WEED!

We made our crowd-funding target!! In fact we smashed it, reaching a grand total of £2845! Thank you immensely for your wonderful support and contributions…we feel totally overwhelmed and humbled by your generosity and it is because of you all that we can now get cracking on smashing this weed!

So…funds have been released! Hurrah! So we’ve bought the engine, we’ve bought the wood and now we need to build it. I say we, the very lovely Rice is actually going to build it (I don't think anyone would go in a boat made by me! :s), so we’re just waiting for the wood to be delivered from Sandakan before he can start.

In the meantime we’ve been busy little bees. We’ve planted everyone’s trees in the reforestation site (and we’ve had three days of rain to make them feel welcome…hurrah!), and Bro and I have been working like dogs on the lake. We’ve been out there in the super-hot sun, in torrential rain and in crazy thunder storms. We’ve sweated, we’ve got sunburnt, we’ve been soaked through to the bone, but we’ve almost got the weed in the South end contained to a point where we can start using the new boat on it with a vengeance as soon as it’s finished. Phew! I dream about the weed, all I think about is the weed and I swear I see bloody weed when I shut my eyelids!! 

Danum Valley

Bro and I were desperate to visit Danum Valley as after all the rainforest we’ve seen, we’ve not yet been in virgin forest.

So we booked ourselves on a 3-day, 2-night trip which involved a bus to the small town of Lahad Datu, then a mini bus to a research centre in the heart of the rainforest, which was where we’d be based for our trip.

Our friend Atteh from the village is a guide there, so we tagged along with his group for the three days, and we had an amazing time trekking, doing night walks, getting up at 4.45am to see the  sunrise (one of the best views I’ve ever seen!), swimming in the river and generally immersing ourselves in this new type of forest. We knew we were unlikely to see much in the way of novel wildlife from that we’ve seen in the Kinabatangan, but we were excited just to experience a different type of environment. The trees here are colossal compared to those in the Kinabatangan, and they are simply magnificent!! We spent a lot of time just gawping up into the canopy (I actually have a sore neck as a result of the trip!), in awe of how tall these marvellous trees are.

Late afternoon on the second day we rallied our nerves and made the 60m climb up the tree canopy climb. This just involves a step ladder up a tree. There is a vague cage surrounding it, but this wouldn’t stop you if you fell, so essentially it’s just a straight drop down to Earth if you let go. I was petrified and I’m ashamed to say got myself so worked up on the climb to the first platform (about 40m) that I had a little cry, but Bro came down and said he’d climb up a few steps behind me, so I persevered and made it to the top, super proud of myself! It was worth the fear....what a bloody marvellous view!

The wildlife didn’t disappoint either…my highlights were the gibbons first thing in the morning who make a glorious ‘Ooo ooo ooo’ song to one another, and just look spectacular swinging through the trees, and some red leaf monkeys! This was the first time we’d seen these and after a distant peak on the second day, they finally gave us a marvellous show on the last morning, when we got up super early to try and catch them before they headed off for the day. What stunning little creatures!

 

What perhaps upgraded the trip from great to simply awesome, was that we spent the three days with an wonderful group of people. We all got on so well, and it was great to click with people like that in such a short amount of time. It is perhaps worth mentioning that we were more than a little excited by the fact that one member of our group was the Production Manager of the new series of Thunderbirds (her hands are Lady Penelope’s hands!!) and the writer of the new edition of Sabah’s Lonely Planet!! Starstruck.com! Needless to say we shoe-horned in as many plugs for KOPEL and the Eco Camp and our fave hostel in KK (PODs) as possible and are reliably informed that we’ve earned ourselves a credit in the next edition. Hurrah! Couldn’t have met a more interesting or down-to-Earth bloke, and we’ll definitely be taking him up on his offer of stopping in for coffee next time we pass Cirencester!

An awesome trip all round! J

Things that bite…part 2

No, I’m not going to talk about mozzies. They are the bain of my life and are sent from the devil to try me at all hours of the day and night, but I moan about them like a broken record, so I’ll leave them be for now.

