Borneo travels

Happy New Year!



It's been a while since I blogged, but I've been busy in Borneo!



We arrived on December 23rd (at 1am!) and (later that day) got picked up by the lovely people at Borneo Native Homestay and Tours (http://www.borneonativehomestay.com/) who we'd booked our 3 day, 2 night trek up Mount Kinabalu with. Mount Kinabalu is the highest peak in South East Asia (4092.5m above sea level) and is apparently one of the easiest mountains to climb. However, if you're not very fit and haven't done any training other than taking the stairs rather than the lift every day, it's definitely not easy! Luckily our first day involved nothing more strenous than visiting the visitor centre and watching a video about Mt Kinabalu.



We set off on our hike at about 9am on Christmas Eve. We did the Timphon Trail which is the easiest, shortest route, but involves an awful lot of very large steps. There are 7 shelters to pass between Timpohon Gate and the Laban Rata Guesthouse where we would spend the night and Rachel and I stopped at every single one of them, and plenty of other places along the way! It began to rain quite heavily around Shelter Number 4, so we donned our waterproofs (thankyou Jude!) and continue to trudge uphill. We didn't see any views due to the cloud and mists, but we did get to see the cool vegetation. There are impressive tree ferns (ferns the size of trees!) that are some of the oldest plant types on earth and crazy pitcher plants that slowly digest any insects that get trapped inside them. We stumbled in to Laban Rata at about 4pm and peeled off our wet layers before grabbing a hot cup of tea. The Guesthouse has a really nice atmosphere, everyone is going through the same challenge, and when the rain cleared up a bit later we were able to go out onto the balcony and admire the stunning view of blanket cloud below us and the dark granite peaks above. After digging in to the buffet dinner and chatting with a few fellow climbers, it was time to have a nap...



... then at 1:30am on Christmas Day, we were woken up! I'd set the alarm for 2:15 but other people in our dorm started rustling about much earlier and there didn't seem much point in lying in bed. We had a little breakfast (Remy our guide had said don't eat too much in case of altitude sickness!) and put on our Santa hats (Rachel had brought 7 along and distributed them amongst our fellow climbers) and headed out in the dark at about 3am. The full moon made the peak look even more impressive as it glistened slightly against the black sky. It's surprisingly cold at 3am at 3600m, so we were wrapped in layers of clothing and woolly gloves, scarfs and hats. The effort of climbing, however, rapidly warmed us up! It was extremely tough going that morning. I would stumble forward for about 20 steps and then need to sit down and catch my breath, then pull myself back into standing position before the cold set in! The path over the granite dome is pretty steep in places and there are sections where you pretty much haul yourself up using a rope, although things flatten out a little when you get closer to Low's Peak, which is the highest point. With our extremely slow progress, the sun began to rise long before we'd reached Low's Peak and it was extremely tempting just to sit down where we were and watch the colours glow, but our guide was very good and kept pushing us on, so we reached the top before the sun was fully up and were able (after another rest to get our breaths back!) to admire the beautiful views and take some photographs. After that, the world seemed to be a much brighter place, for a while, and I felt pretty cheerful on our descent to Laban Rata for breakfast. We had a short break there to repack our bags and have some more coffee, and then we began the long walk back to the Timpohon Gate. It rained again on the way down, so things got quite low for a bit, but as we got closer and closer we started singing some Christmas songs. We finally made it back to the gate at about half 3 in the afternoon. We were given our colour certificates and fell into the back of our waiting van... one of the best things about booking your climb through a tour group!

The other worldly landscape near the peak.

Sun coming up

Me and Rachel at the top!

From the mountain we were driven for about 5 hours to Tempurung Seaside Resort (http://www.borneo-authentic.com/tempurung2.php) which was a bit of a long trip when our day had started at 2am! But the drive was worth it, we were greeted by extremely helpful staff who took us straight to our room to dump our baggage and then whisked us back to the restaurant to help ourselves from the impressive Christmas buffet. The restaurant is open sided and thatch roofed. It was amazing to suddenly find ourselves in such a serene place, sitting at a carefully laid table, being brought glasses of ice cold water and listening to the sounds of waves on the beach. The only hiccup was the lack of phone or internet connections, which combined with an extremely useless mobile phone signal to make it pretty impossible for me and Rachel to send Christmas wishes to anyone.


