The Malay Archipelago, 2009 (1 Viewer)

final word from Sulawesi

After flying from Palu down to Makassar in the south of Sulawesi, I basically had just one day before leaving for Kuala Lumpur. I potentially could have gone up Gunung Lompobatang which is a mountain near Makassar and the only home of the little-known Lompobatang flycatcher which went completely unseen between 1931 and 1995, but I didn’t really know how to access the site and I knew it would have been a fool’s errand looking for the flycatcher anyway. [I have since found out how to get to the flycatcher, so it had better watch out because I'll be back to find it one day!] The other site of interest to birders near Makassar is the Karaenta forest where I could see the black-ringed white-eye, a bird restricted to the south of the island. Karaenta is about ten kilometers past a little place called Bantimurung so that’s where I headed first to see if I could get a motorbike from there. But once there I learned that visiting Karaenta is now “forbidden” without police permission because of some trouble or other that had taken place there, so that was out the window. But Bantimurung is very nice, I was told: 2km of trails through good forest, a river and waterfall, lots of birds. Were there any monkeys? I asked, because the local species is one I hadn’t yet seen, the moor macaque. Lots of monkeys, I was told. I was right there at the entrance and it wasn’t like I was going to be doing anything else, so I paid the 10,000 rupiah entrance fee (less than NZ$2) and in I went. I don’t really know how to describe Bantimurung, its not really like any place I’ve seen in Indonesia before but it is very like many places I had seen in Thailand and Malaysia where anywhere there is even the tiniest waterfall it is made into a major tourist attraction, paths are laid, cave floors paved over, sculptures set up. At Bantimurung the river is actually very nice, flowing between great high limestone cliffs pockmarked with holes and caves and laden with lush vegetation, but there are all the man-made additions to make it as little like nature as possible. There was even a stereo system blaring out Limp Bizkit and System Of A Down of all things! On the wildlife side of it I came across a foot-long giant centipede which I got quite excited about. There were butterflies everywhere, both alive in the forest and by the hundred for sale in framed boxes all the way along the entrance road. Birds were notable by their almost complete absence (full list: black-naped monarch, glossy swiftlet, hair-crested drongo, blue-eared kingfisher and an unexpected grey-streaked flycatcher), as were the macaques which was a disappointment.

There are seven species of endemic macaque in Sulawesi (or eight if you split the Togian Island macaque) and potentially I could have seen six of them in the areas I would have been visiting. I saw the black crested macaque easily at Tangkoko, as I did with the Heck’s macaques at Nantu, but I completely missed the Gorontalo macaque at Bogani, the Tonkean macaque at Lore Lindu and now also the moor macaque at Bantimurung. The fault lay entirely with my poor time-keeping skills. As I said a few posts back, I had originally been planning on spending three weeks in the Lesser Sundas and five in Sulawesi, during which time I would have spent a few days at Tangkoko, a full week at Bogani, a week at Lore Lindu, a week at Morowali, and a few days each at Nantu, Faruhumpenai, and around Makassar. However the schedule got reversed along the way and I ended up with just three weeks in Sulawesi so had to toss out Faruhumpenai (where I could have seen the booted macaque) and Morowali altogether, and cut the other places right down to just a couple of days each, meaning that there was no lee-way for finding animals that proved difficult. I did find some great animals along the way - stand-outs being the bear cuscus, spectral tarsier, babirusa, anoa, and a whole slew of endemic birds - but I also missed a lot that I could have almost certainly seen if I’d had more time up my sleeve. I think a return trip to Sulawesi is definitely in order at some stage in the future.

So that’s the first two months of my trip up already! Now its Borneo time!

Wow, I didn't know a creature looking like that Babirusa existed. I'm glad we don't have to put up with facial furniture like that.

babirusa are fantastic beasts. One of the top-most highlights of Sulawesi for me.

Here's a little prologue for the Borneo bit, just to set the scene (while I try to find the time to write the next posts):

Eastern Indonesia, despite all its trials, was a wonderful two months. I honestly was expecting Malaysian Borneo to be much the same as Indonesia in terms of general difficulties but to my great surprise I found it to instead be an absolute breeze, pretty much about as touristy as you can get. There are comfortable buses going everywhere at scheduled times, it seems that most of the locals on the regular tourist circuit speak English, nobody tries to rip the foreigners off (well, it was tried once with me, but that really stood out as unusual in this place!). On the one hand it made the Borneo part of the trip very easy, but on the other it made me feel like I should be doing something more adventurous!

In Indonesia there had been a lot of tourists in Bali (obviously), as well as in Labuanbajo and to a lesser degree Tangkoko, but outside of those three places I could have counted on the fingers of one hand the number of white people I had seen in the last two months and needless to say none of them were looking for birds. Borneo in contrast was heaving with tourists -- I could barely get away from them -- but despite it being the high-season birders seemed very thin on the ground, at least in the specific times and places I found myself. At Bako I came across a young guy from America who was on his first trip to Asia which was good as it meant I sounded like I knew what I was talking about when pointing out birds. Apparently Susan Myers was there as well but that may have been a vicious rumour. At the Rainforest Discovery Centre by Sepilok I met a Spanish birder who got so frustrated at not being able to find any birds there that he gave up and left in disgust. And in the forest at Mt. Kinabalu I met a young couple from Austria. That was the sum total. I have been told that Mr and Mrs Halftwo were in Borneo at the same time as myself but I did not meet them unless they are actually Austrian (in which case I duly apologise for eyeing up your missus when you weren't looking).

SARAWAK, Borneo Beginnings, 28-31 July

I've been having some trouble with my home internet connection so haven't posted any entries for a bit but that's all sorted now (hopefully). The other thing I've been struggling with is that because Borneo was just so gosh-darn easy to travel around in, the entries are rather boring to write. Its sort of all "went to this place, saw these birds, went to the next place, saw some more birds, no dramas anywhere". Anyway....


When I travel I prefer not to book accommodation and things ahead of time, largely because that would mean I'd have no flexibility in my plans which especially in a long trip is very important. It usually works out all right except for the minor hiccup here and there, but sometimes not so much. Well I flew into Kuching in Borneo, and fell flat on my face with my plans. I was coming into the peak of the Bornean tourist season, which I knew, but August is also the month Malaysia celebrates its independance as a nation, which I did know but hadn't really considered as a problem. Hence I quickly discovered it to be very difficult getting into the accommodation of the national parks of Sarawak. My first stop was going to be Bako National Park to see proboscis monkeys, but it was booked almost solid. I managed to get the last bed for the 1st of August, the last bed for the 2nd and one of the last for the 3rd. In the meantime I decided to go to Kubah National Park for a few days (it being not nearly so popular for some reason). While I was trying to organise these, there was a constant stream of tourists coming through the National Park office in Kuching wanting to go to stay at Bako and being told they couldn't. I really had no idea it would be so busy in Borneo. So I would still be getting to Bako, albeit later than anticipated, but Mulu National Park which was going to be one of the major spots in Sarawak for me was completely out of the question. All the accommodation at the Park HQ (including the 21 bed hostel) was booked wall-to-wall for at least the entire month of August, and there was also no room at the Royal Mulu Lodge (not that I could afford that anyway at a starting rate of about NZ$140 per night!). Potentially after I'd been through Sarawak, Brunei and Sabah, I figured I could retrace my steps and visit Mulu if there was room available then, it being after August by that stage.

