Borneo

Exploring the Borneo Rainforests - Tabin Reserve, Sukau Lodge and Sepilok Center, Borneo, Malaysia - October 2010
6 days of exploring the creatures of the rainforests in Borneo
Scroll down page to see my review of the places we stayed and comments on the trip in general. To see slideshow, click on right arrow below.

	Our trip started with a stopover in California to check out Ventura, a town that I had driven through many many times while traveling north from LA, but never really got off the highway. Exploring the area all day, we were going to make sure that we were tired enough to sleep on the plane ride to Hong Kong and then on to Kuala Lumpur. In KL, our friend Yuan picked us up at the airport with her sister and we proceeded to have a wonderful day with them exploring Kuala Lumpur. At the end of the day we stayed at the Tune Hotel at the airport. This was the smallest room I have ever paid to stay in, but it was just what we needed.. a good shower and to sleep laying down.
	We then proceeded to fly to Tawau on Borneo and were met by the folks at SeaVentures who drove us to Semporna for the boat ride out to the SeaVentures Dive rig, a converted oil platform. Click here or the clownfish on the left to go see some pictures from the underwater part of our trip.
	After the diving we took a local minibus from Semporna to Lahad Datu, where we would get picked up for the next part of our adventure, the rainforests. The minibus from Semporna to Lahad Datu was a 2 hour trip that was for the locals and would stop for people to get out and get in. People were coming home from shopping at Lahad Datu and carrying a small plastic bag of whatever they had purchased in town, we had 5 pieces of luggage and took up a lot of the van. People were so nice, being so careful to walk around all our bulky bags taking up all the floor space.
	We stayed at 3 places during the rainforest part of the trip, Tabin Wildlife Reserve, Sukau Forest Lodge and Sepilok Rainforest Lodge. Each of them was unique. At Tabin, the mode of transport was by foot into the rainforest and in the back of an open pick-up truck along the few roads into the reserve. At Sukau, we used boats to navigate the Kinabatangan River and tributaries to see wildlife along the river banks and did a couple of small walking treks. There were plenty of monkeys along the river banks, perhaps the most interesting being the wonderful proboscis monkeys with their extra long noses. At Sepilok, it was basically walking along a boardwalk to see the place where they would put out some food and see if any of the free-roaming orangutans would come to eat. We were lucky to see 10 orangutans at Sepilok including 3 mothers with their babies.
	In between Tabin and Sukau we stopped off to visit the Gomantong Caves. This was a fantastically large cave system which had millions of bats and swifts. They collected the swifts nests (under a controlled fashion) for the Chinese appetite for birds nest soup. Every creepy, crawly creature you can imagine is running around all over these caves. There were bats, with ample supply of bat guano to feed the roaches, spiders, centipedes, scorpions, lizards and rats. We saw them all in just the15 minutes we were in the cave. The cave itself was beautiful.

Diving Video

(all pictures and videos on this trip taken with Canon T2i with 70-300mm zoom and Olympus E-PL1 camera with 9-19mm and 14-42mm lenses, Underwater used Zen dome & INON s2000 strobes)