Bali in Videos

Hey team,

After five amazing days of diving in Malaysia, M and I jumped ship (via plane) for Bali, a.k.a. 'Sasha's favorite place in the world.' Three years ago, I was lucky enough to visit a great friend living/chef-ing in Ubud with another great friend. Aside from the fact that friend #2 and I both came down with leptospirosis ten days after returning from our travels, it was the perfect two week adventure. In planning this trip, a return to Indonesia was a foregone conclusion; I wanted to share the wonders of Bali and Lombok with M, and continue exploring east to Rinca, Komodo, and Flores.

We arrived in Bali late on March 3 (torrential rains in KL had delayed our plane), spent one night in a mediocre-by-Bali-standards-but-still-very-nice hotel in Seminyak, and then checked into Desa Seni. Cue Bali video log number one:

Desa Seni: Pimp My Vacation

 

We begrudgingly departed our Eden two days later, feeling thoroughly relaxed, refreshed, toned, stretched, clean, and healthy after two days of nonstop swimming, reading, eating organic produce, and taking yoga classes from lovely Spanish teachers ("Alright, breathe deep, and find your thenter") and something called Nia Dance from a jovial yet Zen African-American man named Saffire ("Yeah everyone, feel the groove and spiral around the room. Oh yes, spiral. Spiral. Spiral." In case you were questioning Desa Seni's hippie cred, the NY Times describes Nia Dance as an "emotional fitness odyssey."). Next up, we took a public bus up Bali's gorgeous west coast and landed in Pemuteran, a seaside town down the road from Bali's one and only national park. We spent a pair of days snorkeling in the park and scooting around on a rented motorbike, but our time there was notable mostly for our accommodation. Presenting Bali video log number two:

Pemuteran: Pimp My Guest House

The only downside of having an enormous garden in your bathroom is that you have also have an enormous garden's worth of insects in your bathroom. Fun fact: cockroaches love soap! I accidentally left our bar on the stones underneath the shower head once, and when I came out, it was writhing with roaches. They scattered when they saw me, but the soap was covered in deep lines and squiggles that resembled ancient runes in miniature, created by their forelegs' persistent scraping. Were they eating it? Is mandarin-mint soap from the Hyatt like catnip to them? I'll never know. A few days later we ventured south to escape the coastal heat in favor of Bali's central mountains, which are spectacularly beautiful. We hiked and motorbiked around a tiny village called Munduk for two days before driving to Ubud, where we arrived just in time for Nyepi (the Balinese New Year) and tried not to get rabies from the primates in the Monkey Temple Forest. On to Bali video logs three and four!

Ubud Monkey Forest: Pimp My iPhone Videos

Nyepi: Pimp My Ogoh-Ogoh

 

Leaving Ubud is always hard to do, but it's particularly tough when you've been away from home for nearly three months.The thing is, Ubud has a lot in common with the Bay Area, including but not limited to: scenic running routes, an abundance of delicious, healthy vegetarian food, stores selling incense and crystals, and extremely fit young people who only seem to wear tight-fitting organic cotton yoga gear. Knowing how easy it would be to get happily trapped there, we bought tickets to Labuan Bajo, Flores, and flew east on March 15th. For any non Spanish speakers out there, Flores means 'flowers,' and the island was given its name (and its religion - many inhabitants are Catholic) by Portuguese explorers in the 16th century. Check back soon to read about Komodo dragons, giant manta rays, and the reason so many features have been added to Smashadventures recently!

Over and Out,

S&M

Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus

When my brother and I were traveling in peninsular Malaysia three years ago, I got my Advanced Open Water PADI certification at Turtle Bay Divers, on Pulau Perhentian. My dive master there was a fantastic person and teacher named Mike. Born and bred in Kuala Lumpur, he oozed cool, so I tried to impress him as much as possible by maintaining excellent buoyancy and finding lots of nudibranches on our dives together. When I asked him about his #1 dream dive destination, he got a faraway look in his eyes and spoke of an island called Sipadan, just off the coast of Sabah. "You look up, and you see turtles swimming above you. You look down, you see sharks beneath you," he said with a sigh. Sold. I don't know if Mike's made it to Sipadan yet - I hope so - but what he said stuck in my mind. When M and I sat down in October and began planning our route for this adventure, Malaysian Borneo was at the top of my list. Furthermore, when we sent out our 'Hey world, here's where we're going, do you have any recommendations for us' email to everyone we knew, several people came back and said that the best diving they had ever done was at Sipadan. Double sold.

