A holy pair of trousers!

We had one day of respite in KK where we mainly bought work clothes, did internety things and drank lots of beer.

Then we were off again on the coach to the Kinabatangan where we will be spending the next few weeks volunteering. We will be spending our time here working with an organisation called KOPEL. 

This is a multi-village co-operative that was set up in the 90s to come up with a way of preserving the local environment, regenerating forest where possible, and creating an income for local people through eco-tourism and a homestay initiative. They have now developed their own Eco Camp which is only accessible via a short boat ride up the river from the village of Mengaris (Kampung Mengaris). It has no electricity, very basic amenities and water used is collected rainwater. This is home for the next few weeks.

So far we’ve been at the Eco Camp for 3 days and have started our work doing Silviculture. Basically this is where there is an area of forest that was destroyed by a fire a number of years ago. Regeneration tree growth is currently stunted by an abundance of vines which have overtaken in a Jumanji-esque way, and these vines have become so numerous that many of them are strangling the new trees, blocking out the light, and often becoming so heavy on the treetops that they are causing trees to topple. To combat this, the Forestry Commission have provided funding for local people to manage the area of forest by chopping down any vines. It is this that we joined in with. 

Bro and I were teamed up with a group of about 6 locals, under the guidance of ‘Captain’-a rather intimidating older guy with one eye who basically is in charge. This was a pretty gruelling couple of days. On the first day we walked for 2km through the jungle, then spent the day hacking at vines with machetes. On the second day we had to walk 6km through the thick jungle putting signposts up and cutting vines wherever necessary. This was absolutely knackering. These men are machines and we had to keep up with them! I think they were bit aghast that a skinny white boy and an absurdly sweaty white girl was coming along to help so we both felt like we had to super pull our weight-bro to prove he's not a weedy white guy, and me to prove that I was an asset rather than a liability and can keep up. It was a great start then when 10 minutes in I got stung by a maniac wasp who then refused to leave me alone! It bloody hurt (I can still feel it 2 days later!) but I didn’t want to make a fuss for fear of confirming any suspicions they might have had. 

So we ploughed on the whole two days and think we did ourselves proud! It almost killed us though! They think Bro's hilarious as his trousers split on the first day, so on the second day he wore shorts underneath as he didn’t have any spare…and then they split too so his pants were just poking out! It was so funny!! We didn’t understand a word each other were saying, but it appears taking the piss out of someone for looking ridiculous breaches any language barrier! :) He's now had to buy some local trousers and the only ones they had were these camo khaki ones that are shiny and ridiculous! Perfect for day three! J So funny!

40 Leeches and a King Cobra!

As a post script to my previous post, I thought I’d share two little events in that happened on our trek…

About half an hour into our walk we reached a spot where Stephen suddenly pulled to a stop in front of us and pointed to a small clearing and explained that this is the infamous spot we’d heard about where he almost ended his days coming face to face with an angry mother King Cobra, and narrowly missed getting bitten by smashing it in the moth with his machete. We were pretty thrilled to be seeing this notorious spot which had perhaps fuelled a great deal of our permanent snake fears during our 2 week confinement in the jungle.

Stephen was just reliving the tale again for our benefit when he suddenly froze mid-sentence. He grabbed the dogs and told us not to make any sudden movements as just to our right, tucked up against a tree was a King Cobra. A fairly small one (we think between 1-1.5m long), but a King Cobra is a King Cobra. Bloody hell did my heart skip a beat (or 5!). This was one of those “is-this-for-real?!!” moments where your brain ricochets back and forth between terror and “thisisoneofthecoolestmomentsofmylife”!

So we back-tracked carefully the way we’d come, hearts pounding. If it’s any indication of how actually nervous we all were, we didn’t even hang around for our usual photo shoot…we retreated to a safe distance before getting a quick zoom lens out to take a vague snap as evidence, then got right back out of there! It was definitely a thrill, and I have to say that Bro and I felt somewhat vindicated for making all of our ridiculous snake-avoiding precautions over the last 2 weeks!

(You can just make him out in the background)

Now anyone who’s been to a rainforest will have heard about leeches, and Borneo is particularly notorious for them. We’d each had the odd leech here and there before, and David had given us a little pre-warning before setting off, but were not prepared for this…After about 10 minutes we stopped trying to pull them off our shoes as we wouldn’t have got more than 5 meters from the house if we continued at that rate, so on David’s advice we tried our best to ignore them until we got back 5 hours later…so it was with trepidation that we sat down 5 hours later to peel off our socks and survey the damage. All I’m going to say is that between us we counted over 40 (yes, that’s FORTY!!) leeches…and my favourite part?!!...Brodie had one on his manhood!! Never have I seen more horror in one man’s face!! (No picture of that one…I’ll keep that one for myself!) ;)

The offending characters...