So my first day in Kuching was spent trying to arrange and rearrange my schedule. For the second day I did the usual tourist thing and went to Semenggoh, which is an orangutan sanctuary where formerly pet orangs are rehabilitated to a life in the wild. Much the same as at the more famous Sepilok in Sabah but, I would have thought, less crowded -- nope! Watching tame orangs come to a platform to be fed bananas isn't really my idea of how I want to see them, but I figured this would be my cheat back-up in case I didn't get to see them in the real wild. When I got there I kind of changed my mind about that. I had expected that, as a centre for introducing orangs back into the wild, it would be somewhere in the middle of a forest out of the way of the local populace, but no. Its about 30km from the centre of Kuching and all the way from there to the entrance is lined with buildings and houses. From the entrance its only a couple of minutes drive up a road then a couple of minutes walk to where the feeding station is. Not exactly ideal if you're trying to return human-oriented orangs to the forest I'd have thought! There were perhaps a hundred tourists there to see the show. As far as I could tell that's all there really is to Semenggoh as much as the visitors get: a short paved road to the start of the unpaved track which leads to the feeding platform 300 metres into the forest, and that's it. There is another trail off into what forest there was, but it was closed to visitors. As it happened the orangutans didn't even come to the platform, they came to see the humans at the gathering point instead. There was a young male and an adult female with a five month old baby. They swung on some ropes, ate some sweet potatoes and bananas, posed for photos for the ooh-ing and aah-ing public, then left. It was kind of disturbing to me that everybody there was gushing about how this was a fantastic encounter with a "truly wild" animal when it was nothing of the sort. In a way I suppose its no different to, and just as legitimate an experience as, watching birds coming to a feeding table but it really was pretty underwhelming. "Bornean orangutan" went on my list as a wild animal seen (largely, I decided, because the baby was obviously born in the wild), but I wasn't not completely happy with it. Fortunately I saw "real" wild ones later in the trip up in Sabah so the pretend ones at Semenggoh could be discounted.

Semenggoh is only open for two short periods during the day, for the feedings, so after returning to Kuching in the late morning I went to the museum. There's a whole cluster of free museums in a park in the centre of the city. The Natural History Museum was closed for renovations but the "Old Wing" (the Ethnological Museum) has a quite large natural history section devoted to displays of native Sarawak wildlife. They all have a very very Victorian air to them, with big ornately designed cases filled with dozens of birds in contrived positions and with little scorpions and snakes and butterflies hidden amongst the branches the birds are perched on. The mammal section had a sign saying that the specimens were all prepared in London in 1900 and shipped along with their cases to Sarawak in 1911 when the museum opened. They were certainly showing both their age and the attitudes of the time. It was a bit odd seeing a glass case for a family of badly-prepared orangutans just hours after seeing live ones walking around. Unfortunately for the regular tourists none of the species were labelled beyond general signs on the cases ("wild cats", "leaf monkeys", etc), not even the bay cat. There was an Australian couple standing in front of one display and the husband was helpfully identifying all the animals for his wife: porcupine as echidna, colugo as flying squirrel, and pangolin as armadillo.

Not far from the museums is a place called Reservoir Park, a small garden area around a couple of small lakes. There were various common urban birds found here, although only three -- spectacled spiderhunter, ashy tailorbird, crimson sunbird -- were new for the trip list.

While waiting for the accommodation at Bako to free up I went to stay for a couple of nights at Kubah National Park, a forested hill/small mountain about half an hour outside of Kuching. There used to be regular buses right past the entrance but just that year many of the important bus routes ("important" in visitor terms that is) had been canned. There used to be two bus companies that did routes from airport to city, now you have to take a taxi; there is sometimes a bus that runs past Semenggoh but it is regularly cancelled so you have to take a taxi; there used to be buses every hour to Kubah, now you have to take a taxi. The Kubah run is quite a bit cheaper than some of the other routes because all the locals use the mini-van taxis so you can get there for just five Ringgits (about NZ$2.50) if the van is full. I had originally been planning on doing Kubah just as a day-trip but I'm glad I stayed. The accommodation there is very nice, cheap, and almost completely empty because most of the tourists just go to Bako and even the ones that do head to Kubah only go there on day-trips. For the regular tourist there's not much there apart for forest trails for some walking -- the birds are hard to find and even the macaques stay back in the forest and can't be seen by casual visitors -- but if you stay you can take the pace a bit easier.

Its very hot in Kuching -- very very hot! -- and its not any cooler at Kubah. There's a paved road that runs directly up to the summit, and also lots of trails through the forest and pretty much all of them go straight upwards (even the ones going downhill!), so a short walk anywhere leaves one so soaked in sweat it looks like you've fallen in a river. I took the long-adhered-to advice of the tropics and went out looking for birds in the early morning, slept through the hottest part of the day back at the hostel, and then went out again in the late afternoon for search for nocturnal beasties after nightfall. The forest at Kubah is amazingly noisy at night. I don't think I've ever been in a noisier forest. There were owls and frogmouths whooping and screaming and ponking, frogs weetling and hollering, tarsiers chittering, crickets whining and wheezing. There was even some insect doing the Jaws theme tune which was a bit disconcerting. As usual I didn't have much success with the nocturnal birds but I found a giant scorpion amongst other invertebrates, as well as a nice array of frogs (the best of which were the spotted stream frog and white-lipped frog) -- and let's face it, frog-hunting is way more fun than owl-hunting!

During the day, right around the hostel as well as out in the forest, there were numerous fancy Bornean birds such as purple-throated and red-throated sunbirds, long-billed spiderhunter, dusky munia, scarlet-rumped trogon, black and yellow broadbill, spotted fantail, and lots of others. Almost all the birds were new for the trip list, and about half were completely new for my life list. There weren't just birds out there either: variable giant squirrels, horse-tailed squirrels and the awesomely-cute black-eared pigmy squirrel helped fill in the birdless spots.

Photos: spotted stream frog at Kubah, and how the orangutan experience at Semenggoh presents itself

SARAWAK, Bako National Park, 1-4 August

Bako is one of the best-known, most-visited and oldest of Sarawak's National Parks, and it is tiny. Its pretty much right outside Kuching, on a little peninsula, and it is simplicity itself to get there. You could even do it easily as a day-trip should you feel so inclined. You just take one of the regular buses for 45 minutes from Kuching to Kampung Bako where there's a jetty, and from there take a boat for 20-30 minutes and you're there. The bus only costs 2 Ringgits, the boat 47 Ringgits (but that's split between however many people are one it), entry fee for the park 10 Ringgits, and a dorm bed about 16 Ringgits per night (my three nights came to 47.25 Ringgits if you can work that out). So how do I sum up Bako National Park? It was stinking hot and there was no water. On the last night there was no power either. It hadn't rained at Bako in quite a long time and their dam was almost empty. Sometimes the toilets flushed, mostly they didn't. Sometimes there was a trickle of water from the taps, mostly there wasn't. The streams in the forest were reduced to small puddles filled with dead leaves and little shoals of rasboras. I had a bit of a poke around to see if I could find any catfish or bettas but there appeared to just be rasboras in the pools. However on one of my nocturnal ramblings I did see a catfish of some sort in one.

The meals at Bako are served buffet-style at 7.30, 11.30 and 6.30. The food is always cold so you don't need to worry about getting there too early, but if you're too late you miss out altogether. At lunch there was often the same food as at breakfast -- not the same type of food, the exact same food leftover from earlier in the day. I had stomach pains the entire time I was there and I'm sure it was the food.

The park was very very busy, both with people staying overnight and with day-trippers, the latter often in tour groups of ten or fifteen at a time. Readers may remember that I had to book a week ago to get a bed at Bako because it was so much in demand, and I got the last bed on the 1st, the last on the 2nd and one of the last on the 3rd. Well as it turned out, while the park was undeniably top-heavy with tourists, a lot of the people that were booked in never showed up. My four-bed dorm was empty for the entire three nights I was there. And yet oddly the reception staff wouldn't let anybody stay who wasn't officially booked through the Kuching office. They just kept saying to day-trippers or people who wanted a longer stay that they were full, even though they quite plainly knew they wouldn't be full any night. On the whole I found the guides there to be very friendly, and the reception staff to be very unfriendly and unhelpful. When I first arrived the guy at reception said everybody had to sign in when they went on walks and you had to be back by 6.30. I asked why and he said "because its getting dark then. No-one's allowed out after dark."
"But I want to be out after dark, that's why I'm here," I replied.
"No, no-one is allowed on the trails after dark, its too dangerous."
We had a long discussion about this and eventually he lost his temper a bit and told me I could go out at night if I wanted but it was own responsibility if anything happened, which is what I'd been trying to get through to him all along. As it turned out I didn't find anything of interest in the forest at night, and neither did the participants of the official night walks. There are certainly interesting night animals there, including pangolins, lorises, tarsiers and mouse deer, but I think the dry weather has forced most things away back into the forest. It was very quiet in there at night, especially in contrast to the noise at Kubah. There was just the occasional owl, a frog or two and a lot of insects.

