Alan Irwin’s Blog

After our decadent island stay, we steeled ourselves for our flight to Sandakan and the Sepilok Orang Utan Rehabilitation Sanctuary. (By “steeled” we mean we ate more good, cheap food and cooled off by strolling the air-con shopping malls before returning to our tenth floor hotel room.)
Note to budget travellers: We discovered the Ryan Air [...]

Alan (boring technical note):
Okay, I think I have the thumbnails working on this post so that you can click on the tiny images and get a larger view. I know the image sizes have been inconsistent from post to post and I’ll use the excuse that I’m trying to work the technical issues from frikken’ [...]

A few observations and random thoughts about Malaysian Borneo:

Heat and humidity: high 90s, except in Sepilok where it must have exceeded 100 degrees and, though meteorologically impossible, 120 percent humidity. (Note to Marylanders: by comparison, you have arrid summers.)
Speaking of Maryland, twice we’ve seen “Maryland Chicken” on menus. Something breaded, I think. Didn’t realize they were so aware [...]

Part Satu (1): Kota Kinabalu
We expected Kota Kinabalu to be a dusty little town at the base of Mt. Kinabalu. Okay, well, nothing is dusty here in the tropics, but we did expect a small town. Though smaller than Kuching, KK is another mostly modern, [...]

It was time. We had to get into the wilds of Borneo. Okay, well, nothing seems to be too wild here. (Alan observed that this is one of the few places we’ve visited where we haven’t been awakened by roosters.)
We booked two days at Bako National Park. (Think Yosemite with no cars and rainforest instead of redwoods [...]