Niah Caves

The mouth and main entrance to Niah Cave, a settlement for early man. The roof is also a hunting ground for the swift nest picking locals.

Gunong Santobong

We climbed this mountain opposite via a series on Indiana Jones style ladders followed by a swim on the famous Damai beach

Bako Pitcher Plant

There were lots of these in Bako, different varieties and sizes too

December Sandy Bays

Sarawak and beyond,

Its over a month since we last updated this blog, trying to go back that long in a diary is easy, you just give a list of places you went to and things that you saw. This online blog is more difficult than that people might read it and will not be able to fill in the gaps that my memory does once jolted with a few choice bits of information.

Maybe I'll just talk about a couple of days that stand out and add a couple of photos to make you all jealous back home. It seems a whole lot easier than trying to tell an exciting story about travelling on a boat, a local bus, a national bus and then a night in a grungy hotel/ guest house where the brothel next door payed music till late a night. This is then followed by getting back on more buses and taxis the next day fitted with high pitched alarms that sounded whenever the driver topped the speed limit (most of the time). These left us in the middle of jungle nowhere and late a night, where we are left to rely on a drunk local who I trek off through the bush with to wake up his brother to help us find accommodation as the thunder deafenly cracks and the tropical rain starts. Sue sits quietly under a shelter wondering what step it was exactly that led her off on this random tangent in life!

The bits about back packing that no one wants to hear (maybe they do? leave a note at the bottom and let us know) and no one tells you about! So without further ado here's some stories and pictures of adventure, dare and do, fantastic scenery, amazing places that were enjoyed in between the bits where you were wondering whether the next meal would leave you crippled over the loo for a week and if you fell asleep in the bus station whether you'd wake up in just your pants wondering where all your stuff had gone!

Bako National Park, we spent a few days here near Kuching in Sarawak, Borneo and although the accommodation and the food here was grotty (dinner smelt a bit like Mum's hen food that would be left to stew overnight) the park itself still stands out as a highlight. The weather was wonderful it had been the first few really good days that we'd had for a week or so. We spent several days using the park headquarters as a base, these are accessed by boat and from here one can sweat your way to beautiful beaches through various types of forest, peat bog and mangrove with plenty of wildlife thrown in to boot. Proboscis monkeys, cheeky macaque monkeys who can steal your lunch quicker than lightning and get upset when you try and stop them! Snakes who one had to be always conscious of that you don't stand on them, adders, cobras and the like mot to mention the mangrove crabs with the long one claw roughly the same size as the body for fighting off rivals and attracting a mate by waving it in the air.

All of the beaches we visited were completely empty picture postcard affairs were we eat sandy sandwiches in the shade and swam in the murky brown water carrying in it the silt from the jugle rivers. Sue picked up a nasty sting on one beach and because the water was so brown we had no idea whether it was a jelly fish or some type of nasty poisonous fish.

Niah Caves was another visit that stood out, these massive limestone caves are impressive to say the least no just because of there size, you could easily fit the Red Cow junction, Luas and all inside the main entrance with traffic tail backs to boot. We treked deep inside these past the point of pitch black and through the mountains of bat poo to a huge sunlit chamber a vast hall with holes in the roof where shafts of tropical sunlight shine through. Looking up at these blinded by the bright lights one can make out the lengths of timber coupled together with timber pegs from which the specialist locals use to gather the valuable birds nests for the famous soup. Even as a rock climber I cannot fail to be impressed, shunting up and down these poles, 100m up and scrambling around the guano covered ledges in the cave roof, dripping with sweat and no doubt been atacked by birds and bats with not a safety rope to be seen seems like pretty serious buisness to me. We sit by the cave mouth as the sun sets and watch the swifts fly into the cave mouth for their evenings rest while avoiding the outgoing bats.