Being a nature and wildlife fan I was eagerly looking forward to visiting Borneo! I booked onto a Highlights of Borneo tour with G Adventures starting from Kuala Lumpur where I was picked up from Kota Kinabalu airport and taken to the starting hotel the Shangri-La in the city, an easy 10 minute drive. I met my roomie for the tour, a girl from Canada and the rest of the group at the 6pm welcome meet and local dinner/dance. The majority were Australian travellers (and we all got along well for the duration of the tour) and our guide was a very entertaining local Borneo man called Ricky (who was also great for our enjoyment of the tour). The first stop that we made was at a local homestay in the Mt Kinabalu area where we took a village walk. The scenery was fantastic with lots of beautiful flora, including a very interesting plant that shut all its leaves when touched and insects, such as pretty dragonflies, and stingless bees (yes interesting). This was followed by chilling by the pool with a magnificent view of Mt Kinabalu and the sunrise before a cooking demonstration and dinner. The dinner was absolutely delicious. The pineapple and pumpkin curry was the absolute bomb!! So lucky that we were able to use fresh local ingredients such as coconuts and fresh tapioca in our cooking. It just doesn’t taste the same without the local ingredients. We were also given two shots of locally made rice wine – which tasted really nice and packed a bit of a punch!
The next morning we had a six hour drive to the Kinabatangan River (Ill call it monkey paradise), so bring on the Asian snack buying! The drive was quite comfortable because we were able to have seats to ourselves due to having 3 minibuses but in Borneo – you should carry your own wipes and sanitisers because you might not find toilet paper and running water in the toilets! As we got closer to the river, we passed a very large amount of palm oil plantations, A LOT. There is A LOT of natural area cleared. We arrived at our lodge – The Sukau Bilit before lunch, a chill afternoon and then heading out on an evening boat cruise with our nature guide.
Just to make busy people not stop we did a jungle walk after dinner. It was very muddy,,…. like a proper jungle walk. I was so paranoid I was going to fall over and get my camera or phone wet – probably should have thought about waterproof covers…… It was an experience in itself but made even better when we spotted a tarsier and some baby birds sleeping on branches.
The next morning was a morning river cruise after breakfast. We saw lots of monkeys, mostly cheeky but playful and entertaining macaques, a ‘mafia’ monkey, rhinoceros hornbills (difficult to get a photo), crocodiles, and excitingly a Storms stork, proboscis monkeys and 1 wild orang utan!!!!!! amazing!! Feeling very satisfied with the river cruise we had lunch before we were doing an Oxbow jungle trail hike but it started to rain heavily as it was wet season so the walk was a bit in doubt. We had to delay for a few hours but we eventually got into the boat and headed to the trail.
It was very wet – knee deep in our gumboots and we could barely see the trail. It felt like we were walking for ages (we weren’t it was only about 1 km), but we got to see some funky jungle creatures, spiders, a type of lemur, centipedes and at the end of the trail we planted some trees by the lake. We were out there for a while and I was sweating under my waterproof gear, wet gumboots and swatting mosquitos away, and I did have another questioning my life decisions as to how I came to be in this situation. It was all better when we started walking back to the boat and got back to our rooms and had a shower. I opted to take a rest after dinner and then went on the 9pm night cruise where we saw baby crocodiles and a snake in the reeds and then we chilled on the water in complete darkness and silence listening to the sounds of the jungle.
I highly recommend this part of Borneo, we were able to see the amazing jungle wildlife from the comfort of a breezy boat and the accommodation was nice with all of our groups balconies facing each-other. Just be careful not to slip over, especially in the wet season LOL.
Leave a Reply