to read on, hopefully you’ll get some sense of what this beautiful part of the world is like.

The airport in Male’ (the capital of the Maldives) is possibly the only one in the world where you walk out of the terminal and have to get straight onto a boat, which is the only way of getting anywhere as the airport is on its own island. We arrived around 1am, so we spent the night in a hotel in Male’ before being picked up the next morning to get on our boat. The boat we had was fantastic – big, spacious and with plenty of places to chill out and relax. There were 13 of us, as well as a crew of 7 people on the boat, plus 2 dive masters, and they were all great as well. The food was amazing – a lot of fresh fish, some of it caught on the boat. All up, the experience of living on the boat for a week was brilliant. The weather was perfect, the scenery was stunning, and the whole experience was very enjoyable. We really couldn’t have asked for better.

The Keyif - our home for the week.

I spent a lot of time relaxing here on the back of the boat.

Our crew getting into the party spirit.

There’s actually not that much to the Maldives itself. It is a serious of atolls which are made up of scattered reefs with only a few small islands in each atoll. Some of these islands have resorts on them and a few also have a small town on them, but most are uninhabited. They are quite picturesque, with white sand beaches surrounding dense green vegetation, all set within crystal-clear blue water. Seeing all this from a boat was definitely a better way to go than being restricted to one of the small island resorts, in my opinion.

As for the diving, it also lived up to expectation. We did 15 dives altogether and the visibility underwater was fantastic, ranging from 15 to over 40 metres. The variety and quantity of fish and marine life was incredible ... here are some of the highlights of what we saw:

• Dozens of reef sharks, some of them very large
• About 10 hammerhead sharks on one dive
• Manta rays, eagle rays and a large stingray
• Turtles
• Huge Napoleon wrasses
• Dolphins
• Heaps of different varieties of moray eels
• Giant lobsters
• Octopi
• Triggerfish, angelfish, surgeonfish, trumpetfish, pufferfish and lionfish by the hundreds
• Huge schools of tuna and snapper
• AND a whale shark!

For those of you who don’t know, the whale shark is a bit like the holy grail of diving because they are quite rare, and because they are so big (in fact, the biggest fish in the world) and so placid, everyone wants to spot one. They are not easy to find in the open water, but our trusty boat crew managed to find one in between our dives, so we all jumped in the water with our snorkels. Unfortunately, it swam away quite quickly and we didn’t get to see it. After getting back on the boat and looking round a bit more, we found another one (or possibly the same one), and this time we got in the water in time. I was quite lucky to get quite close and swim along with it for a while. It is a truly majestic creature, gliding along only about 5 or 6 metres below the surface. I was also lucky enough to have borrowed an underwater camera from someone at the time, and managed to dive down and snap the following photos:

I also got a few other underwater photos on our next dive, but none of them are fantastic unfortunately. I am still very much an amateur underwater photographer and the skills needed to take good underwater photos are quite different to normal photography. But, here are some of the better shots I got:

An Oriental Sweetlips

Clown Triggerfish

Powder Blue Surgeonfish

I will hopefully be able to post some of the better underwater photos from other people in the next few days. We spent one night having dinner on a small island, which was a lot of fun. The boat crew had gone to a lot of trouble to create some sand sculptures for us and then cook a sensational meal as well. It was a great night.

The whale shark sand sculpture the crew did for us.

The boat crew on the beach.

A blood-red moon that we saw a couple of times during the week.

The only negative side of the trip was that 2 of our group developed some symptoms of decompression illness and had to leave the boat to spend some time in recompression chambers on a couple of the islands. Fortunately in both cases the symptoms were not severe (although potentially serious enough that the doctors recommended time in the chamber) and in both cases we just happened to be near an island that had a recompression chamber. It was a timely reminder of how diving can actually be a dangerous activity if you’re not careful. On our last day I got to spend a bit of time in Male’ itself. Unfortunately, it’s not the most interesting city in the world, although we did get to see part of what looked like a Maldivian soap opera being filmed.

So, overall it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience and I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have had the opportunity to do it.

Cheers!

Who's your daddy?

Every so often here in Bangkok I encounter a situation that is so bizarre by Australian standards that it’s difficult to take it seriously. So let be warn you that some details (and definitely some implications) of the following story are weird at best and disturbing at worst.

My friend Lee recently told me that he needed to speak with me privately. I assumed he had some deep personal issue with which he was struggling and wanted to seek my professional counsel on the matter. However, he in fact told me that he had been approached by the security guard in our apartment building, who told him about a situation he was hoping Lee could assist with. The situation is that a local Thai woman who lives in our street has been married for 4 years and has been having sex with her husband all this time (Lee assures me there were some graphic hand gestures to emphasise this point), but so far there is no baby. It would appear that she lays all the blame for this lack of offspring on her husband, so she asked our security guard if there might be any English men in our building who would be interested in a little casual sex with her in order to get her pregnant. The plan would then be that she moves up to the country to have the baby and that would be that – no problem.

