Malaysia (Borneo)

As we already told you, we spent quite a lot of time in Malaysia and we had the time to go to Borneo Island.

Kota Kinabalu

The city of Kota Kinabalu, located on the west part of the island, in the Sarawak region, is not a pretty city. However, we could still enjoy some very nice sunsets as the city is right by the seaside:

Waow!

There's also some very nice islands close by where you can swim and also do some nice snorkeling!

We would have liked to show you pictures of Nemo and its friends but the photos from the waterproof camera are bad quality... What we saw looked more or less like this:

:)

From Kota Kinabalu (KK as the locals say), we took a bus then a train to go to do some rafting. The river was quite rough (level 3&4 out of 5) and we enjoyed ourselves! For the record, we woke up at 5am because it takes 5h to get to the rafting starting point... So we did about 10h of bus and train for about 1h15m of rafting. :) Moreover, we were 6 per boat plus one guide. The 4 other persons had decided not to paddle, they were here just to enjoy the ride but it's a sport, ffs!!! We missed a few rapids thanks to them but we had a ball anyway.

Once again, sorry for the pictures, they're crap too...

Still in KK, we participated in multiple nights out organized by members of the couchsurfing website: a food and French film night for the 14th of July (with crepes!), a night out on the Ramadhan market and a dinner to eat fresh grilled seafood! We met a lot of nice people and we especially enjoyed spending time with Didier a.k.a "Indiana Jones" :). 

Didier lived for 10 years in Amazonia and now lives in KK after spending some months in the Borneo jungle. He's a snake specialist and lives from selling t-shirts he draws. He's an ecologist, militating to save rivers and forests thanks to Effective Microorganisms. For those interested, have a look at this link: Effective Microorganisms.

We did a tour of the market with him and he showed us some local products that we would not dare to taste on our own! Etienne even bit in a coconut seed fresh from the bin! :) (Relax, the bin wasn't so bad, it only contained coconut waste) :P

Didier collecting the juice from an "old" coconut...

... and having fun watching Etienne tasting the coconut seed coming from the bin! :)

Bilit

We booked a trip with a travel agency to spend 3 days and 2 nights in a guesthouse along the Kinabatangan river, in a small village called Bilit.

In the bus toward Bilit, we could see the mount Kinabalu, the highest mountain in Borneo, which culminates at 4095m!

Why would you go and sleep along the Kinabatangan river? Because this river goes right through a national park, there's jungle and a lot of wild animals (but no fierce animals! :D).

We took a boat (every evening at 4pm and every morning at 6.30am) to observe the animals, mainly monkeys and birds.

The kind of boat we used to go on our river cruises every day

We could see: macaques, proboscis monkeys (with their strange noses...), Orang Utans (from afar), leaf monkeys, squirrels and all kinds of birds (Hornbills, king fishers,...)

It was a great show for our senses! :) It was weird to see in the wild all those animals we usually see in cages at the zoo!

The famous Proboscis monkey and its strange nose...

Kuching

Here we are in Kuching, in the east part of Borneo, in the Sabah region. "Kuching" means cat in malaysian and, as a result, there are cat statues all over the city. Miaow! :)

"Especially for you Cookie, we spent a few days in the official city of cats. We promise we'll bring you there some day!!!"

Some photos of this nice city:

The vegetable market

Like a chameleon, Etienne is blending in with the bus... :P

The city has kept its village look despite its size

♫ A Dada à Dada et fouette, ♪ fouette Fouette, ♪ fouette, fouette là ♫... :)

We met a very special person in Kuching thanks to the couchsurfing website once again: Chai. He's malaysian with Chinese origins and has a passion for adventure (look at his cool car!) ;) :

Chai really made sure we spent a good time in his region and he helped us a lot! In particular, he advised us to rent a motorbike for an afternoon but this motorbike gave a hard time to Etienne... It was a manual, whereas all the other motorbikes he drove until then were automatics and semi-automatics. The engine kept on stopping at every traffic light with a really frustrated Etienne! :D

Despite those technical problems, we still managed to see the Orang Utans rehabiliation centre and the crocodile farm.

"Look! It's easy to do the splits!" :)

Kind of scary, isn't it?

Even MORE scary!

Back to Chai's, we did a bit of cooking to our host and his students. We didn't cook anything special, but they never had mashed potatoes with butter and they loved it!

The next day, we went on a road trip with Chai in his jeep and we did a BBQ along a river:

Chai knows it all and only needed his knife and a lighter to get a good fire burning!

Guess what that is?... It's rubber coming straight from the rubber tree.

We stopped in two villages from the Iban tribe. They still live in their traditional long houses. It's a house built in length with a big shared room and "flats" along this room. All the villagers live in this house, around 200 people live in the biggest we've seen!

Long house

The shared room, all in length

We were very warmly welcomed by the Iban people with an orangeade.

Here, we sit on the floor to have a drink, have dinner and pretty much everything else.

Cute kids

Handmade carpet

Iban people are so welcoming that they even invited us to sleep in the long house! But we refused their invitation when we saw this:

These are real human skulls!

The Iban tribe used to cut their neighbours' heads and to keep them... Indeed, the one who brought back a head was considered a brave man and could access a higher social rank in the tribe and became more popular among the women. Anyway, all this was about 200 years ago so there's not much to fear from them anymore, but it's still disturbing to see human skulls in the shared room. :S

We set our tent along a river for the night and we went to visit the primary school of the nearby village. The children were so cute and so brave! The youngest ones are 6 years old, live in the school all week, do their homework and their laundry on their own and they have to walk for about 6 hours to get back to their home! It was touching to see those kids who are already asked to be independant.

No doubt on who's the happiest person on this picture! :)

We were here to put them to bed :)

The next day, we went to another school for Chai's work: he's a teacher for teachers and he's here to review his students progress (i.e. the teachers). It's a Chinese school and we were invited to observe the classes with Chai.

It feels weird to be back on the school bench!

The way back to Kuching was fairly quiet and quick, everybody was tired:

"Allah hu Akbar", Aurore? :)

We then went to Bako National Park for the weekend. The park is near Kuching and reachable by boat. We did a good trek of 3 to 4 hours to see (again) some monkeys and the tropical forest.

A langur, these ones are so lovely!

New buddies ;)

The trek lead us to a small and nice bay where we swam and then headed back to the camp before nightfall.

Us, happy of this week full of adventure! ;)

Finally, we spent one last night at Chai's. He surprised us one last time as he kindly brought us back some jackfruit from his parents garden. It's our favorite tropical fruit! Thanks again for everything Chai!!!

"BACK TO NATURE" was the sentence of that week, we'll remember it! ;)