Just wanted to tell that we are glad to present our photos from Borneo in Flickr. Much awaited pictures of Orangutans, nose monkeys and all the rest of the wonders of the jungle.
And also you can enjoy this small piece of backpacking lifestyle here:
Maiku
Posted in South-East Asia, Trip
Tagged animals, Backpacking, Borneo, jungle, Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, monkeys, Mount Kinabalu, Mount Kinabalu National Park, orangutan, photos, Proboscis monkey, videos
I had never felt such a fear. Maiku was behind me screaming on me GO, GO, do not be a coward! And the rain was poring so hard! So hard.
I was really terrified, I looked down and I saw a no end of the green! It was not as I expected to climb up there, it was not the safe treck I had thought, the cords were so flexible and the pathway was so small and it was just so high over the jungle! The pathway was so narrow and there were pieces of wood linked with cords to each other and a small net but nothing that makes you feel really safe, certainly if you have height fear.
Canopy walk of Mt. Kinabalu National Park
The funny part of the event is that my fear of height was understandable due to the extreme weather conditions we were in. It was a heavy seasonal rain and you couldn’t see anything in front of you. It was pouring so hard that even an umbrella couldn’t stop it but the water kept percolating TROUGH it. We were carrying bags and tried to protect the cameras and all wet and hot and humid made the walk almost unbearable.
(Actually, the scariest thing wasn’t the canopy walks but the trek itself. The steep path had turned into streams and mud was extremely slippery. There was also mud slides. I kept slipping and fell down a couple of times and got nice bruises for souvenir but luckily, we managed to get back down in one piece. Maiku adds.)
Canopy walks of Mt. Kinabalu National Park
We were on canopy walks of Mount Kinabalu, the famous sacred mountain that rises as high as 4000 m of altitude and is well know for it’s national park, a world heritage site of UNESCO.
After the walk on the 60 meters height canopies looking all over the Borneo rain forests, we were lucky to see the biggest flower in the world, the famous Rafflesia that looked like an alien plant with no roots and just stucked to a tree trunk. Its the biggest flower on Earth and a rare one to find, so rare that locals charge about 5 Euro’s per person just to go to see it after they have spotted one somewhere in the jungle. Ours wasn’t the biggest one but an intriguing discovery nerveless.
Rafflesia
Rafflesia was all red with yellowish dots and huge. It sucked and attracted all kind of flies with its smell, attracted them to their deadly fate as it seems. The biggest ones can even attract rats and squirrels to their death though it don’t eat them, they just wander there and dont get up anymore and then die. We walked into the jungle for a while until we saw it behind a wooden barrier and we were not allowed to touch it! I was so happy since it has always been Maiku’s dream to see it, and now she was jumping out of joy like a little girl.
Then we headed to the magic or at least we expected it to be magic and relaxing place, the hot springs that come from the heart of sacred mountain Kinabalu.
It wasn’t any geyser-like ponds I had expected but the water was led to big pools, tiled pools filled with hot stinking of sulfate water that is supposed to be healthy for your skin and excellent for your back pain. It was not what we expected after seeing the crows of local tourists in the pools, kids splashing around, and we were then wondering is it the water that is actually hot or wether the kids had peed in there…
The water was really hot and it smelled really on the skin even after the shower. It was relaxing though after the hard walk in the wet, wet jungle and sore muscles. But after, Maiku was really angry since I forgot to pack any change of clothes with us, and we had wear the same wet and muddy clothes and be all wet the whole 3 hours trip back to town in the bus with A/C on. Gosh it was cold!
That’s it folks from Borneo, Kota Kinabalu the city that rains like hell and flood its streets and then shine with colors and dragons every Chinese new year, not to forget that it offers an escape to the rain forests of Borneo and to amazing Sabah!
Sasi, now in Finland and missing cheap Asia!
Posted in South-East Asia, Trip
Tagged Backpacking, Borneo, canopy, jungle, Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, Mount Kinabalu, Mount Kinabalu National Park, nature, Rafflesia, tourism, trekking, Unesco World Heritage
A big apology for our delay of posting. Believe us we want to write but life here back home has not been easy at all between the re-integration and moving flats and work and Finnish winter and it’s flu we had no time to write anything. We are just busy all the time!