To Earth with a Bump

A pre-warning…this is a mammoth one (this is what happens when you care about something and have spare time on your hands!)

If you’ve ever been to a rainforest then you will know that it is a chaos of noises; layer upon layer of different sounds fill your ears at any one one time- Hundreds of different bird songs (most of the time you can’t even see them, but you can sure as hell hear them!), crickets hissing, monkeys whooping, a whole orchestra of different cicadas whistling their way through the day, every type has its own unique sound (my ‘favourite’ is the one that starts singing like clockwork at 5.30 am every day and sounds just like a car alarm. Pure joy). You can hear the rain coming through the trees long before you see it or feel it, it’s quite exhilarating and puts a tingle up your spine…And then, in some rainforests there are the logging vans and the chainsaws. The dull, depressing, omnipresent drone of the logging vans resonates as a sinister undertone in the background of life in the jungle in Suka-hutan, coupled with the jarring sound of the saws that accompany them. And every now and then you get a pause in the chainsaw, followed by a desperately slow, painful creak, and then the inevitable crash. You stop whatever you’re doing and take a moment to compose yourself and take a deep, long breath. It’s not the kind of sound you can let pass you by…it strikes you right into your core.

We decided to come to Suka-hutan as we knew that Stephen and Sarah own 300 hectares of rainforest in an area that is currently being heavily logged, in Malaysia where the palm oil craze is both mind-blowing and devastating in equal measure. This couple have set out to protect their land, with the long-term goal of gazetting the trees on their property (therefore protecting them from potential loggers), and developing an eco-tourist project to educate people about the rainforest. They sounded like people we wanted to meet, and this sounded like a project we wanted to be involved in.

It took about two minutes after meeting Stephen before we got on to the topic. This is clearly something he cares deeply about.

The road that leads to Suka-hutan is a dirt track that follows the valley through from Lawas to Stephen and Sarah’s home. The only reason there is a road there is that loggers need to have access to the forest for trees, and a route to carry them out. Driving down this road for two hours on our way to Suka-hutan, you would be forgiven for thinking that the forest is relatively healthy and untouched as it lies thick on both sides of the track and it all feels very wild and inaccessible and everything looks very green. However, Stephen would point out every now and then a ridiculously tall tree that towered above the rest. This, he pointed out, was how high the canopy used to be. The current existing canopy lay a gut-wrenching 10, 20, even 30 foot or so below that as only smaller trees that are no good for logging are left. That was quite hard to swallow.

He then pointed out the skyline on the top of the hill, and where there should be a solid line of trees, there is a now only a straggly line up of sparse trees remaining. It was depressing. The entire 2 hour journey from Lawas to Stephen’s place had the same harrowing symptoms where loggers had systematically combed through the forest and removed any large trees. You might think, well at least they’ve left the remainder there, and yes, in comparison to many areas of Borneo where land is just completely flattened to make way for monoculture (usually palm oil plantations), this is not nearly as devastating. In fact some species even prosper in selectively logged forest (eg. berry-eating nectarivorous birds such as bulbuls and sunbirds), but many species will decline as a result (eg. insect-eaters such as pittas, babblers and flycatchers). But if I tell you that primary, untouched forest in Borneo should have approx. 1,200 tree species and 220+ bird species, yet secondary forest can have as few as 80 tree species and approx. 60 bird species, that perhaps opens your eyes a little.  

That said, if left to regenerate, after 30 years, logged land should be able to regenerate to its original numbers of both bird and tree species. This is where people like Stephen and Sarah come in.

Stephen and Sarah built their own house 10 years ago, on the top of a hill in the centre of their land with this incredible view. 

Two weeks before we arrived the loggers reached this stretch of forest and holes started appearing in the hillside where trees were being logged (if you look carefully enough you can spot them in the picture). By the time we’ve come to leave there are now 5 holes where mud is visible through the canopy of trees. Every day at Suka-hutan we could hear the logging trucks and chainsaws creeping steadily and steadily closer. We couldn’t see them  but my god could we hear them well above the other sounds of the forest.

