End of Year

 So we've finally come to the end of the school year in Malaysia. The last few weeks have been a constant struggle to find and speak to teachers, who have been busy with a pile of administrative tasks. Although the aim is not to take teachers out of class, in reality there is very little teaching time in the last month, as there is no real administrative staff in schools. Teachers have to write, record, and submit reports on each child, take in and report on textbooks, complete data on assessments and progress online, make reports to the local, district, state and national offices, and... well... take part in a LOT of ceremonial days. Yes, ceremonies are a large part of the last month; they're a large part of the year, really, but the last month is crazy.

Ceremonies include preschool graduations in which the children wear little hats and red capes, Parent-Teacher Association fishing competitions, singing and drama competitions, Year 6 farewells, teacher appreciation days, prizegivings, and parent report readings.

The other day, I was invited along to a farewell party for Year 6 at one of my schools. Thinking it would be a bit of makan with the kids and their teachers, I wore a skirt and short-sleeved blouse. To their credit, the headmaster and curriculum head didn't bat an eyelid as they told me that since the exam results have been delayed, the party was postponed until late November, and instead, the day would be devoted to entertaining none other than the State Minister for Education, and his wife. I batted several eyelids as I cast an eye over my totally inappropriate clothing. I did manage to get out of sitting on the VIP couches at the front of the hall with the Minister and his entourage, as we listened to a wee little thing belt out that song about living your dreams and aiming higher. You know the one.

But later on I was called up to the stage for photographs, which rather amusingly ended up being me in short sleeves with around 20 men. Well, not that amusingly...

Then at the end, the headmaster, who is a lovely man, called on me to come back to the stage to receive a gift in thanks for the year, and it was only when I returned to my seat next to my teacher that I realised that this was my new baju kurung.

Baju kurung is the uniform of Malaysian women. All teachers have to wear it in school, although I have seen a few daring women in skirts and blouses lately. It consists of a knee-length, long-sleeved blouse worn over a "sarong" skirt. It's grown on me. When I first arrived I swore that nobody, but nobody, was getting me into what is basically a bright purple (/orange/yellow/other luminous unmatched patterned material) sack, covering as much as it can without putting a paper bag on one's head.

Now, I looked at my present, and said, "What a pretty combination of blue stripes and purple swirls." It has a neckline of large plastic beads. I did tell my teacher that they weren't getting me into the traditional high heels as well, but I'm not so sure anymore that I will be finishing my contract without owning at least one set...

So off I went into the office to get changed, and when I came out, the Minister and his wife congratulated me with big smiles on how pretty I had suddenly become. The teachers all exclaimed and smiled and patted me on the back, and I smiled back and realised that this moment should have come several months ago. Their pleasure shamed me!

After makan, I had to pop into another school where the teachers were having a meeting, and I actually got a round of applause when I walked in.

Unfortunately, although I was asked to pose for photos with every single person at both schools, I didn't take one myself, so you will have to wait until the new year for a photograph of me in my lovely new uniform. 

For now, school is over, my meetings with my Project colleagues are done, the cats are settled and I have found someone to feed and cuddle them while I'm gone. Tomorrow, I fly home to Zimbabwe, and sadza, and Castle beers, and Amarula in morning coffee, and my family and friends, and I cannot wait!

New Home

Isn't it always the way? After weeks and weeks of waiting for the teacher's house to be finished for me, and problems with the electricity connection (they didn't want to connect a foreigner), and arguing with the workmen, another school suddenly realised that they too had a house to offer me, and I could move in almost straight away. Although losing all the money I'd spent on renovating the first house was difficult, I decided to move to the second house instead, the benefits including being a short walking distance from the hot springs, and having three bedrooms instead of two. The hot springs was the more exciting benefit, I'll admit.

So. It's a kampung house, a village house. Kampung houses are stilted and wooden, with slatted windows, leaky pipes, bizarre bathroom arrangements, and sinks hanging out the back window. Really. They are usually quite beautiful (if it's not you living in it...) but mine is not.

That's okay. Inside, it's lovely. When I got it, it was pretty dingy, with yellow walls and lots of graffiti. Malaysian graffiti artists are as imaginative as western ones - my favourites include "I love you" and "Hello". The floors were raw wood, and the doors, which were once made of cheap plywood, were now made of splintered cheap plywood. The former owners had nailed wire to the walls of one room as a laundry, and the pretty netted shutters had lost most of their nets, letting in bugs and moquitoes to breed in the nooks and crannies.

The doors are still splintered wood. I'm not that fussy. I did get them to nail some new plywood onto the worst ones, but brand new doors can wait.

What couldn't wait were the floors and walls. Now, Malaysian men are not particularly macho, really, if we're being honest. Which is why it was so humiliating when the workman - who was originally only hired to tile the bathroom - gently removed the paintbrush from my hand and proceeded to do the painting himself. Put in my place, I agreed to pay him extra to complete all the painting. I think he took the same time as I took to paint one panel, to paint four and a half rooms.