By our Blog time line we are still in Malaysia and we should be writing soon about that part of the trip. So stay tuned and we promise in the next few days we will post new pictures and new Blog!
Sasi from the flea market!
Bali, or as also referred to by the name “The Island of the Gods” is one heck of a paradise! I was so happy to be able to make it to the Southern hemisphere at last.
The majesty of the nature in Indonesia is grandiose, from rain forests to furious volcanoes and to the infinity of your vision rice paddies and terraces. Traveling on the road from Kuta to Ubud, we had the chance to team up with other travelers on this rough ride through the jungles of Bali. Transport in Bali is not top notch, I would say, Indonesia after all is a bit isolated and having such a huge population makes things hard to be organized. Bali though gets the biggest part of the pie being renowned as the major tourist destination.
The trip to Ubud gave us an overview on one of the most fierce volcanoes in there, we crossed the area of Mt. Batur and its caldera lake, and see how harsh nature can be sometimes, and how small we are in the face of our planet. The volcano was resting at the moment though it’s still active and attracts many tourists to watch it. It erupted the last time in 2000. You can read more about it here. Not to forget to mention the beautiful rice fields that gave us an outlook on how hard it is to do that kind of jobs, it requires time and patience and lots of energy to be able to get the final stage of the rice. The rice terraces we visited were so green and lush and dipped in water as if it was grass growing out of a river.
Ubud, the cultural center of Bali was one of the most relaxing place in our stay. Religious Hindus are living in harmony there and religion sounded as an important daily task. In Hindu tradition, they put a leaf basket full of rice, flowers and a burning scent daily in front of each house and each shop, so streets are full of these small offerings every day. Someone put that every morning in front of our door in our home stay accommodation, a place called Brata 1. The accommodation itself, was a small heaven, small cottages with lovely Hindu designs surrounding a family temple. They used to be a family house where the whole wide family would live next to each other but times have changed, families moved and now some houses are rented for tourists.
Staying in Ubud, made us discover a totally new culture to both of us. Maiku has been to India and Nepal, but Hinduism in there was totally different she said. We saw lots of art and even had the chance to see an event where all scooter drivers from all over Indonesia met to hang out, that was the most hippie scooters we ever seen. They were like straight away from a Mad Max movie.
The visit to the popular attraction called Sacred Monkey Forest was a must, even though Maiku’s love to monkeys is as much as my love to snakes: we are not best friends. She thinks they are dirty thieves (fact is that they are tricky nasty little devils). The forest has a few small Hindu temples, and we had the occasion to be visiting on the same date when a holy ceremony was taking place, once every six months. Ladies were all dressed up in their batik outfits on their best, carrying a food basket for the Gods on top of their heads, and walking in groups of family members, friends and neighbors. It was impressive how the colors mixed with the surroundings of the jungle. It was just magnificent!
Leaving Ubud was really sad, we found peace and harmony there (no wonder that has been a hot spot of hippies since 60′s) and good food and cheap accommodation and nicest people ever. We left on our bus trip to Lovina, the so-called dolphin heaven, but unfortunately after taking the morning boat for 2 hours in a lovely ride, sunny but windy, I didn’t have a chance to see any dolphins. Lovina was our New Year’s destination. We spent the event teaming up with other travelers in the pool. Literally IN the pool. That was coolest ever, swimming in a pool drinking gin and tonic. What more could you do in The Island of the Gods!
The trip of course, had to continue. The packing has to be done, and it’s always due to our little budget that land transport as our main choice. So we took a bus to Java island, the most populated island of Indonesia and the center of it all. Our destination was Yogyakarta, a student city located nearby the Borobudur Buddhist temple and Prambanan Hindu temple, where we did a day trip to see the majestic holy sites of two biggest religions in Asia.
On the way we saw the other fierce volcano, the mighty Merapi. Puffs of smoke circled over its top, when the monster was snoring in its sleep. The sleep can be easily disturbed, though, and we had a bit shivery feeling of that. I can’t understand how people live so close to these live volcanos and don’t give a damn.
