Borneo Archives

A Note From Matt: If you haven’t read the first four parts of the story, you should either read the recap below or read the story from the beginning to make sure you’re up to speed. If you have read the story from the beginning, you should skip the recap, which is the section below written in italics.

Recap

I took a ten-day trip to the Malaysian province of Sabah on the island of Borneo to search search for, and hopefully photograph, the elusive endangered pygmy elephant. I rented a motorcycle in Kota Kinabalu and set out for the opposite side of the island where I was most likely to find the elephants. On the first night I discovered that the motorcycle had no headlights while driving up the side of Mount Kinabalu. On the second day I drove for nearly 10 hours in a monsoon and spent the following day trapped by the heavy rains in a dingy hostel in the port city of Sandakan. The next morning, determined not to fail, I mounted my motorbike and drove to the nearby Sepilok Orangutan Reserve. There I ran into two Swedish nurses that I had met in Kota Kinablu and they suggested we travel together. Things were looking up. The following day I received an email from the local tourism board offering to pay for my room, board, and a personal guide to help me find the pygmy elephants. All I had to do in return was provide them with fifty photos. My guide, Thorpe, picked me from the hostel up in a small car. On the way to the park we stopped at the fabled Gomantong Caves where, in the process of photographing the cave, I climbed a giant mountain of bat guano. Afterwards, while discussing photography equipment with Thorpe (he was also a photographer) he informed me that I would need a telephoto lens to shoot the elephants because we would not be able to get close to them. There was just one problem: I didn’t have one.

Part 5: The Eye of the Elephant

“What do you use to shoot wildlife?” I asked Thorpe as we drove slowly on a bumpy dirt road through the village of Sukau.

“I use a 100-300mm telephoto lens. You only have a 70-135mm?”

“Yes.”

“We can not get closer than 20 meters from the elephants. If we do they will either charge us or run away. How are you going to shoot them?”

“I don’t know.”

“It has been raining a lot. When it rains the elephants will usually move into the jungle. It’s possible that we won’t see them at all.” Thorpe offered. “They can’t expect pictures of the elephants if we can’t find them.”

The idea did not console me. I gazed out the window at the huts along the road.

We arrived at the Barefoot Sukau Lodge, put our bags in our rooms, and then met in the dining room where our dinner was waiting. My room was comfortable, the fried chicken and vegetables smelled delicious, the dining room that we sat in was suspended on pillars above one of the most scenic rivers on one of the most beautiful islands in the world, and I felt like a failure. I had come all-expenses-paid on one of the best assignments of my young career and had messed it up before I even got started.

“After the tourism board emailed me I looked at some zoom lenses online. Nikon makes a 100-300mm lens that I can afford. I would have bought it if there was time, but there wasn’t. Are there any shops in Sandakan that might have one?” I asked.

“No. You would have to go to the Kota Kinabalu.”

Kota Kinabalu was more than 400km of windy, potholed, mountainous roads away.

I shuffled my vegetables languidly around my plate.

Thorpe and I met at 5am the next morning to take a boat up the river in search of the elephants. We wanted to get started before the other guests woke up. Thorpe’s job was to get me as close as possible to a herd of pygmy elephants. That would be much harder if other guests were trying to follow us, hoping for a glimpse of a member of the smallest subspecies of the largest land animals in the world. Since the other guests knew that I was there on assignment to find the elephants (I had unwittingly told them in conversation the previous night) they were sure to ask where we were going.

It was still dark as we motored up the river wide silent river. The sun rose and the mist began to burn away. The light was perfect for pictures so I took out my camera.

Thorpe directed our driver to turn into one of the many small tributaries stemming from the main river.

When I raised my camera to shoot a colourful bird on a nearby branch the boatman turned the boat gently towards it and slowed down for me. The next time I raised my camera he did it again. I then realized that these men had only one job: to help me get the pictures I wanted.

The fact that these men were charged with assisting me, a supposed professional who was worthy of such assistance, was humbling and inspiring.

After all of the trouble that the people at the tourism board and these men had gone through, I could not return empty handed. Telephoto lens or no, I was going to shoot me some fucking pygmy elephants. I wanted to get close enough to shoot a close-up of an elephant’s eye looking right back at me.