The trails at Bako are even steeper than the ones at Kubah, often just being jumbles of boulders and tree roots up the sides of hills. I walked some short trails when I first arrived but it was too hot and everything too steep and frankly I was sick of walking up and down hills, so I gave up and just sat around the headquarters like a chump watching the abundant wildlife there. The park doesn't seem overly great for birds but I must admit I wasn't trying very hard. Around the dorms there were mangrove blue flycatchers, rufous-tailed and ashy tailorbirds, common iora, fairy bluebird, pied triller, hill mynah, white-breasted woodswallow, magpie-robin, common goldenback, collared and stork-billed kingfishers, black-winged flycatcher-shrike, ruby-cheeked and crimson sunbirds, red-crowned barbet, greater coucal, chestnut-rumped babbler and others. Really Bako's speciality isn't birds though, its mammals. The first animal I saw at Bako was actually a proboscis monkey sitting in a mangrove tree as the boat came up to the jetty. The Paku trail is supposed to be the best trail for seeing proboscis monkeys but really they can be seen just as readily or even more so, and without any strenuous activity, in the trees right around the rooms where you sleep. In fact its easier to see all sorts of mammals around the headquarters than it is out on the trails, including silvered leaf monkeys with their adorable bright orange babies, massive bearded pigs, plantain squirrels, and even colugos. Most obvious are the pesky crab-eating macaques who are an absolute menace. At meal-times they often mobbed the restaurant, snatching food from people's plates right in front of them, and if they can access a room through an unlocked window or open door they will ransack the place and carry off anything small enough. The park's promotional material also claims you can sometimes observe small-clawed and hairy-nosed otters in the mangroves, which I was looking forward to (well the small-clawed otters anyway, I didn't have any faith in the claim of hairy-nosed otters!), but apparently it is rare to see them and I had no luck.

I was really trying to get some good photos of proboscis monkeys but while they were easy enough to see they proved frustratingly difficult to photograph. They liked to hide behind clusters of leaves or branches, or when in the open to position themselves against the sky so they were in silhouette. Only in the middle of the day when the sun was too strong for good photos did they sometimes come out to pose. I found a big male along the mangrove boardwalk which would have made for some nice habitat shots. He sat in a tree and ate leaves, then walked across the mud to another tree and ate leaves. I sat in one of the shelters for four hours, watching the mudskippers race the tide, waiting for the monkey to come within a good range for the camera but he never did.

Out of all the fantastic wildlife at Bako, the best one of all for me was the colugo. The vulgar masses call it a flying lemur, although it doesn't fly and it isn't a lemur. I've always wanted to see a colugo. If you don't know what one is, imagine some sort of mashed-up mix between a bat and a lemur and a flying squirrel, and that's about right. They're nocturnal, spending the day clinging to tree trunks, and because the fur is exactly like lichen-covered tree bark (except for the startlingly orange ears!) they are extremely hard to spot. There happened to be one suspended in a tree almost right outside my dorm, looking exactly like a lump of tree trunk. At dusk I returned to its tree to watch it as it became active. By day you can't really see much, just a lump of speckly fur, the forelimbs stretched out in front, the head either laid down on the trunk or raised to see what the people below are doing. Their eyes always seem to be open and they don't really seem to ever sleep while clinging to the tree. They are most odd little creatures. As night came along, the colugo started moving its head around, peering down at me, its huge bulbous eyes like glowing orbs, licking its fangy lips. Then it shuffled round to the other side of the tree, moving very much in the manner of a sloth, clambered up a branch and hung upside down, tucking its head down inside its gliding membrane, looking suspiciously like it was licking a baby. And sure enough out from the side of the wing popped a tiny grey head to have a look down at me. It was a most amazing experience. The reign of the bear cuscus as top mammal didn't last long. Best mammal I had ever seen was now the mighty wierd colugo.


Photos: Wagler's pit viper; silvered leaf monkey with baby; colugo (photo taken by torchlight at dusk with no flash so very blurry); proboscis monkey X2

SARAWAK, Niah National Park, 6-10 August

Because Mulu National Park was fully-booked up for the whole of August, I decided to go to Niah National Park for a while instead and then hopefully visit Mulu later in the trip. To get to Niah National Park from Kuching there is first a five hour boat trip to the town of Sibu. For pretty much the entire voyage up-river there were stacks of logs lining the river banks. From Sibu there is then a four hour bus ride to the town of Bintulu, through 200km of almost entirely denuded countryside and massive oil palm plantations. Outside of the national parks the end of Sarawak's wilderness areas is fast approaching. There is no longer a bus directly to Niah National Park so you need to get off at the turn-off halfway between Bintulu and Miri and take one of the private taxis that hang around there waiting for passengers. There's probably no cars there at night though so I decided to stay overnight in the mining town of Bintulu. On the boat from Kuching there was an older couple from Queensland with the same plan so we teamed up to split the cost of taxis and so on. Bintulu is a dodgy eerie sort of town that felt decidedly unsafe. Strangely we had arrived right in the middle of the annual Kite Festival which runs from the 2nd to 9th of August and every hotel was almost full, entirely unexpected in a town that nobody has heard of. The first hotel we tried, the Lai Lai Hotel where the two reception staff had the combined intellectual ability of a plantain squirrel, did have two rooms available but they were 60 Ringgits each so we thought we'd see if we could do cheaper. While Mr. Queensland waited on the sidewalk with the bags, Mrs. Queensland and I did a tour of the night-time streets looking for hotels. All were full, and they just kept getting worse and worse. At the last place we tried before settling on the Lai Lai, a fat troll of indeterminate sex and with only one working eye languidly pushed a registration form at us while an old man with a mass of sores for a face stared from the corner. The room rates were suspiciously cheap, the premises less than lowly, and when we asked to see the rooms first the troll just angrily tapped at the form with a pen. I don't think it was the sort of hotel where the customers normally stay for the whole night, if you get my drift.

The next day we headed onwards a further two hours north to the lovely little town of Batu Niah, next to the national park. We didn't stay at the Niah Cave Inn (say it out loud) because their rooms were 74 Ringgits, so went round the corner to the Niah Cave Air Cond Hotel which was cleaner and cheaper at 30 Ringgits. I spent one night in town but for the next two nights I moved to the accommodation at the park headquarters which is slightly more convenient being right at the park itself but more restricted in choice of eateries.

Niah National Park is a real place of contradictions. There are four-bed dorms but you can't just pay for one bed, you need to pay 42 Ringgits for the entire room, even if you're all alone like me. The hostel buildings have large kitchen areas with fridges and acres of cupboard space for crockery and food storage, yet cooking is forbidden and you are required to eat all your food at the park's restaurant. There is loads of accommodation at the headquarters -- seven chalets and five hostels (each hostel with four rooms of four beds), all quite flash really -- but almost nobody stays at Niah because the only attraction for most people is the cave system and its an easy day-trip from Batu Niah or even from Miri just two hours away. The HQ used to be on the same side of the river as the park, which would have been mightily convenient for the guests as they could access the park at any time they wanted, but now its on the other side so you need to rely on the hours of the boat service which means no early mornings, and no night-time trips unless you don't care about cost. I wasted the best birding hours because of the boat service. The river is only about twenty feet across but too deep to wade (and there are crocodiles in there). The boat fare is just one Ringgit, but after 7.30pm its supposed to be negotiable. On my first evening I was going to go into the forest to look for nocturnal animals, and the boatman says the fare will be 30 Ringgits! In isolation thats not a lot of money (about NZ$15) but in relation to other costs its ridiculous and its also a fair chunk of my daily budget so night-time forays were out apart for the first half-hour of dark up till 7.30pm when you're not likely to see anything except spiders anyway. In the mornings the boat was supposed to start running at 7am. I only had one free morning for birding so I was there at 7. The boat arrived at 8.15. The whole time I was waiting the forest on the other side was positively heaving with sound as the birds did their morning exercises but by the time I got over there, even though it was still only 8.30, all the activity had died down and apart for the occasional call here and there the forest was a silent as a non-haunted morgue. I was very annoyed.

