Back to reality

What a day! My colleague and I finally checked out of the air-conditioned bubble that is the Hyatt Regency Kinabalu. We were the last two from our induction group left, and our placements are in the same area, so we left together in one of our lease cars, with drivers from the car company. 

As we left Kota Kinabalu, Borneo slowly started to creep into being. The leaves got bigger, so did the flowers. Palm trees sprang into fan-tailed splendour and the glass-fronted, 30-storey apartment blocks crumbled away. The trees sprouted butterflies and tender ferns and little, wooden, stilted cottages crowded over streams. The land started to rise and fall and the rises got bigger until suddenly I looked out the window and realised I was looking at Mount Kinabalu. It is a truly staggeringly big mountain, even when viewed from the side of another mountain, as I did. It's half the size of Everest, but going from sea level to 4000m in such a short distance does wonders for the perception. It loomed. I started to rethink my desire to climb it.

When we arrived at our "hotel" we'd been driving for nearly three hours, and this probably had something to do with my reaction. Or not. I don't know. I do feel I was a little justified in reacting in horror. Faced with a long, partially-painted, partially-peeling bungalow, we walked into what appeared to be a reception area - an enormous room with chairs arranged around the edge and a sort of wood-panelled servery - Zimbabweans should bring to mind any official building from the 1970s they like. Three men and women lay in a state of torpor on the chairs and barely looked up as we entered. The rooms looked as if someone had taken a row of concreted public toilets and tacked on a wooden row of bedrooms behind. Literally, you had to walk through a dark, tiled, and very smelly bathroom to get to the dark, carpeted, very smelly bedroom. A ceiling fan pretended to do its job, while an unidentified scuttling occurred in the vicinity of the cupboard, to which one sad door held on for dear life. Fiona gingerly pulled aside a filthy curtain to look outside. The curtain very un-gingerly fell off, letting a completely unwanted stream of light in. We walked out, got in our car, and drove off in search of something, anything, else.

We found it in a little, out-of-the-way village. As I sit on the long balcony outside my room, fat fruit bats are being clichéd and flitting about in the gathering dusk. The call to prayer has just rung out over the valley (and I can't recall hearing the beautiful and haunting sound once in Kota Kinabalu), and the birds are noisily settling down to sleep. We were greeted by the family who owns the homestay with big smiles, and basic but clean rooms. Okay, so a single en-suite room is £20 rather than £10, but you know, sometimes a smile is worth the premium... :)

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?

Eating out, or, why not to blindly follow others...

So tonight I made plans to eat out with some colleagues. This fancy hotel we're staying in includes breakfast and lunch, and I make full use of both, but dinner is on us. Fiona (who will be living in Ranau, like me) and I set off obediently following our colleague, but soon regretted it when, after a 15-minute walk in the evening heat (and I mean it, heat - it's great!) we arrived at a seaside boardwalk lined with identikit tourist-filled restaurants, with names like "O'Connell's Irish Pub" and "John O'Groats Restaurant & British Bar". I held my tongue until I saw the menu, which started at 20 ringgits, when I could hold it no more. Fiona and I made our apologies and walked back along the seaside to the slightly less upmarket market, where we sat at a shared table on the edge of the sea wall, and paid 4 ringgits for a steaming plate of vegetable fried rice. We  overlooked four houseboats; on the edge of one, an ancient man sat and fished with a wire wrapped around his finger. My rice was cooked with amazing finesse in a wok beside the vinyl-covered table, the young boy flipping the wok right into the fire to give the rice a tasty smoky flavour.

Yes, we couldn't have ice in our drinks, and the dishes were being washed in a bucket of water under the table, and yes, I'm the first to admit that at some point I will crave a taste of Western food, but three days into my stay in Malaysia? Give me the street food every time...

On an unrelated note, I think a little fairy lives in my hotel room. The beds are made and the towels replaced every morning, which is expected. What's not expected is that every other time I go out - for instance, for an hour in the evening to eat dinner - when I come back all my artistically-flung clothing has been collected from its position, neatly folded, and placed on the chair. It's really not on, you know... 

Adventuring again...

Flying into Borneo is like landing in the open pages of a Boy's Own adventure story, especially if you can mentally overlook the beach resorts and apartments blocks that scatter the Kota Kinabalu coastline and focus instead on a couple of miles inland: thick, pristine rainforest, rising in a lush carpet to form the slopes of the mighty Kinabalu mountain, Sabah's roof, in the foothills of which lies the town which will be my home for the next 26 months.