We signed up for a five day, four night package at an island resort with a dive operator called Scuba Junkies, with M earning his Open Water certification along the way. M and I mostly have been winging our travel, planning two or three days in advance, but to visit Sipadan, a protected marine park, one needs a permit. The government of Sabah only issue 120 permits per day for divers and snorkelers, with odd restrictions on things like gender balance, so we did our best to anticipate our movements and booked five weeks in advance. With the exception of M's first day on the island, when he had to spend around a hundred hours doing all the boring PADI classroom work while I was reading in the sun and snorkeling with turtles, this part of our trip was delightful and vacation-like. In fact, it was sort of like dive camp for adults.

Being the prime athlete that he is, M attended plenty of skill-based sports camps growing up (not to mention the one he founded), but with the exception of a week long swim camp the summer before ninth grade and a few weeks at a musical theater workshop thing the next summer, it's something I never really experienced. Enter life at Scuba Junkies: breakfast began at 7:30 AM in a big communal dining hall, where all meals were served, and we reported to the jetty at 9:00 AM for our first dive. Afterwards, we'd have 45 minutes for tea and coffee before reporting back around noon for our second dive, followed by lunch. After the third dive, tea and biscuits were served, and then we had the rest of the day to wander the island, watch the local kids play with marbles, find a soccer game to join, or try to piece together a decent run by doing the same loop over and over, with only a teeny bit of trespassing onto one of the larger resort's garden paths. Dinner was served just after seven, and we'd stuff ourselves to the gills before retiring to our room. One of the great ironies of diving is that in spite of barely moving at all when you're underwater - exertion is discouraged, since you suck more air - it leaves you both ravenous and spent. We could barely keep our eyes open at night, and would get in a few minutes at most of our team read, The Hobbit, before passing out. There were nights when M asked me what I last remembered from the story, and I'd name an event from the first minute and a half of his previous night's reading. Needless to say, we did not get very far in our Tolkien.

Four days passed blissfully in this manner, and on our fifth day, we went to Sipadan, which was everything we expected and more. Here are our thoughts halfway through the day:

The only downside to all of this is that M is possibly the world's most spoiled new diver. 

After a full day of swimming with the sharks and turtles Mike promised, we returned to Semporna, the not-terribly-attractive coastal town that serves as the portal to Mabul, Sipadan, and a handful of other islands. Our flight to Indonesia was the next afternoon, and we expected the evening to be completely uneventful. However, as we mentioned in a previous post, we sort of got caught in a shootout between supporters of a Filipino sultanate and the Malaysian army. M explains: 'We first got wind of it when the restaurant we were eating in started shutting down at 7:38 PM communicating that the police were coming and they would be fined if they were not closed. As you can imagine this was confusing to us, having eaten there before and much later in the night. In any event, we stepped outside to walk the short distance back to our hostel and noticed that everywhere was shut down, or in the process of doing so. And then we got different bits of info that there was a shootout, that it was just rumor etc. etc.  We heard the next day from fellow travelers that there was a shootout VERY near to our hostel. Really though, I'm not sure how close we were to the larger standoff, this shootout may have been the result of police tracking down a few stragglers. All in all there were nearly thirty killed on both sides and I don't think we were anywhere near that. The airport the next day did have real military presence including tanks. So easy to miss those things if you don't speak the language.'

Who knew that between Sudan, Uganda, Tanzania, Indonesia, and Malaysia, the latter would be the closest we'd get to danger? Next stop: Bali, Isle of Wonder.

Love and Lollipops,

S&M

P.S. More news on the Sulu Sultanate/Malaysia clash.

