“I had no way of bailing the water out of the kayak, and I was nearly a kilometer from shore.”

I am a master of pushing my luck. I get bored when everything goes right, and a get a strange satisfaction from pushing my little expeditions farther and farther until something finally goes wrong.

When things go really badly, I curse myself for my stupidity and vow never to do it again.

And then I do it again.

It’s kind of like a game.

I’ve been staying in my family’s cabin on Kootenay Lake, a large and sparsely populated lake in the Canadian Rockies. My dad bought a couple of kayaks last year. I’ve wanted to try kayaking for a long time, so, the first chance I got, I took one out for a long paddle.

I followed the shoreline south for about forty minutes, and then came back. It was scenic and peaceful, and much too uneventful.

The next day I paddled down the shore in the other direction to the general store where I bought a drink. I wasn’t wearing a lifejacket because I had planned to stay close to shore, but I wasn’t ready to go home yet, so I decided to paddle across the bay, a distance of about 1.5 km. I didn’t think that it was dangerous to do so. I had swum across the bay several times before. I could do it again if something went wrong.

Besides, the lake was calm and the kayak was sound. What could possibly go wrong?

I paddled across the bay and followed the cliffs along the shore. Then the wind began to pick up and I decided to go home. To get back across the bay to our cabin, I had to paddle diagonally into the wind and waves.  By this time I had been kayaking for over an hour and was getting tired. It was very hard to keep the kayak on course, because it naturally wanted to turn itself into the waves. I was using a lot of energy just trying to keep straight and my strokes were becoming sloppy. Then, one particularly large wave came and I, tired and off-balance, leaned too far over as I reached forward with the paddle. The kayak tipped and I fell in the lake.

My sunglasses fell off. I dove quickly to catch them before they disappeared. Then I flipped the kayak right side up and tried to climb into it, but I couldn’t. There was too much water in it. When I tried to lift myself into it, it would nearly submerge. I had no way of bailing the water out of the kayak, and I was nearly a kilometer from shore.

“Well, I guess I asked for this.” I thought and began swimming towards shore, pushing the waterlogged kayak ahead of me.

It took me almost an hour to get to shore.

After such a mishap, most people would probably wear a life jacket, at least put a bailing can in the kayak so that they could bail out the water if the kayak flipped again.

The next day when I went kayaking again I, of course, did neither.

In fact, I decided to up the ante, and brought my Nikon D80 DSLR camera.  I hung it around my neck and put my father’s semi-waterproof kayaking jacket on over top of it so shield it from splashes.

I kayaked for 30 minutes directly towards the middle of the lake where I shot a 360-degree panorama. It was sunny and the lake was like glass. I turned around and began paddling back.

The weather turned quickly. Clouds moved across the sun and I the wind began howling through the mountain pass behind me. The waves grew quickly and I began to paddle faster.

I was in exactly the same position that I had been in the day before, kayaking diagonally through the waves, except this time the waves were bigger and I had my very expensive DSLR camera around my neck.

And I totally deserved it.

Cursing under each grunt, I paddled as fast as I could. When I was about a half a kilometer from shore, the waves began to whitecap.

Paddle, paddle, “sh*t”.

Paddle, paddle, “sh*t”.

The waves broke on the side of the kayak, splashing into it and onto my kayaking jacket. I didn’t know how waterproof the jacket actually was, and whether or not some of the water was leaking through onto my camera.

Paddle, paddle, “sh*t”.

Paddle, paddle, “sh*t”.

Finally, arms exhausted, I made it to shore. I tore off the kayaking jacket to check my camera.

It was dry.

Whew.

And, it contained this picture, which made it totally worth it.

When I was out there, I also got a good look at a section of the far shore that I hadn’t seen before.  I can’t wait to go and photograph some of the coves over there.

Nelson Vacations

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ADVENTURES IN MALAYSIAN BORNEO

PT1: Driving at Night With No Lights

PT2: Lost in a Monsoon

PT3: Salvation in Sabah

PT4: A Mountain of Bat Guano

PT5: The Eye of the Elephant

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.

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.