Yogyakarta was awesome. Our accommodation was a hostel where all the rooms had a painting of a different color, pictures of animals and mostly the popular Gekko lizards. We also teamed up again with our new friends after a few days separation. They brought with them greetings from our lovely new young friend Afrika. She missed me so much she emailed a drawing of me. I think its quite alike, especially the hair.
Sasi by Afrika
Sasi
Posted in South-East Asia, Trip
Tagged Backpacking, Bali, Borobudur, Buddhism, Hindu temples, Hinduism, Indonesia, Java, Merapi, Religion, South-East Asia, volcano, Yogyakarta
On a long trip like this, it is normal that you have good moments and bad moments – and very bad moments. I guess we have hit the bottom now.
It seems that we are either getting too old or physically too tired of traveling since after every long trip, especially night buses one or both of us is having fever. As it happened, after a night bus from Bangkok to Phuket, 14 hours, we were totally, completely, fully done. Tired like never before, and getting fever. Sasi got very ill, fever more than 39C for several days, and I got truly worried. I was having a bit fever myself, but worse was that my upper back was cramping really badly, there was a lump of a size of a baseball in there and inflammation in the muscles.
It wasn’t all. We were at that point totally broke. We had barely money to have one meal a day, and there were days I got food only to my poor feverish husband to get him better and was left hungry myself. Obviously, we had to buy also medicines, which wasn’t planned in the strict budget. I had to stop smoking to save money (well, my mum was probably happy with THAT), and we couldn’t do anything. Not that there would have been much to do anyhow with a feverish husband in RAINY Phuket. Yes, it was raining most of the days, which didn’t make it any easier.
And Christmas was on the way, which is really hard for me to be away from home. It doesn’t matter how old you will get, I still want to be home on Christmas. I love the season deeply, and normally decorate the first tree already in the end of November. Now I don’t get any of that, and that made me feel blue. Dark blue. And homesick. (Oh, mind you, I have bought Christmas fairy lights from Bangkok, and have been putting them to every hostel room we have stayed. It helps a bit.)
Those days were miserable on the level we seriously thought of going home, simply giving up. There were moments when we were asking from each others the question over and over again: Why do we travel? But when Sasi got better, we figured that we were already so far that we might as well continue to Bali, which has been my dream for years, and to Malaysia in between, which have been Sasi’s dream.
I got the money from my sold articles eventually (although I have to thank my parents of helping us over the hardest part), and all started to be better. Sun was shining again, we managed to go to beach, and Sasi’s fever was finally down, thanks to the strong Thai medicines. We got over with the worst burst of homesickness by eating meatballs, dark bread and other Scandinavian delicacies in Phuket’s Karon Beach, which is almost like a small Nordic village. Thousands of Swedish and Finnish elderly couples or families with children comes with tour operators to this small paradise, so you hear Swedish and Finnish in the streets more than Thai. Normally, I would avoid places like that like hell, but now it felt homey and made me feel a bit better.
Another thing that made me a bit unbalanced was the fact that the last time I had been in Phuket was the tsunami time, when I was working to write the news of the horrible accident. The first days in Phuket, I was having some flashbacks of that, some sort of post-traumatic stress order, but luckily it didn’t got so bad as I was afraid. Like a friend of mine, who got also through all that, said to me: just go to swim, and it will all be good. And so it was. I don’t think I need to think about all of it, ever again.
We decided then to go to Phi Phi island, which was supposed to be a true paradise. I guess it had been, long before the famous movie The Beach was filmed in there. Like one guy said: “After that, there was about five Swedish blond girls on top of every palm tree in the island to look for Leonardo di Caprio”. I don’t know if they ever found their Leonardos, but there definitely was plenty of them still.
We were still a bit strict on our money, so we planned to stay in a dorm in a hostel. A mistake, huge. I got attacked by bedbugs, AGAIN. But worse still was to listen to the Swedish and Australian teenagers having party all night IN the dorm room, having loud (bad) music and smoking pot. I am obviously getting seriously old, but I just couldn’t stand it. Am getting an old, nagging hag. Bless me.
Maiku, now in balance both with bank account and mind.
Posted in South-East Asia, Trip
Tagged Backpacking, Karon Beach, Leonardo di Caprio, maikusasi, Phi Phi, Phuket, South-East Asia, Thailand, The Beach, tsunami
|
Maiku’s Photoblog