Sepilok, Sukau, Semporna, and Other Hard-to-Remember Names

Hey gang,

It's officially time to play catch up. We've been in Indonesia for eleven days, and we haven't even gotten past the first four days of Malaysia! Here goes.

• We caught an eastbound bus the day after climbing Kinabalu. I mention the bus only because it was playing the second 'Ghost Rider' movie in English. With Malay subtitles. Which had then been translated back into English subtitles. Now, I like Nic Cage as much as the next girl, but the Ghost Rider franchise is not my favorite of his films (it's a toss up between 'Lord of War' and 'Honeymoon in Vegas'). What I do love is getting to compare the hilarious juxtaposition between what all the characters were saying and the words on the screen. For example, "I'm Jonny Blaze" became "I am the devil magistrate." Amazing.
• Our eastbound bus was headed toward Sepilok, a small hamlet booming with big tourism because of its world-famous orangutan rehabilitation center. (Fun fact: M discovered only a week before our visit to Sepilok that it's orangutan, not orangutang. The name comes from Malay: 'orang' meaning man, and 'hutan' meaning forest.) We spent a day visiting the SORC (Sepilok Orangutan Rehab Center) and hiking around the RDC (Rainforest Discovery Center) and getting SSWDKWTDWO (So Sweaty We Didn't Know What To Do With Ourselves). Fortunately, we were staying at a lodge called Paganakan Dii, and if you're reading this, stop right now and go to Borneo if only to stay there.  We had a villa to ourselves - well, closer to a grown-up treehouse than a villa - with a beautiful indoor/outdoor bathroom and walls that were almost all sliding, so you could create an indoor/outdoor bedroom as well if you wanted to. It was delightful, and a much-needed respite.
• Around this time I developed an odd medical symptom, wherein it hurt terribly every time I swallowed. As a food lover, this was a big problem. Fortunately, M and I have a glut of medical professionals in our lives, and after email consultations with four of them, we figured out that I had developed an ulcerated esophagus as a side effect of the doxycycline we're taking for malaria. If you're reading this, stop right now and make a note to yourself NEVER to take doxy without a meal and lots of water, and never just before bed. A couple days off the drugs and I was chowing down like a pro. Special shout out to Drs. Cochran, Cox, Solomon, and Rakowski for their combined smarts.
• Next, we ventured to Sukau, a tiny village on the tourist map only because of its location on the Kinabatangan, Malaysia's second longest river. Our journey here was also notable, not for the epic cinema, but because we wound up in the back of a car with a driver who was certifiably insane. (It's unclear whether he was a taxi driver; we were standing at a juction and he pulled over and offered us a ride.) Other passengers included a tiny old woman who cackled at everything the crazy driver said, and an illegal immigrant from Indonesia who we had to stop and wait for after he got out of the car and hiked through the jungle to avoid a military checkpoint. Wildlife viewing is the name of the game in Sukau, and every little riverfront lodge has its own boat to take tourists out on river cruises to spot local fauna. After the Serengeti I felt sort of jaded and didn't expect to be impressed by the animals, but our cruise was amazing. We saw a huge herd of pygmy elephants (cuter because they're small, as with most things excluding M) the biggest crocodile of our trip yet, wild orangutans, pig-and long-tailed macaques, and the hilarious proboscis monkey. The latter is so delightful because more than any other primates, they look like awkwardly proportioned men wearing fur suits. While the tourism industry is undoubtedly an enormous boon for Sukau and the other villages in the reason, the sad truth is that animal life along the river is so dense because the rest of their habitat has been taken over by palm oil plantations. Sabah produces fully a quarter of Malaysia's palm oil, most of which is exported to China, though it's a relatively small proportion of the country's land mass.

Next up, adventures in Semporna, 'dive camp' in Mabul, and escapades at Sipadan, one of the world's greatest dive sites!

Over and Out,
S&M

Mount Kinabalu Videos, Finally

This means we can finally start working chronologically through the enormous backlog of videos we've taken since climbing this mountain. Wahoo! This first video was taken immediately after we made it down from the most precarious part of the summit, just after sunrise:

And a few hours later, after completing the Via Ferrata without any major mishaps:

We'll hopefully keep things flowing a bit more regularly from here on out! To all the fourth year med students in our lives, we're thinking about you and wishing you a happy Match Day!