Stephen and Sarah arrived back home two days ago and we had the horrible job of telling them our concerns that they must be close, so Stephen decided that we should take a jungle trek to his perimeters the following day to see how close they were and to see if there were any signs of them encroaching his land.

So Tuesday arrived and we set off with lots of water and having made suitable precautions against leeches (thick socks with trousers tucked in and a second pair on top as apparently even the small ones can get through socks. Joy). We trekked down the hillside through the forest-you follow vague ancient hunting trails where there is a vague path through the thickness, but we still needed a machete to get us through-this is serious jungle!

We slowly meandered our way down the steep hill to the river at the bottom which marks the boundary of Stephen and Sarah’s land. And this is where we got a massive smack in the face. It was devastation like I can’t describe it. It’s so hard to put into words. Stephen’s side of the river was thick, luscious jungle, like something straight out of a Tarzan film, and the other side....like a war zone. We weren’t wrong when we thought they loggers had been close…they were on Stephen’s doorstep and this was worse than even he’d feared. Rather than selectively removing only the trees they needed, these loggers had come in with their diggers and mowed down everything in their path. By everything, I mean everything. I have put some photos below but I don’t think they do it justice as they don’t convey the vast openness you are suddenly confronted with. I can’t describe what it felt like to emerge from this thick forest where you’ve spent two weeks without seeing a soul and then smack, you are confronted with a gaping hole and a vast ceiling of sky…like a giant piece has been blown out of the Earth. It knocks the wind out of you.

The loggers were still there, still busy, so we decided they should see us with our cameras and know we were there…anything to try and keep them away from Stephen’s land. Stephen also wanted to gauge the extent of the destruction so we picked our way across the new wasteland, weaving in and out of the river, following his boarder. I have to say this was one of the most harrowing and humbling experiences of my life. You learn about it in school, you read about it in the newspaper, you watch it on the TV, and it’s all quite abstract..“An area of rainforest the size of <insert arbitary American state here> is destroyed every minute/hour/day”…but it’s all just numbers of things that happen a long way from your sofa in rainy old England. And here we were staring it in its disgusting, gruesome face. And it felt shit. They wouldn’t want my pity, but my heart broke for Stephen and Sarah. I can walk away from this but this is their front garden.

We spent about an hour picking our way along the border. They hadn’t encroached on his land, but in about three substantial areas they had dropped trees right across the river onto his land, blocking the normal path of the river.

One of the worst things about this is that this suggests these people are not just selectively logging, it looks like they’re clearing the land entirely. And that probably means the end of the forest, and the start of palm oil which would be the worst case scenario. Rainforest soil when cleared is extremely nutrient poor, and you end up left with deserts of mud where very little can grow. Forest clearance is linked with mudslides, river silting, and the absolute loss of biodiversity. If this land becomes palm oil, you can throw pesticides, herbicides and people traffic (to name but a few) into the mix. Just to twist the knife in.

Stephen’s land is an island, and becoming more and more so. I’ve mentioned before the kinds of animals Stephen has seen on his land...macaques, gibbons, the extremely rare clouded leopard, sunbears…and that’s just the mammals. If these animals can’t go anywhere they won’t be able to breed, they won’t be able to move, they will simply disappear. That’s not a hunch, that’s a fact.

The day after our forest trek was the day we were leaving. We had our breakfast on the deck as usual overlooking the incredible view of the forest and Stephen came up to us and said gently…”Beautiful isn’t it? I’m glad you got to see it like this…Perhaps you’ll be our last Wwoofers to see it like this...” What do you say to that?

I am sat here writing this on our 4 hour journey back from Lawas to KK watching field after field of palm oil slide past my window, feeling a bit broken. It’s the hopelessness, the inevitability of it…this gargantuan feeling of irreversible loss. Stephen and Sarah are doing their best, but as I’ve written in previous blogs, they are two people up against an army. They have been beaten up, had guns to their heads, been framed and let down time and time again by police and the judicial system. All because they want to keep their own precious land safe. If Stephen puts even a foot wrong he could lose his visa and be thrown out of the country so all he can do is watch as the forest around him falls, and do his best to protect his own tiny oasis in this horribly scarred world. It’s absolutely heart-breaking.

We can help. Even from those sofas in England. We can raise the profile, we can sign petitions, we can avoid foods containing palm oil (http://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/which-everyday-products-contain-palm-oil), we can raise our children to be aware of these issues, or teach them in schools, we can only buy sustainable products and recycled loo roll….And me? First stop, I’m off to the Kinabatangen to plant some trees! 

