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In this week's blog update, Brent and Tara go from jungle to jungle, Northern Laos to The East end of Borneo, with a bit in between. So set your computer screens to a comfortable reading brightness and let's get started.
It was exactly one month ago since the last update in Vang Vieng, Laos, known basically for tubing, nightlife, and tubing related injuries/deaths. We went tubing, and can definitely see the danger zones, notably buckets of whisky based drinks, free shots, cheap beer, giant swings, giant slides, giant flying foxes, a slingshot target range, deep water, shallow water and more dirty cheap alcohol. T'was a great day, that ended with a sobering marathon paddle back to the town, a quick bite to eat, and then onwards on another night bus to the quaint hill station of Luang Prabang. A lovely little city, filled with 100 year old French architecture, 200 year old Buddhist pagodas, and 1000's of orange robed balled headed monks. We arrived at 5am, and on our mission around town to find a bed, we witnessed the daily procession of the monks collecting alms and other offerings from devote Buddhists in the town, luckily we arrived so early, because I sure wasn't gonna get up that early to see it! We lazed about for a couple of days, and then said our goodbyes to Ben and Reg, our English travel companions for over a month, and we headed in the direction of Huay Xai (way sigh.) Huay Xai, a small border crossing town on the banks of the Mekong River, bordering Thailand, does not have much/anything to offer, but it is the location of the booking office for the Gibbon Experience.
The Gibbon Experience deserves its own paragraph, it was awesome! Leaving at 9am in the morning in the back of a 4wd Hilux, we drove 2 hours to our destination - 1 hour on smooth bitumen road, the next hour up and down steep rutted out 4wd tracks - to where the 25 or so gibbon experiencers were mustered along a walking trail to a little settlement on the edge of the jungle. We organised ourselves into groups - ours being the awesome couples group, 4 couples + the 1 random annoying American guy that talked a lot - we were given our harnesses, and escorted to our home of 2 nights, a tree house 30M in the air, accessible only by the use of zip lines across valleys and through trees! It was awesome from the get go, we got to our first zip line, 300M long, Tara went first, and the rest of the group followed. The zip lines are usually 150M-410M long, and will generally start high in a tree or on a hill, you clip your harness onto the steel line, and away you go, zipping through the canopy and over a valley at maybe 50km/h 100M in the air, it's incredible! Our tree house was the newest of 7 tree houses, slept 9 people, had the most amazing view I've ever had from a toilet, and came equipped with a local rat that liked to rummage through our trash. We were maybe 30M in the air, there we no walls only balustrading, had a zip line in, and a zip line out, we got our meals express zipped in to us, and I think we were the only tree house that got to see Gibbons. The gibbons are apparently quite lucrative, and according to the guides most groups only get to hear them, we were very lucky to see them on both mornings. We had a great time over our 3 days, and made some fantastic new friends, learnt that Canadians call a nipple cripple a titty twister, and taught said Canadian that we call a duvet a doonah in Australia, apparently hilarious. I'd never thought about it, but the word doonah is actually quite funny. Doonah…
Wasting no time, we were across the river, entering country number 6, Thailand, and on our way at break neck speed to Chiang Mai. We found suitable accommodation, and had a delicious pizza for dinner. The next night we were in Pai, a really cool little hippy chilled out town, 3 hours into the hills from Chiang Mai. We met up with our Canadian mates Jacquie and Casey, went motorbike riding with them to a waterfall, then met up with our Austrian mate Heli, of whom we trekked in Nepal with 5 months prior, theeennnnn out of nowhere Ben and Reg our pommy companions appear and are staying literally 50M from our bungalow. So we now had a crew of 7 of us, we all got motorbikes the next day and explored Pai's surrounds. Overtaking an elephant on the road for the first time, we went to the hot springs, another waterfall too cool off, and then went piranha fishing, none of us caught anything, but at least the beer was cold. It was our last night in Thailand, and our last night with our crew of mates, with everyone splitting off into different directions, we said our goodbyes at about 1am after a few beers and a sing-along with the guitars.