The canopy seemed to billow out of the jungle and into the river as if they were competing for the space. As we meandered up the river Thorpe told me about previous clients that he had guided: photographers from National Geographic and other prominent magazines, camera crews for nature documentaries, and wealthy enthusiast photographers with cameras worth more than I earned in a year.

Suddenly Thorpe spoke rapidly to our driver in Malaysian and he slowed the boat. Thorpe pointed to a broad section of trampled vegetation.

“The elephants were feeding here yesterday.” He said. “We need to go back to the car.”

“Shouldn’t they be nearby?”

“No. They eat so much that they are constantly moving in search of new food. They can walk thirty kilometres in a single day. They could be very far by now.”

“Why did they leave? There’s lots of plants here to eat.”

“They only eat elephant grass.”

“Oh. That makes sense.”

We arrived at the dock as the other guests were climbing into their boats for their morning river cruise.

“Don’t tell them where we are going.” Thorpe told me. “We don’t want them to be jealous or, even worse, to try and follow us.”

“Any luck?” A woman from Chicago called to us as we pulled up.

“No.” I replied. “But it’s early. We’ll try again after breakfast.”

As soon as they were out of sight we got in the car. About thirty minutes later we stopped at a dilapidated convenience store. Thorpe spoke to the men outside rapidly in Malaysian.

“They were here this morning.” He told me as he swung the car around and turned down a side road. He slowed the car pointing to a large area of trampled bushes.

“They slept there. If we’re lucky they haven’t gone back into the jungle.”

We continued creeping down the bumpy road. Suddenly, Thorpe stopped. He pointed where a side road veered left and up a small hill. Over the crest of the hill I saw an elephant’s head. Three more appeared in the bushes, eating their way toward us through the foliage

“Stay behind me.” He cautioned as he opened his door and stepped out. I leapt from the car, camera in hand and starting shooting as fast as I could. The light was bad. I was barely able to take clear pictures, even with my camera set to the highest ISO.

My view of the elephants through my camera quickly grew hazy. It looked as though I was shooting them through a thick fog. I checked the pictures the LCD screen and they looked the same. All of my pictures were unusable.

Pygmy elephants are notoriously shy and we had disturbed them. They began to retreat over the hill.

I took off the lens off of my camera and looked inside. The rapid change in humidity and heat that occurred when I jumped out of the cool dry car into the hot humid jungle air had caused the inside of the camera to fog. I quickly wiped it clean and replaced the lens. My camera could take clear pictures again.

“Come on.” Thorpe shouted. He was already following the elephants up the road.

Just over the rise was a gravel pit. The elephants were at the far end of the pit ready to return to the jungle. Thorpe and I were at the opposite end with our backs to a road. Thorpe motioned for me to follow him and he began creeping closer. We moved closer and closer until the elephants began looking at us angrily. Thorpe motioned for me to move back. We retreated a few steps.

“Here.” He said.

The elephants returned their attention to eating and ignored us. Thorpe had determined the edge of the elephants’ natural boundary. They wouldn’t mind us here. I snapped photos as fast as I could, varying the composition as much as possible from my restricted vantage.

A few minutes later, we heard a door slam behind us. A tourist van had stopped on the road so the occupants could look at the elephants. A tall european-looking man with short cropped grey hair and a beard came ran past us, camera in hand. He stopped 10 feet directly in front of us and started taking pictures of the elephants.

“Hey,” Thorpe shouted. “Come here. It is not safe.”

The man ignored us.

“Asshole.” I muttered.

Several of the elephants retreated into the jungle. One of them charged the man.

The man jumped back and was about to run away, but the elephant stopped about 20 feet short of him. It had been a false charge meant to scare the man off. The man went back to taking photos. Emboldened by the elephant’s retreat, he started walking towards the beasts. The elephants turned and hurriedly exited the gravel pit on a dirt road. The man disappeared down the road after them.

“Lets go.” Said Thorpe. “This is no use.”

I agreed.

“That is very dangerous.” He said. “I hope they don’t hurt him.

“I hope they do.”

A few local children had gathered behind us to watch the spectacle. Thorpe spoke to them in Malaysian for a moment before we got back in our car and returned to the guesthouse for lunch.

We waited for the other guests to leave for their afternoon river cruise, telling them that we would be going out later. As soon as they were gone we got back into the car and returned to the gravel pit. We found the children from that morning, and Thorpe began speaking with them again.