BUT I did varnish the floors, so I feel a little more dignified now.

I'm still living as a bit of a camper, but just look at those beautiful floors:

I have kept a lot of the furniture, some of which is better than others, like my kitchen cupboards, which are fronted by, yes, mosquito net, and which are now playing home to my Semporna fish.

Round the back I have a bit of a garden, which hasn't dried out once since I moved in, but which offered up the gift of a sprouting palm nut as compensation.

 

The cat is less than impressed; the fact that palms are sprouting in my backyard does little to distract him from the fact that I now require him to use said backyard (yes, the damp one) for his littering purposes.

 

The local kids have already discovered the two cats, calling to them through the fence and giving them the adoration they so rightly deserve. I'd invite the kids in to play, but I forgot to ask the workman to build a gate into the fence...

It's a quiet little village... actually, make that a little village - it's not quiet at all, with the roosters and dogs and people and babies and scooters... but there's not really much going on. The highlight of most of the boys' days is the football match that gets played in front of my house on the school field every evening at 5. The team can be told apart easily - Team A wears shirts, Team B doesn't. It's a change from the inside-out-division.

I have a lovely view over the hills of Sabah towards the second-highest mountain in the state. The highest one is directly behind me, looming over Poring Hot Springs. It's a pretty awesome little spot, really :) I do hope you'll come to visit!

Grammar & Me

Malay doesn't have any tense. It has sudat, already, and belum, not yet, but there is no such thing as eat, eaten, ate in Bahasa Melayu. "Great," I hear you thinking.

So the other day, I'm sitting in one of my school's canteens drinking coffee with a librarian, when a cat saunters up. (Even scrappy cats like this one saunter - it's a DNA thing.) He pauses at my laptop bag, looks at me, looks back and starts pawing at it, miaowing strenuously. I look at him and laugh; say to the librarian, "He can smell my cat!"

She looks at me expectantly, so I go on, "My cat loves to sleep in the bag, I don't know why. She sleeps in the bag all the time. He can smell my cat."

She looks at me oddly, so I stop, and then she turns to another teacher and speaks in Dusun, and the other teacher says to me, "Miss Emily, why don't you leave your cat at home?"

There's a small pause, during which I realise that really, if one is not to encounter a situation in which a colleague believes that your cat is currently sleeping inside your laptop bag, one needs tense.

I did eventually get across that I was talking of habit rather than current reality, but the librarian's been eyeing me suspiciously ever since...

The Longhouse

Life in Sabah has moved at an incredible rate over the past century. In the late 19th century, when Britain first laid claim, the state was mostly unspoiled rainforest. In the 1930s, when Agnes Keith wrote about her expat life as the wife of a forestry official, she included descriptions of children who'd never worn clothing, travelling from town to town via sea because there were no roads, and meeting headhunters living less than a day's boat journey from Sandakan. In post-war 1948, Kota Kinabalu was still a small collection of stilted water villages, colonial homes and shophouses. In the 1970s, David Attenborough made most of the journey to Mount Kinabalu on dirt tracks - the national road to Ranau was only paved in the 1980s. I met a man recently who used to be the Ranau doctor in the late 1990s - he used to travel to one of my schools by boat once a month. It took him two days to get there, a week to treat everyone, and two days to return to Ranau. It now takes me 3 hours by car.

One of the main casualties of this rapid expansion (apart from the traffic jams in KK, a city made for the few cars of the British elite post-WWII, and which now make me cry when I have to drive there) has been, of course, traditional lifestyles. The tribe around Kudat in the north of the state is known as the Rungus - they are related to the Dusun of the Ranau area, but with one significant difference: while the Dusun build wooden stilted houses, one per family, the Rungus, until quite recently, lived in longhouses. A longhouse is exactly what it says on the tin: a long house. There was one in each village, and all the villagers lived inside it. Think of it as being one, long, covered street of terraced homes. Except that it's the only street in the village. And the terraced homes are just single rooms. And it's raised two metres above the ground. Oh yeah, and that sound you hear on the palm-leaf roof? That's a ten-foot snake, and perhaps a few monkeys. 

Okay, so not your average English countryside village then.

Last month I went to see one of the last surviving examples of a longhouse. The villagers were living in one until just a couple of years ago, when a fire burnt it down. Afraid to move back in, they built separate houses for each family - which still mimic the structure of the longhouse, but give each family a better chance of surviving a fire started by a neighbour.

So: the longhouse.

It's really rather beautiful. It can be built in 2 weeks by a group of men ("Not women?" I said. "No," said our guide, "the women are too busy with the cooking.") from entirely local and completely free resources - mainly bamboo, but also wood and palm leaves. This one also used bark for the walls of the rooms.