The next day, we had breakfast in the hills of northern Thailand, and had dinner in the concrete jungle of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, country number 7! KL was a bit of a shock to the system, so modern and concretey, was like a baby step back into Western society. We didn't do much for 5 days, went to the movies, caught monorails and subway trains, walked around, everything was too expensive so we layed low. However, March 27th we headed across the water, arriving in Kuching the capital of the Borneo Malaysian state of Sarawak. A really nice, green, clean city, very reminiscent of Cairns, we found ourselves at possibly the cleanest backpackers hostel that we've stayed at on our trip. We made a visit to the highly informative information office, and sorted ourselves out with a plan of attack. We visited Semenggoh Orang-utan (Scotty Bradley) rehabilitation centre, where we were one of the luckiest groups in months, with 12 orang-utans showing up at the 9am feeding time, rather than the usual 2-4. This included Ritchie, the alpha male of the group, weighing in at a cool 160kg's! He was literally a beast. We saw a mumma and baby share a special moment, where the mum put her fingers up her bum, then let the baby have a whiff. Next we headed out to Bako National Park for a 2 night stay, where we did some trekking through the hills to some beaches and a waterfall, saw and abundance of wildlife including the rare proboscis monkey (looks like it has an appendage on its face, very ugly), silver leaf Langurs, Macaque's (Matt McPhee), monitor lizards, hornbill birds and of course the local residents to our hostel, the bearded pig (not me), but when photographing one up close, I avoided getting bitten on several occasions, until it nipped me on the knee. Also, Tara fell through a gap in a plankwalk bridge and bashed up her leg pretty good, she cried and I laughed, not in the good books that afternoon….. Moving on we spent the night in the industrial town of Bintulu, our transit point for the next NP, and after having an upset belly for almost 26 years, the place where Tara had her first poo-tastrophy for the trip. Our destination was Similajau National Park, where the accommodation is set 50M back from the beach, the canteen was not operational, and we ate noodles out of a kettle for 2 days. The trekking was also pretty good, Tara stayed behind with her bruised and gammy leg, but I walked 8km to turtle beach 2, no turtles, but did see some gibbons on the way, got soaked in a rainstorm, and watched a salt water croc swim around near the beach, ate my peanut butter roll and walked the 8km back. We then visited Niah National Park, home to the Niah Caves, a giant cave network, where the internal capacity was over 10 hectares, the roof was sometimes over 100M high. There were thousands of swiftlets living there building their saliva based nests in the caves ceiling, which in fact are big business, going for $1000 a kilo, as the Chinese consider birds nest soup a delicacy…. Now what I want to know is who was the first person to climb up the 100M bamboo pole in the middle of the cave, fetch a birds saliva nest, wack it in a soup and decide it was worth a thousand bucks? It definitely doesn't appeal to me. We only stayed 1 night at Niah, and proceed to avoid Malaysia's expensive cab fares twice in one day, with a couple of nice fellas giving us a free ride to the bus stop, and then to town at the other end, we are now in Miri, a city full of big buildings and expensive cars, in fact your typical Malaysian city, we were quick to move on, and move on me did to country no.8, Brunei.
Brunei was terrible, everything was priced as high as Australia, we got our most expensive room to date - $26AUS a night - and it was a dump. The city/country is definitely not geared for tourists, let alone backpackers, it is purely a big oil pump and business centre full of gold covered mosques, and needless to say we left at 6.30am the next day, and crossed the water back to country number 7, this time to Kota Kinabalu, the capital of the Malaysian state of Sabah. This is our 4th night here tonight, and tomorrow we fly to the Philippines for the beginning of our last 3 weeks of our adventure. As I type this now, my skin is as red as a fire engine, I was an un-smart beach goer today, and am feeling it, photos to come.
Well that brings us up to speed, hope you're all eagerly awaiting our next blog update and our return back to the land Downunder, I know I'm hanging for a vegemite sandwich! Peace and Love, speaking to you soon. Thank ya very muchly
Also, make sure you have a look at the videos from the gibbon experience. Bye!
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