Malaysian Borneo

Just been travelling around Sabah:



It's one of the states of Malaysian Borneo:



We flew to Kota Kinabalu stayed a few days and then went and climbed Mount Kinabalu - the highest mountain in SE Asia (4095m) The last 700m is just rock and the views from the top were spectacular. We also visited Sepilok Orang-Utan rehabilitation centre and got some good views of the Orang-Utans, and stayed for a few days in a camp called Uncle Tan's on the Kinabatangan River deep in the jungle, taking boat rides, jungle walks and just looking at everything around us.
The country is covered with Palm-Oil plantations and the amount of primary rainforest left is rapidly diminishing, but if you look at what we've done to our own environment we can hardly take the moral high ground on this issue. It is a shame because the biodiversity of the jungle is incredible. We also got a good luck at some rather strange Proboscis monkeys that live deep in the Kinabatangan Jungle.

Deforestation in the Kinabatangan

Here's some pictures of the palm oil plantations:



And a picture from the road as we drove along:




Here's a map of the whole area - it used to be primary tropical forest only a few years ago - click and drag to have a look around the area. No wonder the Orang-Utans are gradually becoming extinct. The bright areas are where the primary forest has been replaced by Oil Palm plantations - an introduced species from West Africa:



It turns out that the forest won't grow back (at least within the 30 years tested so far) - it's a climax vegetation and no-one can yet work out how to get it to regenerate so that they can have managed harvests of the wood (economically). The only thing that's changing is that as more of the forest is removed, the trees become more valuable and therefore it becomes more economical to invest in research to replace the forest rather than covering it in palm oil plantations. There's also other research into ways of converting Palm Oil into fuel so there's not a lot of hope for the wildlife unless a large enough, non fragmented area can be protected.

Kinabatangan jungle at night

We spent a fair bit of time wandering around the jungle either on foot or on boats at night. Great for viewing animals:

Proboscis Monkeys

At Uncle Tan's we saw a fair few of these odd looking creatures:

Walking in the jungle

We spent several hours walking around the jungle looking at the trees and wildlife:




Here's some more photos of life in the jungle:

Uncle Tan's - Kinabatangan river

We also stayed at Uncle Tan's about an hour along the Kinabatangan river in the jungle - we travelled there on speed boats and stayed in huts with mosi nets for 3 days.



Here's some more photos of the river:

Sepilok Orang-Utan rehab centre

We also visited Sepilok Rehabilitation Centre to see the Orang-Utans that come in from the jungle to get an occasional feed. We saw three young males who hung around for a few hours before heading off to the jungle.



Here's a slideshow of the Orang-Utans:



We stayed at the Sepilok Jungle resort where they found a really small owl that had fallen out of it's nest in the night:

Climbing Mount Kinabalu (4095m)

We spent a few days in Mt Kinabalu national park before climbing the mountain. Obviously we didn't plan ahead and book permits, but once we arrived it was easy enough to get a cancellation and a completely unnecessary guide (apart from for the local economy). We started at 1800m, spent 3 hours walking up to 3200m where we stayed the night (with a very annoying snoring Cantonese man) and at 3.45am we woke up and spent another 1 1/2 hours walking to the top in the moonlight. It was high so the altitude was a factor but really easy compared to other things I've done. The last 700m of rock was superb.



Here's a slideshow of the climb:



FULL SCREEN SLIDESHOW