After writing this yesterday, we went to have our shower after dark as usual (not ideal as this means using torchlight which invariably attracts more nasties). We tend to go together, and take a tap each, and share the bucket (so romantic!). So this time it was rather annoying when we found a scorpion under one tap, a rather nasty-looking spider on the wall next to the other, and an army of fire ants patrolling up and down between the two.

If you’ve not met fire ants before, then in a nutshell they’re horrible nocturnal ants that spit acid at you if aggravated, which hurts like hell…or so I’m told…I’ve never actually felt their wrath but Brodie has twice, and I wasn’t in a mood to see what it felt like.

We tried scaring away the scorpion but he just sat there petulantly, getting progressively angrier the more water we splashed at him, so we managed to scare away the spider instead and shared a tap, whilst we both kept a wary eye on that sneaky little fire ant army. 

The joys of jungle living! J

Things the Bite come out at night!

A few of you have asked where we’re staying so I thought I’d put some lovely pictures of the beautiful Eco Camp up for you to see.

This was our first camp deck next to the lake

The view from the viewing deck 

The dining hall

The wonderful thing about it is that it’s totally open, there are no windows, there’s no electricity (we use a kerosene lamp in the dining hall after about 6.30pm when it gets dark), our drinking water is boiled rainwater, and all waste is carried off-site. The simplicity of this means that you get to see some awesome wildlife. Our regular daily visitors include oriental darters, hornbills, monitor lizards, a whole flipping army of squirrels (much to Janet’s chagrin!) from the giant squirrel to the pygmy squirrel, to flying squirrels, macaques, flying lizards, skinks….and more!

We call this little chap Scrat...he's always after our dinner!

At night, a whole new world emerges…we are visited most evenings near the dining hall by a cheeky palm civet and a malay civet who rustle about under the board walk. A Buffy Fish Owl can be heard and usually seen most evenings, and he’s just beautiful!

We are woken most nights by rustling, but you can’t always see what’s making the noise so we’ve recently taken to keeping a torch by our pillow, so in the last few nights we’ve been woken by a Malay badger (twice), a rare banded palm civet, and bearded pig….all which were right below our heads! Amazing!

Then there’s our bathroom….This is basically a toilet and sink surrounded by corrugated iron for our modesty, but nothing actually keeping the wildlife out.

We moved to camp deck 9 last week and to our fascination we discovered that we were sharing our bathroom with this giant chap (the photo probably doesn't do it justice...he’s about as big as Brodie’s outstretched hand!).

While we were fumbling for our cameras, I spooked him and he ran over the top of the fence, so we followed him round the back of the bathroom and to our excitement/horror we found he was being kept company by two more spiders (one equally big), a whiptail scorpion and a long-legged centipede (google it-it’s petrifying! Alas no photo as I was in mid-swing of a true Bridget Jones moment and was stood on the other end of the stick it was on so when I moved I simultaneously catapulted it in the air and it scurried off)…

The following night, we found this friendly chap on our sink (missing two legs..)

This little chap popped up on a recent night-walk...

...And our most recent night-time spot last night?....A 5meter long python!! Simply beautiful!

Just another day at the office...

I've just been snooping through our phone pics and have found a few that we've taken while out working...I thought I'd share them to give you a taste of what our office is currently like...

Bro driving to work

Tree Ninja!

Crowd-Funding HQ on the jetty! (check out the signs!)

Our view on the way home...

Bro on the boat

The only blonde at the wedding

So you know those cringe moments where you’re in a totally different country, it’s your first time at a non-British wedding, you only know the father of the groom, and you’re the only white couple in a room of about 200 people…and you totally balls up everything. Yeah that.

Bro and I were invited to accompany Martin and Janet to the Executive Manager of KOPEL’s son’s wedding in the neighbouring village. It was the first Muslim wedding we’d been to, so we were a little excited and a little nervous. We arrived at the village hall to much hustle and bustle…everyone clamouring to see the bride and groom. They’d already been married the night before, so this part of the ceremony involves them sitting on the top of the stage on thrones, dressed in their finery, so that the congregation can bless them and observe them. They looked incredible.