Love,

S&M

Mount Kinabalu

Hey gang,

As promised, here's a recap of our climb of Mount Kinabalu. If you didn't read our last long post, let me set the stage for you: the morning of our climb, M has slept, I have not. This is not an unusual state of affairs.We arrived at park headquarters around 8 AM, paid the multitude of mandatory fees (park, guide, conservation, etc.) met our guide, who spoke a small handful of English words, and were soon ready to set off. We arrived as early as we did because we'd signed up to do the Via Ferrata. 'Via ferrata' is Italian for 'iron way,' but in this case it refers to a trail made up of iron rugs, footholds, cables, and rails wrapped along Kinabalu's north face. It's basically a completely safe yet thrilling/terrifying alternate method of descending from the peak. We needed to arrive at the base camp where we'd spend the night no later than 3 PM for a safety briefing, or we'd have to forfeit the trip (prepaid via an extremely complicated overseas bank transfer, shout out to M's financial people at Chase who helped make it happen). We heard most people complete the hike in 4-6 hours.

The Lonely Planet had mentioned that it was possible to walk from park HQ to the Timpohon Gate, the 'real' starting point of the hike, in an hour, but that it was also possible to hop in a car for 16 ringgit (just over five dollars). Since we generally put ourselves in the category of hardcore individuals, we thought we might hoof it, adding three miles to the day's work. However, our guide immediately went over to one of the waiting cars, opened the door, and motioned for us to get in. "Car it is," we thought, half disappointed. Two minutes later, we were delighted by the choice that had been made for us. The first half mile of the walk was relatively flat and scenic, but soon after, the pedestrian path on the side of the road disappeared and the incline steepened dramatically. After a fifteen minute ride, we reached the gate, ogled the results of the 2012 Mt. Kinabalu Climbathon, and began our own journey up the mountain around 9 AM.

The hike itself was relatively uneventful: it was pleasantly cool, and felt great to be moving. We were chugging along at a decent clip, sometimes leaving our guide a ways behind, passing other hikers consistently, and reached the rest hut where our guide had indicated we'd have our lunch break at 10:45 AM. No matter, we can always eat, we thought. We didn't realize just how quickly we were moving until we overheard another couple resting there say they'd left an hour before us that morning, and were then told by some descending hikers that we were 'winning', i.e. we were the first upward-bound hikers they'd seen that day. (This of course excludes the porters, who hauled up huge wicker baskets full of food/luggage using straps around their foreheads, who were beating everyone. Their calves were roughly the size/shape of softballs.) Now, I know that hiking is all about the journey, etc. etc., but I admit that as a competitive runner, there was a small part of me that was delighted by our progress. When I see people in front of me, I want to pass them. It's part of me, like herding instincts in a sheepdog. Anyway, we arrived at base camp by noon. They were surprised to see us so early - most people show up sometime in the early afternoon - but one of the guides took advantage of the opportunity to give us the safety briefing right then, to give us the rest of the afternoon off. Delightful! Afterwards, we crawled into the cozy sleeping bags provided for us on our bunk beds, and spent the afternoon reading, watching the terrible rainstorm that began around 2 PM and lasted all evening, and feeling awful for the many people that arrived chilled and soaked to the bone.

Dinner was served that evening in a giant communal dining hall, early in recognition of the fact that everyone had to get up again in the wee hours to begin their summit attempts (between 1:30 and 3 AM). We shared a table with a fun group of Malaysians in their early twenties who'd hiked the Mesilau trail (the other option besides Timpohon - M and I originally were interested because it's longer and harder, but the Via Ferrata people told us we couldn't). It took them eleven hours, and they'd hiked straight through the rainstorm. Again, we were happy with how things turned out for us. Given how early we'd arrived at base camp, we asked our guide what time we should set out in the morning to make it to the summit for sunrise around 6 AM. He recommended 3 AM, meaning a 2:30 AM wakeup. Even though it was only 7:15 PM when we returned from dinner, we got into bed immediately. More specifically, we squeezed into my bottom bunk, and M read aloud to me from 'The Hobbit,' our team book of the moment.

