Chiang Mai, Thailand: February and March

How we came to all be in Chiang Mai in February

These are the first few weeks of our travel time, spent with the family.  The plan came about when Sean and I decided that we’d start our travels in Thailand in February, and we realized that it will be the only time in 2012 that we’ll have a set date and location.  Little did we know that as time goes on, we’ll end up with a series of flights and plans to meet certain people in certain places at certain times through our travels.  Nevertheless, mom and dad got flights to arrive in Chiang Mai the same day as Sean and I.  Then Jamie and Kazusa booked themselves a Japanese-length vacation to spend five days with us from Feb 26^th to March 2^nd.   And we arranged for Donna to come so that she could finally meet mom and dad!  By some sort of colossal date confusion, it turned out that Donna arrived the evening before mom and dad left… but we had some parental-vacation-overlap to hang out by the pool, go out for dinner, and spend some time together before mom and dad flew out.  Well, the whole family will ultimately have more time together next June in Canada. 

Mom and Dad’s layover at Incheon International Airport, near Seoul, South Korea

            Their original flight only had a few hours layover in Korea.  Then as flights tend to do, this one shifted and morphed and suddenly had a 12 hour layover with a free sleep at the airport hotel on the 21^st.  Pool under construction.  But oh well, we’re going to the tropics! 

            Sean and I had our flight from Incheon on the 22^nd, at a sickeningly early hour in the cold winter morning.  So we figured we’d go meet mom and dad when they touch down, escort them to their fancy pancy hotel, and then sleep at the airport jimjilbang (Korean sauna).  Dad, though, had other plans.  Soon after our series of hugs, hellos, big smiles, and mandatory questions about the flight (Are you tired?  How was security?  Good food in the air?  Got all your baggage? God, your eyes are red!  How many hours?  Twenty?! ) and the mandatory answers (Yes, Okay, Yeah, Yop, Oh is it that bad? Twenty!), we got right to business.  Take this magical flight ticket to the specific counter at the other end of the building, and trade it for a shuttle bus ticket and a sticker which grants you a room at the hotel.  Sneaky dad somehow convinces the ticket and sticker man that it is incumbent that he feels sympathy for the sad nature of our familial dilemma, and he should allows Sean and I to have a hotel room near our beloved parents.  Even though he has absolutely no reason to do this, he is swayed by the endless fountain of eloquence that is Jim Flood, and we end up with twice as many stickers and tickets as allowed. 

            Later in the hotel room, we had a catastrophic cream mix-up which I will not speak of here, but feel free to ask mom and dad about the incident with dad’s foot. 

            Did you know that Incheon Airport has a skating rink in the winter? 

            And that it’s rated the best international airport in the world, three years running? 

            And that the restaurants inside have the same prices as normal restaurants outside?

            And that the staff are all at least trilingual?

That’s enough about planning and getting to Thailand.  We had a few weeks there together, so I’ll just write about the random things for which I have pieces of memories in my scrap book. 

Linda Guestho & Trekk

            For a period of time, mom and dad and Jamie and Kazusa afforded Sean and I a room at the same hotel as them.  They reasoned that it would be insane for us to all come to Thailand to spend time together, if we were to end up sleeping in different hotels.  It was good that way, since we could all meet for breakfast at the hotel restaurant to eat together and laze about for hours and hours until someone got restless and decided to go somewhere.

            After this period of time, Sean and I booked ourselves into a guesthouse around the corner that was of a standard more becoming of our unrefined palates.  This guesthouse turned out to be owned and run by a German lady, and frequented entirely by German people. Except for Sean and I.  While we were there, we met lots of people in the common area, including a man who I think I’d heard other travelers talking about.  You don’t forget stories like this.  He’s a guy who travels only by boat and train, and he’s been doing it for decades while writing books and blogs about his stories.  These days, travel by boat is more difficult, but since he started so long ago, he has connections with people all over the place.  And like in most guesthouses, we met other people with amazing stories, and other people who were a little strange.  And we discovered that a room full of German people will switch to English when two Canadians show up.  That’s a neat thing that we haven’t seen people from any other country do.  We ate a cheap breakfast here every morning and spent some time hanging out with our new friends, and then wandered over to hang out with mom and dad at their place. 