Out in the wilderness

On Thursday 4^th June we were abandoned on a hilltop in the middle of the Bornean rainforest with just the two of us, 3 dogs, 2 cats, a rather beautiful Samba deer (that they rescued from a local who had shot her mother) and 300 hectares of our own rainforest to babysit. And of course lots of creepy crawlies.

(Clairey, this one reminded me of you on Mantanni!) ;)

Far from the brave bush men and women we’d hoped to be, we became very practical, sensible bush man and woman, and sat down and made some plans. First rule was that neither of us would go anywhere by ourselves, in case of surprise animal encounters (mainly snakes), and we would always wear trousers and shoes and socks when not in a building. We then raided the first aid cupboard for the emergency medicines that we would require in various scenarios, placing them in easy reach (the coffee table), and accompanied with a first aid book (which we both took pains to read all parts relevant for the most likely mishaps we might encounter), and some money in case we needed to persuade someone to drive us to town. We also made an action plan of what we would do in the case of a snake bite. We were prepared. Wilton, Taunton’s 16^th Guide and Scout groups would have been proud of their protégées.

What started as a rather foreboding initiation into life in the rainforest, gradually morphed into what can only be described as a rather charmed existence for the two of us.

The three dogs, which admittedly on paper would give Garfield serious reasons to tremble, turned out to be rather wonderful company. From day one, anything we did would be accompanied by old and rather regal alpha dog Lou, Max the ridiculously playful Doberman-rottweiler cross who will do anything for a tummy rub, and likes giving us a continuous stream of marvellous presents of anything that will put in his mouth, and Ben, a huge, clumsy, lumbering, homosexually-inclined 2 year-old Alsatian with skin-issues, permanent ear-infection, and a partiality to humping poor Max, much to our amusement. Considering Bro and I have never had much exposure to dogs, we took to these three instantly, and Bro and Max formed a speedy and mutual bromance from the minute the laid eyes on each other.

So our days consist of a mixture between daily chores, set tasks that we’ve been left to do by Sarah and Stephen, and any free time left over to relax.

Our chores include feeding all the animals (no mean feat), powdering, treating and showering Ben, checking the water butts/filters etc, cleaning out Megan, strimming, watering the plants and managing the generator.

Feeding Megan is perhaps the most time-consuming of these. Megan is an orphaned deer that Sarah and Stephen rescued from a poacher from the nearby village and hand-reared. She is now two years old and fully grown, and she is simply beautiful! Feeding her requires both Brodie and I to spend about half an hour, twice a day, foraging for leaves, ferns or grass. She’s a big girl. She’s so inquisitive and friendly, and sometimes when you’re in with her it suddenly hits you that you are rubbing the ears of a fully-grown Bambi, and that is just magical.

The rest of our time is filled with doing tasks left behind by Stephen and Sarah, ranging from treating the wood on the house, to digging drainage ditches.

There’s something remarkably romantic about being here, surrounded by forest in every direction, with just the two of us and the animals for company. You have time to think, and reflect, and absorb, and cheesy as it sounds, just be together. It’s such a wonderful luxury that I constantly keep reminding myself to soak it up, capture it and keep hold of it for when I’m home and am busy and stressed and don’t have time to just stop.

Although when I say romantic, I don’t mean two blissful lovers, floating about on a peaceful cloud in their secret getaway…I’m talking dirty and noisy and smelly and sweaty and hot and humid and tiring. The thermometer says 32°C IN THE SHADE and we’re mainly working outdoors in the direct sun at constantly over 70% humidity. All day. That means getting through two shirts a day. It means flies buzzing around your head. It means socks that smell like death. It means one very stinky, sticky, smelly, sweaty Emma with the-shampoo-I-bought-in-KK-doesn’t-clean-my-hair-so-it’s-permanently-greasy hair and an impressive a-la-pre-pubescent-teenager spot collection on the entire upper half of my body and face. Throw in a cold shower, an ‘oriental’ toilet (a hole in the ground) and ridiculously squeaky bunk beds, and you get the gist of it. That said, this grotesquely unappealing girl gets to spend 24-7 with her equally disgusting (albeit disappointingly less spotty and decidedly less smelly) boyfriend of seven and a half years and that, my friends is bloody awesome.  

