The Long Way Home: Bako National Park

With the music wrapped up it was time to say goodbye to our jungle lodging and return to the hustle and bustle of Kuching.

Conquering boulder beach

Back in town we did some souvenir shopping and our last laundry of the trip!

The hornbill is a sacred omen in much of SE Asia.  Danger Monkey is unimpressed.

The gentleman on the left had strong opinions about temperature settings.

Our flight to our last hop on the long way home left late at night, so we decided to spend the day visiting the Bako National Park just a little ways to the east.  The park covers a large peninsula and is home to a variety of native and endangered species.  It has no roads into it, and so the only access is from the coast by boat.  We took a taxi ride to the ferry terminal where there seemed to be a number of competing "official" ferry services, and eventually hired a boat to drop us off at the visitor center and then pick us back up at a bay a few kilometers down the trail.

The visitor center had a bare-bones cafeteria, a camping registration desk, and kind of a lot of "wild" animals.  We saw herds of bearded pigs that seemed to have become pretty accustomed to humans, a lone proboscis monkey sitting in a tree, and a green viper chilling in a bush.

Low tide makes for a long walk

Looks like someone has a regular feeding spot

The staff claimed the viper was "very friendly".

Then it was off down the trail.  The trail itself was an amazing track of roots and cliffs and trees and wildlife.  We saw ant trails that stretched for a hundred meters, families of monkeys crashing through the canopy, and this super-awesome caterpillar:

No worse than a typical BWCA portage

Ants.  All the bugs in Borneo were 10x the size of bugs in Minnesota.

We found a swing!

Not pictured: her Pineapple Majesty getting stuck at the top.

Apparently Michelle Yeoh beat us here.

There are like 10 monkeys in this picture, I swear.

Eventually we reached the spine of the peninsula, and found the top was dry and barren!  Bako park is notable for containing a surprising number of climactic zones, from mangrove forests at the shoreline to lush jungle on the lower slopes to cloud forest filled with epiphytes and orchids in the upper reaches to this alien rocky and sandy arid savannah on the top of the ridge.

Suddenly parking lot

We assumed the boardwalk is there to protect some endangered microbial environment.  Or maybe it just gets really muddy when it rains?

We eventually made it to Telok Pandan Kecil, the bay where we would meet our ride home.  There was a stunning overlook built on top of a profoundly strange rock formation that looked more like mushrooms and tree roots than anything else.

Danger Monkey rides again!

Non-zero chance that middle child is standing on an enormous alien brain

We climbed down about 500 feet of rickety steps and spent some time cooling off in the ocean and exploring the cliffs and estuaries before getting back in the boat.  On the way back we did some sightseeing of the geological formations that the guide insisted we see.

Mandatory tourist photo

After getting back we called a car, zipped back to the hotel to collect our mountain of luggage, and then off to the airport where we found out our flight had been moved up an hour and we were the last ones to board!  Luckily it was a small airport and the staff were amazingly helpful (Michael now considers his karmic relationship with Malaysia Airlines square after they stranded him in rural Malaysia on his birthday once) and so we were able to make it on board.  We had a hop to Kuala Lumpur to change planes, and then a red-eye to Tokyo for our connection to Okinawa, the last stop on our trip!