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So here we are - at the last installment! Its been a long 2 years, but looking back it's all passed quite quickly, especially these last 2 months!
Borneo has been very different from the rest of our tour - much more about doing things than chilling and getting Nepal out of our systems. So some thoughts on the different places we saw here:
Kuching: Rained the first couple of days but quite a nice place anyway! Lots of improvements going on and our hotel was brand new but not many tourists about to appreciate it all. Did a couple of nice boat trips, particularly to Bako National Park though the waves on the way there were a bit exciting. Didn't see any orang utans here but lots of silver leaf monkeys and a giant squirrel, and rather too many kitsch statues of cats!
Kota Kinabalu: Bit more going on here with good fish market in harbour and lots of boats going out to islands. We had great day on Pulau Gaya trekking over the top to what we expected to be a deserted beach but had now had a big resort built. But it was still deserted and very beautiful. Had some nice meals here in an Italian restaurant and a good curry on the boardwalk strip looking over the South China Sea, and fun times in the hotel bar watching the resident band - in fact about the latest nights of the whole trip! Gunung (Mount) Kinabalu was a bit disappointing after the Himalayas but the gardens were nice.
Sandakan: Odd place that hardly seemed to cater for tourists at all i.e. virtually no restaurants apart from the local style of bright canteen type fuel stops. But the day trips we took were fantastic - seeing loads of orang-utans at Sepilok, and boat trips up the Kinabantan river delta to see proboscis monkeys and to turtle island where we only say baby turtles but the snorkelling was fantastic again. In fact so much so we both got very sunburnt!
Permai: great tree house which was fun and a lovely beach again. Also nice rain forest walks which kept us occupied for our 2 days here.
Singapore: And finally... We weren't sure we'd like it here as other people had found it a bit sterile but we loved it. Made us want to get back into the rat race so we could get a nice shiny new car and shop in all the expensive malls! And it was expensive here - the days of bargain shopping in Asia are gone I think, at least while the exchange rate is bad! Shopping and eating are the national pastimes but we also visited lovely places like the botanics and orchid garden, the night safari and the colonial core. It was great to see the lovely old buildings in front of these huge modern sky scrapers, and having a cocktail on the 71st floor, though not quite as atmospheric as the Sky Bar. All the different sections of the city had their own atmosphere e.g. China town with its medicine shops and the tea ceremony, Little India with all the shops spilling out on to the pavement and the only traffic jam we saw while in Singapore! There were a lot of rules e.g. no smoking in the Botanics, but it meant the city was pristine and everything worked smoothly. In fact the only place that wasn't so great was the train station to Malaysia to get to KL for our flight home! But we did get there fine, though a bit cold as the A/C was rather excessive, to find most of the F1 teams staying in our hotel, making G very happy to have David Coulthard sat at the next table to us at dinner! A high point to end on!And now back to the real world. We could be depressed, but its the start of a whole new phase so we've got to be excited about it. Its just getting past the job hunting and imposing on family again........lets just hope it doesn't take too long!
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