The back of beyond

If the profile had said…

 “Come to our rain forest retreat, it’s suitably in the back of beyond that the only way to access it is via 2 hour drive along a dirt track and there’s no internet or phone reception. You will have neighbours as such, in the shape of loggers (a couple of which have threatened us with a gun before, our closest neighbours once to spite us (when we wouldn’t allow them to take one of our trees) falsely told the police we were growing drugs, and another group beat me up and broke my wife’s hand with a stick when we asked them to leave our land) and you can be reassured by their proximity as you can hear them chain-sawing every day. You’ll be staying in your own accommodation which is a room in the workshop next to where our elderly mum lives. She recently got bitten by a pit-viper just outside your door, and prior to that, by a scorpion which sneaked under her doorway (previous Wwoofers found a scorpion in your room-you should probably keep something under the door to stop anything nasty sneaking in). You get to share our lovely home with 3 huge dogs, one of which is a Rottweiler-doberman cross, another of which is a giant Alsatian. One of your chores will be to give the Alsatian eardrops every day and powder his balls as he has eczema. He doesn’t really like it. We used to have a rabbit too, but he escaped and the dogs killed him. They also killed a dog from the village. It wasn’t very nice and we apologised, but it was good propaganda for us as it makes us look dangerous and keeps the locals away. We also have two cats. They’re lovely, but we’re currently having problems with them crapping on the balcony and pissing on our lounge chairs as they’re so scared of the dogs they won’t venture down beyond the steps. You won’t definitely see a snake, but I did come face-to-face with a King Cobra on our land a couple of months ago. Luckily I was carrying a shovel so I smacked it in the face and chipped its fangs, otherwise I would have been a goner.….”

…then we might not have made the three hour coach ride to Lawas, followed by the bumpy two-hour ride to Suka-hutan, Inthemiddleofnowhere to spend two weeks by ourselves in the jungle with no internet or phone.

Luckily the webpage showed a pretty picture of a beautiful wooden house nestled neatly amid a luscious rainforest, and boasted of a pet deer, friendly local family of macaques, and visits from hornbills, one of my favourite birds. Plus we were enticed by the fact that Stephen and Sarah who own the property, own over 300 hectares of rainforest which they are desperately trying to protect for the future, and that sounded like our cup of tea.

However, the information above is roughly the shape of our first conversation with our new host and owner of the property Stephen on our way from Lawas to Suka-hutan, the home we were due to be staying in for two weeks, house/land/animal-sitting whilst he and Sarah visit family in Australia. I would quite like to have seen our faces at the end of that crazy jeep ride. I imagine they would have looked a little like Macualy Caulkin looked at the moment he discovered he was home alone. Times 100.

What had we let ourselves in for?!

Well that’s what we asked ourselves the second we had a moment alone together. We had three days with Stephen and Sarah in which we were supposed to learn everything about the place before they left us to it, so we decided we’d be sensible to see how we felt about the place, and how safe we felt before we let them dessert us in the middle of the jungle with no forms of communication.

Thus we endeavoured to emerse ourselves in life here and ask as many questions as we could to make an informed decision about whether we were being foolish to stay or not.

To give you a taste for the kind of things we asked about, one of our conversations with Stephen and Sarah in those first couple of days went something like this…

B and E: So we need to look out for King Cobras right?

Stephen: Yes. And pit-vipers. They’re far more common and will just sit there and not move. Both can kill you so always check the ground in front of you. Some of them hang around in trees-we call them ‘lazy vipers’ as they wait for prey to come to them before they strike. So make sure watch out for branches at head height. 

B and E: Right, so no flipflops then, just trainers?...

Stephen: Sure. But always check inside your shoes before you put them on. Otherwise you might stand on a scorpion and you don’t want that…sneaky little buggers.

B and E: So look out for snakes and scorpions…

Stephen: …and spiders of course. And it’s the wasps you want to watch. The big orange ones. They’ll get you at night as they swarm around the lights.

B and E: Ok so snakes, scorpions, spiders, wasps…anything else?

Stephen: Millipedes are OK.

B and E: Phew!...

Stephen:…but watch out for the centipedes. They have a nasty sting. And if you’re wondering around at night look out for the wild pigs.

Sarah: And the porcupines! They come and steal my pineapples! Maybe carry a stick with you if you’re walking around after dark.

Stephen: Your biggest worry is the snakes though…

B and E: OK, so what do we do if we get bitten by a snake?

Stephen: Get to hospital fast.

B and E: Which is?....