The caves at Niah are really fantastic and really big (although nothing compared to Mulu of course). There is a boardwalk running right through them so its all nice and easy. The main attraction at the caves for the last several centuries have been the swiftlets that nest inside. They can fly in total darkness because they echo-locate like bats. There are three species, identified by their nests as physically the birds look almost identical to one another (although I think only two of the species are in the Niah caves). The mossy-nest swiftlet builds its nest of moss, the black-nest swiftlet of its own saliva mixed with feathers, and the edible-nest swiftlet of pure saliva. It is this last species that is the main supplier of birds-nest soup. The nests of the black-nest swiftlet are also collected but are less valuable because of the work involved in getting rid of the mixed-in feathers. The nests are really just like tasteless gelatin, their only worth coming from the difficulty of collection. The birds breed deep in the caves, cementing the nests on the walls and roofs, so to get them the nest-collectors clamber up ridiculous bamboo ladders that look like wisps of straw and swing about in the upper reccesses of the chambers a hundred feet above the floor. Its one of the more stupid food collection techniques around, for one of the more stupid food items.

Once I'd seen the caves I just spent my time wandering around on the rotting raised boardwalks through the forest looking for wildlife. Not all the wildlife was in the forest. There was a big huntsman-type spider in my room. Not as big as some of the ones I saw out at night but still big and scary enough to make most people want to vomit in terror. I don't know if they're venomous or not but they certainly look like they could be, so I trapped him under a cup from the kitchen, under which he stayed till I checked out. I probably could have taken him outside and released him the next morning but I expect spiders have the same revenge fantasies as the rest of us so I decided it was best for all concerned if he stayed under the cup during my tenancy. And speaking of big spiders I found a tarantula burrow out in the forest which had an entrance as wide as my thumb is long. I was hoping to see the inhabitant by night but the spider stayed hidden. There were naturally lots of birds around (um, during the day that is) such as various babblers (short-tailed, chestnut-rumped, chestnut-winged, scaly-crowned), sunbirds (ruby-cheeked, brown-throated, little spiderhunter), yellow-rumped flowerpeckers, chestnut-breasted malkohas and all the other usual suspects. The best of the birds were the teensy little rufous-backed kingfisher and the absolutely ginormous great slaty woodpecker (50 cm long according to the field guide). Best of the mammals was the plain pigmy squirrel which is so small it looks like a bushy-tailed mouse, and so fast they look like they're flying between the branches. Once you get your eye in, the pigmy squirrels are everywhere in the forest. (Truthfully, the plain pigmy squirrels were one of only three mammal species I saw at Niah, the other two being the variable giant squirrel and the lesser tree shrew).

When I left Niah I took the secret direct taxi that the locals use when travelling to Miri which only costs 20 Ringgits, cheaper than the combination of car to junction and then bus to Miri, and also faster. It left Niah at 8.15am so I was anticipating getting all the way to my destination in Brunei on the same day but when I arrived in the Miri bus terminal at 9.30am I discovered that rather than buses all day long to the border as I had thought there would be (translation: as there used to be), there are just two, at 9am and 3.30pm. Another taxi driver at the terminal kindly offered to take me to the border town for just 100 Ringgits. When I baulked at this ridiculous price and said it was too expensive he responds with, "no, very cheap"!! The 3.30pm bus wasn't really worth catching so I stayed for the night in Miri at the surprisingly nice and professional Cosy Inn. Miri is a very nice town, the kind of place where you could stay for a week or more just to relax. Something that wasn't to my taste though were the numerous seafood restaurants everywhere with rows and rows of tanks of live fish, crabs, river shrimps and even big mangrove frogs, all fresh for the table. One of them was even called the Seaworld Seafood Restaurant which conjured up some interesting mental images!! It was mainly the frogs that made me sad because I really like frogs (to look at, not to eat). I went looking for a post office and instead I found a pet shop just a few doors down from the Cosy Inn, filled with baby turtles and tortoises, hamsters, mice, kittens, puppies and fish. Strangely enough, the staff didn't seem to think it at all wierd that I was wandering round taking photos of their fish tanks. I guess nothing tourists do is odd any more.


Photos: rufous-sided sticky frog (great name for a great frog); assassin bug; giant cave cricket in its natural habitat

BRUNEI, 11-14 August

You’ve got to feel a bit sorry for the tourism department of Brunei. The country has a reputation for being very expensive and most tourists only use it for a logistically-required stop-over of a day or two when travelling overland between Sarawak and Sabah. I wasn’t any different with three days, the first and last being days for arriving and departing, so just one proper day in the country. Brunei has masses of forest left, because its so rich from oil it doesn’t need to chop it all down and convert to plantations, but a lot of the reserves are quite difficult and/or expensive to access. I did like Brunei though and it really didn't seem overly expensive after all, so I decided that I would return there for a few more days on my way back down from Sabah to Sarawak (which didn't happen in the end but never mind).

Its very easy to get from Miri in Sarawak to Brunei’s capital Bandar Seri Begawan (known ubiquitously by the ugly abbreviation BSB), but you have to like bus travel - it takes four of them over the course of the day! When coming from BSB to Miri there is apparently one combined ticket all the way, but Sarawak doesn’t like its own buses going into Brunei so when travelling in the reverse direction you need to do a few change-overs. The first bus goes from Miri to the border immigration point at Sungai Tujoh. For almost the entire way the landscape on either side of the road was just black ash, all the land burned off presumably to make way for oil palms. They didn’t even appear to have cleared the trees first, just set the whole damn place on fire. There was the charred corpse of a monkey by the roadside at one point. White plumes of smoke were still rising from the scorched earth all along the way. It was incredibly depressing.

Things are taken very seriously at the Brunei border point. Everybody was required to stop individually in front of a thermal-imaging screen to make sure nobody had swine flu which at that time was in full-swing around the world. I’d picked up a cough in the last week or so and I was always worried I was going to get detained and quarantined at checkpoints. Once safely past the health check everybody had their bags searched. Not the casual flick-through for suspicious-looking hobo types but a thorough and complete emptying of every single bag for every single person. After that the second bus takes you across the border into Brunei to Kuala Berait, then a third to Serai, and finally the last one to BSB. And then I jumped on a speedboat for a 45 minute trip up-river to the little town of Bangar, which confusingly for me was also called Temburong! There was palm forest (wild nipa palm forest, not oil palm plantation) all the way along the river, and then the town itself appeared to be surrounded by rainforest. Certainly a big change from Sarawak. I stayed at the Pusat Belia (the Youth Centre), even though my youth days are well and truly gone. It’s a very flash sort of youth centre with air-conditioning in the main room, hot showers, everything like that, and its only B$10 for a dorm bed (and I think I was the only person in the whole building).

The next morning I went to the Peradayan Forest Reserve, about 15km out of town. The bit of the reserve that visitors can go to is called the Bukit Patoi Forest Recreation Park. There’s just one trail there, basically going straight up the side of a hill, although mostly boardwalked and stepped so quite easy, then it hits a big stone cliff-face covered in mosses and herbs, curves up the side onto the top of the plateau and stops at a look-out. There used to be more of the trail but its been abandoned and is now overgrown. I found another old trail up there as well which followed the line of the plateau edge, where I spent part of the day. There’s no public transport in Bangar so you have to go to Peradayan by taxi, which costs B$30 return, but you can pick your own hours at least. Because I only had the one day I set off at 6.30am and arranged a pick-up time of 8pm. I didn’t really see a whole lot during the day as it happened. In the morning the air was filled with the sound of calling gibbons and hornbills but the forest was so thick that there was no way I would be seeing them unless they were sitting in the trees right above my head. So I saw no gibbons and only brief non-identifiable glimpses of flying hornbills through gaps in the canopy. It wasn’t until near the end of the day that I finally got a good look at one of the reserve’s six species of hornbill when I spotted a rhinoceros hornbill perched on an open branch. Among the few other new birds I saw were a fabulous pair of striped wren-babblers, surely one of the most outstandingly-attractive birds of the trip (much nicer than their pictures in field guides), yellow-vented flowerpecker and grey-chested (white-throated) jungle-flycatcher. The plain pigmy squirrels were ubiquitous here as well. So it was one of those bad birding days and my Brunei list remained pitifully small.

