Uncle Tan Wildlife Camp Sabah

Thank you Air Asia. Now, everyone really can fly. After exhausting our one month tourist visa in Indonesia more quickly than we could imagine, we decided to take advantage of one of the ridiculously cheap deals offered by Air Asia for flights around the Indo/Malaysia area. I'd never even heard of Kota Kinabalu, Sabah before, much less known much about the island of Borneo. I must admit, what made us book our flights over to KK was first and foremost, the price, but after doing a bit of browsi...

Sepilok is near the town of Sandakan in Sabah. We stayed in Unlce Tan's B & B before and after our 3 day / 2 night trip to the jungle, which is also run by Uncle Tan's. Just down the road is the Orangutan rehabilitation center. We stopped there before heading into the jungle. The best preparation for the uncle tans jungle trip is goin to Electric Picnic or some other festival like Glastonbury where you get all sweaty, dirty and don't wash for a few days. The bogs are definately on a par. ...

Wednesday 15th September Mt Kinabalu - Poring Hot Springs (cont) Back at the shelter, we talked and had tomato soup, and wasted most of the time we could have been resting, so packed our bags and started down about 10.30, just as it started to rain We had kept our thermals on, and were glad of this, as the rain got progressively harder. The 0.5 km marker posts seemed a long way apart, and at one point MP hurried on ahead to find a loo, and quickly, but painfully covered a full km without stop...

So after all the umming and arring, I finally filled the last place for a 3 day, 2 night tour up river to the jungle camp. It was great to have a group again and I felt like I'd known the Redcar for ages. Uncle picked us up (actually this isn't true, he's dead and the company is run by his family) and took the 14 of us for an amazing buffet including whole crabs before an hour in a bus before getting to the river. Before I go any further, I ought to explain that while much of Borneo is still ...

Up early for breakfast and off to the orangutans. Boy was once again entertaining the crowd and we all shuffled our way along the boardwalk to the the ropes and feeding platform. There were about 7 orangutans there with the largest being a big mother protecting her cute baby and constantly chasing away the very cheeky macaques. They were hugely fun to watch and so much like kids, wrestling each other and playing with vines. It was all over pretty quick though as they got their food, ate some,...

Up at 6 and off in the boats at 6.30. The river was misty and very pretty and it was lovely being out on the water. Back for breakfast (pancakes and noodles - yum), a bit of chatting time and off for the morning trek in our 2 groups - us in the orangutans, plus the ever hopeful elephants. (Humphrey and Nocholas left that morning.) We were lucky enough to see some rare bird and best of all, a mother orangutan with her baby. Our guide was good and showed us heaps of stuff. Back to the raised wa...

Don't get me wrong, it's a lovely wee town, there is just NOTHING to do!
The bus arrived early afternoon, and after walking the wrong way (again) we managed to find the hotel we were looking for, only to find they were fully booked. Bugger! Luckily they pointed us in the direction of another (rather smoky) hotel. After checking out a couple of rooms, we went for the one that stunk less.
We went out for a walk and tried to find something to do. After checking out the shops in a record 5...

I copied this email from my Hotmail Inbox recently. It had been sitting there for a year and a half waiting for a permanent home. I thought TravelPod.com might be a good place to keep it... Hi All, This is going to be my one and only email from Sabah, Borneo. This is actually our last day here, flying back to Singapore tonight, and home on Saturday. It's been an exhausting 2 and a bit weeks. We landed in Singapore on the first day of our holidays, and spent 2.5 days amusing ourselves, but get...

So.....we arrived at the base and after a lovely Malay lunch of various curries and rice we set off. We drove for about an hour and for the vast majority of the journey all we could see for miles around were palm plantations which was pretty scary. But then we arrived at the Kinabatangan River and it began to get exciting. There were eight of us in our group and we all boarded the boat and set off down the river. On the way to the camp we saw two stork-billed kingfishers and a troop of macaq...