Tuk Tuks with an amazed Jamie

Tiger and Wat Phrathat, Feb 27^th

            One of the things Kazusa really wanted to do in Thailand was see tigers.  So she found a place where she could do that.  It was one part of a long daytrip that involved being carsick most of the time, and amazed at everything else the rest of the time.  We started the day with breakfast and then all jumped into our driver’s van for a day of driving and looking at things.  After a day of deliberating over Sean’s and my restrictive budget and the level of generosity of our family, we arrived to a conclusion about the day’s plan, which involved a high level of cheapness on our part and a high level of sharing on their part.  In the van, we went North West, uphill into the mountains towards a hilltop temple called Wat Phrathat.  We stopped halfway up the hill at a lookout to admire the ability of fog and smoke to completely conceal the city below, and try to battle the beginnings of carsickness.  Then back in the van to the temple.  Some of us took this strange contraption of a diagonal elevator with a funny name that I was sure mom had made up, while a few of us took the hundred-something stairs that had long decorative dragons as handrails. 

            The temple itself is really beautiful, with multiple paths through small temples, beautiful gardens, and huge platforms with views that would be nice if it weren’t for the inconsiderate fog.  There’s also an inner courtyard where people go to walk around clockwise and say prayers while looking at a gazillions statues of who I assume to be Buddha.  

            Next stop: tigers.  Jamie, Kazusa, mom and Sean all wanted to go touch some sedate tigers, so we drove our carsick asses to this place where people can do exactly this thing.  Dad and I sat out, had some snacks, and watched people while they had photo opportunities with tigers and their trainers.  Kazusa had herself a cuddle session with a tiger, Jamie spent time with it while avoiding all the sharpest bits. 

Ladyboy Cabaret, March 1^st

Kazusa and the Ladies

            Kazusa is the engine that drives motivation.  Everywhere she goes, she has a million ideas for all the things she wants to do there.  It’s like she has this inventory of the zillions of things she wants to do around the world, and she’s ready to whip out the list for any given country.  When she goes to Canada, she wants to see polar bears, Niagara Falls, whales, and eat beaver tails.  Sadly in Canada, reality has to kick in when the size of the country is taken into consideration and you realise you can only do a couple of things on the dream list.  In Thailand, I think Kazusa got most of to-do list crossed off.  With the tigers cuddled, the temples epic, and the shopping successful, the only thing left was to see a ladyboy show. 

            Ladyboys are an interesting part of Thai culture.  They are men (or should I say ladies?) who range anywhere from transvestites to transsexuals.  Ladyboys in Thailand are, unlike in most other countries, socially accepted and generally understood to be perfectly normal.  We had a lot of conversation with Thai people about how they feel about ladyboys, and how it is that a mostly homophobic country has no negative feelings about ladyboys.  To me it sounded like a double standard.  But ladyboys are not seen as being gay, somehow, they are just seen as people who live in a different way and are really fun to party with.  We also had long confusing conversations about how exactly it is that ladyboys are neither gay nor straight, but we came to no logical conclusions about how this is possible. 

Anyways, most cities have a population of ladyboys, and in some cities they perform at clubs and bars.  In Chiang Mai there is a nightly cabaret in the night bazaar, a super touristy shopping district within the city walls.  I assume that this cabaret is a toned down version of the more exclusive private ones, but it was still seriously booby and leggy.  Sean and I went with Kazusa and dad while Jamie walked around the market with mom.  I won’t go into detail here about the show, but don’t you worry there were definitely cowboy hats, skilled dancers, hilarious songs, customers on stage, and a great many ladyboys who’d you never guess were at any point in their life male. 

Your smiles will tell you what makes you feel good

            Not much of a story with this little scrap of pink and purple paper, it’s just one of the many different happy things that sugar packets tell you before you empty them into your unsuspecting cup of coffee. 

Unsuspecting cup of coffee

Strawberries

            This colourful background is something I took from one of the many tourist pamphlets and brochures that anyone can get anywhere.  Hotels and tourist offices have dozens of them for anything that might be of interest to people.  From cooking schools to farms, temple guides, maps, events schedules, hotels, boat rides, shops and businesses, and other such things.  One day we went to the TAT office, the tourist admin of something or other, which has walls lined with brochures in English, French, Chinese, Korean, Thai, and other languages.  I love pamphlets.  They are so awesome.  Partially for the free maps, partially for inspiration, and mostly for scrap booking.  I have no idea what this giant picture of strawberries was for, but I took it because it was pretty. 

