Pom Pom Island

Pom Pom Island is on the east coast of Sabah. It's not quite in the famed Sipadan set of islands, but for second-best, it's not bad... We unfortunately had to fly, as with work I couldn't make the 8-hour drive to Tawau in time for the transfer to the island. It felt like a rather crazy dog's leg, driving west to Kota Kinabalu, then flying east over the mountain range I live in, to Tawau, but it takes far less time. It's a 40-minute boat ride from Semporna to get to the island, through water villages and past other islands.

We also saw some kids collecting shrimps from a homemade trap, in amongst the wooden houses of the water village next to the jetty.

It's a bit bizarre, the lovely, brand-new, hardwood jetty, next to some of the poorest houses I've seen in Sabah.

It gets more bizarre, though, when you arrive at the island, which is absolute paradise.

On the day we arrived, there was an earthquake in the Philippines, which meant I did my diving certificate in water that the instructor described as "murky, horrible."

Shall I show you a picture?

Ok, I'll admit that it did get a little bit murkier the following day. I did the second half of my certificate in surging sea. I had to kneel on an underwater concrete platform for some of the exercises; my knees afterwards looked like a schoolgirl's, and not in a cute way. My instructor promised sharks when she saw all the blood, but it wasn't to be... Concentrating on the instructions was really tough when I was being dragged five metres and dumped on the sea floor inches away from spiny anemones half a metre wide. Okay, maybe not half a metre, but close. They were big, alright? 

I eventually got to dive below the swell, and it was amazing, with crocodile fish, lots of Nemo fish (if anyone still calls them clownfish, I have yet to meet those people... even my instructor called them Nemos) and several turtles. One was so enormous, I didn't see it at first, in that way that the human brain has of mentally filing a very large animal as a very large piece of sea floor.

When we left on Sunday morning, it was still unfortunately feeling the effects of the earthquake and was really very gloomy below the jetty as we walked to the boat. Ah well. I guess I'll have to go again sometime to see it when it's really good.

Turtles... again...

You know how turtles are one of only three animals with a crystal lodged in their brains so they always know east from west? And how they're so smart they return to the beach they were born on thirty years later, despite only having seen it for a few moonlit minutes in the dash for the sea? And how the clever little babies just know to head for the moon when they hatch because it'll lead them to the ocean? Don't believe all the hype.

We arrived on Selingan Island mid-morning, and after the usual talk from the tour guide, decided to head for the beach. Shortly thereafter, squeals of delight were heard from atop the dune, where we, too, soon saw tiny blue heads poking up out of sand, as an army of baby turtles came charging towards the sea. Even the existence of an arrogant Aussie man who persisted in holding his camera 5cm from their noses and walking backwards to get his shot, did little to lessen the sheer delight I felt in seeing this for the first time (seeing them released from a hatchery is simply not the same.) 

Soon the army thinned and then stopped entirely as the last, awkward, little tanks reached the water and transformed into graceful sea creatures, raising their heads now and then to get their bearings. We all knew that we might have increased the survival rate by as much as ten-fold simply by being around, keeping predators at a distance - one case in which I believe (and I'm sure there are many who disagree) human intervention is okay - in a way, it's just making up for the negative intervention: plastic bags in the ocean, polluted waters, brightly-lit island resorts... (and on, and on, and on...)

But the true test hadn't yet arrived. I walked to the back edge of the beach to see if I could spot the now empty nest. From the dune forest I heard the sudden grunt and rustle of a monitor lizard, and as my eyes adjusted to the relative gloom, I realised that half the babies were still stuck in the forest, blindly flapping away from the short, and being picked off by a huge monitor lizard and his small minions... What to do? Baby turtles are endangered, monitor lizards are not. A fellow visitor said she'd been told, "If you have to touch them to save them, do it." Basically you can leave them to die in the forest, or you can at least give them a fighting chance in the sea. So in we charged, hauling out soft little bodies from the leaf debris and entangled roots, and passing them out like a bucket chain to the sand. I told the lizard to back off, and he did, though I admit it may have been the wild eyes and waving arms rather than any true sense of conscience. An Italian angrily told me to let nature take its course, but I explained they were dying in the forest, and another guest explained that we were carrying out the instructions of the rangers, of course a much more knowledgeable source than a holidaymaker, and he quietened down. He was wearing Speedos, anyway, and it's hard to take a middle-aged man in Speedos seriously.

