Borneo

As promised, here's a continuation of the last entry about my parent's visit.  After we spent some time in Singapore, my parents and I headed to the city of Kota Kinabalu, on the north coast of Borneo.  Because Borneo sounds super exotic and you may not know where it is (I probably didn't until I moved here), here's a map:

As you can see, the north coast belongs to Malaysia, and the rest belongs to Indonesia, except for that tiny sliver that is Brunei.  (Brunei was actually supposed to join the federation of states that merged to form Malaysia in the early 1960s, but pulled out at the last minute.)  Here's another map showing Borneo in the context of Southeast Asia (ignore the random German writing on Borneo):

As you can see, it's not too far from Singapore.  So, after a quick two hour flight, we landed in Kota Kinabalu.  We did a bit of exploring around the downtown (consisting of a couple blocks - it's not that big of a city) and the harborfront.  Here there was an enormous "wet" market with stalls selling everything from fruit and freshly butchered meat to local handicrafts.  However, the food section of the market smelled terrible!  So, we wandered the handicrafts portion instead.  Here are some statues we found on the waterfront:

And some boats that were in such disrepair that they looked like they belonged to a scrappy pirate gang: 

The next day, we learned about the various cultures of the Bornean natives, with a visit to a resurrected tribal village that had once been inhabited by headhunters!  The man who rebuilt the village is descended from this tribe, and all the tribal artifacts (including 42 skulls) have been passed down through the generations and have ended up in his possession.  Here are some of the skulls:

We also got to do all sorts of fun activities that the villagers would have done in their daily life.  We saw how the natives made rice wine - and we even got to sample some.  It didn't actually taste like much, although if you drunk enough of it, I imagine it would have done the job.  We also got to try shooting blowguns!  Here is my dad showing off his expert skillz.

Later that day, we went to a wildlife park, where we saw proboscis monkeys and orantugans.  The proboscis monkeys were actually sort of disappointing - their noses were not nearly as large as I had hoped.  But, they did have some babies, which are always super cute.  The orangutans were more interesting.  The park helps to rehabilitate injured orangutans (I guess they are injured due to poaching?  I was not sure about this), so the ones that were in the zoo were the ones that were too injured to be released back into the wild.  Here's one with a mangled hand - he seemed to be managing ok.

Also, we saw a bird of paradise!  Most people only think of these as those poky, bright orange, flowers, but the original birds of paradise were actual birds.  These birds used to be incredibly common in Borneo, but were hunted to near extinction because of the desire for their beautiful tail feathers.  

The next day, we headed out to a group of small islands off the coast to do some scuba diving.  I recently learned how to dive about a year ago, so I was eager to go!  Unfortunately, the visibility was quite bad, the maximum visibility was only about 5m.  However, I did see a huge moray eel and lots of flourescently colored nudibranchs.  My parents saw a turtle, so I was quite jealous.  One of the coolest parts of the trip was when we stopped for lunch on one of the small islands.  The island was inhabited by water monitors!  They were huge - some were over 5 feet long!  The lizards were almost completely tame, because they were used to getting food from the tourists, that they were just lounging around in the sun and begging food scraps.  Like very large, very spiky, house cats. 

On our final full day in Borneo, we took a bus several hours to go hiking around Mount Kinabalu.  This is one of the tallest mountains in Southeast Asia, and is very popular with climbers because it's quite easy to climb - pretty much like a two day hike uphill.  Not having time to climb all the way up, we contented ourselves with some jungle hiking around the mountain.  There were a lot of very pretty plants and flowers that we saw, like these beautiful red flowers.

We realized while we were hiking that we were "hiking the jungles of Borneo", and that that sounded totally badass (it sounds extra cool if you say it in that movie-preview-announcer-deep-male voice.  Really.  Try it, right now.).  Here I am in the jungles of Borneo:

On our last day, we managed to have time to make it to the Sabah State Museum before we had to be at the airport to catch our flight.  A unique feature of this museum was that it had recreations of the many different types of houses that the various tribes of Borneo used to live in.  Here's a picture of a few, surrounding a picturesque (but completely mosquito infested) lake:

Also, it had silly animal statues, and I'm a total sucker for hokey dioramas, like this fake water buffalo standing in a rice paddy:

That afternoon, we headed back to Singapore and I said goodbye to my parents, who were off to Tokyo for a couple days before returning home. 

Overall, I thought Borneo was a really interesting place, for both the culture and the unique jungles.  I enjoyed being in a more rural setting, away from the huge city of Singapore.  However, I think that Kota Kinabalu is begining to experience a tourism boom, and will probably grow much larger in the coming years, especially as they promote themselves as an "ecotourism" site. 

It's interesting to note that in my two visits of Malaysia, I'm always surprised at how developed it is.  It always seems much cleaner and safer than I expect.  Overall, I think it's a good place to travel to get exposed to Southeast Asia (I'm assuming Singapore doesn't really count), without encountering too many issues.  People are quite nice and helpful, and I rarely felt like they were trying to scam me.  So, all in all, a good trip.   

 
 Also, Merry (late) Christmas to everyone!  I enjoyed a delicious German lunch at a local brewpub with some friends, before heading home to skype with various friends and family.  Now, I'm just about to head out to meet Chris at the airport here in Singapore, and we'll be continuing on to Vietnam in a couple days.  Hope everyone has a very happy New Year!