I then realized what he had done. The local children, with no school to attend, had nothing better to do than follow the elephants around all day. For them is was great fun. Thorpe had asked them to track the elephants for us. The children pointed us down a muddy road overgrown with vegetation excitedly. We started walking with the children following us curiously.

“We must be quiet.” Thorpe told me. “I need to figure out exactly where the elephants are. Sometimes they can circle around and trap you.”

“Quiet works for me.”

We spent the better part of an hour creeping down the road, Thorpe cautiously inspecting the surrounding jungle. Then, suddenly, he turned back.

“They’re near the river. We must get the boat.”

“This could be an excellent opportunity.” Thorpe told me in the car. “If we are in the boat, and the elephants are on the shore, we can get very close. On land they won’t allow you to get close to them, but if you are in the water then the water’s edge is their boundary. You can get as close as you want as long as you are in the boat and they are on land.” Thorpe had only been fortunate enough to approach elephants from the river a handful of times in his career. This might be our lucky day.

In the boat Thorpe quickly located the place where the elephants were likely to be. We pulled up to the shore. I began to get out of the boat.

“Wait!” Thorpe said.

I turned around. He was holding out his 100-300mm lens.

“Use this.”

“Thank you so much.”

The elephants were less than 20 meters away, but seemed not to mind our presence. With the proper zoom lens on my camera I began shooting like a madman, zooming in and out, and hiding in bushes and climbing trees to shoot from different angles, and filling my memory cards with well-exposed and well-composed photographs.

A boat full of tourists on their afternoon cruise soon noticed us and came over to see what we were doing. The swarmed onto shore with their cameras. The elephants became agitated and started trumpeting and moving off into the bushes.

Thorpe grabbed my shoulder.

“Quick. Into the boat.” He said. “They’re heading for the river.”

We jumped into the boat and shoved off. We turned in the river and approached shore. As we inched towards the bank I could see the elephants eating through the foliage and moving towards the water. I stood on on the narrow tip of the boat shooting as fast as I could as we crept closer and closer.

We were an arms length from the bank when the first elephant’s head appeared through the bushes. He looked right at me, and I took this picture.

The post Adventures in Malaysian Borneo Part 5: The Eye of the Elephant appeared first on XpatMatt.

Adventures in Malaysian Borneo Part 4: A Mountain of Bat Guano

Matt — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 07:44:13 +0000

ADVENTURES IN MALAYSIAN BORNEO

When I rented my motorcycle on my first day in Kota Kinabalu, I asked the owner of the shop where I could find bornean pygmy elephants, an endangered species found only on Borneo.

“Here.” He told me, circling an area on the east side of the island that comprised 1/10^th of the province. The province of Sabah is about 74,000 square kilometers, so the area that he indicated was probably about 740 square kilometers.

“Can you be more specific?”

“No. They’re always moving.”

I went to the northern part of that area hoping to find better information once I arrived.

I was staying at a hostel beside the Sepilok Orangutan Sanctuary. There I ran into two Swedish nurses that I had met on my first day in Kota Kinabalu. We had met two pretty Dutch sisters the previous night, and I had stayed up very late talking to the younger of the two, a recent MBA graduate named Klara.

We planned to continue traveling as a group. The Swedish nurses and I had already visited the orangutan and proboscis monkey sanctuaries, but the sisters had not, so we decided that we would stay at the hostel one more day to give the sisters a chance to visit the sanctuaries. After that we would go south to Kinabatangan Park to take nature-watching boat rides on the Kinabatangan River.

I asked the staff at the hostel if they knew where I could find pygmy elephants. They did not. From what they told me, it sounded like nobody would. Even the experts rarely know where they are. Pygmy elephants are restless creatures. They sleep only two hours a day and spend the other 22 walking and eating. They can travel as far as 27 kilometers in a day so, even when somebody does spot them, they are often gone by the time word makes it back to the tour guides. To make matters worse, during heavy rains (like the ones that had been flooding the peninsula in the preceding weeks) the elephants tend to move into the jungle.

Despite this, that afternoon my chances of finding them improved dramatically. A few weeks before my trip I had emailed the Sabah Tourism Board to ask if they could recommend a guide to take me to see the elephants. I also mentioned that I would be working while in Borneo, and that I would be happy to write articles for their tourism publications.

