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 (
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!
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