The security guard obviously took this matter very seriously and had taken the time to carefully assess each of the males in our building (8 in total). Three were ruled out because they weren’t white (including Lee, who is of Taiwanese background – I secretly think he was rather disappointed about this) and another one because he already has a girlfriend. Two others were eliminated because they had been seen bringing women back to their apartments; on the surface this would seem an illogical reason to deem them unsuitable for such a purpose, but the security guard insisted that the correct candidate must be a “good man”. This only left one other teacher (who happens to be 60) and me. So the security guard had asked Lee to approach the two of us with this enticing offer.

Needless to say I was flattered beyond words. In the ensuing days I started getting a bit of pressure from the security guard to take up the woman’s offer. Whenever I saw him he assured me that he could phone her there and then and she could come down straight away – no problem. While I can only assume that somewhere in this world there might be men who would jump at such an opportunity, I am certainly not one of them. As a result, I was initially in a bit of a dilemma because I knew that saying a blunt no to someone can be interpreted as quite rude in Thai culture, and the last thing I wanted to do was insult someone over such an important matter. So despite the security guard trying to convince me with compliments about my high IQ (clearly a sought-after pre-requisite for sperm donors in Bangna), I have politely declined his request. The only price I’ve had to pay for my negative response was a few days of the security guard insinuating that I must have some difficulties keeping my end up, so to speak.

So after such an existentially stressful experience, I figure I have earned a short holiday. I may have mentioned to some of you in passing that I had arranged a diving trip to the Maldives. Well, I am happy to report that I leave for this on Saturday. I really do feel incredibly lucky to have this opportunity. By any standard, this is going to be a pretty special trip – a week living on a chartered yacht with 12 other staff from school, sailing around the Maldives and diving at will with manta rays, sharks and if we’re really lucky, whale sharks. Rest assured I will write all about it upon my return. Cheers.

The only time my parents will be associated with kick-boxing

It is amazing how quickly one can adapt to a new environment, without even realising it. My parents have been to visit me the last week and a bit and their comments about the traffic, the dodgy taxi drivers, the spiciness of the food, the number of kids out and about in the street at all hours of the day and night, and the difficulty in making yourself understood have reminded me of how much I just accept that all these things are part of Bangkok life and they don’t really bother me anymore. In so many ways, Bangkok is so different to Sydney, yet I’m increasingly feeling quite comfortable here. I’m still really only scratching the surface of what this huge and diverse city has to offer, but I’m still enjoying both the challenge and the fun of living here.

It’s been good to catch up with my parents while they are here. The first weekend of their visit we took the bus to Kanchanaburi, which is a few hours west of Bangkok. The old part of Kanchanaburi down beside the river is very nice and relaxed, although quite touristy: the street we stayed on seemed to consist of only guest houses, bars, massage places and travel agents. We stayed in a nice guest house right on the River Kwai. The area is famous for its role in WW2 when a lot of English and Australian (among others) POW’s were forced to build a railway for the Japanese from Thailand to Burma, and tragically over 100,000 people (mostly Asian “workers” - in reality they were more like slaves) died in the process. We visited some of the war-related sites, including the cemetery, a couple of museums and Hellfire Pass. We also did some of the cheesier tourist things like an elephant ride and bamboo rafting. After this my parents went to Cambodia for a few days to see Angkor Wat and then returned for the weekend. We went to the huge weekend market in the north of Bangkok last Saturday and then they headed down the coast on Sunday. They get back to Bangkok tomorrow and then fly back to Australia on Thursday.

Mum, Dad and I on our very adventurous elephant trek.

Mum and Dad steering their bamboo raft down a jungle river.

Konyu Cutting, also known as Hellfire Pass.

The Death Railway - with a lot of tourists hanging out the window to get the obligatory photo.

The Bridge over the River Kwai.

While my parents were in Cambodia, I finally got around to seeing a Muay Thai (Thai kick-boxing) match. It was quite an experience. We had to pay 1000 baht for the privilege of being in the standing section up the back. We could have paid twice that much for ringside seats with the tourists, but now that I and my colleagues are Bangkok locals, we decided to hang up the back with the rest of the locals. However, we still had to pay tourist prices (the local ticket windows were only written in Thai, so we don’t know how much they pay to get in, but I did see one Thai guy hand over 100 baht and get change – some serious discrimination we felt). The other thing that made us westerners stand out was that we couldn’t participate in the constant gambling that was going on all around us. The amazing variety of hand signals that were used to bet on various aspects of the fights were completely beyond our comprehension. It was fairly crowded and with all the activity and buzz going on around us, the atmosphere was quite good.

There is a very elaborate ritual that the fighters go through inside the ring before the match starts.

But once that's over, there's no holding back.
These guys were doing "old-school" Muay Thai with no gloves.

A knee to the head is fair play in Muay Thai...

...as is a kick to the head.
This is the more modern style, with gloves and coloured shorts.

And afterwards, there's hugs all round.

So they have been the highlights from my last few weeks. Work continues to be busy and challenging, but that's fairly boring to write about, so I won't. Cheers!