The Long Way Home: Northern Borneo

Our only fixed point in our 5+ week trip was a world music festival on Borneo, and we decided to spend a fair amount of time on the Malaysian side of the island beforehand.

Turns out, no one we talk to knows where Borneo is.  It's the great big island in the middle of South-east Asia.

 Borneo is the third largest island in the world, and home to an amazing ecological and cultural diversity. It was one of the few places on earth that resisted traditional western colonialism in the 19^th century, largely due to it’s incredibly rugged terrain and fierce head-hunting indigenous tribes. Malaysia has an interesting history, and has only existed in it’s present form since about 1965.  It was formed by the gradual accretion of independent British colonies from peninsular Malaya, and then later the addition of Singapore, North Borneo (now known as the Malaysian state of Sabah), and Sarawak (also on Borneo). Singapore didn’t stay at the party for long, but the Bornean(Bornesian?) states of Sabah and Sarawak still maintain a high level of autonomy, and even required immigration screening even though we were coming from Kuala Lumpur on the mainland.

Our first stop in Borneo was on the northern end, flying into the small city of Kota Kinabalu in Sabah, and then undertaking the most dangerous and hair-raising part of our entire trip: driving.

Our noble steed.

We picked up our rental car at the airport when we landed late in the evening, which requires a surprising number of WhatsApp messages and phone-calls. We put down a 300 Ringit depost (about $80 USD), and they handed us the keys. Slightly terrifying! Michael did an admirable job getting to the hotel for the night in the middle of a tourist district, where we crashed until morning. Borneo is (or was) a tourism hub for peninsular Malaysia, and there were not a lot of western affordances. The next morning we got some breakfast at a kopitiam (SE Asian coffee shop) around the corner, bought some inscrutable fruit at the vegetable and t-shirt market that had sprung up around our hotel during the night, and hopped back in the car.

Snakefruit and Cristal and Lychee!

Our destination was Mount Kinabalu (which is probably technically redundant), the tallest mountain between the Himalayas and Papa New Guinea, where we were planning on staying at a farmstay lodge and doing some hiking in the jungle. It was about a hundred kilometers away, and we drove along the coast for a short ways and then cut inland up narrow winding mountain roads, which at the time we thought were pretty bad.

Along the way we stopped at a tourist market and viewpoint to let the kids run around for a bit, and since our check-in wasn’t for a few hours went to the national park and hiked around the trails at the base of the mountain.

Borcherts love maps.

Cool mushrooms in the jungle.

Finally, tired out from hiking to the summit of various foothills and along jungle rivers, we drove to our lodge. By this point we had discovered that none of our international wireless plans worked in the Borneo interior, and we had exhausted the saved map data that our phones had downloaded when we were back on the coast. With nothing but a crude hand-drawn map that the lodge had WhatsApp’d to Michael we set off. As soon as we turned off the main road we experienced the worst roads that we have ever seen in our lives. Forty-five degree slopes on the switchbacks as we descended into a valley, dodging suspension-destroying wash-outs and free-ranging cows, ascended the other side, and then turned off onto an even smaller and worse gravel road when we saw a sign for our lodge. We regret not getting any pictures or video of the drive, but we were busy trying to survive it.

The lodge was rustic, with many cats. We had to shoo some large butterflies out of our room before closing the windows, but the view of the mountain and the night sky were truly incredible.

The next morning we risked life and limb on the drive back to the main road, and visited the mountain again. This time we drove up the road towards the summit as far as we could go, and then got out and hiked around. The trail beyond the gate we were at is not really maintained, and going any further required a two-day-one-night hiking permit and a park-certified guide. We didn’t think Danger Monkey. despite her nickname. would appreciate an actually dangerous mountain ascent, so we settled for feeding some squirrels with the Chinese tourists.

The best views were probably while we were driving, of course.

Well fed rodents

From an American ex-pat family we had met the previous day in a rest hut we heard that somewhere further down the road was the Sabah Tea Plantation, a tourist attraction built around the local tea industry. The other family had been living in Sabah for 7 years, and it was actually the first time they’d visited the national park but they apparently visited the tea plantation all the time, so we figured it was worth a trip. We headed down the road, past the township capital (a town with about 8 roads and lots of little shops selling hardware, clothing, and electronics). All along the road we had been seeing hand-painted signs for an “Arnab Village”. Which sounded to us like it must be some sort of ethnic village or tourist attraction or something, and so when we finally saw a sign for a turn-off to the Arnab Village we figured we’d see what all the fuss was about. It turned out to be a village alright, but a village for rabbits, guinea pigs, and hamsters.

Probably seen better days?

It was like a petting zoo extravaganza, with 4 parks in 1! We splurged on the all-access pass (10 Ringit, or ~$2.50 USD per person) to see the guinea pig and hamsters of the world (they were living on and around crude dioramas of world monuments), the rabbit village, the baby bunny pen (though to our eye they looked just as full-grown as the “regular” bunnies) and Cat Mania! Which had various breeds of cats loose in a big room. There was also a snack stall and gift shop, though sadly it was only selling generic bunny-themed merchandise and no Arnab Village branded souvenirs. The kids fed the animals, washed their hands thoroughly, and we ate a picnic lunch.

It's a "Robbit" house!  GET IT?!

Such kitten.

Happy kids and indifferent bunnies

After lunch we continued on, took a couple dubious detours through some other very small towns, and eventually made it to the Sabah Tea Plantation! Where... we had some tea, and took a short walk through their tea plantation. There was also a janky tree house that we paid 3 ringit to climb up to, and signs indicating there were sometimes guided tours of the industrial tea drying facility but we couldn’t figure out how to make that happen. The tea was quite tasty, and we made an afternoon break of it with some fried and steamed bananas.

If you leave the roped path the carnivorous tea plants will eat you.

Charismatic megafauna

Safety and liability are largely western constructs.

Classy!

On our way back to the lodge for the night we had dinner at a restaurant that was made out of piles of old buses, and watched the sunset on the mountain while the kids explored the caged birds and flower gardens.

Wacky shenanigans and decent food

The next morning we were up just before dawn to drive to the airport, where we took the only “domestic” flight of our entire trip to fly to the other end of Borneo to visit Kuching and attend the Rainforest World Music Festival. Our visit to Sabah was interesting, partially because it was the leg of the trip where we felt most disconnected from the people and culture of where we were. Michael attributes this to it being the only place where we had a car, and so were not at the mercy of local guides, bus schedules, and toddler-paced walking. It certainly made us think about how we are used to traveling in the US, and whether or not we would have a more interesting time if we just drove less.