We stayed at Tempurung for 3 nights to recover from our climb. Our muscles were aching the next day and we hobbled about like old women and moaned every time we had to stand up. Swimming in the sea helped, as did the massage that Amy (one of the lovely staff) arranged for us on the third day. I think we had just enough time to appreciate the peace and beauty of the lodge, if we'd stayed a bit longer it would've got a bit boring as there's nothing much to do, although we could've arranged trips to go white water rafting if we'd had the energy!


We were picked up at Tempurung by the lovely Borneo Native Homestay people (our driver, Conran, was incredibly helpful and full of fascinating facts about the things we passed - for example he told us that in a few years time all the fuel in Sabah will be 30% palm oil) and driven back into Kota Kinabalu to catch our bus to Uncle Tan's Operations Base near Sepilok. Sadly, we couldn't get a seat on any of the earlier buses so had to leave at 8pm, which meant travelling in the dark and not getting to Uncle Tan's Ops Base until 3am! The bus was clean and comfortable enough to nap on and the driver helpfully dropped us off at the right place and pointed at the building we wanted, so we were able to get ourselves inside and fall into bed pretty quick.


Uncle Tan's (http://www.uncletan.com/wildlifetour.html) is a camp in secondary rainforest along the Kinabatangan river. It started off as a really small basic camp run by Uncle Tan (who is sadly dead now) and has grown over the years. Most of the guides live on camp year round and in the peak season they employ part-time workers from local villages. They're also involved in conservation projects - at the minute they're growing tree seedlings to try and create an elephant corridor with the WWF to connect some of the patches of fragmented rainforest.


The camp is pretty basic but has everything you need for a few nights stay. The rooms are basically raised wooden boxes with 3 sides of wood and the front side covered in wire mesh to keep the monkeys out. There is a troop of long-tailed macaques that like to visit the camp in the afternoon and you can hear them dropping on to the tin roofs. During our stay, one of the other guests was napping in a hammock and a monkey came and stole his packet of cigarettes! We saw an awful lot of monkeys, most of them hanging out in trees by the river when we did our river trips, including the strange nosed proboscis monkeys that only live in Borneo. There were also a few crocodile spottings, which is a bit disconcerting when you're only in a wee boat, and a river otter, which was a bit nicer to look at! The boat trips were my favourite part. The camp is set in a flooded woodland so you spend a lot of time winding your way out to the main river through the tree trunks, with large branches covered in ferns and bryophytes flying over your head. At first you wonder how on earth the guides know where to go, but by the end of your stay you start to recognise the way yourself and it feels like you've learned a way into a secret garden.

Inside our cage/room!

As well as the river trips, we did a day walk and a night walk in the swampy forests around the camp. We were all told to wear rubber boots (wellies!) for our walk, but the water levels were so high that the murky puddles came right over the top! The wet feet were very much worth it when we found ourselves standing directly underneath a young male orangutan. He just hung out in the shade, gazing at us nonchalantly as we snapped hundreds of photographs (I'd lost my camera but Rachel gave me hers whilst she took video clips) and didn't even complain when we followed him for a bit as he wandered off. The night walks were more focussed on little creatures - we saw lots of frogs and spiders and the Borneo Blue Tarantula and a black scorpion which the guide let us each have turn in holding. It was surprisingly light for such a scary, spikey looking creature.

The beautiful Orangutan

On our last morning in camp there were no spaces to go out on the boat trip (the new arrivals get priority) so me, Rachel and a Glaswegian girl called Louise had to stay in camp. Louise's boyfriend John went out on the trip and reported that we didn't miss much, just a few more monkeys, and we were much cheered up when a few monitor lizards decided to come and visit the campsite! After that, there was only time to lie in the hammock for a bit and look at the pygmy squirrels (SOOOO small and cute) chasing each other around the tree before we had to pile back into the boats with all our stuff and say goodbye to Never Never Land.


The long bus trip back to Kota Kinabalu was air conditioned, which was fantastic after the oppressive heat of afternoons in the jungle, and as we passed Kinabalu National Park I was able to look up at the spikey peaks poking through the cloud and remind myself that I'd been up there! We had the same experience when we saw the mountain from the window of our plane, but somehow it all seemed a bit surreal.