Our first blunder was that all 4 of us went straight up on stage to wish them well, but it turns out the family and friend procession of blessings hadn’t even begun yet. We were late so assumed we were the last to do this...turns out it hadn’t started yet!! The custom is that you offer the groom an envelope containing a monetary gift, but this is supposed to be done subtly in a secret handshake between the men. Bro forgot so then kind of doubled back and just handed it to him in front of everyone. Cringe. This was perhaps made more cringy by the fact that I was wearing my borrowed customary dress again, and it happened to exactly match the colour scheme chosen for the wedding (which everyone kindly pointed out!) so I’ve rocked up looking like a try-hard bridesmaid. Great.

Then later on, when it finally was our turn to properly go up and bless them, we actually didn’t have a clue what to do, so while in line, we both tried to see what everyone else was doing so we could copy them. It seemed to involve sprinkling chopped parsley and rice into each of their upturned hands, then sprinkling them with water from this little jug. When it came to my turn, no water came out so after an embarrassed fumble, I just mimed, however, when it came to Bro’s turn, he tipped practically the whole jug all over the groom’s hand. The poor guy didn’t know what to do with it, even less so when Bro then proffered his hand for a shake….

So all in all, I can’t say we excelled at slotting into our new cultural experience, but I did enjoy it for the novelty of experiencing something new and so different from the weddings we’re used to. We ate a LOT of food, and too many scrumptious little cakes and enjoyed watching the Malaysian Kareoke that was going on at the foot of the stage throughout the ceremony by various uncles and aunts. It was swelteringly hot (Bro took a video of me from behind up on stage and I have a sweat patch the size of Asia!…Sexy!), and I did feel for the poor couple who were roasting on the stage, but it was a happy event, and we felt honoured to have been invited.

Salamat Hari Raya!

We arrived in Batuh Puteh on the second day of Ramadan, so most of the people around us have been fasting whilst we have been steadily filling up with rice. The excitement about the impending Hari Raya celebration was communicated with us by the ever enthusiastic Jeff (our favourite guide) on our first day in the Eco camp. He described it as… “You just go around aaaaall the houses in the village and eat and eat and eat! Make sure you wear elastic in your trousers!”. 

This last week, you could feel the excitement in the village building as Hari Raya approached, and then BANG on Thursday evening, the usually quiet night filled with distant bamboo fire crackers and karaoke as Hari Raya was announced and the community started celebrating!

We had to wait until Sunday morning to join in as we were all so busy in the camp, but Hari Raya is a month long celebration, so this wasn’t a problem. So off we set with Martin, Janet and the kids, all togged up in our Baju Raya (our celebration clothes, borrowed from friends).

In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have had two breakfasts before I left (one at Martin and Janet’s, followed by our normal breakfast)…because then we just ate cake for an entire morning. We basically just went from house to house wishing everyone “Selemat Hari Raya”, being fed trays of delicious cake, and watered with ridiculously sweet squash, then moving on to the next. It was a great experience and everyone was very excited about the crowd-funding project, so all in all a super fab day! 

Here are some piccies of us all dressed up! (My outfit was previously the very lovely Zaza's wedding dress! Better not spill anything then!!...)

Us with Kamsa, one of our camp runners

Kamsa and Martin (and a weeny gate-crasher)

Salvinia molesta - Our Mission!

Most people spend a chunk of their gap year acquainting themselves with weed. Most of them tend to smoke it. We chose to scoop it.

I have mentioned in previous blogs that part of what we’ve been doing here is clearing weed from the very beautiful Tungog Lake, but I haven’t told you much about it.

In a nutshell, this is a devastatingly invasive weed called Salvinia molesta which has sidled into many of Malaysia’s water ways and is steadily wreaking havoc on any ecosystems it encounters. Initially from Brazil, it’s now officially made the IUCN’s Top 100 Invasive Species list and is causing problems in huge parts of Australia, SE Asia, and the USA, so this stuff is nasty. The problem is that it can double in mass approximately every 3 days and creeps across the surface of a lake until it is covered.

