Month: July 2010

C’mon, you have to chuckle when you see a Proboscis monkey (pictured above).  The guy has a phallic nose, a pot belly, and seems to always be “ready for some action,” if you know what I mean.  Proboscis monkeys are found only in Borneo and are an endangered species because the jungle is being chopped down to plant palm trees for palm oil.  It’s quite a sad sight to see miles and miles of palm plantations, but the country is hungry for development and palm oil is lucrative.

When we saw photos of the Proboscis monkeys (above is a mama Proboscis with her child), we knew we had to go seem them – and boy were we glad we did.   We visited the Labuk Bay Proboscis Monkey Sanctuary (in Sepilok, near Sandakan, $60RM per person or $20USD) which is private land bought up to preserve the rainforest and the native habitat for the monkeys.
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While the monkeys are wild, the park rangers have scheduled feeding times where they bring out sugar-free pancakes (they don’t like sugar) and what looked liked watermelon rinds to feed the various families of monkeys.

When we first arrived, the park rangers started ‘calling’ the monkeys and it sounded like the “uh oh” sound from ICQ, the old school instant messaging software (listen to the video below).

Slowly, we started to hear rustling in the trees and eventually saw multiple families of monkeys swing from the tree limbs to gather for the family breakfast.   But, only one monkey came forth – Jonathan, the head of family for one of the families was the only one that would come close to humans – within arm’s reach!  But don’t let their size fool you – these are some powerful creatures.

Here’s a family of bachelors getting fed.  Each “family” has one male and many females.  So all of the males that don’t have a harem hang out together until they can get strong enough to beat an alpha male in a fight for control of his family.

Now check out this video Lisa took of the feeding… then watch out for the macaques that take over.

Macaques, while small and cuddly looking, can be aggressive and nasty.  We’ve been advised to avoid getting too close or interactive.

After the feeding, we moved on to another platform to check out some wildlife – here’s a hawk that was being rehab’d at the reserve.

And there are hornbills in the reserve as well, but they are quite shy.  This one was far far away.

Here’s Ki Ki, a baby hornbill that fell from the tree and is being rehabilitated.

Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Center

In the afternoon, we went to the Orangutan Rehabilitation Center to check out young orphaned/injured orangutans being rehab’d for life back in the wild.   Orangutans are an endangered species and only found on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra (Indonesia).

As a note to future travelers, the morning feeding at this place is supposed to be super crowded with tourists, so the afternoon is the time to go.  But unfortunately for us, only a young female showed up.   It was still fun to see this one showboat for tourists taking photos.   If you want to take it a step further, you can go stay in the jungle along the Kinabatangan river and see these guys in the wild, National Geographic-style.

Did you know?  Orang means “man” in Malay, and (h)utan means “forest”, hence orangutan means “man of the forest”.

Got milk?  Here she’s got a coconut milk mustache.

Action shot!

There are many more photos and videos to be seen – check it out in the slideshow below:

[flickrslideshow acct_name=”tony-chen” id=”72157624501139659″ width=”640″ height=”480″ border_width=”1″ border_style=”solid” border_color=”#000000″]

Sipadan Island is considered one of the top dive sites in the world, and so with much anticipation, we looked forward to our only day of diving in Sipadan (though we did 4 dives that day).   The photo above is a school of jacks swimming in a tornado like formation and made for a great accidental but artsy photo.

Why come all this way and only dive one day?  Because Sipadan is exclusive, but not like a hot-sh*t LA club where you get in if you know someone.  As of 2005, the Malaysia government limits the number of divers to 120 per day through a black-box lottery system of sorts – you know it’s not completely random who gets in, but you’re not sure what the logic is and you can’t find out.  And forget about paying someone off to guarantee a spot – it doesn’t work that way.

[Note to divers: If you want to dive Sipadan, your best bet is to stay longer  at one of the nearby resorts – every day you stay means you get another chance at the diving permit lottery.  The consensus seems to be at least 4 nights, giving you 3 days of diving.  But again, there are no guarantees.  Our hotel, Sipidan-Kapalai, sent 24 divers for 2 days in a row, and then sent only 12 another day.  Also, if you have the budget, we also recommend staying closer to Sipadan, on Kapalai or Mabul Islands, which are only a 15 minute boat ride away.]

Here are some photos to start, then videos, and what we thought about the diving.

Tons of turtles at Sipadan:

A school of barcode barracuda at the famous Barracuda Point dive site, swimming against a ripping current:

A school of jacks for as far as the eye could see:

Lisa swims with the jacks:

A big school of barcode barracuda at Barracuda Point:

So, we asked ourselves, did Sipadan live up to its reputation as one of the top dives sites in the world?

