I left KK on Monday to go to Sandakan. I was interested in seeing the orangutan conservation area. It’s been on The Discovery Channel before and it supposedly is a pretty big deal. I had a choice of either going by myself or taking a tour that would be three nights. The tour included much more than just the orangutans, but it was also kind of expensive, so I decided to just do it by myself. Big Mistake. Yeah, the orangutans were cool, but the whole thing lasted maybe an hour and a half. The park was laid out in such a way that it was more of a zoo than being a part of the experience. It was still cool to see, but to make a 7-hour trip to see it was probably not the best idea.

Right across the street from the orangutan park there was a Sun Bear Conservation Park. Sun bears look a lot like black bears, but maybe a bit smaller. I think I heard someone say that it is the smallest bear, but I’m not positive. The main building is very nice and after you pay your $10 you start walking up some stairs, maybe 50 or so, and you get to a deck/viewing platform. Below the deck there were about 6 bears. After I took a bunch of photos I went to go further into the park to maybe get a view of other bears… Turns out, that was it. The bears were cute and I’m glad I went, but I think the experience kind of summed up how I’ve felt about Borneo since I’ve been here. It’s kind of a tourist trap.

 

 

The second tour that I took was to go to the national park that supposedly was great… When I did the tour it was just okay, nothing special. But, I went with a friend that I met in Penang about two months ago. She lives in Singapore and decided to come visit me for the weekend. So yeah, the tour wasn’t very good, but I really enjoyed hanging out with Nicole.

The first stop in our two-hour ride was to a vantage point overlooking the Kinabalu Mountain. Nice view, but the opportunity to stretch my legs was maybe even better. Got some good photos of scenery and of Nicole.

Our next stop was to a botanical garden… meh. Kind of interesting but it was something that I think I could have skipped without much of a regret. Still it was okay.

Then we headed to Poring Hot Springs and what I really wanted to do, a canopy walk. Canopy walks are basically suspended rope bridges high in the trees. Unfortunately, we went directly from lunch to the hot springs and I didn’t have my camera. I didn’t know that we weren’t getting back into the van so the photos were taken by Nicole or me using her iPhone 6. Still pretty good photos.

The canopy walk was short, too short, but still fun. I loved being up high and maybe even more fun was watching Nicole trying to walk on the bridge… I’m still smiling just thinking about it.

This cruise happened about ten days ago.

So do you know what ‘proboscis’ means? It means, ‘nose’ and the monkeys with the big noses have got the notoriety of being named after them. The first tour I took when I was in KK was to take a river cruise to see the monkeys with a nice dinner afterwards.

 

 

I had a good time and took a lot of photos, but unfortunately the monkeys like staying high in the trees, so many of my photos didn’t turn out. They were either blurry or not framed well, but like I said some were pretty good, so I thought that I’d share. Oh, and at the end of the cruise we got the opportunity to see fireflies in the mangrove forest. I hadn’t seen them before, so seeing hundreds of lights flickering in the trees was something I really enjoyed, especially knowing that they were random organic lights.

 

I met some good people during the tour and one just emailed me yesterday. What a nice surprise. She doesn’t speak English very well but maybe this will be my chance to learn a little Chinese/Mandarin.

It’s Sunday the 15^th; the day after Valentines day and I’m sitting in the hostel in Saladan, Malaysia. I arrived here from Tawau yesterday. This is my second time to the city and the second time at this hostel. My visit to Tawau wasn’t very productive and if you were to have viewed my time there, it was a waste of two days. I didn’t really do too much exploring, I didn’t go hiking like I had planned, and most of all I didn’t have any fun. Pretty much my time was spent in my room doing seemingly nothing but wasting time.

Tawau really doesn’t have any tourist spots, and its one attraction, the national park is about twenty kilometers away. My idea was to go for two days and nights, the first full day I’d go hiking and then head back to Saladan. What actually happened is that I waited too long to leave and about 9am decided that it was too hot to go. I pretty much just stayed in my hotel all day.