When we'd helped all the babies we could find, and the forest floor was free of all rustlings but the ones of a pissed-off monitor lizard, and we were back on the beach, the guilt kicked in. Apart from ill-fated rescues of baby birds as a kid, this was the first time I've ever intentionally interfered in nature and touched a wild animal. Although I hate cruelty, I'm not all that sentimental about animals, and recognise the fact that all animals need to eat, even the nasty ugly ones with lots of teeth... If turtles weren't so endangered and monitor lizards so not, I wouldn't have done what I did. 

A week later, I got to talk to a marine biologist, though, and she told me I'd done absolutely the right thing.

So there.

Things I learned in Tabin

1. Don't try to win in the "Nings Being Last in a Dark Jungle" game against a Japanese woman with a child. You will lose, and then you will be not just last, but alone in the dark jungle, as they disappear round a big tree with the torch.

2. Ants are not our friends. They may seem tiny and industrious and friendly, but when your guide looks at your feet, widens his eyes, and shouts, "RUN!", run.

3. "The Song of the Gibbon" isn't in any way euphemistic or metaphorical or exaggerated - gibbons really do sing to each other at dawn. Just not anywhere near a camera.

4. Baby pygmy elephants are small and cute. Mummy pygmy elephants are not, especially when they are inside the lodge and decimating an area of wild grasses a mere 30m from your cabin.

5. Male Orang Utans are hairy everywhere but their armpits.

A stopover

We crossed the border at 4:30pm, and immediately found a taxi outside to take us to Kuala Besut, the estuary town where we would catch a boat to the Perhentian Islands. Our taxi driver called ahead to the ferry operator to let him know we were on our way; between them, they strung us along for almost an hour, suggesting that we would still make it to the jetty in time, but in the end we arrived at 6:30, an hour after the last boat had left.

Thus we found ourselves in Nan Hotel for the night - and the less said about that, the better. Suffice to say, expecting to awake with the sound of the sea in your ears, and instead looking out at 6:30am over a grim little street is not one of life's little pleasures.

Although our neighbours were interesting - it was a soup farm. A roosting spot for swiftlets, from whose nests Bird's Nest Soup is created. Fairly common in Malaysia - in Sabah, it's more likely to be an old cave than a house. In the peninsula, families build a double storey house and, keeping the ground floor to live in, turn the empty upper floor into a dark, safe place for birds. Well, at least safe until the nest is built - often in the haste to harvest these expensive bits of spit and mud, eggs and chicks are simply turned out onto the floor and left to die. Asia can be a hard place.

The following morning, we caught the earliest boat possible to the Perhentian Islands. There are five of them, and they have a more interesting history than present - their name means "Stopover", and they used to be a regular port of call for Chinese and Thai traders.

Now, though, the once numerous turtles are in decline, mainly due to the frequent oil spills from a nearby oil rig, and the supposedly gorgeous beaches are littered with backpackers in tiny bikinis. Actually, I think I would have preferred it if they had been the only occupants - it was the contrast between the nearly naked people and the fully clothed Muslims from the mainland that made it somehow worse. There were women swimming in full burkha, and men in Speedos, and it just didn't work!

Anyway, I think our beaches are better in Sabah.

So we had a halved stay on one of the islands; I went snorkelling a couple of times, and was lucky enough to see three black-tip sharks, which was pretty thrilling, plus a family of clownfish - I couldn't work out why they were so brown until I remembered my diving training: red is one of the first colours to disappear underwater.

The day after arriving, we were back on the boat to the mainland; we stayed overnight in Kota Bharu, the main town, and early the next morning were on our way to the railway station in Wakaf Bharu, for the final train south.

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...

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%.

The Lower Kinabatangan

Perhaps the most eye-catching thing about the jungle in north-east Sabah is how little of it is left to catch the eye. On the three-hour drive east from Ranau, the commonest view is one of the oil palm, twenty-year-old dark green hulks, pale and tender babies, a spiky carpet from roadside to horizon. Palm oil is the difference between squalor and wealth for many families - from a single hectare, harvesting twice a month, a farmer can make RM2000 a month with ease, in a region where the average wage - if you're lucky enough to have a paid job - is around RM500. It's easier to condemn the palm oil industry when it doesn't mean the difference for you between bare subsistence and an education for your child.

However. Most of these plantations belong to Big Business, not Little Farmer. They replaced primary jungle with a non-native weed. The palms are a perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes, and malaria and dengue fever are on the rise. Pygmy elephants, unable to cross the fenced and guarded plantations, are trapped in small pockets of forest. The birds are badly affected - in primary Bornean jungle, you'll find more than 220 species; in secondary forest after cultivation that drops to around 60. Palm oil plantations support ten. Just ten.

Palm oil is in everything you use, from shampoo to lipstick to cooking oil. For the sake of my view, which is far better when it's of jungle, please check the label next time you shop, and buy the product that doesn't contain death and destruction!