Most Rungus lived in longhouses of 30 to 50 rooms. Each family gets one room - and when I say room, I do mean just that: a room.

In Sarawak, the longhouse will get extended backwards; when a child marries, a room gets built at the rear for the couple. In Sabah, the longhouse gets extended sideways; a newly-wed couple will build a room at the end of the row of rooms, where they will raise their own family. But from birth to marriage, the whole family lives out their lives in this single room, mattresses on the raised platform at the back, a small cooking area at the front, storage above the ceiling bars. The back wall is made of widely-spaced sticks, truly enabling one to feel as if they are separated from the wild, dangerous, scary, dark jungle by a few sticks. Um.

Social life extends out into the communal area, a strip on the other side of the 'street', where the inhabitants gather to sing, play the gongs, make crafts, talk and carry out religious rites.

This last is still carried out in many parts of Sarawak, although it's largely dead here in Sabah. I met a traveller who had attended a rite in a Sarawakian longhouse, alongside a British family. He admitted to laughing inside when a woman brought out a chicken to be sung over, and one of the British kids asked anxiously, "Mummy, what are they going to do?" The mother replied, "I think they're just going to bless it and then put it outside again." It was an optimistic guess, and one which I  guess the child will always hold her mum accountable for, particularly during therapy sessions trying to overcome her horror of blood.

It must have been a pretty remarkable style of living - your friends and family just a thin wall away, and plenty of properly traditional drinking of an evening (believe me, prior to Islam arriving in Sabah, Sabahan people could drink a Zimbabwean under the table, and that is saying something.)

Examinations and Celebrations

A couple of days ensued after Selingan and before Pom Pom Island in which I had to work. Yes, work. Well, somebody's got to do it. I packed Aurelia off up the Mountain and she came back down reporting that it was easy. She lives by the Alps though, so read that as you will...

With the beginning of school after the break, Year 6 had more than usual to be sad about: with only two weeks left until the national exams, they are spending every night camping at school, the better to study and learn until as late as humanly possible. Last classes are at 10pm; they start again at 7am. At one school, a teacher tells me she was up until midnight dealing with welfare issues; the kids were up until 2. The headmistress is considering sending them all home again if they don't stop seeing it as a summer camp, but the parents complain that they don't study when they're at home. Teachers are unhappy because it means a lot more work for them, and the kids - one third of whom will fail the exams entirely, on average - are stressed and anxious; their midnight antics are a side product of that. It seems to me to be one of them lose-lose-lose situations, but you know, that's just me. 

The week after the week after the break (because between now and about the second week of October, everything will be counted from then; after that, time will be marked in relation to the end-of-year holidays...) we had a much more fun event at my biggest school (and the most Muslim school): a big party, combining Hari Raya and Hari Merdeka (Independence Day). 

The children were all allowed to attend in their holiday finery, and when I arrived, they were all standing to attention in the straightest lines I have ever seen children make, listening to the teachers exhort them to do their best to make their country proud.

We sang the national song, the state song, the school song, and finally the Hari Merdeka song, and then it was time for the choir competition. I did as I was told and sat in the front row with a flag.

The kids had been put into groups spanning three year groups (1-3 or 4-6) and given a teacher as a choirmaster, then spent two days rehearsing a version of the Merdeka song. Some did better than others... :) But all waved flags and grinned in their finery!

After the choir competition, the headmaster and local VIPs cut the cake...

...which is almost as obligatory as the food at these events.

The kids got their own food in their classrooms - each child had brought one thing to share from home, as well as their own plate, spoon and cup. A few had brought an old plastic container or bowl, and some had brought nothing at all - the teachers produced spares for them.

Through all the speeches and flag-waving and cake-cutting (and the cake was only for the teachers!), I never once saw a child seriously misbehave - they were little stars, singing and smiling, even when they were hot and tired.

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.

Lahad Datu to Sepilok

From Lahad Datu we curved up towards the north-west, mainly through oil palm plantations again, but also, with a pang of adopted patriotic pride, over the lovely Kinabatangan River.

Shortly after, we took a right turn to go and have a look at the Gomantong Caves. We were a little late, though, and just as we stepped onto the trail from the carpark to the caves, there was a rush of sound as far above us the 250,000 fruit and wrinkle-lipped bats left for the night, swirling into a single helix as they tried to avoid being ambushed by bat hawks and peregrine falcons. Too late for the caves, then, we watched from ground level. The flight formation was just dispersing when a troop of maroon langurs arrived above our heads; they snacked and talked and occasionally glanced down at us, clearly not disturbed in the slightest.

