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Tuesday 2nd October
UP early this morning for pick up at hotel for 7.30am for trip to Mount Kinabalou which took about 2 hours. The drive up to the mountain was spectacular. I thought it was more breath taking than the journey we had from Louang Probang but Lee didn't agree with me. At one point you could this extremely tall water fall pouring from the mountain. It's going on these tours and driving through the villages you get to see local life and I love it when you see small children playing in buckets of water or around a hose pipe. When they see you looking out the window they always give you such a lovely big smile and wave. The conditions we saw were by far the worst we have seen in Malaysia and you do wonder with all the heavy rains they have how these wooden huts with corrugated roofing can sustain the weather that they have, but the simplicity of it all is quite humbling as no matter how simple it looks you will always see a big line of washing hanging outside the windows or on some makeshift line.
We arrived first at a Botanical Garden and our guide Marc was very clued up on the plants and flowers. He did show us the smallest Orchid in the world which was tiny, but he could have told us anything as we didn't know what the tallest orchid looked like! Unfortunately it was the wrong time of year to visit the garden as nothing was flowering so we moved on.
Another long journey through the mountains and we reached Mount Kinabalou National Park and Hot Water Springs. The springs were small hot tubs of sulphuric minerals known for their healing and destrssing properties and very popular with the locals, we did t get to dip into them as it was busy.
Mount Kinabalou is 4095 metres high and is the tallest mountain in South East Asia it can be climbed and a lot of people do a night stopover and enjoy the early morning walk up to the summit to enjoy the spectacular rise.
We just enjoyed a walk a round the National Park and did a stint from what looked like "I'm a Celebrity Get Me Outa Here" when we did a canopy walk with a drop of 40 metres. It was bit scary they allowed only 6 people across the walk at time only behind us a big guy weighed about 18 stones and when he got on the walkway it dipped. It had signs to say do not rock the walkway but we had the kid from the hell who thought it would be funny to rock it, there was 5 walkways to cross,,so needless to say we was glad to get off it.
During our trip we was informed that the Rafflesia flower which has the largest bloom in the world and is rare to Indonesia and Malaysia was-flowering in a local village. This is an extremely rare thing to see as they take about 8-9 months to grow, they only flower for about 4 days then they rot. The start of the flower looks like a black cabbage and to be honest when we saw it is just looked like a big rotting flower but it was interesting to see it as they don't flower very often, this one wasn't particularly big as some of them can grow up to 3 feet across and weigh 15 pounds.
It took about 4 hours to get back to the hotel and we headed straight for the bar and ordered twocold draught tiger beers, then off to bed.
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