In general, it takes me a while to switch off each night in bed. M might fall fast asleep within a minute or two, but I need time to unwind, physically and (especially) mentally. However, in the past few months, I've discovered something of a magic sleep bullet: M's voice. He is my personal puppy whisperer, I am his newborn Boxer. He is the turkey farmer, I am the upside-down turkey. Nothing else works to put me to sleep as fast as the sound of his voice reading Tolkien. Since I'm also a night person and find it hard to fall asleep before 11 PM regardless of the circumstances, I was hoping this would work to help me take advantage of the few hours between us and 2:30 AM. I almost fell asleep hearing about dwarves pillaging Bilbo's well-stocked pantry, but when M crawled up to his own bunk around 8:30 PM I woke up again...and stayed awake, all night.

I'll posit that there is almost no torture so exquisite as desperately wanting to fall asleep and being unable to do so. I lay still with my eyes closed, to no avail. I picked up the book I'd started the night before and read another third, hoping sleep would start tugging at my eyelids. Nothing. I was too hot. One of the older climbers from Hong Kong in our bunk room had on and off coughing fits all night, but my earplugs were giving me a headache. I felt like Goldilocks, except I never found my 'just right.' Shortly after midnight, M woke up too, and saint that he is, he rejoined me in the lower bunk and told me a story to try to get me to sleep. At that point, though, it was too late. I knew the Chinese climbers would be getting up shortly after 1 AM, and another weird quirk of mine is not being to fall asleep if I know I'll be woken up soon. I was miserable in the knowledge that the summit leg of the hike was the hardest section of yet, and I'd be doing it on no sleep. Finally, 2:30 AM rolled around, and I tore myself from bed. M and I were slow to get moving, and didn't end up on the trail until 3:20 AM.

Fortunately, my strange competitive instinct is good for something. As soon as we started hiking, we ran into the long string of climbers who'd left base camp in the two hours before we had. I got an enormous jolt of energy (no doubt inspired by my desire to pass everyone) and we cruised quickly up the mountain's final steep pitches. Once again, it felt great to be moving, and the cold air invigorated me; it was probably around 35 degrees. An hour and a half later, we made it to the final leg of the summit: a slippery pile of boulders that we needed our hands to climb. After ten minutes, we reached the top, and snapped a photo with the one other hiker who'd arrived moments before us (not that anyone's counting). We felt great! Then we realized it was 5 AM, fully an hour from sunrise, and we were standing on a windy mountaintop in sweat-dampened clothing. We spent the next hour huddled against the leeward side of a boulder, cursing ourselves for moving too fast, and watching the other eighty or so climbers reach the top and take their mandatory summit-sign photos. Here's ours:

After what felt like an eternity, the sky began to grow brighter by degrees. It was too overcast for a real sunrise in the end, but the light illuminated the dramatic landscape that we'd skated by in the earlier darkness.  Here's some of what we saw:

We walked another twenty minutes down the mountain to the starting point of the Via Ferrata, and so began yet another adventure. You may have read elsewhere on this blog that I have what some people call 'a crippling fear of heights,' but for some reason I'd set my mind to doing this. As a climber, I have at least 80% faith in things like ropes and carabiners, so I felt mostly alright about walking down the side of the mountain, thousands of feet of air between me and the ground. I volunteered to be the group captain (the group being me, M, and our guide J) meaning I had to go first, and I think the tiny leadership role did me a world of good. It's hard to describe the experience exactly - I think my mind was addled by the adrenaline and lack of sleep - so I'll let these pictures do the talking.

This is much more impressive than it looks.

This is exactly as impressive as it looks.

What's impressive here is primarily our guide's photography skills.

