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.
Over and Out,
S&M
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