Crossing the jungle

We left at 9am, because I was completely and utterly lazy and somehow managed to waste two hours on such things as an English breakfast (i.e. Cornflakes by Kelloggs), losing my precious Capetonian sandal to an enthusiastic dog, and checking Facebook. Yes, apparently that's the kind of person I am. 

Anyway. We left Nabawan on a lovely, new, tarred road, and travelled at pretty high speed for half an hour, until, very suddenly, we dropped off the edge of the tar onto graded gravel. Some mercenary villagers had put up a toilet and were charging travellers 30c a time. We paused to stretch and get our bearings before moving on.

The Nabawan-Tawau Road. What to say, lah? Most maps you see of Sabah - particularly the ones provided by car rental companies, in whose car you are driving - show only one main road making a sharp curve from the south-west, through Ranau and the northern interior, and down the east coast. The central and southern interior are shown as a big empty space, sometimes occupied by a suitably large grinning orangutan. And this is, in fact, mostly the case. On either end of the road there are cities and industry and plantations. In the middle, there are a few logging companies, a couple of tiny houses, and the Maliau Basin, the most remote primary rainforest in Sabah. That said, the road is excellent, recently graded and levelled, with only a few spots where I needed to slow down to under 30km/hr. Compared to the road out to Malinsau, this is a city highway! 

We drove through beautiful secondary forest for nearly three hours, stopping briefly at an awesome restaurant halfway along for sustenance. The only other patron was a Malaysian lumberjack sitting with a place of mi goreng. The Chinese owner - in itself unusual, as most Chinese Sabahans are urbanites - spoke great English. He'd built a wide verandah hung with plants, and decorated his land with recycled truck tyres, plastic cups, and corrugate iron scraps. 

We couldn't stay too long, though, as we still had another hour on the dirt road, and a further 4 hours from there to our hotel.

It wasn't long after the cafe that the first oil palm plantations began to appear, and by the time we hit the tar it was road-to-horizon palm trees.

We were hoping to find a shortcut along another dirt road which would cut out a large loop through the city of Tawau, but despite stopping to ask some very amused villagers for directions, we missed the turn-off. We drove through Tawau and Kunak, on some very dull, tarred, and well-lit roads, and arrived in Lahad Datu in time for dinner.

We'd been driving for nine hours.