Wat Jet Yod and the Chiang Mai National Museum, February 24^th.  Jamie’s birthday without Jamie

            Not too far north from the city walls there are a few things to see.  After consulting a few brochures and mom’s Thailand book, which was half underlined and covered with stars and notes of all the things she wanted to see, we made a day plan to see some tourist things.  Wat Jet Yod is a really beautiful temple complex with massive grounds, manicured gardens and grass, huge temples in different states of repair, decay, or awesomeness.  One of the things I like about the Thai landscape is these giant old trees that have long colourful strips of fabric wrapped around their trunks, and dozens of branches and poles leaning against the trunk, looking like they’re somehow supporting the tree.  Another thing is the variety of temples.  Some are made of bricks, others white plaster, many have ornamental golden roofs, and they’re all of different sizes.  Some are multi-storey buildings that are the size of a city block, and others are tiny things tucked away between buildings in the city.  Somehow I’ve lost all my pictures of this particular temple, which included a lovely picture in which Sean and dad very passively ignored me while I put flowers behind their ears and told them to look pretty.  Too bad. 

Giant tree with 'supports'

I think that’s all for page 2, each of my pieces of paper have been accounted for now. 

Now for the logistics

Don’t try to walk from the airport to town.  It looks like it’s just a couple of kilometres, which it is, but it’s a couple of long dusty kilometres along highways with confusing and chaotic intersections and overpasses that never come in handy.  Unless you’re into long dusty walks with nothing nice to look at, I recommend not doing this walk.  Especially when you’ve just quit smoking that very day, and you’re not used to walking with 10kg of stuff on your back. 

There are some nice hotels a few kilometres outside of town, like ours.  And there are some equally nice ones within the city walls that are about the same price.  The problem is that the convenient ones don’t have websites, and the inconvenient ones do.  So if you’re into booking ahead, you’ll probably end up staying far, and having to pay 100 baht every time you want to get to town and then again to get back home.  If you’re not into booking ahead, and you have the patience to shop around, you can find really beautiful places for seriously good prices. 

This songthaew goes to Doi Pui and Pooping

Tuk tuks, songthaew, private hire, public buses.  There are lots of different ways to get around within and without town.  Tuk tuks are cheaper and go exactly where you want them to go.  These are motorcycles with an attached carriage-like thing.  For about 50 baht, they’ll take you a few kilometres.  Songthaew, pronounced song- tow (like the tow in tower, or the ow in ka-pow!) kinda have set paths along major roads.  You stand on the appropriate side of the road, flag one down, discuss your price, and jump in if you agree to said price.  Sometimes they’ll just tell you that they’re not going there; you have to take the blue one, not the white one, something like that.  The beauty of Thai culture is that they won’t just leave you lost and stranded, they’ll point you in the right direction until your lost-and-confused look fades away from you face.  

Volunteering in Bali, August 2012

Mandol and Sambal and my foot.  Food and my foot.  These are the two most memorable things about staying at the ‘farm’ in Bali.

After chilling in our Terima Cost for a few weeks with Kim and Dan and their entourage, we all jumped in a van with all of the surfboards and other such accoutrements and went off to the East.  Away from the beaches for Sean and I, back to Korea and NZ for all the kiwis. 

Arriving at a volunteering situation is always a little awkward, we’re never sure if this is going to be fun, or comfortable, or how hard the work will be, or how rewarding.  Or what the company will be like, what kind of social setting there is.  There are so many things that could make a volunteering period either awesome or just bad.  This one was good and bad. 

First impressions: we’re greeted by three dogs: one that looks healthy and good; one with a gimp leg; and one with a nasty swollen infection on her snout.  Nasty-Face-McGee is pretty sweet and has an inclination to licking knees.   We knock on the gate and we can see a mud pit on the left, a wood workshop on the right, and a long dirt path leading to the back of the narrow, long property.  The path is lined with mud house after mud house, on both sides, right to the back where there’s a kitchen and the house of the owner and a few skinny trees in the back yard. 

The owner isn’t there, and there are no other volunteers, but there are two Indonesian guys, both from Java, who are our hosts and soon-to-be-friends, who greet us and show us around.  Arif’s domain is the wood workshop (the guy with the 'economics' t-shirt in this picture).  He lives above it, up a ladder to a room on stilts, and spends most of his time there producing commissioned work while a few cats stare at him and lounge around.  Supri (the one pimpin with his arms around me and his friend) lives in an adjacent neighbourhood with his wife and kids, but works in the adjacent property doing construction there.  And he’s in charge of pointing Sean and I to the various stuff that has to be done on the property.  Which is everything. 