Lisa: Unfortunately, with murky water the visibility was limited.  I’ve seen clearer waters in the Caribbean.  But the sea life was outstanding.  I’ve never swam with bigger schools of fish.  On several of our four dives, we saw several white and black tipped reef sharks.  We’ll have to wait and see how Sipadan compares with our future dive journeys.

Tony: It’s hard to judge after only 4 dives but I won’t say that Sipadan is the best diving I’ve ever done (Turks and Caicos, specifically, the uninhabited island of West Caicos, is still the best for me, although that was 10 years ago).   I’d rank it like Cozumel’s wall/drift dives and diving in Belize, which are great dive spots, but probably below spots along the Great Barrier Reef and the manta rays in Kona, Hawaii.  That said, Sipadan is still very much above the average.  It’s great for viewing sealife.  As Lisa said, there are huge schools of fish, so many sharks and turtles you lose count, healthy and abundant coral, and breathtaking wall dives.

Here are all the photos and videos – simply skip through the ones you’ve seen already:

[flickrslideshow acct_name=”tony-chen” id=”72157624622421476″]

The scuba diving/snorkeling off of Kapalai and Mabul islands is mostly “muck diving” – the visibility isn’t great, but there are lots of tiny little creatures hiding amongst the corals which makes it interesting but also very hard to photograph. That said, here are some photos that turned out and some fun videos. Let’s start off with the Mantis Prawn. If you’ll recall from Kota Kinabalu, we ate a Mantis Prawn, pictured below.

Here it is in the wild, where the divemaster is luring it out with a chicken sausage on a caribeener. Awesome.

Here’s a sea turtle – there were so many of these guys just hanging out or eating grass. I think they’re the cows of the sea.

Some more shots of turtles modeling (note the 2 fish eating the algae on the turtle’s shell — Lisa thought the turtle looked like it had on a jet pack):

Some of you may have seen the photo of the rockfish on our Facebook Group page. Here’s one below from the side. I almost overlooked it as I was floating over it.

Cuttlefish – every time I see one of these guys, I think of sushi. Mmmm… and the sweet dried cuttlefish sheets you can buy in the Chinese grocery stores.

A green moray eel. These are pretty common. Don’t point at it with your finger, OK folks?

Here’s a juvenile toadfish disguised as coral. He doesn’t even look like a fish save for his fins.

Finally here’s the slideshow of all the photos and videos. Enjoy!

[flickrslideshow acct_name=”tony-chen” id=”72157624622349152″ width=”640″ height=”480″ border_width=”1″ border_style=”solid” border_color=”#000000″]

Total Miles Traveled:  30,384

I (Lisa) have been waiting for this experience for 20 years (since I found out that such places existed)… where your bungalow is built on the ocean – with clear blue water for as far as the eye can see and where the fish swim under and around you.

Kapalai Resort is built on a sandbar off of Malaysian Borneo’s east coast in the middle of the Sulawesi Sea.  It is NOT easy to get here.  From the US, you would need to take a 15 hour plane ride to Kuala Lumpur (in peninsular Malaysia), followed by another 2.5 hour flight to Tawau, Malaysia (on Borneo).  Once in Tawau, you take a 90 minute bus ride, followed by a 45 minute boat ride to the resort.

Within in our first few minutes of arriving in our room and looking out on our private balcony (and from the bathtub), we saw barracuda, trumpet fish, sting rays and (my favorite) sea turtles.   But don’t let the beautiful view fool you.  This is no 5 star resort.  With no aircon and a very porous structure that lets in noises from both sea and human creatures, we felt like we were ‘glamping’.  But being woken up at 5am with the clanky clanks of the diving tanks didn’t bother us.  We were here to dive. And dive we did… 4 times a day for 3 days!

Check out our slideshow from the resort (below).  Coming up next – photos from our dives.

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Yes, we’re in Asia, so we have to “FOB” out our photos.  That means, doing the peace sign in all your photos.

Mari Mari Cultural Village is a recreation of tribal life in Borneo – similar to cultural/dancing shows you’d find in Hawaii or Disneyworld.  Yeah, it’s a bit cheesy for sure, but still educational and fun.   We (and by ‘we’ it’s really Tony) got to do things like:

Trampoline Jumping – two guys jump on the bamboo trampoline while the third times it so that the platform slings him up high enough so he can touch the ornament up at the top of the photo.

Here’s my attempt… not enough air… gotta lose a few lbs.

Blowguns – it actually works, scarily well.  You don’t have to blow very hard at all for the bamboo dart to come out and hit the target.