One of the things that I had difficulty with was that I didn’t see any other European-looking people, not one in the time I was there. That in of itself is usually a good thing, but the locals also weren’t very friendly. I started to get the feeling that they didn’t want me there. Of course that’s probably not the case, but I’d walk around and very few people would look at me, and even fewer would actually acknowledge that I was there.  Maybe I have been spoiled the last few weeks, but I started to feel a little uncomfortable walking around.

So now, as I’ve mentioned, I’m back in Saladan and to be honest it’s just slightly better than Tawau. I’m more used to it, but I’m not really happy to be here. Tomorrow I’ll catch a bus for the 8-hour ride back to Kota Kinabalu for a couple of days before I head to Brunei.

Okay, so now that I’ve added one kind of catch-up post there are some things that I would like to write about. Again, I say this quite a bit but I need people to understand that this blog is mostly just for my own memory. I want to go back and read what I did on a particular point in my travels, I want to remember my emotions, and in general relive my experience. Sometimes it’s interesting to others who may stumble onto my site, but that isn’t my goal here. It’s for me.

 

Traveling Alone:

You know, for the most part I like to travel alone. I get to make my own schedule, do what I want and never feel responsible for someone else’s happiness. But, and this is a big ‘but’ I sometimes get lonely. For whatever the reason, maybe it’s simply that I’m not near others, or maybe I’m in a kind of quiet mood, whatever the reason there are times that I get lonely. This is one of those times.

After my friend went back to Singapore I returned to what I know the best, being on my own. All was good, I met a lot of people and was generally feeling pretty good about life. Then somewhere along the way I started to get quiet, I’m not sure exactly why, but I remember being on the bus to Sandakan chatting with a girl from England when I just kind of shut off. I stopped talking to her about mid-journey, feigning sleep and since I haven’t felt like being around anyone. During the bus ride to Tawau a older man tried to befriend me, but I just got annoyed by his attempt to get me to interact. For me, this is highly unusual since I tend to embrace the interactions that I have with people and especially when I meet very nice locals, but at this time I just wanted to be left alone. Again I feigned sleep.

So now I’m sitting in the lobby of the hotel typing a blog entry to nobody, with the expectation that nobody will see it. How pathetic is that???

On a side note, one of the changes that I’ve noticed about myself that I attribute to traveling for an extended period on my own is that I have become much more outgoing. I used to have a hard time starting a conversation with strangers, or sometimes even with friends, but now I find that it is easy. Sometimes it seems too easy and I refrain from engaging just so I’m not, ‘that guy’ who talks too much. Not sure what caused it, but I think I like the new ken.

It’s been so long since I wrote anything for the blog that it seems kind of strange to add something now. I think the last time I added an entry was about three months ago when I was in Thailand, and so much has happened since then.

Let me first start by saying that I’m in Borneo right now. For those of you who don’t know, Borneo is an island that is controlled by three countries, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei. Currently I’m in the Malaysian part known as Sabah, in a city called Tawau. There really isn’t that much around here to do, and the only thing that I did find interesting, I missed my opportunity to go. So right now I’m sitting in the lobby of my hotel drinking a coffee and trying to somehow put my life into context for any one interested.

From the time I left Krabi, Thailand (last entry) to now, I’ve spent about 6 weeks in Penang and 6 weeks in Kuala Lumpur, and 2 weeks in Borneo, all are cities are in Malaysia. The remaining time, about 30 days I traveled around Indonesia.

Now I realize the next part may seem boring to anyone reading this, but I want to write the path that I took from Krabi until now. It’s more of a way for me to document what I have done for posterity and not necessarily for enjoyment.

I left Krabi and headed to Penang for 6 weeks. I rented a room in an apartment for a month, and spent a little bit more than a week in a neighboring town. Most of my time there was just relaxing and hiking in the national park in Batu Ferringhi.

