Monday, March 26, 2012

Sukau

The Kinabatangan, as I've mentioned before, is the longest river in Sabah, a great, brown, twisting snake of a river, all set about with rainforest and palm oil plantations. It runs from the heart of the state to the sea, and for this trip we enter from the sea, departing from Sandakan jetty on a covered boat. The Kinabatangan announces herself with an enormous spray of water that drenches everyone, and then we're into the muddy waters. Sukau Rainforest Lodge is about 2 hours upriver - one of National Geographic's 50 Best Lodges, and apparently David Attenborough's favourite place in Asia. It's certainly not on the same level as Uncle Tan's - clear from the moment we step onto the jetty and staff take our bags for us. The lodge is an eco-lodge, which in Asia usually means that it's surrounded by nature, but Sukau take their eco-credentials seriously, hiring only locals, depending on rainwater and solar power, and using electric boat motors. They're on the elephants' migration route, so they've built a walkway through the forest that has gaps for the elephants to pass through.


"Are they bothered by the presence of so many humans?" I ask our guide. "No, but I wish they were, " he replies. "They keep me up all night rubbing against the stilts of the staff room." Oh, for the life of a Sabahan guide.

The next day we're on the boat heading up a tributary, when we happen across another boatful of tourists, and Fernando the guide pauses to speak to the boat driver. Suddenly he turns tail, speeding us back the way we've come, executing the equivalent of a right-angled wheelie onto the Kinabatangan and racing up towards a bend, where we first see the boats, and then the elephants, grazing at the water's edge.


They're definitely smaller than other elephants - some of the female adults are shorter than me. There are a lot of babies snuffling about too, playing with each other and occasionally getting into trouble with the adults. Although the boats have to keep a certain distance away, we're only about three metres from one mother and child. She doesn't seem at all concerned. I am though - last year, a pygmy elephant trampled a woman to death in eastern Sabah after she used the flash on her camera.

It's a massive herd; I count forty elephants including babies, and can hear the trumpeting of more in the forest, hidden from the camera lenses. This is a good thing, because the only place in the world this subspecies is found is in eastern Sabah, and there's only around 2,000 of them altogether. They're in trouble because of the fragmentation of their habitat - illegal loggers and palm oil plantations cut into their forest homes, and create barriers on their migration routes. The migration route here is being grabbed back in stages by a government-WWF partnership. It's a rather lovely route: the elephants meander up one side of the river, then swim across, and wander back down the other side. The river crossing is something to behold, creating a traffic jam on the river as palm oil transport, tourist boats, and local canoes are forced to stop and wait for them. One day, one day...


At night, the wildlife, unconcerned by the rattle of a dinner trolley bearing our meals to the floating restaurant, move into the lodge's canopy to eat, hunt and sleep. One night there's a flying lemur who defies photography, another night a troupe of sweet-faced Silvery Lutungs settle in with their startlingly ginger babies.


Unfortunately, they're not very aggressive, which of course means that they make good pets, which is one reason their numbers are declining rapidly. Another is the ubiquitous palm oil plantations stealing their habitat. Is it nagging if I ask you again to stop using palm oil? Sorry. But stop it. Really.


Okay, so when I was a child, I was completely freaked out by the Ground Hornbill. It terrified me, with its visceral markings and evil eyes. Borneon hornbills are nothing like this, though, which is lucky... Sarawak is often called Land of the Hornbills, but Sabah has a few too - eight species, of which I have now seen eight. My sister Lisa managed to rack up five on our trip to Sukau. Most of them aren't difficult to find, and as we drift down the river, Oriental Pied and Rhinoceros hornbills drift regularly overhead. The difficult thing is getting photos of the damn things. Here's one, for example:


Yeah, that's a Rhinoceros Hornbill. I swear it. An Oriental Pied Hornbill stays at the lodge overnight though, and he's a little more amenable. 


Despite what you may think, had you thought of such a thing, hornbills aren't feminists. When the time comes, the male walls the female up into a hole in a tree, where she lays her eggs. A single opening remains, just big enough for the male to pass food to the mother and chicks, and there they remain until space becomes an issue, when the female will break out.

There's a whole lot of analogies to be drawn out there...

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Turtle soup and other No-Nos

We left from the jetty at Sandakan in high spirits, ready for the 45-minute journey across the Sulu Sea to Turtle Island National Park. Past the super-modern angular mosque and the pretty water village; past a Philippine cargo ship and low houseboats waving laundry like shapely flags. The headland disappeared behind us, while upfront darkness loomed - perhaps you might not have felt its looming, but as someone who feels queasy on a bridge, it loomed. Soon the rain came, spattering the water into texture, forcing the boatman to lower the canvas sides. We sat in darkness, noisy darkness, the sound of the engine filling the small space. Looking out the back, just grey sea, grey sky, and in true Sabah style our lime-green boat.


After 45 minutes, solid land started appearing again - little grey islands, dressed in grey trees and beige slices of beach. And then the air cleared a little, and the grey sea turned to bright turquoise, the coral causing dark hiccups as we slowed, and stopped, right on the beach. Someone leant a wooden stepladder against the bow and we all stepped prettily down onto the sand. Well, mostly.


Turtle Islands Park is made up of three small islands (yes, really) on which there are turtle sanctuaries (honest) and which have collectively been a national park for nearly 35 years. It lies right on the border, so that the next island you can see from the beach is Philippine. Southern Philippines. Where they still eat turtle soup, and munch on turtle eggs for breakfast. It hasn't been an altogether easy ride for Sabahan environmentalists... Pulau Selingaan, the only island with tourist access, is visited by 15 to 20 Green and Hawksbill turtles every night of the year. As we walked up the beach ot the cabins, we crossed over their curious tracks - like the tracks of a small tractor that's dragging a body behind it, say - and (repeatedly) fell into the cavernous holes that used to be nests. The reason these are holes and not nests is, of course, entirely eco-friendly: a team of rangers waits up every night, stealing the eggs as they drop from the mother turtles, and carefully reburying them in a safe hatchery, then, two months later, releasing the newborns back into the moonlit sea. It's all a terribly romantic job and reignites my 8-year-old self's desire to be a marine biologist.


