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Welcome to the jungle! Our MESCOT guides greeted us on arrival at the village of Mengaris on the Kinabatangan river, with some yummy pancake things. We then cruised the croc infested water to our jungle eco-camp. Our itinerary was to be a wildlife spotting river trip and night walk but the torrential rain had other ideas. I have to say I was somewhat relieved about the latter :0 and the river trip was rescheduled for the next morning. So after a few rounds of the name game we donned our head torches (attracting every bug within a 10 mile radius) and braved the camp deck. My roomie and I kept each other awake with our irrational bug fears but at least we didn't need any trips to the loo in the night :) One of the group had a rat visitor in the night, so we were quite lucky, especially considering I had some sweets in my bag that I forgot to surrender to the camp kitchen!
Our 6am river trip was fun and yielded some birds: kingfisher & hornbill, a bug croc, monkeys: long tail & probiscus and even an orangutan - tho only a very brief glimpse as it swung between trees. Our guide got very excited at spotting a flying lemur, which to us looked like a bat splatted on the trunk but it's apparently quite rare.
Luckily didn't come across any snakes on the jungle walk but Cherie did get leeched!
Lunch was the product of our cooking lesson - luckily we actually did good :)
Between courses we visited a cave where locals used to be buried in crocodile shaped coffins. There were a few bats hanging around too ;)
After a cultural show and a fun game of volleyball we headed to our homestays. Suraya and her family of 4, very sweet, children were my hosts. They had one of the simpler houses in the village but were very welcoming and spoke good English. I was a rather smelly house guest having decided against a 'shower' after seeing the barrel of brown river water! We had dinner of rice and cabbage - eaten with just our fingers, on the floor and played Rock, Paper, Scissors and helped them with some of their English homework. I slept amazingly well, tho feel bad that my hosts won't have, having given up their beds for us. During breakfast, of green buns and tea, the kids played with rainbows cast on the floor by some glass on a shelf. They tried to squash them, then took delight in moving around so it shined on them - very cute. We said our thank you's and goodbyes and it was off to Sandakan.
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