            The property is covered and layered an accumulation of unfinished projects.  Buildings that aren’t quite finished, walls that are incomplete and don’t reach ceilings, rooms that have been left unused and gather dirt, roofs that are falling apart.  Volunteers who’ve come and gone probably have built things but not stayed long enough to finish projects, and not had attention to detail while they were making things.  Building with cob can produce really beautiful and interesting buildings, but these look thrown together in a sloppy kind of way and left that way.  Supri and Arif have tons of stories of people who’ve been there and how they party, go to the beach, have fun in the mud pits. 

            So that’s what the place was like.  Sean and I spent our time there working a few hours a day, not having a real schedule, and kind of doing what we think aught to be done.  From the owner’s order, Supri got Sean on a building project, so he made mud and built a wall for a shower that was previously decaying and falling apart.  I suggested that I make the kitchen look better (this is the kitchen, post-improvements).  The walls there weren’t finished, so every day there was a new layer of dust on the counters, tables and floor.  So I learned that mixing school glue and water and painting the walls with that makes them sealed and complete.  There ware also huge sections of the walls and benches that were ‘finished’ with colourful mosaics of broken tile pieces.  But they’d been left too long, so most of the pieces were coated in mud and looked really terrible.  So that was my project.  By the time I was done, all those tiles were clean, and the walls were painted with glue to keep them from falling apart. 

            In our spare time we did all kinds of stuff.  We had a motorcycle rented for the whole time there, so we drove around the rice paddies, went to the beach which was just as un-swimmable as the ones near Canggu, went to the market and bought stuff, and went on a couple of day trips out.  And cooking.  Lots and lots of cooking.  Supri and Arif and their friends showed us how to make a few of the staples of Indonesian cuisine.  Sambal is this spicy red condiment of sorts that people put on every meal they eat.  Lol, they even put it on the spaghetti that Sean cooked.  The stuff is ridiculously spicy and really delicious.  The way it’s made is by chopping all the ingredients (tomatoes, chilli peppers, onion), frying them, blending all of it, and frying it again.  Sounds simple because it is.  Another thing Sean learned to cook was mandol, or tempeh balls.  It was really funny learning this one because two of the ingredients were mystery ingredients that weren’t in the dictionary.  We eventually figured it out by going to markets and asking other people.  But at the time, we were cooking with garlic, saffron, mystery balls called ketumbar, and laos, and tempeh of course.  Turns out that the mystery balls were coriander, and laos is galingale. 

            Ultimately, of all the things we learned to cook, the only one we’ll be able to reproduce is the spicy sauce.  We learned that making tempeh is a long arduous process that involves a specific yeast that we can’t really buy anywhere.  Perhaps we’ll try to make it again in Canada with a bunch of different yeasts.  A science experiment of sorts, with different batches. 

            My foot.  Oh, my foot.  It’s healed now with a lovely scar that loves a good scratch.  And now I have an obsessive habit of keeping track of every nail that is used in construction.  Gathering them together and making sure that none goes astray.  Because you never know when a nail will find its way into somebody. 

            Apparently the mud pit at the ‘farm’ had in the past enveloped a stray nail.  A long, long time ago.  And this nail over time oxidised and because half rust, half original nail.  The mud pit must have worked long and hard to produces this specimen, this nail which was to find its way directly into my life through the sole of my foot.  Stomping mud to break down the clay with Supri and Sean was abruptly interrupted, from a fun laughing process it was very quickly denigrated to a screaming, swearing, and painful situation… a situation that was sharp and rusty and an inch into the bottom of my right foot.  Well, I tell you what, it’s the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced, and I hope it stays that way.  The first thing that crossed my mind, other than GET THE MOTHERFUCKER OUT OF ME, was a sense of admiration for people who’ve had encounters with bullets and other such penetrating objects.  Well, I keeled over and stuck my foot in the air and yelled and Sean and Supri to get the motherfucker out of me (it was not time for subtleties or politeness), and Sean went straight to it.  One strong yank at the thing got it a centimetre out.  Then Sean held the flesh on my foot down so it didn’t rip while taking the nail out, while Supri gave it the final and most satisfying yank.  Satisfying for him, but it certainly didn’t make the pain subside.  Torn flesh is really a unique and unpleasant thing. 