One side effect of this protection is that the beach is wonderful, and only inhabited by the twenty tourists staying on the island, while the snorkelling is amazing - just a metre or so off the beach, you better pick up your feet, because otherwise a multi-hued parrotfish or a bright blue starfish is going to get you. Or, arg, one of the millions of very healthy-looking sea slugs. Really. It took me about an hour to persuade my sister to go any further than the end of the sand.


Apart from dodging the vicious little beasts, I spent the late afternoon sitting and watching herons hunt amongst the rockpools, and raucous kingfishers swoop in on unsuspecting prawns in the shallows. It's well worth a visit, even if turtles don't rock your boat. Which they do. Obviously.

So at night, after dinner and a well-made video that roundly castigates the Philippines for being such turtle-murdering meanies, we sit and wait. It's very dark outside the main building, so as not to put off the turtles, but we can see the torches of the rangers going back and forth until one cries out "Turtle!" We all grab our cameras and hurry down to where he crouches with a bucket, grabbing each soft, round egg as it falls from a 1.5 metre Green Turtle, a beautiful creature who's in a birthing trance and isn't in the slightest disturbed by the fifteen tourists oohing and aahing over this encounter with a real-life dinosaur.



The ranger watches her carefully, and as soon as she's rested he shoos us off the beach. We see a couple of other turtles in the moonlight, but only one is allowed to be disturbed each night so we let them be. Up to the hatchery where we watch the 79 eggs being re-buried in a lizard-proof hole, carefully labelled with the date, species, number of eggs, and number of clutch since January 1st - 869 clutches have been stolen and coddled so far this year. Our pleasure is somewhat reduced when the ranger tells us less than 1% of these turtles might actually reach adulthood. But it's a start.


Finally it's back down to an empty stretch of beach to watch a bucketful of babies ("...and here's one I prepared earlier!") being returned to the ocean. Almost all of them waddle frantically straight for the torchlight being shone on the water, but three head for us and I'm permitted to gently turn one around and set him off in the right direction. He's soft and grey and his flippers smack my fingers, and I just know that he's going to be one of the 1%.

Telupid

My room is finally ready, but for a little storage space, so I drove to town on Saturday morning and bought a new kitchen dresser. Furniture shops here are big warehouse type places, with a mass of dressers and wardrobes and shoe racks just piled in there, and it always takes a while to evaluate and choose the right piece. Thus it was that by the time I had chosen, paid, and given details for the delivery, the two foreign hitchhikers I saw on my way out had walked about half a kilometre further up the road, and were now sitting on top of their bags looking thoroughly wiped out by the draining heat of Borneo. Feeling a little bad, but not bad enough, I stopped at a kiosk down the road and bought a cold drink. And it was the coolness of the drink that tipped my guilt far enough to stop for them when I left the shop.

Hitchhikers 4 and 5 were Russian - nice guys, on a one-year trip around Asia - and they were going to Telupid. "Agh," I thought, "it's only 2pm, I'll be back by 4, I can do this favour for them." So in they jumped - one of them straight to sleep in the back, the other in the passenger seat to chat to me about Russia and Putin and Siberian winters. See, sometimes it's nice to be able to communicate with people you pick up!

I wondered aloud how they had gotten as far as Ranau, Sabahans not being the most likely people in the world to pick up a hitchhiker. He told me the first lady to pick them up had told them the same thing, and so had the second driver. I was the third leg, and they were obviously starting to be a little disbelieving of the fact that hitchhikers are distrusted in Sabah! It made me feel good - I already knew that Sabahans were the friendliest in the world, but I've had so many people tell me not to pick up hitchhikers that I was beginning to worry if they had trust issues.

Anyway, Telupid - which is a grim little dorp, and to which I shall not take you if you come to visit me, as it is honestly just a dirty marketplace on the side of the road to Sandakan - was, as expected, just over an hour away, a little longer than it would have taken me had I not been worried about throwing the guy in the back through the roof by bouncing too hard over the terrible roads. I left them there on the side of the road, with my phone number in case we were the only three drivers in Sabah that trusted hitchhikers and they needed help getting to their final destination of the Indonesian border in Tawau.

It was about five minutes on the road back to Ranau before I glanced down to see that terrifying little event: the fuel light flashing on. Mindful of the fact that there is a fuel station in Sandakan, and a fuel station in Ranau, and nothing in between, I started to worry. Thankfully, my mind was taken off the light several times on the journey. For instance, when one lorry with a maximum speed of 20kph overtook another lorry with a maximum speed of 19kph on a double white line on a blind rise. That was fun. Also, the scooter with two adults and a tiny baby on it that was so close to the truck in front that from my angle, it looked like his front wheel was underneath the back bumper. Oh, and the moron that decided only he was waiting to pass a lorry, and overtook 12, that's right, I counted them, twelve cars, on a double white line. That was a fun one, because when he tried to force his way in front of me, I could give him the finger. Fun fact: living in a conservative country gives a woman twice the impact when being outright rude to men. He eventually had to drop back,  pull in behind me and wait his turn. 

So apparently my car can travel, without aircon or stepping on the accelerator too hard, 73.4km on an empty tank. The reason I can be so precise is that the moment it cut out was as I pulled up to the fuel pump in Ranau.

And on the way home, I bought a fuel container which from now on will live in my car boot.