Hi everyone!

Today we went in search for monkeys with long noses - Probiscus monkeys.

The English weather seems to be following us, this morning we had torrential rain and last night there was a terrific thunderstorm - very exciting. We thought this morning that our trip would be cancelled because there seemed to be no end to the rain but fortunately the sun did make an appearence at about 1pm - just in time for the start of our cruise at 2pm. We had to take a 2hr bus ride to Kota Klias village. I forget the name of our tour guide but to be honest he wasn't the most friendly of guides, he spoke Chinese throughout the entire trip so we never really knew what was happening, we just followed the rest of the group who suprisingly happened to be all Chinese. On arrival at the village the local women had prepared for us some donuts - yum!! We had brought with us a supply of food because we weren't sure what to expect, but so far so good. We were then shown the toilets and advised to use them as our river cruise was going to last around 2hrs...oh dear...not exactly luxurious and you had to fight your way in through the hundreds of Gekos crawling up the doors and walls. They didn't flush either but there was toilet paper, so it wasn't all bad.

We all clambered onto a small fibreglass boat and told to put our life jackets on. We made our way through the murky looking river, littered in places with rubbish - not exactly the beautiful setting they had promised in the brochure - and looked eagerly through our binoculars for signs of rustling in the Mangrove trees........half an hour passed by, no monkeys! Then an hour went by, no monkeys! I was convinced it was a scam. We saw several other boats pass us by, full of more Chinese, all of whom looked just as miserable as us, there were no monkeys, i was convinced of it. The brochure also promised us water buffalo, monitor lizards and Borneo bats - yeah right! Anyway, the sun was beginning to set at this point, in about 15 minutes it would be pitch black...then suddenly all the Chinese started screaming! What the hell was going on? I thought maybe they'd seen a crocodile or something but then i heard the word monkey!!! We frantically looked up at the trees...where the bloody hell was it? I couldn't see anything. Then Mia started shouting..."over there! In that tree!" That was a bloody good lot of help seeing as i'm staring at about a thousand different trees..."over there!" she cried, pointing at this large tree in the distance...and to my delight there it was, a huge male Probiscus monkey just casually staring at us idiots screaming. I guess it must be used to all the noise by now. We were watching it for a good 10 minutes, playing with its huge nose and long tail. We did manage to get some good footage on our video camera but unfortunately we can't put it up because these computers can't read DVDs, so I guess you'll just have to take our word for it. By this time it was almost dark so we headed back to the river bank for a meal.

We arrived back at the village hut, starving hungry having only eaten 1 donut all day, to be presented with a buffet of fish heads (with eyes), some brown lumpy stuff (possibly curried goat??), something that looked like maggots and some water melon, hence we headed straight for the water melon...but even that had flys on it. So we took out our apples and peanuts that we had packed incase of a situation like this and tucked in. The Malaysian women looked abit miffed but to be honest we really didn't care. After our delicious meal we headed back onto the boat to look for fireflies. This time we were more successful. Within about 2 minutes we came across a glorious display of twinkling lights in the trees, just like Christmas tree lights. It was quite amazing. Our guide then steered the boat into the twinkling trees and managed to catch two fireflies into a plastic bag. He shone the torch on to the bag. Expecting to see two huge insects with bulbs on their bottoms, we were amazed to see two tiny little flys about 1/2 a centimetre long. Its amazing how much light they generate for such small creatures. A little Chinese boy then snatched the bag and stuffed it in his pocket, think he was going to keep the flys as pets. We then headed back to the hut and then back on the bus to home.

The day turned out ok in the end but it could have been better. I think if we'd have had a better guide who actually spoke english we might've had a rough idea of what was going on. Still, we saw a monkey which was the main purpose and the fireflys were amazing so its all good. We've put some video footage up, taken with our digi camera, so make sure you check it out, its quite funny.

Take care xxxx