Mud Tattoos – these are basically henna tattoos.  I really liked Tony’s

Cooking in Bamboo – You basically choose your raw ingredients like chicken, ginger, chili, garlic, etc. and then put them in a palm leaf lined bamboo.  The bamboo sticks are placed on a fire while they cook (think of it like steaming in aluminum foil).

Dancing between moving bamboo poles – The music starts slow but quickly builds up speed so you have to (literally) stay on your toes or else get whacked by the bamboo pole.

Touring Long Houses – multiple families lived in these longhouses

And we’ll end with a couple of more photos we liked:

And this last one is of our little friend we called “McNugget.” He was fattening himself up on fried rice flour noodles. That’s how chicken mcnuggets are made you know… j/k.

For all the photos, go to our Flickr slideshow: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tony-chen/sets/72157624573900268/show/

In a few days, we’re headed to Sipadan, purported to be one of the top dive sites in the world.  I can imagine why, because only 120 divers can visit the island per day. Since we hadn’t been diving in almost 2 years, we decided to get in a few dives at the TARP right off the coast of Kota Kinabalu.

Side note to divers reading this:  We used Sabah Divers, which was cheaper than Dive Down Under and included equipment ($200RM for 3 dives), but it’s budget.  Don’t expect a lot of hand holding from the divemaster if you’re not comfortable with your gear, and you better know how to put it all together and know when something isn’t right.

We can’t say we’d recommend diving here unless you’re really in to small critters and low visibility types of diving – we had only 10 feet visibility and the sensor on our camera is starting to go bad, but here are some photos we captured:

Here’s the full set of photos:

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/tony-chen/sets/72157624447734083/show/

Next, we head to the island of Kapalai and dive Sipadan, purported to be one of the top dives sites in the world.

Total Miles Traveled: 30,130 (we passed the 30k mark!)

Kota Kinabalu is the largest city on the Borneo side of Malaysia.  While it’s located on the coast, it’s not a city you go to for the sights – it’s a bit of a concrete jungle that happens to be next to the water.  It is, however, a great jumping off point for a lot of different activities:  some of the best diving in the world, wildlife spotting in the jungle, orangutans… AND the best part of all, it has great food.

So let’s start off with some food and drink, shall we?  The most fun we had was at Ocean Seafood Restaurant, where the menu is a bunch of aquariums from which you choose your prey and then the waiters tell you how you can have it prepared.   Here’s what we picked to eat, prior to it being cooked:

And, here they are cooked:

Spanner Crab with Chili Sauce… mmm.  Large chunks of slightly sweet, delicate meat (worth the effort!).  Delicious.

Deep-fried Mantis Prawn with Roe.  Sweet meat much like a lobster.

Steamed Red Grouper. The most expensive dish, steamed with green onion, ginger, and a bit of soy sauce.  Super delicate and mild… awesome.

Kedai Kopi Fatt Kee

This open-air Chinese restaurant is always packed, even when we showed up at 9pm one night for a late dinner.   We got winter melon soup (with mushrooms, chicken feet), sauteed sayur manis with garlic (a.k.a. sabah veggie, which is a jungle weed kind of like a cross between broccoli and spinach), and sauteed fish with ginger and onion.  Total cost? $8.  Love it.

Sri Melaka

This restaurant featured nyongyan or Straits Chinese food.  Here’s a dish called Watan Ho, which is flat noodles with whitefish, squid, prawn, egg, bok choy, and a bunch of goo.

A close up of sayur manis, this time with dried shrimps:

And Mee Hai Law – a noodle dish with seafood:

The Kota Kinabalu Night Market is a happening place, featuring fresh groceries, seafood, and tons of hawker stalls with a variety of grilled seafood, satay, and other stuff.   Here are some photos:

So, you’ve seen all the food photos – what about drinks?  Well, they don’t make for very interesting photos, but the one interesting thing we’ve noticed is that all the drinks are super sugary and there are no diet sodas to be found anywhere.  However, Malaysia has some wonderful fruits (it’s a hot, humid tropical climate).   Nearly every restaurant or cafe will offer fresh juices – watermelon, mango, pineapple and really fresh coconut water straight from the source!

Kota Kinabalu – the city

For those who are interested in how Kota Kinabalu actually looks, here are some photos:

Finally for the fun photos:

What this is supposed to mean, we don’t know…

And, finally, you just might know the next Supermodel and Man Hunk of Sabah… 😉

For all of our photos in Kota Kinabalu, check out the Flickr slideshow:

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/tony-chen/sets/72157624447525673/show/

Next up, some photos from our scuba diving in Kota Kinabalu and a visit to the Mari Mari cultural village where we did things like blow darts out of a blow gun, jump on a wooden trampoline, and get mud tattooes.