            Then, as I pondered tetanus and wondered what it even was and if I was indeed inoculated, and I contemplated the Indonesian hospital system and how clean and reliable it is or isn’t, Sean and Supri had a quick conversation about our plan of action.  The conclusion: get this Leah onto a scooter, and to a clinic.  Independent doctors’ offices are cleaner and more efficient, it turns out, but more expensive.  Speed was on my mind, so we chose that. 

            I’ll keep the doctor bit short because I wasn’t looking.  Sean was looking, and I told him to keep his mouth shut about what the doctor was doing, because otherwise I’d throw up.  There was a tetanus shot, a local anaesthetic, and various sharp tools for prodding, grabbing, tweezing, and pinching.  Half an hour later we were $150 poorer, and 100% more confident in the prospects of our future, and there was 100% less rusty nail bits in my body.  Armed with bandages and antibiotics, and advice to come back in a week and to somehow shower without getting my foot wet, we got back on the scooter and back home.  This is when my task shifted from building with mud to cleaning the kitchen. 

            Hmm, what else can I say about our time at the farm?  We ate well, worked most days, had lots of scooter time and very little walking time after the nail incident.  Our money-saving potential was utterly destroyed by that trip to the doctor.  Our happy belly potential was undeniably increased when we discovered that our friends could teach us how to cook.  We had many long afternoons in the kitchen with Arif and Supri and their friends, cooking and hanging out and enjoying all the good stuff we made.  We learned that having a mud oven might not be a part of our plan for our house anymore, since it requires preposterous amounts of wood to get it hot enough to cook something.  And we learned a lot about how we want to run our homestead, or more so how to not run it.  We gained a lot of respect for Anke and Aoi and their work ethic, and their ability to complete projects beautifully while all their volunteers have fun.  

Georgetown on Pulau Penang, Peninsular Malaysia: April 19-24

April 19->24

Our first weeks in Malaysia, we moved fast from place to place, each one completely different.  Our path started in the NW, moved east to meet Byron on the Perhentian Islands, then south again to Kuala Lumpur.  Before Malaysia, each place was for weeks, making ourselves comfortable and settling into routines.  Here the routine was packing up, moving, new places and new people all the time.

This is a map of the downtown bit of Georgetown; Georgetown is a city on the island of Penang.  It feels like being transported into what I imagine Europe is like, but full of Malay, Indian, and Chinese people.  And Street food, tucked away markets, huge temples in the suburbs, and beaches and jungle nearby.  This is when we were with Helga, with our endless giggles and shenanigans while Sean sat by speechless.  Can you believe it?!

We spent our first night in a shitty dark room with Helga and her moody friend across the hall.  The next day we hunted for a better place.  We ended up choosing one that Sean sold to us by describing it as a creepy old-school orphanage.  The ceilings were incredibly high, taller than the room was wide, and the only furniture was metal-framed child-sized beds and a wood desk that looked like the kind of thing you’d find in an old Catholic school with mean nuns smacking your hands with rulers. 

Georgetown itself is beautiful to look at, each neighbourhood pretty different from the previous one.  Little India with its smells and colours and intricate temples covered with hundreds of gods; Chinatown with its hardware stores, dollar stores, baked goods, alleyways and oily street foods; the main hostel drag with its coffee shops, restaurants, fruit smoothies, fast buses, crazy traffic, and dozen corner stores; and the ocean front with fancy shops, garbage-coated rocky beaches, coffee and tea stalls, and wandering people.  And a couple of markets here and there, with cheap fruits and veggies, stinky fish, rats running around, and cages full of foul. 

Main street at sunset.  Cornerstores and bars and internet cafes.   

City buses are the way to go in Georgetown, standing by the right road and waiting.  Just like home. After wandering the city for a few days, we took an awesome day trip to Penang National Park.  A long bus ride to get there, gathering snacks and paying for the entrance ticket, and we’re on our way into the jungle.  A tiring hours-long hike in the jungle, listening to birds, looking for monkeys, and staring at the floral eye candy.  We could hear birds, but mostly couldn’t find them.  Until we got to the beach and I went to pee on the other side of a sand dune… I looked up and saw that the ‘leaves’ of a tree were ten percent fluorescent green pigeons that matched the sun-backed leaves perfectly.  Man, you could stare at the tree for a long time without even noticing. 