The rest of the day passed in a damp blur (you can't tell from these pictures, but it rained all morning, making the Via Ferrata even more excitingly/terrifyingly harrowing because of the slippery rocks). When we finally reached the Timpohon Gate around 2:30 PM, I cast another glance at the 2012 Climbathon results. All told, M and I spent around seven and a half hours going up and down the mountain, not counting the Via Ferrata, considerably faster than any other hikers that day. The previous year's winner, on the other hand, made it up and back in two hours and eleven minutes. No matter how fast or hardcore you think you are, there's always some Spanish guy out there named Kilian Jornet ready to totally school you.

We've got a couple videos of our time on the mountain that we'd love to share with you, but the Internet gods aren't smiling on our upload speeds at the moment. Soon!

Over and Out,
S&M

Mystery Fruits

Hey gang,

We haven't come across a computer yet here in Indonesia - just patchy WiFi - so to tide you over until we can write everything up, here's a video in which we explore some of the unusual fruits we found at the market in Semporna (southeast corner of Sabah). Let us know if you can identify any of them, and welcome to the undersides of our chins! Note to future selves: never again film from below. This is the least flattering angle possible. 

More Soon,
S&M

P.S. Shout out to M's mom, who celebrates her birthday today. Woop!

We're Back!

Hello, world!

Our sincerest apologies for the enormous gap in our posts. I've looked upon the situation with mounting dread for the past two weeks, sort of like an overachieving middle schooler bummed about missing school because of mono, knowing he'll have to make up all the homework assigned in his absence. I have so wanted to post almost every day since I last did - M will attest to this - but every hotel computer I've sat down at has been broken, every internet cafe has had a power outage, or in the case of tonight, the entire section of town has shut down because the Malaysian army is moving in due to a (rumor of? real) shootout with some Filipino pirates supporters of the Sulu Sultanate, who laid claim to parts of Sabah. However, I waited out a twenty-something German with wispy blonde facial hair to get on this ancient PC in the lobby of our inn, and M is providing moral support by watching Shanghai Noon and booking tomorrow night's accommodation on the couch next to me.

Anyway, let's back things up. Last time we checked in, we were celebrating Valentine's Day on Zanzibar. To be more specific, we were ringing in Valentine's Day on Zanzibar, but then we took a taxi to the airport at 2 AM to catch our 4:50 AM flight to Addis Ababa. And so began our longest section of transit thus far, 40 hours of flying and layovers, laid out as follows: a flight from Zanzibar to Addis, three hour layover, Addis to Frankfurt, two hour layover, Frankfurt to Seoul, seven hour layover, and finally, Seoul to Kota Kinabalu, arriving near midnight on February 15. This video of Matthiah in one of the 'relaxation rooms' in the Asiana Airlines lounge in Incheon does a pretty good job summing up our mental state 75% of the way into our journey:

As you can see, we were pretty delirious. We tried naming all the movies we 'watched' once we landed, but apparently there were several hours when we were in our seats, staring at our personal entertainment centers, with as much going on upstairs as jellyfish. It wasn't all bad, though. The Lufthansa lounge in Frankfurt was amazing, and we treated ourselves to abundant creme-based desserts, truffles, and champagne (and in M's case, several giant Bavarian pretzels). While the 'relaxation rooms' in Incheon were less than relaxing, the full service shower rooms were particularly life affirming. M got to shave with a brand new razor, I got to use conditioner for the first time in seven weeks...what more could you want? When we arrived in Kota Kinabalu (KK), we took a mildly extortionate taxi ride to our hotel (we were too tired to argue) and promptly fell asleep for fourteen hours.

When we woke up, more or less alert and now with as much brainpower as primates, or at least very clever Golden Retrievers, we were in a new country, on a new continent. M and I had both previously traveled (independently of one another) to peninsular Malaysia. During my trip almost exactly three years ago, I grew curious about the unread Borneo section of my Lonely Planet, and started plotting my next Malaysian excursion almost immediately. I had three goals in visiting Sabah, one of the two Malaysian states on the island of Borneo: 1) explore Sipadan, a tiny blip of an island in the Celebes Sea featuring some of the world's greatest diving, 2) climb Mount Kinabalu, Borneo's highest mountain and a Unesco World Heritage Site, and 3) eat as much roti canai as humanly possible. Roti is sort of like Malaysia's version of Ugandan chapatti: a hot, flaky, crispy, oily, melt-in-your-mouth flatbread. While Ugandan chapatti is usually wrapped around eggs, roti is dipped either into a lentil or a coconut curry sauce. M and I were all booked to climb Kinabalu on February 18, and were starting our stint at Scuba Junkies' Mabul Beach Resort on February 26, meaning our first order of business in KK was obvious: stuff our faces.