Besides, if your lipstick's got palm oil in it, then your beauty regime is killing orangutans, and orangutans are quite simply the most touching creatures I have ever had the privilege to meet.

They're being poisoned, starved, maimed and orphaned in large numbers by the plantations, but if they're lucky, they'll be found and taken home by the Sepilok Rehabilitation Centre. I wasn't originally going to go to the Centre - I'd had visions of a cramped zoo. But what it actually is is 43 sq km of forest, and a team of amazing, loving, foresighted people, who gently coax traumatised orangutans back into an independent life in the forest. Starting in the orphanage, the babies and young adults are fed daily at a series of feeding stations, each one deeper into the forest, each one serving smaller amounts, encouraging the orangutans to forage for the rest of their meals. So far, every orangutan has become independent - some are never seen again, some return now and then, to show off a new baby or say hello to a ranger.

Part of the Centre's income derives from Feeding Station A, which is open to the public. You watch from a separate platform as a ranger brings milk and fruit to a platform in the trees, but the orangutans have little care for the separation, and as I was standing there, a young male came swinging onto the boards, loping so close to me I could have cuddled him.

After the sanctuary, we set off on a 90-minute drive south, to a jetty on the Kinabatangan River, the second-longest river in Malaysia, and one of the best-protected reserves - not that you'd think so to look at it. Even here greed has won over thoughtfulness, and in between ten pockets of secondary growth forest, the palm oil plantations are huge. In some places they start right on the riverbank, but there's positive news - the WWF has wrested back control of a 100-metre corridor between each forest pocket, and in most places has ripped out the palms and replanted indigenous trees, allowing wildlife to move more easily. The farmers are not happy, but they've mostly submitted.

At the jetty, I and my co-travellers board a speedboat to travel 45 minutes upriver to "Uncle Tan's Wildlife Camp."

The website and other travellers have warned that it's the roughest camp on the river, that there's no luxury, that it's extremely basic - in short, that it's no 5-star hotel. But I find it far above my expectations. Yes, the accommodation is a mattress under a mosquito net, and you share a cabin with five other people. There's no bathroom as such, and you wash from buckets of river water in the open air. On the other hand, the buildings are wooden and on stilts; beneath them is moss and water, turtles, fish and monitor lizards, and above is the forest canopy, filled with birds. There's a big eating area with a staff cooperative that sells cold beer (there's no electricity except for a few hours in the evening, but they've got ice). And everything's spotlessly clean, which is a little short of a miracle in Sabah.

And it's beautiful and quiet, and on my first night a spotted civet pauses in its prowl less than a metre from me, watches me for a minute, and then silently slips into the forest.

The guys who work here are passionate about conservation and the forest, and knowledgeable. One is studying birdlife, another patrols the nearest corridor in his free time to make sure farmers are staying away. It's all a world away from the Hyatt, my first experience of Borneo, and all the better for it. We're lucky enough to see four orangutans in the wild, and hornbills, and an owl during his nighttime fishing. Eagles glide overhead, and down on the forest floor, we get to see tiny frogs, and chameleons, and what the ranger insists on calling a trilobite - it certainly looks like the fossils, but aren't trilobites extinct? This place is pretty prehistoric - I wouldn't put a live trilobite past it!

I could have done with a few more days, but had to make do with the two nights of boat rides and jungle trekking on offer, before getting back to the village for work...

Pulau Gaya

So in retrospect, I probably should have read the signs properly, rather than a cursory glance. I'm not sure it would have dissuaded me from the pale blue water entirely, but it may have made me a little more cautious. 

We'd caught a rather hair-raising ride on a boat from Kota Kinabalu out to Pulau Gaya island, whose main claim to fame is being the first site of the British North Borneo Company's settlement. The boat stopped off first at the floating village I mentioned before for fuel, poured from a shed beside a house - I'm not sure I would be a particularly relaxed neighbour, knowing that this settlement has been almost completely destroyed by fire twice... Most of the residents of the stilt village are illegal Filipino immigrants and they're scapegoated by the government for pretty much everything, as far as I can tell. Although I'm not sure that it's entirely undeserved - one drug raid left two policemen and one drug dealer dead a couple of years ago. This is the place to go in Sabah if you wanted to find, say, a gun-runner. Or a companion for the night. The boats won't drop you off there, and it's considered an incredibly dangerous place by Kota Kinabalu residents. 

