Malaysia, 1 Nov 2006 --

I usually try to make my writing concise, so when I look at the rambling of my previous post I cringe a bit.  It’s impossible to summarize all the great things we experienced on the week or so we spent in the Kelabit highlands of Borneo, so I’ll try a summary list of why the Kelabit Highlands are great:

• Transportation is exciting:  The one and only way into and out of Bario is by 6 seater twin otter aircraft.  It takes 3 weeks to walk to the closest major city.  The pilots keep the cockpit door open, and if they’re in a good mood and you ask nicely they’ll fly you by some of the local mountains on the way in.  I also enjoyed watching the pilot steer with one hand and gesture animatedly with the other while talking to the copilot.  Ba’Kellan is a bit more connected, and you can take a 5 hour rollercoaster 4×4 truck ride instead of the airplane to get in and out.  Oh, and I have some pictures of dogs sleeping on the runway in Ba’Kellan…which is great.
• The Food:  I haven’t eaten as well as I did in Bario and Ba’Kellan in a long time.  I think it’s a longstanding Kelabit tradition to stuff visitors as full as possible with fresh rice, jungle vegitables, fried chicken, and tasty tapioca cakes as possible.  Our guide, Walter, told us that when Kelabit people visisted relatives in another village it used to be the tradition that they would eat every meal with every relative.  Apparently you’d finish your first breakfast only to find your next relative waiting for you at the door to take you to his house.  In the jungle, our guide picked and cooked us a dinner of fresh jungle spinich and jungle fern with some rice from his hometown of Pa Lungan.  We were lucky enough to arrive in Ba’Kellan for a wedding (a British guy met a girl from Ba’Kellan while they were both doing missionary work in Kosovo…and the rest is history) and we were welcome at all the pre-wedding festivities.  They even slaughtered a pig.
• Walter, our guide:  This guy was awesome, he took us to his hometown of Pa Lungan, fed us, and had us stay with his brother.  He made a great jungle cook, and was always chopping down random jungle plants with his parang (machette) and showing us we could eat them.  Apparently, when he’s not guiding tourists he prefers to travel the jungle without a trail because it’s faster.  Also, he helped me find a left handed parang (they’re only sharpened on one side) of my own to buy.  He told me a used one would be the best bet, since I was looking for one I could use…not just one to look pretty on the wall.  Oh, and Walter can cut perfectly straight planks from jungle trees with a chainsaw…which I think is pretty amazing.  Walter’s had some bad luck lately, and he really liked my jungle shirt from REI, so I got online today and ordered one to be sent to him.  I hope REI can figure out how to ship something to Bario.
• Walter’s Brother, Mado: This guy was really smart.  We stayed overnight at his house and he told us stories about the WWII Japanese occupation of Malaysia and the 1965 ‘confrontation’ with Indonesia over the border.  On both occasions the Brits and the Aussies parachuted soliders in to Borneo to help prevent the invaders from attacking the Kelabit, and for that reason the white man is held in high regard with the Kelabit.  Nice to see westerners doing something right for a change.  Also, Mado filters his own water and uses solar panels he installed himself instead of the standard generator.  I think he has the smallest eco-footprint of anyone I know.
• The Kelabit People:  The traditional greeting for travelers passing through a town translates something like “Hello, where have you come from, where are you going,” and everywhere I went I heard people greeting me.  We passed briefly into Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) on the trek to Bario, and we came to a village where they were building a new church.  A string of something like 40 men walked past us on the trail, each carrying a giant fresh cut plank from the jungle on his back…amazingly each man paused to shake Walter’s hand, my hand, and Cara’s hand before continuing on to the church site.

So, I’m sure this doesn’t do it justice….but I’ve been at this webcafe for far too long now, so that will have to do.  I posted many more pictures today, as well including…

A few last pictures from Singapore:

Pictures from Kuching and Mukah in Malaysian Borneo:

Some from Bario, Ba’Kellan and the Jungle in between:

And finally, we also have a point and shoot camera with us that can go some places my D70 can’t.  Though they’re a little out of sync with the rest of the pictures, here are a few from the b-reel:

Borneo, 26 Oct 2006 --

Ok, that is seriously the lamest title in history.  I promise I have not accepted employment with the tourism commissions of Sabah and or Sarawak (the two Malay provinces on Borneo)…but no matter how many superlatives I stuck in I don’t think it would do the last few weeks justice. 

We spent our first few days on Borneo in Kuching at the south end of Sarawak.  Kuching is a very nice town, but it doesn’t compare to some of the things we’ve done since so I won’t say much.  I will say, though, that if you fly to Sarawak you will probably land in Kuching.  The crafts there will seem very nice, but you will think “Hey, I just got to Sarawak…I bet I can get this stuff everywhere.”  I can say now having gone from one end to the other that you can’t, in fact, find that stuff everywhere.  I don’t usually buy stuff, but I wish I would have bought this big rug made of what sort of looked like wooden dominoes that I saw in Kuching for something like RM 100.  Kuching is the place to buy crafts.

From Kuching we stopped in the small fishing village of Mukah on our way to Miri, from where we flew to Gunung Mulu National Park.  Mulu is billed as “one of the world’s premiere caving destinations” by Lonely Planet…and I have to agree.  We spent our first day seeing the park’s “show caves” which are lit up like the most accessable areas of Mammoth Caves if you’ve seen those.  Mulu boasts the largest cave chamber in the world and the largest/longest cave mouth opening in the world (Malaysians love their superlatives, so those may be taken with a grain of salt).  Sometime around 5 in the evening, we got to see the cave’s collection of wrinkle lipped bats (possibly the world’s largest, I’m not sure) all flying out of the cave together to hunt insects.  The thousands of bats come out in one long line, which sort of waves from side to side like a sine wave (hey, a degree in physics does come in handy sometimes).  Apparently, the big bat togetherness party is so they can avoid the hawks which prey on them as they exit the cave and only partially works as we saw a few hawks enjoying the bat-buffet.