That evening in Sepilok, with just five days left to hunt for the pygmy elephants, I received the tourism board’s reply. They said that they wanted photos of orangutans, proboscis monkeys, and pygmy elephants. In exchange for one hundred photos they would provide me with a room and board, a guide, transportation to Kinabatangan Park, and a private boat with which we could cruise the river.

I replied immediately. I wrote that I’d be thrilled to go, but would only have enough time if I left immediately. After a quick email exchange everything was arranged. My guide would pick me up in front of the hostel the following morning.

At dinner I told the girls about my trip. They were excited for me. They had found some good holiday deals, but mine took the cake.

“Do you know where you are staying?” Asked Klara. “Maybe they will have some empty rooms.”

I didn’t know. I only knew that I would be in the village of Sukau on the river. The girls decided that they would also come to Sukau so that we might find each other there.

Things could not have been better.

My guide, Thorpe, picked me up early the next morning. He was a slender Malaysian man with dressed head-to-toe in khaki and wearing a wide-brimmed trekking hat and large glasses.

On the ride Thorpe told me that the guiding company he worked for was the same one that the tourism board sent all of their major clients to: National Geographic, the Travel Channel, the BBC. I was epically thrilled that I was being guided by the same guy that took out NatGeo photographers, but, I was also intimidated. Thorpe had worked with the best of the best. I, on the other had, was young and new. I was afraid that my photography wouldn’t be up to par.

“Is there anything that you’d like to see today?” Thorpe asked me. “We won’t be go out in the boat until tomorrow morning.”

“I read about cave where they collect nests for bird’s nest soup.”

When I was young I had seen pictures of the bird’s nest collectors in National Geographic—slender Asian men climbing bamboo poles hundreds of feet up the sides of caves to pluck tiny nests from the walls.

“Ah yes. The Gomantong Caves. How tall are your boots?”

“Just above my ankle. Why? Is it muddy?”

“No,” he laughed. “Bat guano. If you want to get the good pictures you will have to climb mountains of bat guano.”

My first Bornean outdoors wildlife adventure was going to climbing giant piles of bat poop.

“Awesome!”

Two hours later we walked out of the jungle into a large clearing in front of the majestic caves. The entrance to the main cave was at least 40 meters tall. In front of it was a creek with an arched walking bridge. On each side of the clearing was a long rectangular wooden building on stilts. They were the bird’s nest collectors’ homes. Several were lazing in the shade beneath one of the buildings.

As we approached a man came out of the building on the left. He had shaggy hair, was missing several teeth, and was wearing flip-flops and socks. Thorpe asked him to show me one of the bird’s nests. If you took a hollow softball and cut it into quarters, the resulting pieces would be about the same size and shape as the nest. It was varying shades of brown and looked like it was made of melted plastic. He held it to his hand to show it would sit against the cave wall.

“They’re made only from bird saliva.” Thorpe told me proudly.

I thought it was strange that he would seem proud of such a fact.

Of course, Canadians chose the beaver to be their national animal, so who am I to judge?

“This nest is not a very good one.” He continued. “The color means that there are a lot of other things mixed in with the bird saliva. A white nest is pure. It’s worth much more.”

“Because it makes better soup?”

“Yes.”

“So, bird’s nest soup is actually bird spit soup?”

“Exactly.”

Bird’s nest soup is a perfect example why I love living in Asia—at least once a week you encounter something so brilliantly bizarre that you can only shake your head and laugh. It’s like living on one of the planets in Star Wars, except weirder.

I snapped some pictures and we continued to the cave. The bridge that crossed the creek connected with an elevated wooden walkway. At the entrance it forked, each path leading to one of the cave walls and then following it to the back, enabling people to walk a complete circuit. At the rear of the cave there was a large opening allowing the light to stream in. There were also two fair-size holes in the ceiling. We had come at the perfect time of day for photography. Brilliant shafts of light penetrated the massive dome giving it the appearance of a holy chamber.

The floor of the cave was covered by what appeared to be one giant black sand dune. At it’s peak it was at least 15 meters tall. On one side a small creek ran through it.

“Bat guano?”

“Yes. Bat guano.”

“I can walk on it?”

“Yes. But be careful. In some places it’s firm, but in other’s it’s soft. I don’t want you to get stuck.” Thrope grinned.

I didn’t care about the mountain of bat poop. I was too excited about shooting the cave. I pulled out my tripod, put my wide-angle lens on my camera, and climbed over the railing of the walkway, and began hiking up the black dune of excrement.

