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Tomorrow we leave Malaysian Borneo for Peninsular Malaysia where our first stop will be Penang. We've spent just shy of a month in Borneo having initially thought we'd only spend two weeks here. From Miri (our last blog) we followed the coastline down to Sibu via a couple of longish bus rides. Simalajau National Park near Bintulu provided us with a 12km jungle trek where we saw more monkeys, a tree monitor lizard and met mudskippers for the first time. The latter are a mix between a fish and a frog and they do fairly skip along in the shallow water - they appear almost evolutionary.
We also took a 130km trip inland up the very wide and busy Batang Rejang river for a couple of nights in the town of Kapit. Here we visited a traditional Iban longhouse community and saw around the village chief's rooms. This is a way of life which is certainly receding, but it hasn't disappeared yet. It's a very communal style of living and the extended wooden structure was pretty rickety. Nowadays, many Iban communities have moved to more modern styles of longhouse. This community still had a few skulls hanging up though as a reminder of the good ol' headhunting days.
We've just returned to Kuching after visiting our final national park, Bako. It has a beautiful coastal setting and we sweated our way up and down a few trails. It's only accessible by boat and this morning's return ride was really wet as there was a monsoon-style downpour.
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