Round the corner, though, is another stilt village, but this one is crowned by the gold dome of a mosque: it's populated by local fishermen, and is entirely separate from the Filipino settlement, in stigma, in religious beliefs, and in aesthetics - here, the jetties lead to photogenic, brightly-painted wooden homes on sturdy stilts, and their pride and joy is the secondary school built out over the water, with the rest of the homes.

The main reason these houses are built above the water is that the island itself is national park area. Our boat continues its bumpy ride for another 15 minutes around the side of the island and delivers us to a wooden jetty that extends out from a crescent of sandy beach. We stake a claim on a shady spot beneath a massive tree, which strikes me as leaning on its elbow and gazing out to sea, although we're actually the only people on the beach, so staking a claim is probably slightly unnecessary...

My colleague and I head into the shallow sea and float about a bit, chatting about the program we're about to begin on Monday.

My ankles burst into flame and I reach down to clutch them.

My fingers burst into flame.

See, those signs that I glossed over before were for jellyfish and not an amusing alien-octopus hybrid.

I went almost weeping with pain to the ranger, who so sweetly bound my feet in ammonia-soaked bandages, and, I assume trying to be kind, told me that it was completely out-of-season for jellyfish, and I must have very bad luck, and no I certainly shouldn't go and drag those sweet little children out of the water by their hair, because they almost certainly wouldn't have as bad luck as me. 

And nor did they, nor anybody else that day - I was the only person to leave limping on swollen and welted feet...

And the jellyfish wasn't as big as my head, so I feel the sign was a bit of a letdown anyway.

Later on, we were both within about a metre of the table, reading on the beach, when some Korean women nearby started flapping their hands and calling "Ahem, ladies! Ladies! A little monkey is trying to eat you! Ladies!" Well, it wasn't a little monkey, it was a great bloody big monkey, with great bloody big teeth, which it bared at me when I shooed it away, causing great hilarity as I leapt halfway into the water. 

I wanted to take a walk deeper into the jungle, but I looked for about 20 minutes and couldn't find a pathway anywhere - the jungle was so densely packed around the clearing that I'd have needed a machete to go off-road. I could hear the wildlife though - a few birds, and definitely some wild pigs at one point - and am looking so forward to getting out on a couple of treks. Orangutans, while arguably the most famous Bornean citizens, aren't the most interesting - pygmy elephants anyone?

In which our heroine goes wild... sort of...

With our schedule tight for the rest of my stay and no more koalas in plain sight, Lisa and I decided to head to Australia Zoo down near Maroochydore on Tuesday. We caught the free shuttle bus from a park just across the river from Lisa's house and immediately regretted our eco-friendly decision not to take the car. This about turn was brought on by the tiny feet jammed into the back of my seat, the owner of which was meanwhile competing with her sister to see who could cry for mummy loudest. They were joined by several more en-route. Oh what fun we all had! Luckily the hour-long journey passed quickly, as it tends to do when you're having a good time, and we were soon turning onto Steve Irwin Way. I'm sure most will remember the grief following his death in 2006; the hero-worship continues today in Australia. Steve Irwin Way begins at a monument showing Steve wrestling a crocodile; the monument's obscured slightly by a digger waiting to start work on widening the 2-lane highway to accommodate all the cars and tour buses.

The zoo is absolutely enormous - 70 acres in total. It's only the third I've been to in my life - the vaguely distressing Joburg Zoo in my preteens, and London Zoo on a blue-skied summer's day, my first in London, being the other two.

Pictures of the Irwins are everywhere. Statues abound. Even the mannequins in the designer clothing store are modelled on the kids, Bindi and Robert. Enormous billboards announce Bindi's summer concerts and her cutesy, heart-embellished signature adorns everything from pillars to pony rides. No wonder she's such a confident young girl, this kid is a walking brandname. Occasionally it feels like the whole Zoo is just there to promote her.

Now, we all know that Australians are... well, they're a bit different. They talk funny for a start. And the whole sports thing, the way their teams lazily win every game they try their hand at, even if it's not normally played in Aus. They're always 5 shades darker than us because they spend all their time on perfect sandy beaches under perfect blue skies. They're a bit smug, really. And did I mention they talk funny? Anyway. Aussies are different. And Nature didn't stop there, with the humans. No, she did it to the animals too. Australia, even Noosa, with its lovely, neat streets and expensive yachts, has a bit of a prehistoric vibe going on. Everything's bigger here, a bit more primal. The light is brighter, the sounds are more raucous. It doesn't even follow the rules the rest of us stick to - here, mammals can lay eggs. Some nurture foetuses outside the body. And come on, seriously - the echidna? Who thought that one up? Sometimes I feel like all the Australians are snickering at us behind their hands. Some of these animals can't possibly be more than a prank. Take dingos for instance. Really, they're just yellow dogs from the shelter they stick in an enclosure then spread malicious baby-stealing rumours about so we'll come spend our $55 to see them!

