And back and still alive. Whew. You think the jungles of Borneo a bit of a throwback, right? Cannibals, headhunters, log huts, trained monkeys, all that ish. No. Not only was the little kid at my jungle camp rocking a “Carmelo” T-shirt, but I ate my last meal at a KFC before I got on the canoe.
Map of trip (dotted lines are flights)I got into Singapore late night on the 2nd and walked ’round the whole city the next day. You may have thought I was a pretty nerdy economist type before, but if you weren’t convinced, I ought explain that the site I was most excited to visit in Singapore was a container port. It’s not just me: there’s a whole book about
container shipment on store shelves. Seriously, though, the Port of Singapore is the largest, and by far the most advanced, port in the world. There are miles upon miles of cranes and standardized containers, with boats stretching through the Malacca Straits as far as your eye can see.
Ah, beautiful containersThe rest of Singapore was hip, too. Singapore is essentially the proof of Plato’s philosopher king idea. Lee Kuan Yew ran Singapore as a dictator for decades, but he was also quite unselfish and a smart guy, which is why Singapore went from being a relatively grimy third=world port to a city that ranks among the cleanest and richest in the world. There are some people under the mistaken impression that democracy leads to better government. It does not. Democracy does, however, make
really bad government harder to come about, and since we prefer stable mediocrity to waves of incredible competence and incredible tyranny, we choose democracy.
Singapore is definitely the kind of place I could see myself living, lack of freedom nonwithstanding. The museums (particularly the Museum of Asian Civilization) are great, there is an interesting mix of Indian, Asian, Moslem and Western culture, the food is good, the weather is good, the city is safe and clean, even the public housing is nice - really not much of a downside.
(As an aside, the traffic is also amazingly limited in Singapore. This is partly due to good public transit, but has more to do with the absurd taxes on vehicle ownership. A new mid-range Kia sells for almost US$40000, and after you buy it, you still have to pay tax on every mile you drive. That’d push me to bike to work, for sure.)
Petronas Towers in KLFrom Singapore, I hopped a bus to Kuala Lumpur, notable mainly for the “Say No to Porn!” billboards on the tollbooths around town. Well, and also notable for the enormous Petronas Towers, which now stand as the second tallest buildings on Earth. This is a bit of a game, though - the height includes the spire. I’ve stood underneath the Twin Towers, the Sears Tower, the Jin Mao and a bunch of others, and I’ll be damned if they, especially the Sears, didn’t seem much more substantial than Petronas.
KL was also cool because it, along with Bangkok, is the cheapest city in the world for 5-star hotels. I booked a room at the Regent for 73 bucks, which included butler service, top-notch concierge, beautiful pool, and Jack Daniels Black on the nightstand. Not bad. Even the Ritz is only like 100/night. Incidentally, I didn’t see another proper hotel the rest of the trip.
The mean streets of SandakanFrom KL, I flew to Sandakan, on the East Coast of Malaysian Borneo. There must have been a dignitary of some kind on my flight, because when we deplaned, there were dozens of local reps handing us gifts and saying “Welcome to Sandakan!” When it was my turn, they had me take pictures with a bunch of people for the news cameras and local TV. Celebrity for a day, right? The city of Sandakan itself, though, is a bit of a dump. I spent a few hours walking all round the city before managing to, completely on accident, run into an English Tea House on a hill above town.
One does not expect to turn left in a dusty Asian third-tier city, and find a croquet lawn (with peacock), white-gloved waiters, and rack of mutton with a cool lemonade to drink. I certainly did not, but what a welcome surprise it was. The Tea House is the old home of an author named Agnes Keith. Not a bad day to spend an afternoon - the Empire isn’t quite dead, after all. On my way back into town, I ran into three cute English girls, who decided to come with me to the jungle camp the next day.
(This town, by the way, was not really a run-into-backpackers kind of town. The Hello Quotient was very high; I must have gotten a hundred Hello!’s in one afternoon there. I managed to escape with only one “My assistant shopkeeper says she thinks you’re very cute!”, one “Ah, Justin Timberlake!” (I’ve since cut my hair; the curls are gone now), and one “little kid looking back at me so intently he walks into a table of fruit”. As far as backwater towns go, this is about par for the course. It also wasn’t a backpacker town because Sandakan is somewhat notorious for its terrorist presence. The southern part of the Philippines, especially Mindanao and the Sulu islands, is inhabited by a terrorist group named Abu Sayyaf who life to kidnap Westerners. There are tons of Filipinos in Sandakan illegally, including a number of Abu Sayyaf. No worries, though: the last kidnapping was on an island a couple hours away six years ago, when a dozen Europeans went missing while scubadiving!)
Kinabatangan RiverThe next day, I headed with the girls down to the Jungle camp, which involved a 2 hour bus ride, then another 2 hours by motorized canoe on the Kinabatangan River. The wildlife was quite good; we saw tons of monkeys and probiscus, a crocodile, a slow loris (which is a type of sloth), owls, 6-foot-long lizards and tons of birdlife. The monkeys (called macaque) were pretty ridiculous; in the mornings, you had to chase them away from your breakfast! At least it’s not just us humans; the macaques were stealing bananas from the orangutan at the orangutan rehab facility near Sandakan too.
Probiscus MonkeyIt’s amazing how hip with modernity the jungle guys are. We were *out there*. There wasn’t even a village within 25 miles, but nonetheless the kids who worked at the camp had Nike shirts, watched Premier League soccer on TV, and knew the words to the latest track by Akon. They even got cell phone reception! A pretty hip Borneon dude my age got a call at like 11:30. “Ah, my ex-girlfriend, I wonder what she wants?” See, they even have
booty calls in the jungle.
View from about 12000 ft.From the jungle camp, I headed straight to Mt. Kinabalu. Kinabalu is the biggest moutain inbetween the Himalayas and Irian Jaya. At 13450 ft., it’s much taller than Mt. Hood, and a good 250 feet higher than Mt. Rainier. Apparently, though, it’s “an easy climb.” Apparantly was wrong. It is not an easy climb.
Evening Clouds on the MountainI joined two English and a Canadian on the climb over 2 days. The first day, we climbed from 4800 ft. to 11000 ft., which wasn’t too tiring aside from the blazing Equator heat. The second day, though, the climb from 11000 to 13450 was nearly continuous 45 degree granite, steep enough that you needed to use ropes to haul yourself up. Did I mention we had to do this in the pitch black at 2:30 am? Or that the granite was soaking wet? The view was great at the top, at least - you could see hundreds of miles in every direction. Not bad.
The four of us after summittingAfter the mountain, I hopped a bus to the capital of Sabah, Kota Kinabalu, from where I planned to take a boat to Brunei, spend a day in the rich Islamic sultanate, then fly to Kuching in Western Borneo. My legs were too tired, and I missed the boat. What can ya do? I spent the last three days hanging out in a backpacker hostel, watching World Cup, and chilling/snorkeling on a beautiful beach. Nothing wrong with that? Hey, it took
33 hours airport to airport, to get from Kota Kinabalu to Eugene (via Singapore, Tokyo and San Fran), so I needed to rest in advance!
Now I’m back in Eugene for a couple days, trying to decide on a car for going out East in. I’m thinking of getting a 2002 BMW 325i, which is dope in every way, but runs around 425/month with 0 down. For like 300, I could just get a Ford Focus or something like that. Tough decision, yeah? And I don’t even want to get a car at all!
More pictures can be found here.
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