The next morning I took the speedboat back to BSB and went to the bus station to get the bus to the ferry terminal for Sabah (yes, its another one of those travel days everybody loves). It was a bit like when I arrived in Miri to get the bus to Brunei - rather than ferries to Pulau Labuhan throughout the day as my pre-trip-gathering information had claimed there were only two in the early morning which I’d missed, and four in the late afternoon, two of which had already been cancelled. So I had to sit around in the terminal’s waiting room for four hours (hence the term “waiting room” I guess). The boat goes first to the island of Pulau Labuhan where Malaysian Immigration is, and then there’s another ferry from there to Kota Kinabalu, state capital of Sabah. Of course I’d missed the connection; I really don’t know why travel companies don’t tie their schedules together for the benefit of their customers. However for those people like me who are morons and don’t catch boats on time, there are also speedboats that go from Pulau Labuhan to a town called Menumbok on the adjoining mainland, from where (again, if you are in time) there are buses to KK. So that’s what I did, and I ended up halfway through the night in KK at a charming establishment called the Gaya Hotel where the only thing missing from my 15 Ringgit room was the chalk outline of the previous tenant. After one night there I moved to Lucy’s Homestay where I had to have a dorm bed but at least I didn't need to be worried about my stuff being stolen from the room.

Striped Wren-Babbler gets a big thumbs up from me too Chlid. Only seen them once, at Taman Negara, and thought "Wow!"

Great stuff. My favorite part of the world.

An excellent guide to the buses taxis and bureaucracy of Sarawak (plus the odd mammal and bird). I think I know now why everyone I know goes to Sabah!

Great Slaty Woodpecker is a monster, and your sticky frog looks like it could be related to our Spotted Narrow-mouthed Frog.

Cheers
Mike

Larry Wheatland said:

Striped Wren-Babbler gets a big thumbs up from me too Chlid. Only seen them once, at Taman Negara, and thought "Wow!"

Click to expand...

they are a tasty little dish of babblery goodness. I saw some at the Danum Valley as well, a little bit later.

MKinHK said:

An excellent guide to the buses taxis and bureaucracy of Sarawak (plus the odd mammal and bird). I think I know now why everyone I know goes to Sabah!
Great Slaty Woodpecker is a monster, and your sticky frog looks like it could be related to our Spotted Narrow-mouthed Frog.

Click to expand...

well Mulu National Park in northern Sarawak is well-patronised by visiting birders but it seems like a lot of them just add it on to a Sabah trip, simply flying in from KK and back. It is true that not many seem to visit Sarawak much but maybe that's more a consequence of it being less well-known?

You're right, the rufous-sided sticky frog is closely related to your spotted narrow-mouthed frog - both are in the same genus, Kalophrynus

SABAH, Mt. Kinabalu, 15 - 19 August

Because Borneo was so full of tourists it seemed best to do the thing that I don’t like doing, and arrange all my accommodations in Sabah in advance. So on my first day in Kota Kinabalu I booked myself stupid to make sure of getting to the places I wanted to get to, arranging stays of four nights at Mt. Kinabalu National Park, then five nights at the Danum Valley Field Centre, followed by two nights at the Kinabatangan River, two nights at Sepilok and two nights at Poring Hot Springs. There really were a lot of tourists on this island, and all the tourists themselves seem surprised at this. Think “Borneo” and you think untrammelled rainforest, not tourist crowds, but its just one big intermeshed web of tourist routes. The two Dutch lingerie models that were in my dorm at Kubah National Park turned up at Bako National Park, half the people from Bako passed through Niah National Park while I was there, a couple of them were then on my bus to Brunei, I ran into a guy I’d met in Kuching when I got to Kota Kinabalu, and a girl from my hotel in KK then turned up at Mt. Kinabalu.

Mt. Kinabalu is about three hours by bus from KK, and its a fabulous place. It was definitely nice to get to somewhere cooler. It hadn’t rained in Borneo for quite some time and every day seemed hotter than the last, the heat just continually building up with no rain to stave it off. I stayed at a pleasant little place called the Bayu Homestay (aka Bayu Lodge), where a dorm bed costs 20 Ringgits (about NZ$10). Its situated on the main road about five minutes walk from the entrance to the park. The accommodation inside the park itself is operated by a company called Sutera Lodges. Their prices used to be high, now they’re insane! 120 Ringgits for a dorm bed (NZ$60), up to 3500 Ringgits (NZ$1750) for a six-bed room; and if you’re climbing the mountain the cost of a dorm bed at the rest point of Laban Rata starts at 320 Ringgits (NZ$160)! If you want to get a minivan to KK the park charges 150 Ringgits (NZ$75), but if you walk two minutes from the HQ out onto the main road you can get a public one for 15 Ringgits (NZ$7.50). Its an expensive exercise climbing Mt. Kinabalu, but its very popular. In the peak (no pun intended) tourist season the park’s accommodation is fully-booked and so are the climbing permits. I fully suspect that very few tourists visiting the area even realise that there's other cheaper accommodation available so nearby. You can climb the mountain in one day if you’re very fit or very crazy. In fact there’s a race held every year where very fit and crazy people do exactly that. The fastest time in 2008, up to the summit and back down again to the start point at the Timpohon Gate, was 2 hours 44 minutes and 47 seconds. But most people take about six hours just to reach Laban Rata at the 6km point, where they then get a few hours sleep before climbing the last 4km to the summit in the dark so they can be up there when the sun comes up and they get a fabulous view of mist - or, I hear, sometimes a sunrise over a spectacular view. You pays your moneys and you takes your chances. I could never have climbed the whole mountain even if I'd tried: it took me five hours just to reach Layang Layang at the 4km point because I was stopping every 100 metres to look at things and take photos. There was a couple staying at the Bayu Homestay though who did the whole climb from Timpohon Gate to the summit and back in ten hours. They looked a bit tired when they came down.

If you are doing the full climb to the summit you need to pay for a guide, but you can go up to the Layang Layang point by yourself as I did on my third day there. There are certain birds that are only found at higher altitudes on the mountain for which as a birder you need to do at least this part of the climb to have a chance of seeing, like the Kinabalu friendly warbler - which wasn’t so friendly towards me and remained hidden. There are also lots of regular day-tripper tourists to the park who do the climb to Layang Layang, and I don’t really understand why. I can understand climbing to the summit because that’s an achievement, something to be proud of; and if you’re a birder or a botanist or an entomologist or something like that then going only as far as Layang-Layang is understandable because you’re looking for specific things at that level; but the regular folk who just struggle up the steps without ever really looking at anything except their feet, reach Layang Layang, and then turn around and come down again I don’t understand at all. I mean, its not like you can go home and boast about having climbed a third of the way up a mountain!!

Although I didn’t find the un-friendly warbler, I did see some of the other mountain birds like the Kinabalu bush-warbler. The spot-throated form (oreophila) is found up here, but there is also the "typical" form which is found from the HQ all the way up as high as Laban Rata -- I have no idea what the score is with these: they are treated as subspecies but by definition two subspecies cannot live in the same place. I am confused. About 700 metres up from Timpohon Gate is a set of near-vertical steps, and the trees either side were always full of birds. Here you can almost be guaranteed of seeing the mountain black-eye. At about km 3 there are bamboo stands in which I have read you may see tawny-breasted parrotfinch but I didn't. The most excellent sighting for me above Timpohon Gate was a pair of black-breasted fruithunters, absolutely stunning birds and probably my absolute favourite of all Bornean birds. They were exactly at km 3 where there is open forest on the right side of the path with an understory of bamboo and tree ferns (to the left of path is scrubby bank where there were bush-warblers also). The male was here on a bare branch about mid-level (I even got photos, which is not something I normally manage with the forest birds). A bit further along the trail (c.km 3.2) was a pair right above the path, the male of which was probably the one I'd seen previously.

There was also a nice variety of small mammals along the Summit Trail, from the weeny Jentinck’s squirrel, like a super-charged arboreal rat, to the snackiverous mountain ground squirrel, as well as mountain tree-shrews. On the way back down the Summit Trail it started to really pour down which put an end to the birding, but did bring out the 70cm Kinabalu giant earthworms, found only on this mountain. What the rain didn’t bring out was the earthworms’ main predator, the 30cm Kinabalu giant leech, again found only on Mt. Kinabalu and something I’d been hoping to see. However the next day, once more in the wet embrace of another thunderous downpour, I did come across what I can only assume was the Kinabalu giant leech. It was a leech, it was certainly giant, but was it the Kinabalu giant leech? Without any real working knowledge of the Mt. Kinabalu leech fauna I don’t know for sure.