Arriving in Asia was a bit of a culture shock after nearly seven weeks in Africa. The difference between Uganda and Tanzania was already stark enough: in Uganda, it felt like everyone - women and children, anyway - were working all day, every day, doing backbreaking labor. Subsistence agriculture was the norm outside of cities, and cities were few and far between. In our first hours in Tanzania, we saw families relaxing together on the shores of Lake Victoria on a Sunday afternoon, men and women together at bars, and a number of teenage boys dressed like Usher. (Seriously.) In essence, we saw how even a little bit of disposable income can change what a life looks like. Cue our search for the best roti canai in KK, which took us to an enormous mall a block away from our hotel, with an enormous food court on its bottom floor. This was a place where you could find twenty different variations on Angry Birds cell phone cases or bedazzled manicures or corn-in-a-cup. (FYI, corn-in-a-cup is just what it sounds like, and you can get in sprinkled with sugar, or drizzled with butter, or with mayo, or with mayo and raisins, etc. etc. Seriously.) You could catch the latest terrible-yet-entertaining MTV-produced movie, Hansel and Gretel (we did) or get your cracked iPhone screen fixed (we did). The top-floor movie theater was just a small fraction of a massive entertainment complex featuring karaoke, bowling, and billiards, all tempting KK's young people to spend their ringgit. It was almost like being in a first world country again, albeit one where you could stuff your belly to bursting for the equivalent of $7. 

With one item on Sasha's Malaysian To-Do List crossed off already, we spent much of the day wondering at the fast WiFi, perusing the aisles at the supermarket (grass jelly soda, anyone?) and walking up and down the KK waterfront, which was a marvel to us in itself. We hadn't seen any sidewalks, let alone pleasant pedestrian esplanades, in months. The next day, we caught a local minibus to Mount Kinabalu - M tried to do some gentle haggling until it became clear that we were being given a fixed price, another culture shock moment - and ascended nearly 1900m, leaving Sabah's steaming seaside capital city behind in favor of misty drizzle at the mountain's base. With a relatively rapid ascent planned for the following day, we'd heard it was a good idea to spend the night before climbing the mountain sleeping at elevation. Now, there are a lot of reasons I'm envious of M: his impeccable hand-eye coordination, his ability to make strangers like him instantaneously, his imperviousness to cold, and his knowledge of carpentry are a few of them. However, the quality I've coveted most on this trip has been his ability to fall asleep anytime, anywhere. Case in point: he somehow stacked our packs on top of each other on the floor of the minibus, stretched out on top of them, propped his head against the cold window as we bounced along the tarmac, and slept for much of the two hour journey from KK. In spite of his nap and our 12 PM wakeup that day (overslept, yikes!) he still managed to conk out around 11 PM in preparation for our early start on the mountain. I, on the other hand, tossed, turned, finished a book, started a new one, read about a third of it, and didn't fall asleep until two in the morning. 

These facts and more will play in to our next installment of smashadventures catch-up, due at some point in the next very few days. We fly to Indonesia tomorrow, but we still have plenty of Borneo stories to tell, including our ascent and descent from Kinabalu (a taste of that below), encounters with proboscis monkeys and pygmy elephants, five days of adult 'dive camp' on Mabul, and what happens to your esophagus if you persist in taking your antimalarial without food or water immediately before bed for two months. Stay tuned.

Over and Out,

S&M

P.S. We want to give a special shout-out to M's grandfather, Odie. He just turned 90, and packs more cool into his little finger than the two of us have combined. Another set of hugs and kisses goes to our dear friends Brett and Katy (the ones who gave us the horizontal iPhone filming tip) who are getting married on March 3. We love you!