Sad goodbyes

The night we got back from Mount Kinabalu, we treated ourselves to a night in a fancy hotel (thanks Mum! J ). For £56 for the 3 of us, we had a suite of rooms, a rooftop gym (very useful after you've just walked up and down a mountain of course), bar and swimming pool, with spectacular sunset views, and a buffet breakfast to die for. (You could have bread and butter pudding for breakfast. With noodles on top. And sushi on the side....Smothered in chocolate sauce...Not that I did...promise).

This was perfect as we were all falling apart from the climb, and it meant proper relaxation before Claire headed off on her flight home.

Her flight wasn’t until late afternoon so we thought we’d stretch our weary legs by visiting some local mangroves to give us some light exercise and show Claire another little piece of KK to bottle up and take home with her.

I love mangroves. If you walk around and chatter you could be guilty of thinking there’s not much going on in them, but if you stop, and listen, and wait, life starts emerging from every tiny orifice. Stones morph into crabs, skinks peak from behind logs and kingfishers flit through the trees. If you’re lucky you’ll catch a mud-skipper or two, or if you’re really lucky, a lobster, or for the really patient, in some mangroves you might even see a croc! Aside from that, they’re fascinating plants in themselves, and immensely valuable to coastal ecosystems. They are saline-tolerant, they reduce erosion by absorbing energy from the waves (they’ve even been known to mitigate the threat from Tsunamis, and in the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami there are many documented examples of whole communities being saved due to protection from coastal mangroves: My favourite example is the village of Naluvedapathy in India, in which some members of the community had previously planted  80,244 mangrove saplings to try to get into the Guinness Book of Records, which then acted as a superb wave break and protected the entire village whilst the surrounding area was decimated), they act as nurseries for fish, they filter our water supply, and are effective ‘carbon sinks’…And as you might have guessed, they are yet another habitat that is almost universally under threat from clearance and logging. So if you’re ever visiting somewhere where there are mangroves, definitely go and visit them as eco-tourism is as effective way of increasing their value and encouraging local governments to protect them.

We dragged ourselves away from the mangroves and had a final swim before heading to the airport…Claire’s bag a lovely 6kg heavier, and a hell-of-a-lot fuller after loading her up with things we’ve decided we don’t need (thanks Clairey!). I have to say it’s been such a treat having her to visit. It feels like I’ve had a lovely dose of family: Even though I haven’t seen them all, I feel a little like I have as I’ve caught up with everything that’s going on, and it makes me feel a little closer to home! J It’s so lovely to see her so happy and jolly, and I hope a week in Borneo will carry her through her next few weeks of crazy hospital shifts, and those babies will have a lovely refreshed (albeit rather achy!) doc taking care of them!

Missing you already xx