Most of my time at Kinabalu was spent not on the Summit Trail but in the forest lower down. Pretty much everybody goes to the mountain just to climb to the top and then they leave straight afterwards, so you don’t see many other visitors on the forest trails and those you do see are usually birders. There are absolutely tonnes of birds here, and many of them come in waves. Sometimes it seemed as if every 100 metres I was meeting another bird-wave. They’re kind of a blessing and a curse. On the one hand you get several species all at once, but on the other hand most of them are new to you so you’re trying to identify unfamiliar birds from a flock of several different unfamiliar birds, and then a fog bank rolls in so you can’t see anything anyway! After the first day or two though you’ve got the commoner core birds sorted out and can flick through them to concentrate on the less common wavers. There are actually two types of bird-waves, small birds and larger birds. Small bird bird-waves consist mostly of grey-throated babbler, Bornean whistler, yellow-breasted warbler and white-throated fantail, with random additions of indigo flycatcher, eye-browed jungle-flycatcher, black-fronted white-eye, mountain leaf-warbler, etc. (Two-species waves of just the grey-throated babbler and eye-browed jungle-flycatcher were also common). The larger bird bird-waves were made up of chestnut-capped and Sunda laughing-thrushes, ochraceous bulbuls and short-tailed green magpie, with random additions of eg Bornean tree-pie, ashy drongo and various woodpeckers.

One of the more sought-after birds of Mt. Kinabalu is the endemic Whitehead’s trogon. I’ve never had much luck with finding trogons so I wasn’t going to be too surprised if I couldn’t find this one, but I’d barely arrived at the park (well, fourth day, but who’s counting?) before I saw my first pair on the Liwagu Trail, and then just twenty minutes further up the same trail I came across no fewer than four of them all moving as a group, sort of a “trogon wave” you might say. I also managed to spy the cute little Whitehead’s pigmy squirrel, which is only a bit bigger than the tiny plain pigmy squirrel of the lowlands and has long white ear-tufts, so long in fact that they look like horns giving it the appearance of some sort of devil-mouse. I couldn’t for the life of me find the Whitehead’s spiderhunter or Whitehead’s broadbill though. If you’re wondering, and I know you are, John Whitehead was an English zoologist who spent a lot of time in southeast Asia collecting museum specimens. He was the first non-local person to climb to the summit of Mt. Kinabalu, in 1877. He named the highest point Low’s Peak after Sir Hugh Low who was the first to attempt the climb some years earlier.

The best trail without question was the Liwagu Trail, most profitably done I feel from the bottom, going from HQ up to Timpohon Gate; this trail skirts a river valley so has good vantage points. I saw most of my trogons along this trail; they do seem very easy to find -- eleven here on various days but only one pair elsewhere (at the lower entrance to the Bukit Ular Trail). I also saw pigmy blue flycatchers here several times. There was a Bornean whistling thrush holding a territory near the top of the trail and in the area round the Timpohon Gate where he was always easy to find, and the Austrian couple and I managed to spot an Everett's thrush near the top of the trail as well. Bornean montane forktails (split from the white-crowned forktail of the lowlands) were common along the streams. Mammals in the forest by day included black-banded squirrel, variable giant squirrel and smooth-tailed tree-shrew.

Its not all birds at Mt. Kinabalu. The place is an entomologist’s dream. Even just the Bayu Homestay would be heaven for a lepidopterologist. The variety of moths there was extraordinary, from tiny ones the size of ants to ones the size of small family cars, and all the colours of the rainbow from brown to another shade of brown (also white, green, multi-hued, etc etc). On one of my daily treks through the bush I took some time out from birding to have a dabble in one of the mountain streams, where in just one small side-pool I found freshwater crabs and limpets, the nymphs of dragonflies and damselflies, the tadpoles of what were probably large-eyed litter frogs, and three different species of hillstream loaches.

But too soon my allotted time at Mt. Kinabalu was up and I had to leave for the hotter climes of the Danum Valley….


Photos: the black-breasted fruithunter, in full "habitat" shot and a blown-up section

OK now I'm freaked out - no personal pain, no rip-off (for you at least), easy travel, no leprous hunchbacks, but instead nice accommodation, multiple lingerie models, and masses of good birds . . . am I in the right thread?

and that's why everyone goes to Sabah! |8)|

Congratulations on a superb read!!!

I've spluttered a mug of coffee across my laptop laughing at some of your antics and the bizarre predicaments you frequently found yourself in. But the truth is -I wish I had the courage and the youth to embark upon such a journey.

I take my hat off to you sir!

I believe the appropriate lowland Scots term is "Nae Feart"

thanks Steve. The main aim of the trip was the wildlife but the main aim of the thread is fun.

I just hope I don't put anyone off going to Indonesia because despite the trials it is a fantastic place and well worth visiting (and of course I have generally left out all the boring stuff where everything went according to plan because that's not so interesting to read). One just needs to keep a sense of humour as one travels.

SABAH, Danum Valley, 19 - 24 August

I’d booked a seat on the first morning bus passing by Mt. Kinabalu en route to Lahad Datu. My destination was the Danum Valley, one of the last best hopes for the survival of Bornean wildlife. There are two places to stay in the Danum Valley: at the Borneo Rainforest Lodge (BRL) for which my pockets were nowhere deep enough, and the Danum Valley Field Centre (DVFC) which is a research facility that also admits “keen naturalists” (and apparently everybody else as well, as the place turned out to be full of regular backpacker- and tourist-types who had little real interest in the wildlife at all. Of those that were there for wildlife most were mammal-watchers and not birders). The DVFC local office is in Lahad Datu and they have a mini-van to take in the tourists, but only at 3.30pm on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Any other day you need to charter a car for around 350 Ringgits. The first bus past Mt. Kinabalu would get me to Lahad Datu with an ample hour and a half to spare before the DVFC transport left, so all should have been well as I had a pre-booked ticket. The bus did arrive at Mt. Kinabalu right on time. The problem was that it didn’t stop! There were some other tourists there too who were booked on another bus to Semporna, which lies beyond Lahad Datu. Their bus didn’t stop either. Neither did the next two buses. Then there were no more buses for, you guessed it, an hour and a half. We finally got a bus to stop and all piled on board. The driver assured me we would reach Lahad Datu by 2.20pm. I doubted that. At 1pm the bus pulled into a road-side restaurant for a meal-break. The station-master there said the bus would get to Lahad Datu at 3pm. I doubted that too. The way I figured the sums, I’d get to Lahad Datu somewhere between 3.30 and 4pm. I’d either get there just in time or just too late. It was one of those real nail-biters as the bus came up to the town. I was looking at my watch every thirty seconds, then looking at the clock in the front of the bus which was five minutes behind my watch but it didn’t matter anyway because both of them had already ticked past 3.30. Would the DVFC transport be running behind schedule? No it would not. I missed it by about ten minutes.

Before leaving New Zealand I had repeatedly tried to contact the DVFC via email to arrange my stay there with absolutely no success. Apparently this is very common. When I first got to Kota Kinabalu I therefore visited the main office in the Menara Tun Mustapha building and talked to a nice lady and sat there while she phoned the Lahad Datu office and organised everything. So you might have thought the mini-van would have waited for me in case I was just running a bit late but it turned out that the local office didn’t even know about my booking, even though I’d made it just a week ago. The bus foul-up sort of worked in my favour though because an extremely pretty young lady named Rifhan from the office was heading out to the DVFC after work to start her month-long shift there and she said she’d give me a ride. The road to the Danum Valley is surprisingly bad, not the worst I’ve been on in Asia but certainly in the top ten bad roads. It takes about two and a half hours to get there, passing logging trucks and signs warning to be careful of logging trucks all along the way. I didn’t get much in the way of scenery because it was already dark by the time we hit the forested area.

Although the Field Centre is the cheaper of the two Danum Valley accommodation options, its still reasonably pricy. The entry fee is 30 Ringgits; transport from Lahad Datu 65 Ringgits each way; dorm bed 66 Ringgits per night (there are two 48-bed dorm rooms, one for men and one for women - there are also rooms which are more expensive); breakfast 18 Ringgits, lunch 14 Ringgits and dinner 28 Ringgits (all served buffet-style, but they can also make packed lunches to take out into the field with you). Lots of birders who stay here make a day-trip to the Borneo Rainforest Lodge to find some extra birds, and this costs 160 Ringgits per person.