It was a surprising pile of poop—not at all what one would expect. It was dry and springy underfoot, but overall it was surprisingly firm—except in certain places where my boot would unexpectedly sink in and I’d have to try to pull it out quickly before the bat guano reached the unprotected skin above my boot. Some areas, which I avoided, teemed with cockroaches the size of field mice. Strangely, it didn’t smell at all.

Thorpe opted to stay on the wooden walkway. He had taken out a camera of his own and was also walking around the cave taking pictures.

Thorpe, it turned out, was an amateur photographer with a passion for wildlife photography. On our way back to the car we talked about gear.

“What do you shoot with?” I asked him.

“A Nikon D700.”

“Wow, that’s a really nice camera.” A D700 is a professional-level Nikon worth about three times as much as my high-end amateur D80.

My guide had a better camera than I did. This made me self-conscious. I began to think that I had been given this trip in error. Would my photos be good enough for the tourism board?

“What lenses do you have?” Thorpe asked me.

“I have a 50mm, a 35mm, and an 18-135mm.”

“You don’t have a telephoto?”

“No.”

“How are you going to shoot the elephants? We will not be able to get close to them.”

At that moment I realized that I really had stepped in a giant mountain of bat guano, both literally, and figuratively.

Read the final installment: Adventures in Malaysian Borneo Part V: The Eye of the Elephant

The post Adventures in Malaysian Borneo Part 4: A Mountain of Bat Guano appeared first on XpatMatt.

Adventures in Malaysian Borneo Part 3: Salvation in Sandakan

Matt — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 22:28:53 +0000

ADVENTURES IN MALAYSIAN BORNEO

My trip had failed. I had taken two weeks off from work to visit the Malaysian province of Sabah on the island of Borneo to find and photograph the elusive and endangered Bornean pygmy elephant in the wild and, hopefully, write an adventure travel story that would make my reputation as a travel writer.

This was my plan: buy a hammock tent, rent a motorbike, and drive from Kota Kinabalu to the eastern side of the province where the endangered Bornean pygmy elephants ranged. There I would inquire about how and where to find the elephants.

This is what actually happened. On the second night I ended up navigating the windy road up Mount Kinabalu on my motorcycle, freezing cold, in the fog, at night, with no headlights. On the third day, I got lost for eight hours in a monsoon and learned that it had been raining heavily in that area for weeks and that there was no indication it was going to stop.

This part of the story begins on the fourth morning in a dingy room in a cheap hostel by the harbor in a port town called Sandakan, about a four-hour drive from Kinabatangan Park, the place where I was most likely to find pygmy elephants.

I had arrived the previous night. Everything in my bag and on my person had been soaked during the drive. The only things that stayed dry were my camera and laptop. I was thankful for that. My travel insurance would not have covered their full value.

I had hung up my clothes on the door, bedframe, desk, chair, and curtain rods the night before, but they were still soaked. My passport, which I had fanned open on the desk, was still sopping. Outside the rain hammered on tin roofs with a loud crackle. Inside the air was so humid that I felt wet.

I went downstairs for the hostel’s complimentary breakfast. It consisted of Wonderbread, margarine, and jam. I met a sour British Couple who told me that the rain had kept them in the hostel all week. All tours were cancelled. I made a quadruple-decker margarine and jam sandwich and went back to my room.

I plugged in my laptop hoping to pass the rainy day blogging. The hostel’s Internet, however, wasn’t working.

With nothing better to do, I dwelled on my situation. Why hadn’t I checked the weather before coming to this country? Now I would waste my vacation in this dirty room and I would have to drive my motorcycle for two more days in the rain to get back to Kota Kinabalu for my flight.

Laying on my lumpy mattress and staring at the paint flaking off the ceiling, my thoughts turned to the last conversation that I had with my ex-girlfriend in Taiwan. It went like this:

“Where are you going for Chinese New Year vacation?” She asked.

“I’m going to Borneo. And you?”

“I’m going to Bali.”

“That’s cool. Are you going to take surfing lessons?”

“Yup.”

“I’ve heard the surfing is great there.”

“I heard that the surf instructors are pretty great too. I’m really looking forward to it.”

I munched my Wonderbread sandwich and imagined her in a sunny beachside bar filled with large-shouldered scruffy-haired Australian surfers. I abused myself this way for several hours. Eventually, I snapped.

