It's a grey, rainy day in a grey, ugly town, so what better way to spend the day than in an Internet joint? We're waiting to go scuba diving off Sipadan Island tomorrow; with any luck, we won't be taken hostage by Abu Sayyaf guerrillas as happened to a bunch of divers at Sipadan last year.
Sabah so far has been both exhilirating and depressing. We went first to Mount Kinabalu, the highest mountain in South East Asia, where I climbed while Joanne relaxed at the base. We then soaked away our worries in hot springs near the mountain, at Poring. After this, we made our way to see the orang utans at Sepilok Rehabilitation Centre, before heading to the Kinabatangan River for a couple of days in the jungle, from where we made our way here last night.
The wildlife in the lowland forests here is wonderful. There are colourful birds like hornbills and trogons and kingfishers and broadbills; hundreds of types of brightly-coloured butterflies flit about under the forest canopy. Orchids and lianas and figs cling to the trunks of huge trees, and monitor lizards prowl the jungle floor. Proboscis monkeys, macaques and lemurs feed in the trees. Somewhere, unseen, orang utans swing through the trees and even a few wild elephants and Sumatran rhinoceri prowl the forest. You feel part of a vast, primeval ecosystem that belongs on a National Geographic special, or in the pages of an intrepid nineteenth-century naturalist's account of his voyages through darkest Borneo.
The problem is that there is remarkably little of this rainforest left. As we drove from Poring to Sepilok, and from Sepilok to the jungle camp, and then from the jungle camp to Semporna, we saw hardly a single real tree. As far as the eye could see, we were in an ocean of neatly-spaced palm trees, planted for the oil that can be extracted from their fruit and used for cooking oil. The few stands of rainforest that are left are doomed, already marked out on maps for new plantations. Most of the plantations that we saw looked very new, planted in the last five years as the price of palm oil soared. A slump in prices a couple of years ago has slowed the pace of clearing, but I think that within 10 years any lowland forest not within a national park or forest reserve will be gone, and along with it all the animals, like orang utans and elephants and monkeys that require a forest to survive. It's very sad. I know that in North America our forestry practices aren't much better, but at least there primary forests are replaced with similar replanted forests, supporting similar animals, not turned into endless exotic commodity farms as is happening here.
The highlands near Mt. Kinabalu are less cleared, since palm plantations don't grow at high altitude. The forests around Mt. Kinabalu are quite interesting, since they have a mix of very Australian trees like eucalyptus with very Himalayan trees like rhododendrons. The forest there are alive with birds and butterflies, and at middle altitudes, around 2500 metres, there are dozens of types of pitcher plants. Pitcher plants attract insects to "pitchers" of sweet-smelling nectar in which the insects drown and are digested by the plant. There are also rafflesias, the world's largest flower, which bloom to over a metre in diameter and do much the same thing to flies, although their attraction is their aroma of rotting meat. There were no rafflesia in bloom when we were there, but there are other places to see rafflesia and we continue to live in hope.
Climbing Mt. Kinabalu (4095 metres above sea level) was a pretty straightforward climb. I set off with my obligatory guide and a couple of energetic English brothers who barrelled up the mountain at a good pace. I was sick at the time with some sort of traveller's tummy, and by the time we had reached the overnight hut at 3200 metres, I had had enough for the day, but Rob and Dave charged on to the summit and then all the way down to the bottom in the afternoon. I opted for a good night's sleep and a pre-dawn departure the next morning. I felt pretty weak, but I was at the summit for sunrise, watching day break over almost all of Sabah state. The top of the mountain is a series of glacially-sculpted granite spires, very pretty, and the other side of the mountain is a dramatic gorge, Low's Gully, that was only fully explored 4 years ago. The way back down was short but hard on the legs, and my legs have taken a full week to get over their soreness from the pounding of the endless stairs back to the trailhead at 1800 metres.
The hot springs were a nice chance for my legs to recover, and had their own attractions in the form of a wonderful butterfly farm and a forest canopy walkway. The butterflies were spectacular, especially the black-and-green Rajah Brooke's birdwing. The canopy walkway, an alarming contraption of cables and aluminum ladders and nylon netting, scared Joanne and didn't feel too great for me, either. I'd been on one of these things before, in peninsular Malaysia in 1996, and, just as then, we saw almost no animals or birds up in the canopy layer. It did give a perspective on the vast size of the rainforest trees (up to 60 metres high, and tremendously broad) and on the huge number of figs and ferns and lianas that hang from each big tree. The sound effects up there are wonderful, with constant bird calls and animal noises, but you never see anything moving. We were both glad to make our way down to solid ground afterwards.
Seeing orang utans at Sepilok was a first for Joanne, but it was the third orang utan rehabilitation centre I had been to, after Bukit Lawang on Sumatra and Tanjung Puting in the south of Borneo. The eyes of the baby orang utans are heart-melting (there was an 11-day-old baby that a mother brought to the feeding session), and there were 10 orang utans who came for their twice-daily handout of bananas, milk and sugar cane. Most of them were brought to the centre after being kept illegally as pets, or found after a forest stand was cut down. The staff try to teach the young orangs to live in the forest on their own, and they do good work at this. Some of the orangs get rehabilitated, but others stay on as welfare cases. There's also three of the very few surviving Sumatran rhinos left on Borneo at the centre. The staff are trying to get them to breed, but so far without success. The staff are doing good work with the animals, but I found Sepilok less of an impressive experience overall than either Tanjung Puting or Bukit Lawang. The other two are set deep in the jungle, while Sepilok is on the edge of farm fields, in a fairly small forest reserve, and is inundated with tourists (70 at the morning feeding) that detract from the interaction with the animals.
The jungle camp where we spent two days was like a northern Ontario summer cottage, set on an oxbow lake just off the main Kinabatangan river. It was surrounded by forests full of birdlife and monkeys of all sorts, and there were still traces of visits from orang utans and a herd of elephants a few months previously. The early-morning and evening boat cruises brought lots of bird and monkey sightings, while just sitting in camp we saw a constant stream of birds, monitor lizards and spectacular butterflies. It was hard ot tear ourselves away to come here to go diving, especially since we knew what a long, horrible drive it was going to be over horrible roads to get out. I'm sure that the turtles and fish life off Sipadan will make the effort worthwhile, however. And then it will be time to head back to Kota Kinabalu to start cycling at last. Stay tuned!