I met my very first examples of Borneo’s infamous tiger leeches on my very first day in the forest here. The Danum Valley is renowned for its leech population but so far this whole trip I’d only seen three leeches so I was hopeful that the DVFC would be just as leech-free. In any case, leeches have never been a problem for me. I’ve had hundreds of leeches on me over the years and only once has one ever taken a bite and no doubt that individual died soon after. I had been a bit apprehensive about the tiger leeches though because they don’t come at you across the ground like regular leeches but instead wait in the undergrowth, hanging from leaves to latch onto your upper body as you brush past. I’d heard stories of people getting them in their ears, up their nostrils, and even on their eyeballs! I met the first individual as I was going off-trail to try and get into a position to see what sort of monkey was up in a tree. As I pushed past the saplings I felt something land on my arm, and there it was, a good 5cm long. I flicked it away before it could bite but then noticed another on a nearby leaf, and then another, and another. I was literally surrounded by dozens of tiger leeches, all of them stretching off the leaf edges, waving their loathsome bodies at me like I was in some kind of lame student horror movie. I figured I may as well get a photo of one, but as I was lining up the shot the leech disappeared from view. It had just dropped off the leaf onto the ground to get to me, which was surprising as I’d been under the impression they didn’t do that. I looked down to see where it had gone and the entire surface of the ground around my boots was literally a moving carpet of leeches. The ends of the trousers were already turning scarlet from my blood. I’d read that unlike that of the little terrestrial loopers, the bite of the tiger leech is painful but I never felt a thing. Otherwise I’m sure I would have noticed sooner that one adventurous little blighter had made it all the way up to the top of the inside of my trouser leg and attached itself to my scrotum! The funny thing with leeches is that they are actually completely harmless. Sure you lose a little blood and get your clothes a bit ruined, but they don’t carry any sort of disease whatsoever, unlike mosquitoes or fleas. And yet they fill most people, myself included, with revulsion when they afix themselves to your person. That day I unpacked my leech socks.

A lot seemed to have changed at the DVFC recently. Now, for example, you had to have a guide on all the trails except the 500 metre Nature Trail, and the guides cost 20 Ringgits per hour which would mount up quickly if you’re a birder out in the field for fifteen hours every day. Really nobody (visitors nor staff) seemed to be paying any attention to this guide-only rule though. In any case it appeared that almost all the trails were officially off-limits. You weren’t supposed to be on any of the grid system, not on any of the longer trails, and the Elephant Ridge and Rhino Ridge trails were completely out-of-bounds. Rifhan said I could walk the main track of the grid system by myself so long as I didn’t stray from it and came back the same way. So that is what I did. Unfortunately my bad trekking skills meant that I accidentally, completely by mistake, made a wrong turn at the W21 marker and, oh dear, ended up on the Elephant Ridge trail. The reason the Elephant Ridge trail was so important to my visit was that there was supposed to be a rhinoceros wallow there. The rhinos in Borneo are, despite their common name, Sumatran rhinos (so-called because that’s where most of the remaining world population is found now). They’re quite small, very hairy, and very endangered. On Borneo they’re almost extinct. A chap by the name of Vladimir Dinets had seen a rhino in its wallow on this trail. Honestly I don't put much faith in everything that Dinets claims, but of the rhino he had a photo to prove it. However his website’s directions weren’t exactly pinpoint. The gen was also several years old, but rhinos live a long time and are generally pretty faithful to their territory. The chances I’d find the wallow were iffy, and the chances that there’d actually be a rhino visiting it at the same time as me even more iffy. There had been a National Geographic film crew in the Danum Valley for two months before I got there and while they were getting fantastic footage of all sorts of wildlife they hadn’t seen any rhinos, so the outlook for me wasn’t good but, nevertheless, I had to give it a go. The reason the trail was no longer allowed to be walked was because the maintenance of it had been abandoned. It certainly was quite rough in places where the vegetation had swallowed all traces of the path, and fallen trees and tangles of vines blocked other parts, but I’d read Bear Grylls’ survival manual so I was prepared. Fortunately, and surprisingly, the trail was almost devoid of leeches. It was even more devoid of rhinos. I found a large depression about halfway along that looked very much like it had once been a rhino wallow but it was now dry and filled with small saplings. I went all the way to the end of the trail at the Segama River, and that was the only place where there could have been a wallow. So the rhino hunt was a failure. But on the way back, as I rounded a corner in the track, I saw an orangutan! He was huge, looking like he probably weighed as much as I do, and he was only about 20ft away and about 6ft off the ground. I suspect he had come down to the ground to cross to another tree (as the big males often do due to their weight) and he’d heard me coming so decided to head up the nearest tree. He shinned up the tree at what I guess was a rush for an orangutan and once up in the canopy (about 30ft because he’d picked a small tree) there was a furious shaking of branches causing a cascade of leaves to shower down. I just sort of stood there for a minute or so, not really sure how a wild male orangutan would react next to my presence, but the path led right under his tree so I didn’t have much choice about going closer. Remarkably, as I was going past and looking up to see where he was, it was as if the tree was empty. How something so big can vanish amongst the branches is surprising. If I hadn’t seen him go up there I would have walked right on by not even suspecting I was that close to an orangutan. As you may recall, I’d seen (ahem) “wild” orangutans at Semenggoh but that was just a pale imitation of what its like to see a real wild one, hours into the forest from the nearest humans. Sometimes the fleeting encounters are the most memorable. (Afterwards I found out that orangutan sightings are very common in the Danum Valley, even right around the Field Centre, but that doesn’t take away from my moment).

The Danum Valley is home to most of the lowland mammal species of Borneo so night-time explorations here can be very rewarding. As some examples of what can be seen on the scheduled night-drives, on the 19th of August (the night I’d arrived) there were spotted two species of flying squirrel, a small-toothed palm civet and a slow loris; and one in June saw a clouded leopard and two marbled cats! In 2005 I think it was, someone even claimed a sighting of a bay cat! When I arrived at the Field Centre it was already dark so the approach was like my own private night-drive, although the only thing seen was a Malay civet. The next night’s drive was fully-booked, so my first “real” night-drive here was on my third night. I was really expecting more given that this is a scientific research facility. Granted the night-drives are just a tourist thing but I think you can still expect a little more by way of identification from the guide than “owl”, “bat” or “mouse deer”. It was a very quiet night and almost the only things seen worth mentioning were a greater mouse deer, a short-nosed fruit bat, a sleepy crested serpent-eagle and a giant flying squirrel of some kind that was little more than a distant couple of glowing orbs of eyeshine. It was on this drive that I got stung by an enormous wasp. The sting hurt going in, hurt more coming out, and then the puncture site just kept getting more and more painful as the night went on, raising into a welt while the arm around it swelled and turned red. It felt like I’d poured boiling water over it. After the drive was over I could barely straighten my arm. The driver said it would be fine by morning but he must be more immune to them than I because it remained somewhat swollen and tender for the next two days, and the puncture site remained visible for the next six months!. Getting attacked by a wasp was the last thing I’d expected on a night-drive! As it turned out that was the only night-drive I got because the next night there was no-one else to share the 160 Ringgit cost, and the night after that it was cancelled due to rain. Walks in the forest by myself revealed only the easily-identifiable diademed roundleaf bat and a lot of unidentifiable “other” bats, a buffy fish owl, and various glowing eyes that refused to resolve themselves into animals.

All in all, looking for animals in the Danum Valley was jolly hard work. A few people there were seeing monkeys and civets and weasels all over the show, but most of us were really struggling. There are loads of birds there but half of them went unidentified because they’re too fast or too far up in the canopy. And its also one of those forests where you get a bunch of birds all at once and then nothing for hours. Mammals were even more difficult, apart for the bearded pigs and sambar deer around the HQ. I saw only four primates total (a red leaf monkey, the orangutan, and a pair of Mueller’s gibbons, although all were excellent viewings), and only two species of squirrel (Low's and plain pigmy). There were otter footprints every day on the river banks but I could never catch a sight of them, even though I waited in hiding for three hours on the suspension bridge in the pouring rain one evening where I was sure some otters had holed up for the day.

Its not as hot at the Danum Valley as some of the other places I’ve been recently but its still like a Turkish bath when you’re dragging your sorry carcasse up another hill seeing nothing but tiger leeches. I did winkle out some quality birds though, including silver-rumped spinetail and great-billed heron from the suspension bridge, Oriental darter from elsewhere on the river, and from the forest white-browed shama, plain and ruby-cheeked sunbirds, grey-breasted and little spiderhunters, Malaysian blue flycatcher, brown fulvetta, striped wren-babbler, red-billed malkoha, dark-throated oriole and great argus pheasant amongst others of less note. I only found three hornbills, namely wreathed, Malayan black and rhinoceros and I just could not find the sought-after helmeted hornbill. I could hear them calling every day, all day long, sounding sort of like a gibbon building up to a kookaburra laugh, but they remained completely invisible to me. Very frustrating!