**Warning Science Part**

This prevents light from entering the lake and therefore reducing the photosynthesising capacity of plants, and causing them to start to die, therefore reducing the oxygen content of the water, and increasing the presence of respiring decomposers, which in turn increases the acidity of the lake. This as you can imagine is devastating for all of the wildlife that lives in, or is dependent upon the lake.

**Science Part Over** (that’s for you Higgins…though you all know I love to bang on). Basically this weed sucks.

Bro with requisit sun-shade

In a feeble attempt to keep this short, Tungog Lake is rapidly drowning in this weed, and there is no funding available to stop it. Currently the only method of removing it is manually via a moveable pontoon, using only hand-held scoops. This is extremely slow, back-breaking work, and involves hours of hard work, with no shade and extremely high humidity. It’s not fun so no-one wants to do it. The lake is 50acres in size, and this method is so slow that even with volunteers like me and Bro working on it, we are merely slowing down its spread (perhaps worth mentioning that volunteers here are also fairly infrequent).

So…seeing that our manual efforts were getting us nowhere, Bro and I thought outside the box and decided we would try crowd-funding to raise money for specialist equipment to help remove the weed at a significantly higher rate, and enough to employ local people to remove it.

Our beautiful Lake Tungog (the tiny bit without the weed!)

Our manual efforts...not very fun!

Queue lots of discussions with the community, footage-gaining escapades (including a number of 6am starts, river trips and jungle stake-outs), trips out on the lake, setting up a mini studio on the decking with DIY studio equipment (thanks to matresses, string, sticks and gaffa tape), borrowing a drone, almost crashing the drone, then successfully using the drone, hours of editing on Bro’s part, hours of computer time in our make-shift ‘pop-up’ office (perched with our laptops on the end of a jetty using temperamental 3G internet) to set up the website. And finally….Meet….OUR CROWD-FUNDING PAGE!! http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/borneo-lake-restoration-programme

Please do have a look at the site and Brodie’s fab video which I am absurdly proud of him for. If you would like to contribute and are in a position to do so, we would be SO grateful, and please do spread the word and share the link.

Thank you in advance for letting me rattle on. Let’s see how we get on! J

Breaking Fast

On Sunday we were invited to break fast with the KOPEL (the village co-operative we’re volunteering for) board members and their families. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, breaking fast is an event that happens during Ramadan. Tradition is that Muslim families will fast during daylight hours, then will get together after sun down to have a big meal and celebrate together. It is also often used as an excuse for companies or organisations to have a get together.

KOPEL were having their monthly Board Meeting, so used this as an excuse to have a breaking fast meal afterwards with staff and their families. It was a lovely event with lots of sweaty, hyper kids (who just wanted to climb all over Bro and me and have piggy back rides), lots of the friendly faces we’re now getting to know, and lots of unfamiliar, but very friendly faces from the community. 

Despite one or two faux pas on behalf of Bro and myself (eg. Bro trying to copy the men eating with his fingers disastrously which they all found hilarious, eating the dessert with our main course as we thought it was pea soup (it was green porridge), Bro somehow bringing up circumcision with the Chairman of the Board which went down like a lead balloon…you get the gist), we really enjoyed it. 

We felt very welcome and everyone was extremely friendly. The board had also just seen the video we’ve made for our crowd funding project, so lots of them wanted to chat about it and the project and they were all extremely positive and excited about it which we found really humbling.

On the way home in the boat with Martin, Janet and the kids, we found ourselves in pitch darkness with 3 thunderstorms raging at different points on our horizon. It was magical. Martin killed the engine and we all just sat there in silence watching and listening and breathing it in. I wish I could have bottled it all up and shared it with you all….not sure I’ll experience anything like that again any time soon!

A REAL LIFE WILD ORANGUTAN!!! (And a very cool little Tarsier!)

Oh my wow, what an awesome 12 hours!! Last night one of the guides spotted a Western Tarsier in a tree so we all bundled out to see him. What a little gem!! HUGE round eyes and funny little feet and just such a cutie!! It’s very rare you get to see one of these so we were totally stoked! That alone would have made my week!

Then this morning….