My favourite place was the kangaroo enclosure where red and grey kangaroos and little wallabies roam about among the trees and green lawns. We bought "roo food" from a vending machine, and had whiskery noses snuffling at our palms in no time at all.


















It was very chilled, sitting amongst the munching animals under the gumtrees! We even saw a few joeys in pouches. In fact it seemed to be baby season - several koalas were also cuddling sweet mini-koalas.


The cassowary was also amazing - its feathers are long and soft, and the bony protruding headpiece makes it look, well... prehistoric...


I'm not sure how, but Lisa and I completely forgot to check our schedules and therefore missed Bindi and her Big Summer Tour in the Crocoseum! Ahem... But missing Bindi's perfectly choreographed display had its upside: Lisa and I were able to wander through the kangaroo enclosures in almost total isolation while everyone else clapped and cheered in the auditorium. It was great. I couldn't resist conforming to one Great Australian Cliche though. Lisa and I queued up for ages with all the other tourists to hold a sleepy-eyed koala. He was very cute! When I finally took my place in front of the potted palm, the keeper showed me how to cup my hands at my waist, then she deposited this adorable, cuddly marsupial in them, at which point he hooked his long claws over my shoulder and into the bare skin. Luckily the keeper interpreted my grimace fairly quickly and rearranged him into a position to suit us both. He was very sleepy, laying his head on my arm and sinking his bulk onto my body like a supportive branch. So sweet!



Koalas held: 1
Prehistoric birds: 5
Monuments to the Irwin family: 18

In which our heroine finds a Koala...

Who knew? Aussies really do say "g'day mate" and "no worries!" in real life! It took me 18 hours to get from English Village to Brisbane International Airport, via a garlic-flavoured taxi (and when I say garlic-flavoured, I mean I may actually have been put off the stuff for life...), a luxurious bus to the airport and a cramped night on a Korean Air flight - the first long-haul plane I've been on in at least 5 years that doesn't have individual TV screens. With a one-hour delay in Seoul, I'd already missed the airport shuttle in Brisbane, and it didn't get any better when I saw the queue for customs, which doubled back on itself four times before even reaching the official zigzag queue area. Every single person had their luggage opened and checked, and sniffed by a sniffer dog... An hour and a half after landing I finally got out into the tiny Arrivals hall. Another hour and a half later the shuttle driver arrived - the coastal highway had been blocked into Brisbane by a major accident. I shared the minibus up north with a family of four, the son an obnoxious 10-year-old with a mouth dirtier than mine, who started asking "How much further Dad?" as we left the airport gate.

But when the driver pointed out Lisa's house and I saw my sister jumping and waving in a frenzy... well, the journey here wasn't so bad!

Lisa had to go back to work for the afternoon but when she got home at 5, we went out to do some shopping. We took the scenic route around town with Lisa pointing out all the lovely things that surround her new home. Noosa's really pretty with an estuary breaking up the town into a collection of suburban islands.


We drove into the national park's carpark to make a U-turn, but when we saw a car leaving, Lisa got so excited about a space being available we just had to stop and take a walk.

That part of the park ran alongside the coast with a wooden deck path curving through the teatrees. We left the path once to clamber down the rocks to a curve of white sand, the grains so fine they squeaked underfoot. Just then Lisa spotted some people further down the path pointing up into the trees. I laughed, remembering my statement earlier that day that I expected koalas, kangaroos and wallabies in abundance, please, if she would be so kind. When we reached the group and looked up into the trees, I couldn't hide my surprise at my unusual luck. This is someone who spent 3 days in a tiger sanctuary in India without spotting a single stripy cat. And now there, far above me, nibbling on eucalyptus leaves, was not just a koala, but a mummy koala, with a baby clinging to her furry front. As she cautiously stepped along the branch, clutching twigs and stuffing her mouth with leaves, we could see the little round ears and flat nose of the baby as he, three paws firmly buried in his mum's fur, reached out for the leaves she pulled closer to him. It was so sweet to watch!






















A fellow spectator told us there was another one a few trees away so we went to look, but he was less interesting, being fast asleep and wedged into the crook of a tree, and we quickly returned to ooh and aah at the mother and baby.

Shopping that evening was a joy everyone should experience at least once in their lives. Litchies! Smoked salmon! And who knew how exciting Cheerios could be! Korean supermarkets are fine, but a tingle went down my spine at the cereals aisle...

Koalas: 3
Kangaroos: 0
Highways named "Bruce": 1