The highlight of this trip is the inlet that sometimes mixes with the ocean when a sand barrier is broken.  So the water is stratified: on top fresh warm water, and under cool salty ocean water.  You can see the layers if you look closely, because where they meet, the difference in density means that light reflects off the bottom layer, making a kind of shimmering mirror in the water.  And the mudskippers, or Darwin fish, little fish that can breather air or water, and with their silly little fins as feet, hang out right where the water meets the sand. 

The beach at the ocean is ridiculously hot, with cedar trees between the inlet and the sand.  Hot sand and murky water with giant waves, it was fun to swim, get a little sun-burn, and go off climbing boulders on the other side of the inlet across the bridge. 

Well it was some good beach time in the end, book-ended with jungle walking and staring at the flora. 

 Fancy Chinese building on a side road

 Helga and Sean attempting to order a meal.  I don't remember why they were so confused.

 Playing with garbage on the shore.

 Art on the side of a building.

 Aesthetically pleasing levels of decay and order.

 Clever graffiti off the main road.

 Logistics:

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Coming and going: most tickets to Georgetown from elsewhere are well priced and take you right where you want to go.  Leaving, on the other hand, you can be clever about.  The bus tickets they sell from town are twice and sometimes thrice the price they aught to be.  If you have time, you can take a 10cent walk-on ferry across to Butterworth on the mainland, where the bus station is conveniently right next to the ferry terminal.  From there, they sell bus tickets and normal prices. 

Within the city, and without: city buses are cheap and regular, even to places that are more than an hour away.  A lot of the accommodation provides a little piece of paper like the one in my scrap book, that have the bus numbers and destinations.  All you have to do is ask someone where to catch your desired bus, and go there.  With change.  When you’re on the bus, you tell the guy where you’re going, he tells you the price and gives you a ticket.   Going to any of the major sites on the list, you will absolutely know when you get there, since all the sites are well signed  and pretty giant. 

Those confusing Indian restaurants:  If Penang is your first stop in Malaysia, as it was ours, and you have no idea how to do anything in the Indian restaurants, this is for you.  Don’t sit down and wait for a menu.  Well, you can, but then you only get one dish.  If you waltz on straight up to the display case that looks like a buffet, go ahead and help yourself.  Grab a plate or ask for rice, and dish out all the food you want.  They staff has a look at your selection, has a look at you, and chooses your price.  They’re pretty fair about it, giving lower prices for smaller portions, cheaper dishes, and a smaller number of dishes. 

If you’re vegetarian:  Across Malaysia there are tons of vegan Chinese restaurants.  They almost never say so in English, so I recommend memorizing the symbol for veganism. Ask someone Chinese to write it down for you, and you’ll see how common these restaurants are… and how you’d never recognize them without the symbol.  I remember it as being a capital E attached by the backbone to another backwards E, making a tree with three horizontal branches.  And under that there is an explosion of short lines that kind of have a bottomless tent involved.   These restaurants work the same way as the Indian ones: you can use a menu, or go all out at the buffet.

Finding accommodation that’s nice and budget: Get off the main hostel drag, and look along the street that’s parallel to it to the north.  And persevere.  This is one of those strange cities that have a huge variety of accommodation quality in the same price range… and all kinds of shitty places for all kinds of crazy prices.

Bako National Park in Malaysian Borneo.

Proboscis Monkeys are in some ways like a clumsy fat guy, and in other ways like an acrobat.  They, and their big stupid noses and beer bellies, jump from branch to branch way up high, yelling at each other and chasing each other around.  You can hear them from far away because they break half of the branches they use, and even when they’re just chilling, they fidget and throw twigs and tree bits at the ground.  Their nickname is Dutchmen in Malaysia, probably after those who’d colonised the area in the past.

Our ride here was a pretty anti-climactic Canada Day.  We ignored advice to leave Kuching early, and ended up regretting it, since we ended up waiting three hours for other people to share a boat with.  These potentially extant other people never materialized, and we ended up going alone and paying for the whole trip between just the two of us.  The guy driving the boat was pretty cool about it, chatted with us and made plans to pick us up, jumping off the boat up to his thighs on the beach to walk the boat in.  He was probably 80 years old, and I’ll be lucky if I’m that handsome and speedy when I get that old.  That yellow ticket is the one for the guy; I guess his name is Bujang.  Or maybe that’s just the word for boat or something. 

The pink and red ticket is the ~1 hour bus ticket to the boat.  Getting that bus was funny in itself, because while we were waiting, people kept telling us we were waiting in the wrong place and sending us across the street and then back to where we’d already been waiting.  