We spent our next two days at Mulu doing adventure caving trips with the park’s caving guides.  We had only planned on doing one adventure trip, but we had to prove that we were ‘experienced’ cavers before they would take us on the advanced Clearwater-Wind Cave connection trip.  Really, they’re just looking to make sure you won’t freak out underground or do something really dumb.  If I had one bit of advice on Mulu, it would be to scribble ‘caving certification’ on a piece of paper and to laminate it before coming to the park so you can get around this requirement…but oh well.

At any rate, the Clearwater Connection trip was good stuff.  We spent about 5 hours scrambling, wading, and climbing in pitch darkness from Wind cave to Clearwater cave and then down an underground river. At two points (the ‘connection’ itself) we downclimbed through some tiny passages which were only discovered a few years ago by a local.  It was this discovery which made the connection possible, and was probably the best section of the trip.  Technical rock climbing is a lot easier when you have a rock wall in front of you and behind you…who knew. .

This seems like a particularly good place to break this post in half before I start talking about the rest of our Borneo adventure…so I will.

to be continued…

Malaysia, 9 Oct 2006 --

We spent the last 4 days or so exploring Singapore, and we have come to the conclusion that Singapore is, in fact, the city of the future.  The city is ultra-modern, multi-cultural, multi-theological, Disney-land spotless, and packed to the gills with artsy events. 

During our visit, we were fortunate that the Singapore Biennale 2006 was taking place.  For those of us who were unaware, a biennale is a bi-annual contemporary art exhibition hosted by a city.  Singapore’s government has obviously thrown a great deal of money and support behind the event, and cultural, governmental, and commercial venues throughout the city were transformed into exhibit spaces for modern art installations.  The main venue (containing 200+ works) was a former military camp (others included mosques, temples, and the court chambers at city hall).  It turned out to be something like an art scavenger hunt, and was a fantastic way to discover parts of the city we might not otherwise have seen. 

While in Singapore, we were also fortunate enough to stumble across the ‘Mr. International, 2006′ contest, sponsored by urban male.  The pictures (mostly from the ‘cultural costume’ portion of the evening) have to be seen to be believed.  We sat in the back row, (mostly) successfully stifling giggles as these guys came out in one ridiculous costume after another.  Would you believe they had a Mr. Latvia?! 

Singapore pictures are here:

 I also posted a few more pictures from Kuala Lumpur (check out the very unhappy monkey):

…and some pictures from our jungle trip to Taman Negara:

Sorry this isn’t the most descriptive post ever….I’ve gotten this picture processing and uploading down to less than 2 hours, but by the time I’m done with that I don’t have time for anything else!

We’re in Kuching on Malaysian Borneo at the moment…off in search of proboscus monkeys in the jungle tomorrow.

Malaysia, 28 Sep 2006 --

Just because internet is cheap here…here are some pics from Kuala Lumpur (KL to the locals) before we head inland to the jungles of Tamara Negara.

Malaysia, 27 Sep 2006 --

I’m working out some of the hard parts of editing and uploading pictures without a computer (portable software like Portable Firefox, FastStone Image Viewer, and Filezilla are godsends).  So here at last are two more Galleries:

 Pictures from Penang Island, Georgetown

Pictures from the Cameron Highlands, Malaysia:

Malaysia, 26 Sep 2006 --

It’s Ramadan here in Kuala Lumpur, yay.  Those of you who have been reading my random bloggings for over a year will recall that I spent last Ramadan in Jordan, making this the second year in a row I’ve been in a Muslim country for Ramadan.  Many things are the same:  drivers have shorter fuses in dealing with traffic, late afternoon busses drive by full of people who are either asleep or look like they wish they were, and there’s a general air of sluggishness.  

There are definitely some differences here, though.  Obviously, with the large Buddhist and Hindi communities it’s a lot easier for a guy to get a decent meal in the middle of the day.  You have to think a bit about your available choices, though.  I mean, in Jordan if a restaurant was open (most were not) you pretty much figured they were fine with you coming in for a bite.  Here, though, with the large non-Muslim communites, many Muslim restaurants stay open to make money.  They’ll have the usual large trays of food out…but the tables will be completely empty.  Additionally, many non-Muslim restaurants employ Muslim employees.  I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t worry about it…but I feel really bad making a Muslim woman in a hijab who I know hasn’t eaten all day serve me food.  Employment in the food service industry during Ramadan if you’re Muslim has to pretty much suck. 

At lunchtime today I found myself in Little India, which usually has lots of tasty northern Indian Muslim food.  I considered my food options carefully…and ended in the only full restaurant could find: a KFC at a mall, where I was joined by many of the mall’s Chinese employees.

Speaking of malls, KL really likes it’s malls.  For a variety of reasons (searching for free mooncake tastings, going to see movies from Hong Kong about asian boy bands, etc.) we’ve found ourselves in several of them, each more modern than the last.  The MidValley Megamall had a HaganDaas, you could literally smell the paint drying at the Cineleisure Damansara, and the Ikano Power Center had…wait for it…an Ikea.  I think it’s a bit scary to think of upper middle class Malaysians furnishing their homes with the same Poangs, Forbys, and Tindras found in post college ‘gotta get some cheap interior decoration going on’ homes across America and around the world.  Thank you McGlobalization.