We made it back to Hong Kong by 1am on Thursday morning, by sneakily using our 1am ferry tickets for the 11:15 ferry from Macau! Then it was back to work.... only for a month and then it's Chinese New Year!

Santa-hatted Shenanigans

My parents have returned home to the frosts of Scotland. Monday was a school holiday so I had one last long day with them where we hiked along the Dragon's Back on Hong Kong island and then hopped on a bus to Shek O for a chilled out lunch and a spot of relaxing on the beach. The hike went along a ridge with some pretty impressive views of the coastline and, with a sneaky bus journey at the start and the finish, wasn't very strenous at all.

Mum and Dad go paddling in the South China Sea

The week at school has been pretty hectic -Rich and I have been running lots of Christmas activities and on Wednesday there was an Open Day for prospective students and their parents so the whole school was on red alert. Understandably they wanted to show off their native English speaking teachers, but my timetable on Wednesdays didn't fit in with the open day schedule, so I had to teach a class that I don't normally teach in front of about 20 primary school students and a collection of parents, which was just a little scary!

Busy at the Christmas Cafe

The weekend has brought lots of Christmas celebrations as most people are jetting off home or to exciting holiday destinations next weekend. On Friday I watched Love Actually with a bunch of girls and a lots of chocolates before we headed on to a flat Christmas party to dance to some cheesey Christmas classics. Last night was the official Chatteris Christmas event, which involved take away pizza and santa hats on Repulse Bay beach. The boys who organised it did a great job, they'd decorated the trees with tinsel and fairy lights and brought along some Christmas music and made party bags for everyone so that we all wore our free Santa hats and even provided a Christmas carol book so we had no excuse not to sing along. It did feel kind of festive singing 'Jingle Bell Rock' at the tops of our voices, but Santa hats and sand between your toes is a strange combination!

Singing Christmas Carols on the beach!

Song sheets and santa hats!

5 more days of school and then it'll be time for my Christmas holidays! I'm off to collect my washing and try to decide what to pack!

A week in the wilderness

November weather is nice and cool, making it a very good time of year to go exploring the 80% of Hong Kong that is still an undeveloped, mountainous wilderness. However, having noticed that my blog so far is full of pictures of beaches and parks, I'll endeavour to include some pictures of buildings in this entry!

Last weekend I went on a very leisurely hike from the Wan Chai Gap to... Aberdeen! The (mainly downhill) walk went past the Aberdeen reservoirs which look very odd. You get wild, jungley greenery growing down to the sides of the reservoir, but then the water levels were quite low and the baked orange coloured rocks that line the sides of the reservoir look like they've been carefully sculpted by people. Aberdeen itself has a nice waterfront promenade to stroll along, although it's not the most peaceful stroll due to the old women offering rides on their sampans.

The waterfront at Aberdeen

Me and a reservoir

On Monday at 1pm I set off in a bus full of orange and black tracksuited teenagers to school camp. We went to Sai Kung country park, in the Eastern New Territories, where we stayed in the Lady Maclehose Holiday Village (me for 1 night and the students for 2 nights - the teachers were on a rota!). The holiday village was quite similar to the 'camp' that we stayed at when we first arrived in Hong Kong, but this time there were individual bungalows instead of blocks of dorm rooms, so we had our own teachers bungalow where we could hide from the kids. On Day 1, we went on a boat trip to see some corals. Instead of having an expensive glass bottomed boat, the students were equipped with plastic buckets that had glass plates stuck in the bottom. They pushed these against the surface of the water (leaning over the side of the boat) so they could see the seabed quite clearly. It's a great idea, but sadly the corals we were looking at were disappointingly grey and lifeless. We then returned to camp for dinner in the canteen and the poor students had to sit for 2 and a half hours watching an episode of Blue Planet (they dubbed over David Attenborough with Cantonese!), a presentation on coral environments, a video about mangroves and a presentation about creatures that live in the mangroves. I don't think the environmental instructors who were running the programme had done much work with school groups before!

The boats speed back to land

Day 2 at school camp was sunnier than Day 1. In the morning we went a wee walk beside a mangrove. The instructor kept stopping and explaining interesting things about the plants we were seeing, but the student didn't seem that interested and the explanation was in Cantonese. At the end of our walk we got to scramble on a beach that the mangrove was slowly reclaiming and look for crabs under the rocks. Then it was back to camp for lunch, which we needed as fuel for our afternoon hike. We walked up a hill and down the other side to a BEAUTIFUL, rugged, isolated beach. There were warning signs about dangerous undercurrents, but that didn't stop me and a few of the boys having a paddle!