In Sepilok, we, of course, went to the Orangutan Sanctuary, but the animals were smarter than we were, and stayed away, except for one large male. Just as he sat down on the platform, the trees began to shake and wind poured into the forest, bringing just behind it the rain. We tried to wait it out but eventually had to make a run for the main building - not quite fast enough, though.

All part of the rainforest experience!

The following day, we were off on a boat trip across the Sulu Sea to visit the Turtle Sanctuary again, and that would turn out to be a much more successful day...

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.

Primarily Within the Rainforest

So, do you want the statistics? Sure you do! (If you really, really don't, just skip to the next paragraph...) The Bornean rainforest is 130 million years old, the oldest in the world. It contains 15,000 species of flowering plants, 3,000 species of trees. 361 brand-new, never-before-recorded species of animals and plants were identified just between 1994 and 2004, and scientists believe there are still many thousands more. It's home to the world's largest flower, orchid, moth, python, and carnivorous plant. More gliding animals live here than anywhere else on earth - flying squirrels, lizards, foxes, colugos, frogs, and (eeeeeeeeh!!) snakes. This rainforest contains more species of plants than the the entire continent of Africa. More than half of the dipterocarp trees (them's the typical tropical rainforest trees) are endemic to Borneo, and since I have moved here, I've used the word endemic more times than in my entire previous existence... There are 420 species of birds. One-fifth of the mammals on the island aren't found anywhere else in the world. Bio-diversity? This is it, right here. Except it's under attack. Sixty years ago, Borneo was around 95% forested. It's less than 45% now, and a large proportion of the deforestation has been in Sabah. In the 1980s and 90s, logging was the most intensive ever seen in the world - per hectare, around 23 cubic metres of wood is harvested. In Borneo, it was up to 240 cubic metres. Another reason for the deforestation, and I think I hear you crying in unison out there, PALM OIL! Fancy that. Clearing for plantations accelerated in the 1990s, and by 2004 900,000 hectares of previously forested Sabahan land was under intensive, monocultural cultivation. That's one-eighth of all available Sabahan land, dedicated to a single crop, largely owned by West Malaysian and non-Sabahan companies. Where do forests stand against this? Well, approximately 16% of forests in Sabah are under some form of protection. 84% of forests are therefore legally allowed to be exploited and degraded with no controls, and there's currently no obligation to replant any of the degraded land. The 16% that is protected is still under threat from illegal logging. 

Okay! Well done if you actually read all that! If you did, you now understand a little of what I felt on entering Tabin Wildlife Reserve, where a buffer zone of secondary forest surrounds a core area of, breathe deeply, virgin primary rainforest.

Passing the border between secondary and primary rainforest - for the first time in my life - the temperature drops dramatically. The trees are enormous - something I had already glimpsed from the lone trees left standing in plantations, towering above the palms - and there are 50m lianas trailing from 100m trees. Did I mention it's also one of the tallest rainforests in the world?

I have mixed feelings about this visit. It's sad that we have to be driven to look at rainforest in Borneo - it brings to mind the kids' poem by Alan Brownjohn about going to see the last rabbit in the world. All this way, even in wild Borneo, just to see a patch of undisturbed forest...

But there's also hope: all along the road into the core reserve, there are little blue ribbons tied to sticks in the ground. These mark the planting of seedling trees, about every 3 metres, and we're told that, given a hundred years, the whole area will be almost back to the way it was before it was so rudely demolished by humans.

We Are Going To See The Rabbit

We are going to see the rabbit,

We are going to see the rabbit.

Which rabbit? ask the children.

The only rabbit,

The only rabbit in England,

Sitting behind a barbed-wire fence

Under the flood lights, neon lights,

Sodium lights,

Nibbling grass

On the only patch of grass

In England, in England

(Except the grass by the hoardings

Which doesn’t count).

We are going to see the rabbit

And we must be there on time.

First we shall go by escalator,

Then we shall go by underground,

And then we shall go by motorway,

And then by helicopterway,

And the last ten yards we shall have to go

On foot.

And now we are going

All the way to see the rabbit,

We are nearly there,

We are longing to see it,

And so is the crowd

Which is here in thousands

With mounted policemen

And big loudspeakers

And bands and banners,

And everyone has come a long way.

But soon we shall see it

Sitting and nibbling

The blades of grass

On the only patch of grass

In – but something has gone wrong!

Why is everyone so angry,

Why is everyone jostling

And slanging and complaining?

The rabbit has gone,

Yes, the rabbit has gone,

He has actually burrowed down into the earth

And made himself a warren, under the earth,

Despite all these people.

And what shall we do?

What can we do?

It is all a pity, you must be disappointed,

Go home and do something else for today,

Go home again, go home for today.

For you cannot hear the rabbit, under the earth

Remarking rather sadly to himself, by himself,

As he rests in his warren, under the earth:

“It won’t be long, they are bound to come,

They are bound to come and find me, even here.”

Alan Brownjohn

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.