I had not come this far to give up. Rain be damned, I was going to find some fucking pygmy elephants.

I did some pushups and sit-ups to get my blood circulating. Then I noticed that there was an air-conditioner in my room. I turned it on and arranged my belongings as best I could in front of its cool dry breeze. The room got cold quickly, but at least it was dry.

I went out in the rain to find a café with Internet access. There I looked at maps and planned my route for the morning. First I would visit the nearby Sepilok Orangutan Sanctuary. After that I would visit the Proboscis Monkey Sanctuary. Then, weather permitting, I would continue south to Kinabatangan Park and find a lodge on the Kinabatangan River that would have a guide and a boat to take me looking for pygmy elephants.

The next morning I woke up at 7 a.m., showered, packed, ate a quadruple-decker Wonderbread, margarine, and jam sandwich, and left. It was raining lightly and I made good time. I arrived at the orangutan sanctuary early for the 10 a.m. feeding.

I followed the elevated wooden walkway to the feeding area, which was an elevated wooden platform about the size of a large swimming pool. Two young women wearing rain jackets were already there. They turned to see who had arrived.

I laughed.

“Fancy meeting you here.”

They pair were two Swedish nurses that I had met briefly in on my first day in Kota Kinabalu. We had eaten breakfast together before I started my motorcycle trip.

“Heyyy!” They shouted.

We traded stories about how we had come to the orangutan sanctuary and chatted like we had known each other for years. Travel is funny like that. Talk to another traveler for twenty minutes, and you’ve made a good friend. Run into her a second time somewhere else, and suddenly you’re old buddies.

People trickled on to the platform from the walkway. A few minutes after it filled up the first orangutan arrived. Everyone was silent. Several orangutans came to eat. I snapped photographs frantically, worried that they might be the only photos I would take on my vacation.

The girls invited me back to their hostel for lunch on the restaurant patio. Over lunch they suggested that I stay at the hostel and continue with them to Kinabatangan another day. I agreed of course.

I told the girls that I also planned to visit the Labuk Bay Proboscis Monkey Sanctuary. The idea excited them. The orangutan feeding had whet their appetites for anthropoids. The clouds broke and the sun came out for the first time in days.

The three of us squished onto my dirtbike. The publicly funded orangutan sanctuary had been well advertised and easy to find. The privately owned monkey sanctuary, however, was not so easy. It was located about 12 km off the main highway accessible only by unmarked back roads. We had only the directions that were told to us by the receptionist at the hostel.

We joked and laughed as we cruised down the potholed road beneath the first rays of sunshine that any of us had seen all week. We were the only vehicle on the empty road, which was lined with palm oil plantations and rolled over gentle hills until it disappeared in the distance.

The monkey sanctuary also had a wooden walkway, but this one lead through mangroves, rather than jungle, to a large covered platform. The alpha male greeted our group and led it to the platform where the guide fed him and people posed for pictures with him. Around the platform dozens of monkeys played in the trees. At one point the alpha male suddenly screamed sprinted off of the main platform, scaring the hell out of everyone near him, to chase away another group of monkeys that was encroaching on his territory.

I shot hundreds of pictures. The light was good and I knew that they would turn out well.

We returned to the hostel to find that a backpacking British couple and two tall blonde sisters from Holland had checked in. We all ate dinner together. Afterwards we sat on the patio drinking and playing cards. I sat next to the younger of the two sisters, a pretty business school graduate. She told me about an entrepreneurial school trip to Argentina she had recently taken. She was intelligent and charming. We talked for most of the night.

By the time we all returned to our dorm rooms the sisters had decided that they would come with us to Kinabatangan.

It seemed as though things couldn’t get much better—but they did. The next day I received an email that turned my nearly failed trip into the most successful expedition of my writing career.

Continue following my adventure in Adventures in Malaysian Borneo Part 4: A Mountain of Bat Guano

The post Adventures in Malaysian Borneo Part 3: Salvation in Sandakan appeared first on XpatMatt.

Adventures in Malaysian Borneo Part 2: Lost in a Monsoon

Matt — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 17:16:03 +0000

ADVENTURES IN MALAYSIAN BORNEO

I was eating breakfast in the hotel dining room and looking at my map when the hotel manager walked by.

“Where are you going?” He asked.

“Kinabatangan.” I replied.

“You’re driving a car?”

“A motorcycle.”