Stephen: …In Lawas.

B and E: As in…a two hour drive away? And we don’t have a car?!...

Stephen: Yeah, the spare jeep isn’t in action I’m afraid (Nb. We had been promised this would be available before arriving). So you’ll have to walk down our access path (Nb. This is a 2km long dirt track) and get yourself down to the main road and hitch a lift from there.  

B and E: So hitch a lift from someone who happens to be driving that way down the long dirt track all the way to Lawas. Right…and then?!...

Stephen: Get them to drop you at the hospital.

B and E: And they’ll have anti-venom?

Stephen: Well…apparently they only keep antivenom in KK.

B and E: KK?!!! As in 3 hour drive away KK?!

Stephen: I’m afraid so. So just don’t get bitten, OK?!

B and E: Crikey. OK. So you don’t have Leopard Cats then?

Stephen: Oh yeah, and look out for the Leopard Cats.

You get the gist of it. This is Bornean Jungle….There’s no messing around!!

Thankfully what sounded in theory like some messed up horror story actually has actually into a wonderful place for two nature lovers to absorb themselves in. We actually started relaxing into it, and very soon realised that whilst there are lots of scary things around, if we made sure we were sensible and respected the fact that there were lots of nippy stingy things in our neighbourhood, then there’s no reason we can’t all live in happy (hopefully) non-stingybity harmony.

So we decided to stay....

For Robbi

Three weeks ago Brodie, Claire and I went up Mount Kinabalu. We were supported by an incredible guide called Robbi. Today we have just returned from two weeks in the rainforest with no reception or internet to discover the devastating news that two weeks after we climbed the mountain there was an earth quake which caused a number of landslides on the mountain. Tragically a group of young students and their teachers were killed by falling rubble, and Brodie and I have just heard that the guide who saved a tourist from falling rubble whilst sustaining his own injuries, in exchange loosing too much blood and in turn his own life, was Robbi. 

I can’t begin to explain how sad this makes us. He was so full of life, so caring, so determined, taking your hand when you felt scared and checking you’re doing OK when he knew there was a tough bit, putting a smile on your face when you’d rather grimace. The kind of guy you want around if you need to get your lazy bum up a mountain.

I’m not going to say any more than that, other than it makes you realise how unbelievably precious life is. Our sincerest, warmest and most heartfelt wishes go out to his wife and 6 month old son, and our dearest thoughts go out to all those lost on the mountain, and to their loved ones.

Rest in peace Robbi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1ebsoB7qSQ

Visitors from Singapore

Atmika and Rob arrived on Friday and we met them in Tanjung Aru, a suburb of KK with its own beach, food market and bars, and one very magnificent view of the nearby islands.

I was ridiculously excited to see them both as they now live in Singapore so I only ever get to see them a couple of times a year. Plus…the very wonderful Atmika is now 6 months pregnant with baby Winkelmann so this will be the last time I’ll see them before they become Mummy and Daddy (or Mutter und Vater!) Winkelmann. 

We had an awesome few days hanging out with these two. I wouldn’t say our activities were particularly pregnant-lady friendly though…The first day we caught a speed boat to a nearby island which consisted of super bumpy speed boat (sorry baby W!), followed by not enough shade, toilets you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemies and only one café, which definitely had a food-poisony vibe. So we fed Atmika Pringles (safe!), chased some shade, enjoyed some snorkelling and embarrassed the boat-driver by asking him to ride at half the pace of his speed-boaty friends which he obliged albeit reluctantly so all was well.

Atmika had expressed an interest in seeing Orangutans, so on recommendation by Lonely Planet, we took a taxi to Lok Kawi Wildlife Park (just outside KK) on the second day. Thus we spent a rather miserable 2 hours wondering around looking at forlorn animals in oh-so-small enclosures in the hot morning sun (thanks for the heads up LP!). Yet another pregnant-woman’s dream. We did get to see the little orange guys though, and they didn’t disappoint, so all’s well that ends well!

The rest of our time together was spent chilling out by the pool, eating nice food, enjoying the unbelievably beautiful sunset in Tanjung Aru while drinking cold beer (or orange juice for preggo), and having a good old weekend-long catchup.

So my dear Winkelmanns, getting on a plane when you’re 6 months pregnant to hang out in a grimy place like KK for a long-weekend with limited aircon….that deserves an absolute medal! Thank you so much for making the effort to come and for letting us finally meet little bump! Missing you already!