Girls on the beach

Boys on the beach

The rest of the school week was comparably uneventful. The students were still at camp on Wednesday but I had to go in and lesson plan for 3 hours, and on Thursday we all had a day off to recover, but I didn't do anything unusual.


On Friday Cat arrived in town for the weekend. We had a nice dinner in Knutsford Terrace and then took a quick stoll along the waterfront en route back to her hotel. She's been busy with her dad's business aquaintance's family for the rest of the weekend but we'll hopefully have dinner again tomorrow before she jets off home.


Since I wasn't required to tour guide Cat around, I went off on another hike today. This one came from 'The Serious Hiker's Guide to Hong Kong' so it was a bit more strenous. We climbed up from Tai Wai MTR to Amah Rock and then on to Lion Rock, which is about 500m high and is part of the ridge that forms a natural boundary between Kowloon and the New Territories. The views on the ridge are pretty impressive - you can see the whole length of Hong Kong Island - but the haze means that cameras don't really capture it too well. We could tell it was a 'Serious' hike when the concrete path disappeared. Up near the top we had to scramble amongst the rocks. I'm hoping my legs won't ache too much tomorrow!

Elise, Scott and Sarah hold up Amah Rock

View of Kowloon and Hong Kong Island

The scary ridge.

Buddha, Baking and Birds

In the Christmas break I'm going to Borneo, where I might (if the tour company confirm our booking)be climbing Mount Kinabalu! So when Scott suggested a little hike last Sunday I decided I ought to go along. We took an MTR to the end of the orange line on Lantau and then a minibus to a little village called Shek Mun Kip (I think) where the trail began. The start of the trail isn't very well signposted, but it gets better as you get higher up. The path is all concreted so it's strangely like walking on a pavement through the jungle, but the noises and the butterflies whirring past your nose help you to feel like your really out in the wild.

The expedition crew

Temple roof hiding in the jungle

The hike up the hill isn't too steep and there are lots of little distracting monasteries and temples to stop at on the way, as well as 'an audible stream' (that's how it's described in Scott's hiking guide) where we stopped to sit in the shade and I dipped my feet in the pool. After two hours moving uphill in the Hong Kong sunshine it was rather nice get to the top and walk along the flat plateau towards the Buddha. This time I paid bit extra and went for a meal in the vegetarian restaurant. The food no doubt tasted extra good because we'd put in such an effort to get to it!

The 'Audible Stream'

Reflected Buddha

The rest of my week has been quite un-touristy. On Wednesday I went for a few quiet drinks in my local (literally right next to my block of flats) bar. It's called Co Co Duck and is part of a chain. It feels a bit like an old men's pub in Britain (only with that traditional smoky atmosphere) and has tartan fabric on the seats. After our drinks we went for some food in Langham Place, which is the big shopping mall in Mong Kok and discovered that Christmas has officially hit Hong Kong.

Christmas in Langham Place

Yesterday I went back to Hong Kong Park, on the island, for a proper explore. The park is right in the busy part of Hong Kong Island so you have the surreal feeling that your in a giant tv set and either the lush vegetation or the shining sky scrapers has been superimposed on a blue screen. To add to the surreality, the park also contains a marriage registry so the main paths are full of just-married couples queing up to get their photos taken in the most picturesque spots! If you can wind your way along the paths without tripping over the trails and tripods, you can also visit the Museum of Tea Ware (exhibiting a variety of tea pots) and a huge aviary containing around 600 birds before taking in the conservatory (which I didn't have time for) and the waterfall!

Where did the skyscrapers go?

The Aviary

The Bank of China tower from behind the waterfall.

This morning I woke up to the sounds of bagpipes! It's not the Fair day... but there is some kind of celebration going on in the sports ground that my windows look over. I always thought that when I live abroad I would start to get nostalgic over the sound of bagpipes but sadly that effect hasn't kicked in yet. I don't think the pipers were particularly experience - they seemed a bit out of tune to me!

Bagpipers out my window!

I'm going on another hike this afternoon so need to go and get my suncream on, then it's off to school camp tomorrow which should be interesting.