We were out on the lake about 6am with our cameras hoping to catch some of the early rising birds on camera for our crowd-funding video (nb. watch this space)…For what it’s worth, this kind of thing is definitely one of those things where you think…I’m sat in a boat, on this incredible lake, in the middle of a jungle, and this is actually blowing my mind!

Now here we arrive at the point in the story I’d rather not share, but it probably needs to be included to make your image of our situation more complete….

We’re sat on the lake, in the middle of this tranquil lake paradise, when suddenly nature strikes, and I suddenly need to go to the loo. Incidentally we’d been out there 45mins and had just spotted our first kingfisher of the day, but when needs must….so we rapidly turned around and paddled in to shore so that I could run to the facilities. On my hasty way to the loo I passed a tourist fresh back from a trail with a big grin on his face…”We’ve just seen a mummy orang-utan and her baby just beyond the end of the camp!”…SAY WHAT?!!!!!! The first sighting of an actual wild orang-utan and I have to go to the loo!! There was no way I could stop so I shouted out “THAT’SAMAZINGCALLBRODIEANDTELLHIMTOGETTHECAMERASANDGOANDI’LLCATCHUPWITHHIMAFTERTHELOO!!” as I scurried past!

Of course the message was lost in translation…Brodie thought I’d ran on ahead so only brought his camera and disappeared off into the jungle so by the time I was out again there was no sign of anyone. The tourist pointed me in the direction everyone had headed, and I (thank God!) eventually found them. And it was incredible!! We watched mummy and baby for a good 15 minutes as she bashed around above. Needless to say, day, week, month, year absolutely made! J

No camera for me though, so here’s a little Tarsia photo of Brodie’s so you get a taste. 

A holiday from the jungle!

After two weeks deep in the jungle on Lake Tungog, we had a holiday. Janet, Martin, TJ and Bobbie were having a night away in Sandakan to have a break and to stock up on supplies, so they offered to take us with them. So after an early morning start, a boat ride and a 2 hour journey with four of us squished in the back of the van like sardines, we reached Sandakan. We had an absolutely fab couple of days being shown the main hotspots and taken from one lovely eatery to the next by the wonderful Vogel family.

Highlights

·        - Having English Afternoon Tea on the hillside (hot fresh scones!! Oh my wow!!...Sabah’s version of jam and cream were not quite up to Somerset standards though!)

·         -Visiting the famous Sepilok Orang-utan Rehabilitation Centre and seeing the baby orang-utans….soooo cute

·         -Having an ice cold beer overlooking the waterfront

·         -Exploring the canopy walkway amongst the immensely tall and beautiful trees of the Sepilok Forest Reserve at sunset

·         -Eating fresh salad!!

·         -Lots of good company J

Lowlights

·         -My first hot shower in two weeks was actually a cold shower and came out in a dribble. At least it didn’t involve a bucket…every cloud…

·         -Asking in a pharmacy for fibre gel to combat the lack of fresh vegetables in my life, and having the entire staff of 5 get involved. The conversation went something like this…

E: Hi, do you sell fibre gel?

Pharmacy lady 1: Fiby-what?

E:  Um…fibre gel! It’s good for your digestive system? It can help with constipation

Pharmacy lady 1: OOOOHHHHHH you have constipation?!

E: Well no, I….

Pharmacy lady 1 (calling across the shop): Oi! Pharmacy Lady 2! What do we give for constipation?!

Pharmacy lady 2: Hahahahaha! (Yes, she actually laughed out loud)

**Pharmacy lady 2 calls across the room in Malay to Pharmacy man 1. Pharmacy man 1 also laughs out loud and comes over. I now have 4 members of laughing staff in front of me**

Pharmacy man 1 (in unnecessarily loud voice): You want something to make you go toilet in 2 minutes?!!

Me: NO no nonononono! I just want some fibre gel…..

So this is how I ended up with a packet of anti-constipation tablets and no fibre gel.

So in summary….Awesome weekend, nice break from the jungle, lots of yummy food, cold shower, cute orange primates, never again need to worry about getting constipation…

Some cute piccies of some cuddly fellows from the rehabilitation centre