To continue, after Chi left for Viet Nam in late January from Singapore, I travelled to Kuala Lumpar in Peninuslar Malaysia, and then flew to Kota Kinabalu in Malaysian Borneo, to the state of Sabah which you can see below. This is the North Eastern part of Borneo.

So the first night I was there I got an overnight bus to Sandakan, straight past the mountain. Mt Kinabalu is the highest in SE Asia. Anyway, from Sandakan I went to Sepilok, which is a world famous orangutan sanctuary.....it would be hard to read any tourist literature about Sabah without reading about Sepilok. They have specific feeding times where the orangutans come out of the forest to get some free food. From here, I went further inland to spend a couple of nights in a 'jungle camp' called Uncle Tan's. It was very remote, in a protected area of forest, on the Kinabatangan River, famous for its wildlife. Alas, I had some nice pictures of some of the creatures .......crocs, probiscous monkeys, wild pigs, monitor lizards, tree frogs, scorpions, spiders, eagles, kingfishers, hornbills........

Anyway, moving on, I left for Semporna, which is an absolute hole of a place, but the gateway to Pulau Sipadan.

You can see above the small jetty, and the change in colour of the sea....that is where the sea bed has a drop off of 2000 meters. Along that ridge is another dive site called Barracuda Point, probably the most famous site on Sipadan. It lived up to all expectations. There were so many turtles swimming around, schools of barracudas (in thousands), also giant barracuda, big-eyed trevally, white and black tipped reef sharks, grey reef sharks (no whale sharks....although one was sighted that week)....etc etc....you get the idea.

My little story from Sipadan is slipping on a wooden jetty that had been uncovered by the falling tide (before my first dive) and slicing my feet open in 3 differant places on the awaiting baranacles encrusted on the step. Nobody was around, so I was just lying there in pain! Once we got back to land, I went to get my big bag of medicine from my backpack, and then realised that it was still in a small wooden box in the middle of the jungle where it had originally been put to make sure little critters wouldn't be able to get at the sweet smelling tablets. Easy to forget. So once again I was reduced to a hobble for about a week.

http://www.sabahtravelguide.com/mapguide/default.asp?page=sipadan

After 3 days and 7 dives, I flew back from Tawau to Kota Kinabalu. From there I travelled to Labuan and onto Brunei for one night.

Brunei deosn't have much of a repuatation for tourism and rightly so. It has some quirky things which may interest some people. It is a huge welfare state with everything paid for by oil money. The Sultan has the biggest residential palace in the world, a six star hotel was built there, and a huge theme park which is always totally deserted (Brueni has a population of about 76,000). I was extremly bored there!

So I was back on the boat to Labuan and transfer onto KK as quickly as possible, a journey which had a lot of people on the boat puking into their handbags. It was rough!

And also....

23 countries and 10% of the world. I consider Hong Kong and Macau as differant countries as well so thats 25, allright!

Annoyed

I was so hoping to post a long and boring story of my recent trip with PICTURES. On returning from the airport and checking my bags I discovered my digital camera and my mobile phone had been stolen. So I've lost all my pictures from Malaysia, Borneo and Indonesia. Returning to Vietnam and especially Saigon was very exciting. To come home to somewhere so foriegn and yet so familiar is a thrill. Everybody in my locale was wondering where I'd gone, from the women in the laundry shop, the old dears in the store, my nearest noodle soup stand......funny. All of a sudden I seem to know a huge amount of people as well.....all the guys down at the yoga club, all the lads from football and now we have 6 new teachers starting at my school as well as the 5 already working there - it's going to be a very interesting year, and I am building myself up to some very big news as well.

Anyway time away was fantastic. I had reverse culture shock for a while. Having not left Vietnam for a whole year, the clean, orderly and civilized nature of Singapore was a breath of fresh air. The wonderful effeciency of the MRT (underground) with every station spotlessly clean. The public toilets! One thing that sticks in my mind is wondering around in the evening, and the streets are deserted and peaceful....'where is everybody!' I was screaming at Chi. The people are incredibly polite to a point that I don't think you could find a comparable country. Maybe the best thing of all is floating around without being gawped at like a zoo exhibit, an event sufferable in most Asian countries. Below is the Merlion, Singapore's national symbol.

This is a picture of Chinatown in Singapore, the eve of Chinese New Year.

Going to Phuket in Thailand was a mistake. It was high season. The beach is one of the best, but I remember it as being deserted the whole day, the previous two visits I had there. Not high season. High season = row upon row of sun lounger. Each lounger occupied by fat european grilling him/herself in the sun. I also couldn't believe the extent to which people are tattoing themselves these days....its rarer to see someone without one now.

So we took off to Koh Phi Phi. Although more crowded than I would have liked, its still paradise on earth...

We did the usual when in this situation. Swimming, snorkelling, lazing around on the beach, afternoon naps and eating fine food all the day long. Here is our breakfast spot......

And our afternoon spot......

And here's one more just for luck.....

EVERYONE single person in Thailand mistook Chi as being Thai......"Sawat dii kap!".....and the they start rambling in Thai to her. Considering it was her first trip abroad she was always a bit stunned and would just look at me incredulously, to which I had to shrug my shoulders. She ended up shouting 'Speak English!' and "I'm not Thai!' a LOT, to which the reply was always "Oh, sorry! You same same Thai people!". Still winding her up with this.

I am too gutted to talk about the rest of the trip since I lost the pictures. Time will heal me.

Comment

I've been intending on a number of occasions to publish to the blog but facilities have been lacking, as has time, in the last few weeks.

Some Saigon history for you, depicting the scene in the mid 60's:

'A one time population of half a million had become three million by 1966, a city of desitute refugees and enriched elite servicing the US effort. In the night clubs the music was stateside, the mood gay and abandoned. Beyond the flower manicured central boulevards and the encircling pastel villas, the red-light districts had industrial dimensions, employing in 1966 an estimated 30,000 war orphaned prostitutes - who would multiply with troop levels. Elsewhere gangs of juvenile delinquents said to number 200,000 - as numerous and menacing as the old sects - held sway over dark inner citidals 'off limits' even to the police. In the general crowded squalor, the fear was not of war but of disease and hunger. At differant times there was every kind of epidemic, from typhoid to bubonic plauge'.

And, taken from the same book, something which goes towards explaining the current situtation in Viet Nam today:

'Vietnam was a poor country for a thousand years' reflects Premier Ky, but now the endemic poverty was harder amid so much unobtainable affluence (American aid). Asked if the sudden presence of so many Americans was as overwhelming as Communist fire-power, and therefore self-defeating, Ky says 'Yes, it's one reason'. The GI's were needed but not for their lifestyle.

'The American soldiers', Ky says, 'bought a living condition, compared to Vietnamese living conditions, so high, so comfortable, that in many ways it corrupted........instead of helping us it really created more problems for the Vietnamese government.

The book is called 'The Ten Thousand Day War' and is written by Michael Maclean, a non institutionalized and honest account of the history of the Viet Nam war.

Now for the quote of the day, written by Adam Smith in 1776:

The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which efffects are prehaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possilbe for a human creature to become.........His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in manner, to be aquired at the expense of his intellectual, social and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilized society this is to the state in which the laboring poor, that is, the great body of the people. must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.