It's taken a 2.5 hour flight to get here from the Malaysian peninsula. Borneo is an island, the third biggest in the world, three times the size of Britain, shared between three countries: Indonesia, the Sultanate of Brunei, and Malaysia. There are two Malaysian states, Sabah and Sarawak, and both are heavily protected by the government, requiring separate visas and customs clearances from the peninsula, even for Malaysian citizens. Even with this protection, though, Borneo is being deforested faster than any other forest in the world, although I'm told this is mostly due to the mass settlement in the southern, Indonesian section, where poor Indonesians, tired of of the crowded, urban lifestyles of Java and Sumatra, are being encouraged by governmental migration programmes. The rainforest is 130 million years old, the oldest in the world (the Amazon is a baby, at 60 million years!) and is home to an incredible amount of flora and fauna, and despite the mass immigration, it's still one of the wildest places on earth, with much of the interior only accessible by boat.

My hotel, which has porters who send me off to my room, arriving shortly afterwards bearing all my luggage on one of those four-postered trolleys I've only ever seen in American movies, has been chosen and paid for by the British Council for a one-week induction, and it makes me feel like an imposter every time I walk in in my shabby jeans. The pool deck overlooks a section of the waterfront and I can sit and watch beautiful houseboats navigate a wide stretch of the South China Sea between islands. On an opposite beach, the house boats are mirrored in more stationary homes, built on stilts over the blue water, laundry hanging from windows, tin roofs, haphazard walkways connecting each home to the next. I imagine there must be a pretty strictly enforced sense of community, as, if you pissed off a neighbour and he decided to cut off your access to his section of walkway, you'd be swimming to work every day. There's not even any evidence of boats...

I am keen to learn at least some Bahasa Malay while I'm here and was relieved to find out that they use the Latin alphabet. All the street signs are in both Malay and Chinese; there's a large ethnically Chinese community here too, and although Chinese would probably be a more globally useful language, those tiny, complex characters set my knees to wobbling. So Malay it is. And even better - from reading street signs, I've noticed they Malayacise a lot of words, like insurans and imigrasi. There are even a few other familiar words - we passed the Gereja Katolik on the way to the hotel - gereja, church, is igreja in Portuguese!

St Anthony's Day

Saint Anthony, Professor of Miracles, Hammer of Heretics, patron of the poor and oppressed, Finder of Lost Things, saint of the barren and the pregnant. One of the most venerated saints in Christendom. And luckily for me, he was born in Lisbon - because Portugal has this wonderful tradition of allowing cities and towns to have a day off in recognition of local saints, and as Anthony is Lisbon's saint, and Cascais is in Greater Lisbon, I get a long weekend off. It's also Cascais' 647th anniversary of town-ship-ness and the celebrations for the two events have been keeping me awake all week long!

The focus of the party in Lisbon is Alfama, the ancient neighbourhood that clings to the side of pne of Lisbon's seven hills, a careful watch kept over it by the Moorish Saint George's Castle (I know - sounds more English than Portuguese, doesn't it? It was so named after a 14th century king married an English princess and is one more legacy of the longest standing alliance in the world.)

So. Alfama.

It's ancient, really really ancient, and is largely composed of tiny narrow staircases instead of streets. The buildings teeter above, clothed in laundry hung out to dry, and, today, colourful bunting and basil plants; the basil being a symbol of fidelity, couples traditionally give each other little potted plants on St Anthony's Day. The fragrance is everywhere.

Another symbol of Dia do Santo Antonio is the sardine. Why? Because at this time of year, it's in season, it's local, it's plentiful and cheap. Something I love about Portugal: 90% of the fruit and vegetables in the shops are grown in Portugal and are only sold in season, and foreign stuff is clearly marked. Makes it easy to go green. :)

I order a beer at the Miradouro da Graça, one of the best viewpoints in the city - a shaded, cobbled praça in front of a grand stone church, overlooking the castle and downtown Lisbon. Everyone is in a good mood,their voices lubricated and strengthened by cold beer and freshly grilled sardines, and, thanks to the Portuguese love of children, it's a big (drunken) family day out. Actually, I'm starting to understand why so many Portuguese settled in Zimbabwe after their colonies became independent in the 1970s...