Nature Lodge Kinabatanga Sandakan

... than any other in the world it has let itself go in a big way. There is squalor pretty much everywhere you look, you have to dance down the pavement to avoid the super sized cockroaches. Also found baby ones scuttling across our table whilst eating. This place seriously stinks.


The next morning we got a great reminder of why we are here with a trip 20 km out of town to the Sepilok Orang-utan sanctuary. These guys are super cool and whilst feeding time was ...

... They don’t seem to pay much consideration to their size when assessing a landing point – and the adults get pretty big – so they often end up on an impossibly thin branch that bends and sways precariously under their weight.

We continued along the river, seeing several more groups of proboscis monkeys and macacques, until we heard a huge crash of thunder right over our heads that made us jump out of our skins! The ...

26 August:
We caught a bus for KK to Sandakan around eight. It was surprisingly straight forward, we were advised to arrive at the bus station two hours early, so we had intended on getting the ten o'clock bus. However when we arrived, at ten to eight they put us straight on a bus and charged us around half what we'd expected to pay, and off we went. The journey took about six hours and was relatively comfortable. We were also pleasantly surprised by our hotel, it ...

... showed up and livened up the dinner party by attempting to steal whatever they could off the platform. We were pretty tired by now and couldn't wait to get back to Sandakan. After checking into the Mayfair, Rien had to leave for his flight back home. Decided to brave the wrath of Uncle Chinn (not his name but what it should be) picked out some movies and went to grab something to eat and veg out the rest of the evening. Oh I think I caught up on some blogging. And it rained.

... by mosquitoes. We each got somewhere in the region of 50 bites each on our torsoes - through our clothes! Would you believe it - they were so viscious they bit us through our clothes! So that was difficult. But we saw some really cool insects, and on the boat we saw Oriental Pied hornbills, a blue backed kingfisher, a purple heron, and a monitor lizard. A few hours off in the afternoon and we just chilled with the people from our group ...

... came so we hung around waiting for some orangutans to arrive. We were disappointed to find that there weren't any smaller walks we could do in the interim in a bid to increase our chances of seeing some orangutans close up. By now we were both pretty excited, this had been one of the things in particular that Kev had wanted to do (not that I minded in the least) and had been talking about this for 3 years now, so to be here waiting to see the ...

... so Andy, otherwise known as Bobby it was. The following day was to be the highlight of our Borneo trip, this was the day we would visit Sepilok Orangutan Sanctuary, a home to orphaned and injured young orangs and those that required re-homing. It is a fantastic set up with connections across Malaysia supporting a breading and conservation program for these animals that have seen their homes destroyed though logging and farming. We were shown a feeding ...