“Oh.” He replied and looked out the window beside my table. I turned and looked out the window. It was overcast and raining lightly.

“Maybe you should take a bus.” He suggested.

“Why?”

“Rain.” He replied. “It has rained every day for the past two weeks.”

“Is that normal?”

“It is the end of the rainy season.”

When planning to ride a motorcycle across Borneo most people would think it prudent to invest the 25 seconds that it takes to type “Borneo weather” into Google and read the results. Others would go so far as to purchase a guidebook that might contain a sentence like, “It is unadvisable to go on long motorcycle trips during the winter in Borneo because it’s the rainy season.”

I, however, am not what you would call a ‘planner’.

Rain or no rain, I would continue with my trip as planned. I had paid in advance to rent the motorcycle for ten days, and I was already in Kundasang, a village located high on the highway that crosses Mount Kinabalu. I would waste at least a day of my trip, and more than a hundred dollars returning the motorcycle to the capital. Besides, I had been living in Taiwan for seven years and had ridden a motorcycle there all year round, including the rainy season. I had even driven in a few typhoons. How bad could the rain in Borneo be?

A short while later I was driving out of Kundasang and down the mountainside. Soon the rain stopped. A little later the blanket of clouds broke apart and the sun came out. At the base of the mountain I stopped and put on my iPod. The road was lined with lush jungle. It rose and fell over gentle hills and bent in long slow curves. I put on Zepplin IV and zoomed along the jungle highway listening to The Battle of Evermore. It was brilliant!

“Rain?” I thought. “Ha! What did that guy know? This is perfect.”

My naiveté continued for about an hour. Then, the sun suddenly disappeared and was replaced by black clouds. All at once the rain hit me. It was like I had driven into a waterfall. There was so much water running down my visor that I couldn’t see the road clearly enough to continue.

Luckily, a moment later, I saw some blurry lights on the side of the road. I turned off and drove towards them. It was rural roadside store. I got off my bike and hurried under the awning where a teenage Malaysian boy and two young girls were squatting.

Even though I had been wearing a Gore-Tex jacket, I was completely soaked. I pulled the waterproof cover off of my backpack to check on my laptop and camera. They were in a waterproof bag inside my backpack and were still dry.

I took off my dripping jacket and hung it on a nail, and then squatted beside the teenagers and looked out at the rain. They looked at me quizzically.

“Do you speak English?” I asked.

They stared at me blankly.

I asked them in Chinese if they could speak Chinese.

They continued to stare.

We squatted in silence for over an hour watching the rain pour from the sky like a river through a sieve, pounding on the aluminum room with a deafening clatter. Eventually it let up enough that I could drive somewhat safely.

I was soaking wet and was probably going to have to drive for at least another four hours in the rain. I wasn’t excited about this state of affairs, but I also wasn’t altogether surprised. I do this sort of thing more often than one would expect. In a way, I kind of try to get myself into these situations.

Like I said before, I’m not what you would call a ‘planner’. I never carry a guidebook and I rarely visit a country already knowing what I want to do. I like to just show up and ask people: “How do I catch a bus to so and so?” or “Where can I find a cheap hostel?”. Because of this, when I arrive in a new city I often end up wandering around for hours, carrying all my gear, drenched in sweat, looking for looking for a hotel or bus, and drawing strange looks from locals. Basically, I like to make things hard on myself.

If the pleasure I derive from an experience is measured by the absurdity of the situation that I get myself into for no good reason, then my third day in Borneo should have been one of the best days of my life.

Before I left the store I bought a plastic rain suit. It included a baby blue plastic jacket and a pair of baby blue plastic pants that reached to the tops of my ankles. I paid for it and put it on over my wet clothes. Then I put on my jacket and backpack and waved goodbye to the teenagers.

The rain continued steadily. I listened to my iPod for an hour before the rain worked its way into pocket where I had hidden it, at which point the headphones crackled and it died. I drove in silence for another hour before stopping at a gas station to fill up and check my map.

It was 3 pm. It had been about four hours since I left the hotel, and I had been driving in the rain for two of those. From here I would drive out to the end of a peninsula to the port city of Sandakan where I would get a room. That, I estimated, would take about another two hours, which, if correct, meant that I would be taking a hot shower at around 5 pm.

That, however, was not what was about to happen. There was one thing that I had not taken into account: my lack of planning.