From there I took a bus to Kuala Lumpur for what I thought would be a week or two, but it ended up being a sort of home away from home. I met a lot of great people there and am still friends with the hostel owner and some of the staff. I stayed there until December 30 when I left for Indonesia.

I arrived in Jakarta at the end of the year and stayed there for about 4 nights. Before I went many people told me to avoid Jakarta because it was big, dirty, and there wasn’t much to see. That didn’t change my desire to go, afterall, Jakarta has always seemed so mystical to me… for no other reason that for its name. What I did realize is that those people who told me to avoid it were correct. It really is a non-place for tourists.

From Jakarta I took a train to Yogyakarta which is in the middle of Java. I wasn’t sure what to expect but I was pleasantly surprised when I got there. The people were extremely friendly, the weather was nice, and there were at least enough attractions to keep me busy for the week that I was there. One of the best things about it was the hostel I was staying at. It had an open courtyard/garden that all the rooms opened into. I spent many days and nights just sitting outside my room completely content.

From Yogyakarta, I took a flight to Denpasar in Bali. Bali is an island, Denpasar is the main city in Bali. My first week I stayed kind of close to one of the more famous beaches in Denpasar; Sanur. It was very touristy and very developed. Some of it I liked, but most of the time I just felt out of place around the resorts. It wasn’t the busy season so there wasn’t a huge amount of people, but it was busy enough for me to have enough to do while there.

After about a week in Sanur I headed to Ubud (city in Bali) for about a week, and this is where I started to feel a little bit more comfortable. The city was developed many years ago by a Western artist and since has become a somewhat center for the arts in the area. There is a strong tourist vibe to it, but as far as I was concerned it didn’t bother me. While there I went to Monkey Forrest, went on a tour, and generally just walked around the city. Food was good and cheap and after the problems I had finding good food the last few weeks, Ubud was just what I needed.

The last couple weeks, from the time I was in Kuala Lumpur, everyone seemed to be telling me that “I just had to go to the Gili Islands.” So that was my plan. I left Ubud for the biggest Gili Island (there are three), known as Gili T. Oh, shit I loved it there. It was everything I had hoped to see in Bali. There are no motorized vehicles on the island, just horse carts and bicycles, the water was warm, blue, and filled with fishing and diving boats. If there was a drawback it would have been that it was a little bit too touristy, but honestly it didn’t bother me at all. I didn’t do that much while there, but Gili T will probably be one of my most favorite places that I’ve gone in quite a while.

With my Indonesia visa running out, I started to look for a new place to explore. I had planned on going to Darwin, Australia for a few days. Unfortunately finding a place to stay while there was too difficult, so I decided to head back to KL for a week. I don’t like KL for things to do, but I do like that it is the hub of AirAsia, and I can fly to almost anywhere for next to nothing, for example getting to Borneo, I paid $30. You can’t beat the price.

KL was good. I stayed in the same hostel as before and really enjoyed the people there. The owner of the hostel took me and two other tourists for a drive around the city and up into the hills. He and one of the other tourists were trying to locate where a festival was supposed to be held, but I just went for the view.

After about a week at KL I headed to Borneo, where I am right now. To be a little honest, I had no understanding of Borneo except it was supposed to be very remote and have large areas of jungles. I was looking forward to doing some jungle trekking. When I got here I was surprised, and I’m not sure I was surprised in a good way or bad, but much of what I saw was more like the rest of Malaysia. Fairly developed and not the least bit what I had expected. I landed in Kota Kinabalu and stayed there for about a week. Someone I met in Penang decided to visit while I was there so during the weekend she and I went on a tour and just hung out. Got to admit it was a nice change from my usual traveling alone and meeting someone, then a day later I can’t remember their name. She was so funny too. I still laugh at some of the things that she said to me… and that I actually let her say to me.

By Monday I was on my own again and heading to a small town on the eastern side of the island, Sandakan. It’s got a few interesting things to do but in general it was just an okay experience. I was there for three nights.

Yesterday I left Sandakan and arrived in Tawau.  I’m bored. L