 Arriving

The boat goes along mangrove forests, skirting around the shallows and staying close to the ‘shore.’  The landscape goes from a narrow river surrounded by stilted village, to mangrove forests, to the sea, with islands on the North and cliffs on the South.  Around a corner, and there’s a wide sandy beach book-ended with cliffs and backed by jungle and more mangroves: our destination.  Our boat man dropped our grumpy asses off at the beach, and we walked to the main building to check in and get walked along boardwalks to all the chalets.  Ours is a four-bed cottage, in a long dark-wood building with four rooms side by side, a huge balcony across the front, with a kitchen-minus-useful-appliances on the right.  Did I mention the wild pigs?  One of them had green paint on its back from a painting job, I guess.  They just wander around the park grounds, hiding in the shade of the boardwalk, digging holes in the lawn, and generally being awesome.  Until they feel that hanging laundry is aggressive behaviour and start charging at my ankles.  Their noses are really squishy and wet, so you know.  And they do, in real life, roll around in giant mud puddles.  Stinky mud puddles. 

And did I mention the monkeys?  Not just the proboscis ones, but the macaques.  Those little guys hang around the cottages, too, play games of Who’s Dominant with the staff, swing around the tree branches, and break into the rooms and kitchen to take all our food stuffs.  The clever little fuckers know how to use doorknobs, how to open windows, and even the fridge.  And they don’t mind playing chicken with anyone who’s eating on their porch.  Neither do the pigs, though.  Now there’s a clever part of adaptation… knowing that being adorable and having patience near humans usually means you’ll end up with some snacks.  

Our days at Bako were spent hiking, becoming exhausted, and then chilling to recover from said exhaustion with our strange German roommates and another couple a few doors down. 

Our first day, drawn in purple on my map, was a good taste of the eco-systems and animals to see in the park.  Going counter-clockwise from the headquarters, you go straight into steep rocky jungle with long paths and staircases up and down and around giant boulders and thick jungle.  This is the place where the big-nosed pot-bellied guys hang out… along with the giant trees, thick undergrowth, and gazillion different types of vines.  The little cute ones that creep up trees and on rocks, and the thick-as-my-thigh ones that hang down from the canopy in giant curly-cues.  Sean ogled at the ginger monkeys while I stared at all the variety of green things that grow big and small, all on top of each other in layers from the ground to the sky. 

From the breath-taking (literally) rocky jungle part of the trail, you slowly climb higher and higher to a plateau of smaller trees, little birds, pitcher plants and white-as-clouds sand and mud.  That part is long and gets a little boring and sunny, but it feels good to walk on flat land after the steep bits.  Before going back downhill to the part HQ, we took the yellow path down to what we thought was a beach, but turned out to be a giant pock-marked flat rock at the top of a hundred-metre drop down to the beach.  Looking down to the beach we decided that the view was great and that the walk down and back up didn’t look good to our tired legs. 

The next day we went clockwise and decided to do the big loop.  Not the biggest in the park, but the biggest that we could do in one day without camping out with our lack of equipment in the park.  Good thing too since it rained every night while we were there.   When we were a third of the way we were decidedly tired and half done our water, but we kept going.  Through a few more eco systems, some thick jungles with hills, some long lowlands with thumb-thick roots making a messy knobbly carpet across the path, crossing a few streams with feathery trees hanging over the edges, up and down some steep rocky and muddy cliffs, and ultimately back to the proboscis monkey parts near the HQ.  By the end we categorically were going to have a lazy day tomorrow, and went straight to shower, eat, chill out, and sleep. 

 

Day three was short and easy, clockwise through the jungle with a break to stare at the proboscis monkeys, across a short bit of flat boardwalks with white sand and short trees, up and down muddy paths to a beach.  A lonely beach with Jurassic trees, tiny jellyfish, soft sand, and an epic view.  We swam, lazed, gathered some cute shells and shit, stared at everything around us, and contemplated our luck.  To be here on Borneo, on a beach surrounded by thick beautiful jungle, hilarious monkeys, enjoying our rubber shoes, sore legs, and brand new set of memories.  Feeling good.  

 Proboscis Monkey chilling out.  

 Boulders, staircases, roots and vines. And a little Sean over there. 

 The flat bits with white sand and shorter trees. 

 The edge of the beach at the HQ has these neat cliffs on one side, and mangrove forest on the other.

 Beautiful river looks like something out of a fantasy movie.