I can pinpoint the exact spot where my lack of planning turned what should have simply been an uncomfortable drive into a misadventure of absurd proportions.

At about 4 pm I drove past a pair of monkey statues in the middle of a traffic circle. These monkey statues, I would later learn, are very close to the turnoff to the Sepliok Orangutan Reserve. The Sepilok Orangutan Reserve is a popular tourist destination, and, since it is inconveniently far from Sandakan, there are several clean, well-equipped hotels and hostels nearby. At 4 pm I was a five-minute drive from clean towels, hot showers, and cold beer. If I had purchased a guidebook or done some research into the area I would have known this.

I, however, am not a ‘planner’. I’m an ‘adventurer’. ‘Adventurers’ , as it turns out, are the class of people that ‘planners’ refer to as ‘morons’.

As continued toward Sandakan I began to understand how severe the rainstorm actually was. It had been raining heavily on and off for more than two weeks, and the peninsula on which I was driving was beginning to flood. The highway was raised about eight feet above the surrounding flats. Along the sides of the highway were groups of stilt houses—houses suspended high off the ground by thin poles to protect them from floods. I could see residents of the stilt houses standing on the front porches with grim looks on their faces, staring at the water as it lapped at their feet. If it continued to rain, and the water rose just a few more inches, their houses would begin to flood. In some places small rivers ran across the highway, several inches deep, and I had to lift my feet as I drove through them.

It began to get dark. The rain continued, as hard as ever. I drove for another hour or more. I thought that I should have arrived in Sandakan by that time, so I stopped at a gas station to ask for directions. The attendant assured me that I was on the right road, so I continued driving.

Occasionally I would I drive past small clusters of buildings that stretched for several kilometers, but never encountered anything that looked like an actual city. I stopped at a convenience store to ask for directions again, and was again assured that I was on the right road. I became confused. Surely I should have arrived by now.

Actually, I had arrived and just didn’t know it. Sandakan is not a normal town with a city center. It’s spread over a large area with several small sections separated by long stretches of interlocking highway that crisscross the peninsula. So, these people were telling me the truth. I was on the road to Sandakan. In fact, I had driven through several parts of it already.

I continued driving back and forth across the peninsula for another hour in the dark, on the flooded highway, lost in the monsoon. I was tired, wet, cold, and desperate to find a hotel. Then I suddenly realized that I may have an even bigger problem: I was probably almost out of gas.

I continued to drive until I came to another cluster of buildings. I spotted a clean, attractive-looking restaurant and pulled into the parking lot. It was an upscale restaurant by Malaysian standards. I walked in the door. People who had been talking quietly over their meals turned and watched seven hours of rain create a large puddle on the ground at my feet.

My boots made loud squishing sounds as I carried my backpack to a table where I sat down and created a new puddle. I took out my laptop hoping that the restaurant would have WiFi. It did, so I ordered some french fries and set myself to figuring out where I was and where I could find a hostel nearby.

After forty minutes I concluded that the nearest hostel was a few kilometers further down the road that I was on. I memorized the directions, paid for my fries, and left.

At 9 pm I parked my motorcycle in front of a harbor side hostel. I had been driving in the rain for eight hours. When I got to my room and unpacked my bag, I found that almost everything was wet. My money was wadded together and my passport was dripping. The only things that were dry were my computer and camera in the waterproof bag.

I took a shower, climbed into bed, and fell asleep thinking grim thoughts. What had I gotten myself into? I had come to Borneo in a monsoon. There would be no jungle treks. I would not see any monkeys, orangutans, or elephants. And worst of all, when it was time to return to the capital I’d have to do that hellish drive all over again.

My predictions, though, could not have been more wrong. Things were about to get better—much better. I would find monkeys and orangutans. I also would receive an email that would lead to one of the best assignments of my journalism career. And best of all, I would end up staying in a hostel that contained several attractive young European ladies and not one other single male.

If you’d like to hear about it, be sure to check back for my next update: Adventures in Malaysian Borneo Part 3: Salvation in Sabah.

Continue to follow my adventure in Adventures in Malaysian Borneo Part 3: Salvation in Sandakan

The post Adventures in Malaysian Borneo Part 2: Lost in a Monsoon appeared first on XpatMatt.

Adventures in Malaysian Borneo Part 1: Driving at Night with No Lights

Matt — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 11:10:02 +0000

ADVENTURES IN MALAYSIAN BORNEO