Release the bats Part 1: Kuching

The first thing you notice when you get to Borneo is the smell and that smell is me. If you've ever read the book Perfume by Patrick Süskind, it tells the tale of a perfuming savant who kills young women to bottle their scent. In Borneo, it's a similar story except the perfumer has bottled the sweat of 1000 teenage Slayer fans after three hours in the moshpit. I have never, ever smelt this bad. The reason for this is the heat and humidity. I've lived in the tropics before but never anywhere with such heavy humidity. Every breath is like taking a gulp of water and it's almost hard to breathe at times. I do mention my smell for a reason which I'll get to later, not because I want to gross you out.

Anyhow, we landed in Kuching, the capital of Sarawak. Kuching is a town with a thing for cats. Their emblem is a cat, they have statues of cats, a cat museum and cats rather than dogs lie at the feet of men in cafes. Cats were everywhere and Ruth loved them all (except for the ugly ones). I declined to take a photo of this phenomenon but trust me cat fans, your spiritual home is Kuching. As I mentioned in a previous entry, we had a hard time getting anything organised in Kuching so we decided to leave pretty quickly. The one thing we did do was go to the Bako National Park.

Getting there is an adventure in itself as you have to drive thirty minutes out of town and then catch a boat to the entrance of the park. The boat is just a little skip and you seemingly head out into the deepest ocean before you turn into a little island and get off on this tiny jetty. As the only swimming stroke I know is the drown, this was a nervous trip for me.


Here's me enjoying the ride.


Believe it or not, as soon as we got there, these proboscis monkeys turned up. Banging and clattering over the Park HQ roofs, they stationed themselves in trees not far from where we stood. Here's all my camera could muster, a brown blur in a tree but I can assure you, what they say about proboscis monkeys with big noses is true - big nose, big primate.

We signed in for our hike and as we made our way to the beginning we saw a whole family of proboscis walking across the mudflats. Strangely it reminded me of all the tourists with kids, a lot of yelling, goofing off and lagging behind. Monkeys not only share our DNA but the ability to be annoying in groups. It was like a family outing to Skegness.


We started the hike and it was quite hard going at first as we hadn't fully acclimatised to the humidity and it was hard going in the sun.

As we walked, we kept our ears open for any major rustling in the jungle to indicate any primates in the area. At one point, we crouched as we heard a large animal approaching us. It came round the corner, standing tall on it's back legs, shirtless and tribal tattoos on display - the boganus monkey was upon us. We exchanged pleasantries and I asked if the track got harder. "Mate, it's not hard. Matter of fact, it's a bit like Australia." Thanks dude, way to ruin Borneo for me.


To be fair, he was right. The terrain was a lot like some of the hiking I'd done in North Queensland but with freakier bugs and these shimmering pools of urine...


...and Predator blood. Actually, this whole trip has been a flashback to my 80's film loving inner child where being in the jungle and caves of Borneo is a mixture of Predator, Alien, Indiana Jones and the Goonies. I am clearly Chunk in this equation.


We completed the hike in a fair amount of time (about 4 hours) and felt justifiably proud that we'd done it without dying and so soon into the trip. Good work Ruth and Jon. The only downside was that I had that familiar odour that had plagued me since arrival when I ran into a woman I'd worked with some years ago who I really like and respect. As I think this random run in will be the last time I saw her, I told her how much I appreciated working with her. Mid way through the conversation I thought "I'm not she knows who I am and is she holding her nose - OH MY GOD I STINK!" I said farewell and slunk back into the obscurity and I'm sure her memory of visiting Borneo is slightly tainted by being accosted by a sweaty lunatic. Good times...

Continues soon...

--