I saw three black-headed pittas one after the other in the little gullies on the climb up the hill that the main track of the grid system runs up, and on the Nature Trail also found two blue-headed pittas. Now, some of my readers may have gained the impression that I hate pittas, probably from me having written "I hate pittas". The truth is that I only hate those pittas that refuse to let me see them; the ones that I do get to see I think are quite lovely. And the blue-headed pitta has to be one of the most lovely of all. If the blue-headed pitta was a woman she would be the sort that is so far out of your league that she is naught but a dot on the distant horizon, but just to catch a glimpse of her strolling across your path brings joy to your heart. Hmmm, I think I really need to get a girlfriend...

Prize of all the birds here though was the Bornean bristlehead which is a bizarre black-feathered crow-like thing with a brilliantly-scarlet and yellow head that is naked and covered in fleshy papillae. There was a group of about six in the trees by the watch-tower on the Nature Trail.

In total I only got 45 bird species while at Danum Valley (if I’d actually identified everything I saw it would probably be around 70) which is low but for half the time there were just no birds around. Mammal total was only eleven species which has to also be considered low for the area. I really needed more time -- like a month! -- but because I’d booked and paid for the Kinabatangan River in advance I couldn’t change my schedule, which of course is why I don’t like to book things in advance!


Photo: tiger leeches!!!!

SABAH, Kinabatangan River, 24 - 26 August

I think I’m probably going to make myself unpopular amongst people who have been there and loved it, but I found the Kinabatangan River to be distinctly underwhelming. For anybody who’d just arrived in Borneo and been nowhere else it must seem magical but for me, having been lucky enough to have probably been spoiled by travel, it was a big disappointment. Partly it was my fault due to a poor choice of accommodation, partly it was because I hate organised tours and activities, and partly it was because its just really not that great. My two main reasons for going were to see the Bornean “pigmy” elephant and the rare Storm’s stork, both of which I did see so that was the objective fulfilled, but apart for those and a few other good sightings I really felt like I’d have been better off staying another three days at the Danum Valley instead. It was a shame too because I was really wanting and expecting the Kinabatangan to be one of the high-points of the Borneo leg of this trip.

My original intention had been to stay at the Sukau B&B in the riverside town of Sukau, which apparently has good forest right nearby, and where you can just hire boats for trips up and down the river at times that suit you. Instead I ended up at a place that I wasn’t even sure of the name of, having stupidly decided that a set price with boat trips all-inclusive would be more convenient. On the pamphlet that acted as the receipt their name appeared to be the “Kinabatangan Safari” but the sign on their docks when I got there was the rather curious “Nasalis larvatus (Nature Lodge Kinabatangan)”. Their slogan was the cringe-worthy “It’s a jungle out there”. The package was the standard three day - two night deal, and included two afternoon boat trips, two morning boat trips and two night walks. Their promotional material heralded their location as “off the tourist route” which wasn’t really true and in any case is completely irrelevant because the boats from all the many tourist lodges all go to exactly the same places on the river. At times there would be twelve or more boat-loads of tourists massed at the bank where there were some elephants or proboscis monkeys. I thought the tarsier tree at Sulawesi’s Tangkoko National Park was a circus but that’s nothing compared to the Kinabatangan River experience. The most annoying thing from my point of view (apart for the hundreds of flies constantly crawling over everything and driving me INSANE!) was that it was literally impossible to do anything alone. Even a walk in the beaten-up forest around the lodge was completely forbidden without a guide because it was “too dangerous”, and the guides only took out groups of ten or fifteen depending on how many people there were staying there, which is useless for wildlife-spotting, especially in the middle of the day when they did it. So instead I stayed back at the lodge during the day and, because there were only so many birds available to see in the surrounds and they were all very common species, I largely occupied myself chatting up a young lass called Ziha who worked there doing very little. As she didn't speak any English I was pretty much the only tourist who could talk to her (Malaysian and Indonesian are basically the same language and I'd made sure I had become fluent enough to enable flirting with girls). Apart for that diversion I just found the whole place frustrating, although at least most of the guests were genuinely interested in wildlife and not the usual sort of idiot backpackers who don’t have two brain cells to rub together.

The wildlife on the river was reasonably good, not as good as I thought it would be and certainly not a patch on Bako for instance, but it was alright. The first afternoon boat-trip we spotted an orangutan, numerous crab-eating macaques (which the boat-driver insisted on constantly stopping for, which was another source of annoyance to pretty much everybody), proboscis monkeys, a distant soaring Storm’s stork, a pair of rhinoceros hornbills, and a group of elephants. Calling them “pigmy elephants” is a stretch but they are definitely smaller than the usual Asian elephants. Their restricted presence in Sabah is a bit of a mystery, nobody really knowing if they’re truly native to Borneo or if they were introduced by people a few hundred years ago. The latest I heard was that they were probably introduced from Java where elephants are now extinct, which handily explains the discrepancies in their Borneo history and the elephants’ distinctiveness from all other living Asian elephant populations. On that first day the elephants were at the river’s edge, as they usually are I guess, but mostly hidden from view by the towering grasses twice as high as the elephants’ backs so good photos were out of the question although I was more than happy just to watch them feeding. On the second afternoon trip there were no elephants, which is the luck of the draw, but there were lots of Oriental pied hornbills, as well as the notable spectacle of three primate species in a single tree (proboscis monkeys, crab-eating macaques and southern pig-tailed macaques).

Although there were four boat trips in total in the package, the two morning ones went up-river from the lodge which for most people was largely a waste of time because most of the mammals were down-river (I was the only birder at the lodge). The elephants in particular could only be seen down-river from the lodge’s location, so I’d only had two chances to see them. However on the first morning boat trip there were four Storm’s storks perched in riverside trees, enabling me to get good binocular views of them (but only poor photographic ones). Also there were silvered leaf monkeys and another orangutan. The second morning just two Storm’s storks could be found but a lesser adjutant helped fill the void nicely. Also very nice was the sight of a pair of wrinkled hornbills perched right next to a pair of Oriental pied hornbills.

The one night-walk I did was alright. The groups were too large to make it likely you’d see anything really interesting but there were some sleeping birds and various smaller critters. The guide’s identification skills were a joke though. We found a fantastic little lizard called an ornate shrub lizard which has a weird rostral appendage (in English, a thing on its nose), and the guide confidently told everyone it was a “dusky flying lizard” and then, just to make sure we all understood, added that it could fly. The fact that it didn’t resemble a flying lizard in the slightest and was quite obviously lacking even a hint of a patagium clearly did not bother him at all. A Microhyla froglet was described as “the smallest frog in the world”!

Because the night-walks were, um, somewhat lacking in respectability, on the second night a few of us managed to arrange a special night-time boat-trip instead. Some of the other lodges have these as part of their packages but not our lodge. The price was a ridiculous 60 Ringgits per person, but only if we could get ten people. Surprisingly we quite easily achieved the required number. I think we were probably all a bit worried that we wouldn’t see anything and it would be wasted money, but it turned out fabulously. Saltwater crocodiles, rarely seen here by day, were fairly common; there were no fewer than five buffy fish owls and several black-crowned night herons along the banks; a big reticulated python; and cream of the crop, the animal I’d been most hoping to see that night but didn’t actually think I would, a flat-headed cat!! Very exciting for me and definitely worth the cost.

For those keeping score, final species tally for the three days - two nights on the Kinabatanagan River was a paltry 23 birds and 7 mammals. I’m sure it would have been more with a better choice of lodge.


photo: the ornate shrub lizard

Flat-headed cat!!!

I know!! Half the people in the boat actually missed the flat-headed cat unfortunately for them. It was sitting inside a hollow in the bank just above the water-line, which was half covered with drooping grasses. The boatman was pointing and saying "kuching hutan" ("wild cat") and I was straining my eyes trying to see where he was pointing. Because of its position it was only visible from one angle so only some of the people saw it. I managed to spot it just in the nick of time before it upped and slunk away.