25 th Wedding Anniversary Trip - The Silver
Safari: 2008-9
Malaysia segment
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January 9, 2009 Friday (continued)
Layover.
When we arrived at the Kota Kinabalu airport, we perused the list
of hotels (5 star, 4 star, etc.) and decided to take cab to the
city center and get a recommendation from the cab driver for a
good hotel at a reasonable price — 90 ringgits. We
settled in at the Hotel Full Hua. Only one star, but quite
good. No remote control for the TV, but none needed.
The hotel was almost full and we got a 4th floor
supreme double room with a queen-sized bed (for a short queen and
short-sheeted, but comfortable). There’s also a
5th floor undergoing renovation, but that’s
another storey.
J
The Xmas holiday decorations are mostly gone, but the
Chinese New Year decorations are starting to appear
everywhere.
January 10, 2009 Saturday
Nasi Lappy.
It’s a very pretty day in Kota Kinabalu. I hunt for a
breakfast place — Soon Fat next door is Chinese
buffet. Construction starts early. We get a cab over
to KK airport and Clyde tries to talk Air Asia into making some
itinerary changes. No luck. While we wait in line for
our flight to Sandakan, I notice all the Muslim women who are
wearing head scarves. The scarves are for modesty, but I
noticed that no two were alike. They were pretty and
stylish in different ways. Back in the Philippines the
national footwear is easily flip-flops (slippers or
sandals). Clyde shopped for a new pair, and there was an
endless selection of colors and designs, much more than
you’d ever see sold at a beach front.
On the flight, I got lunch of piping hot rice with chicken, all
of which slipped off my smooth plastic tray and into my lap ... a
meal that went straight to my hips. That was a mess to
clean up, so the steward gave me a chicken and cheese sandwich
out of sympathy.
In Sandakan,
we got a cab to the @Ease Boutique Hotel which Clyde
picked out. It is scarcely more than a year old and quite a
step up from Hotel Full Hua. Yet it’s also
cheaper. It’s elegant, clean, and right on the
bay.
The bathroom has a single thick frosted glass door
that swings out to enclose the bathroom and swings in to enclose
the shower. We walked down to the Tiger Harbour Bistro and
ordered dinner outside. Some of the customers were young
people using the spot as an Internet café while rock music
played. A few were tourists. One little cat made the
rounds of the tables, looking for scraps. The full moon
emerged from the clouds over Sandakan Bay, and the evening breeze
felt good. Clyde’s keeping track of our
ringgits. Some Malaysians are boycotting US goods to
protest U.S. support of Israel as it bombs Gaza, but they have to
worry about not banning American Muslim products and
services. So it goes.
January 11, 2009 Sunday
Church Guys.
We had our complimentary breakfast buffet in the Signature
Café. We helped ourselves to Malaysian food, but the
chef knowing we were unfamiliar with the set up, felt sorry for
us and brought some freshly cooked omelets to our table. We
thanked him. Clyde and I took a hike around town
afterwards, going through the Sunday market street sale downtown
to check out food and merchandise. We also dropped into a
music store to pick out some local rock CDs. We decided to
hike up to St. Michael’s Church for an Anglican
service.
We arrived in time, but the 11:15 a.m. service was in Bahasa
Malaysian. We were the only westerners in the congregation,
but the scriptures and praise songs were displayed on side
screens at the front of the sanctuary, so we followed along,
singing - sort of liturgical Jabberwocky. We didn’t
always know what we were singing, but we knew who we were
singing with, and what we were singing
about.
Communion was simple to follow since we know the Anglican
Eucharist almost by heart. Even the Nicean creed sounded
familiar in Bahasa Malaysian. The sermon was long, but,
since it appeared to be a very evangelical piece on women
submitting to men, it’s just as well that it was not in
English. We were asked to stand and be recognized as guests
and everyone applauded us. The stone church was built back
in 1893 and is one of the few structures to survive World War II
bombardment.
We then walked back to the @Ease Boutique Hotel and went to the
Sepelok Orangutan Rehabilitation Center. We arrived in time
for the 3:00 p.m. feeding and spent an hour watching seven
orangutans and a couple dozen macaque monkeys swing down through
the jungle to have milk and bamboo lunch on the platforms.
The orangutans brachiate around using all four limbs or just
their super-long arms.
There are ropes strung nearby to help them. The monkeys
approach in no-nonsense single file up the wooden walkway to jump
over to the feeding station off the trail. They defer to
the much bigger orangutans, but the baby orangutan doesn’t
get much consideration from the macaques. A number of
scientists think that the shy orangutans are smarter than
chimps. In my judgment, chimps play football; orangutans
play poker (so to speak). The scientific literature lauds
how orangutans use big leaves to keep off the rain. They
probably have umbrellas in the bush which they’ve swiped
from tourists. That doesn’t look as good on your
species intelligence resume, however.
When we got back, we had dinner on Sandakan bay at a traditional
Malaysian restaurant. They must have liked us, because they
charged us traditional Malaysian prices rather than tourist
prices. Their crushed ice fruit drinks were the best.
January 12, 2009 Monday
Deathless and non-tragic.
Sabah is “the land below the wind” for avoiding the
Philippines’ typhoons, but it still has a rainy
season. We’re in the middle of it today, with
lightning, thunder last night and rain all day. Well, I
paid for a tropical rainy season, and, if we didn’t get any
rain, I would have demanded my money back. We spend most of
the day around the hotel and have a good time. I did some
work online. It’s flooding over in Sarawak province,
but it’s not that bad here. We dine again at the
traditional Malaysian family eatery. It’s a lot
cheaper than the hotel restaurant. They made us up some
fried bananas on our request. The paper reported on the
recent fiesta in the Philippines was, according to the police,
unusually “deathless” and
“non-tragic.” I’d like to see that kind
of news in the U.S.
January 13, 2009 Tuesday
Survival of the Ugliest.
Today, Clyde and I went out to the Sanctuary for Proboscis
Monkeys. It was a long road trip. The monkeys’
mangrove preserve is on the edge of a palm oil plantation, set
aside by the owners for the sake of the monkeys. We saw an
amazing oriental pied hornbill — a sort of black and white
toucan, a pretty tame otter following the staff around like a
dog, and a pack of silvered leaf monkeys greedy for bamboo
shoots.
The male proboscis monkeys have big Joe Camel noses and
potbellies, like evolution’s booby prize.
Actually, the big nose helps them to handle heat, and the
potbellies have multiple compartments for digesting mangrove
leaves to extract its many toxins and then regurgitate old
digested material as cud which is then more palatable for
them. It’s not just for cows. It’s sort
of like teaching ancient philosophy. The long-tailed
macaque monkeys try to horn in, but the dominant red male
proboscis didn’t stand for it. Actually, it’s
not just an alpha male show. His harem of females has its
own life. We spotted them climbing over a log to seek out
their own food across the creek. As soon as they found it,
the alpha male rushed over and conspicuously plopped down amongst
them.
One lone long-tailed macaque left its group and tried to attach
itself to the proboscis troupe for lunch, but they clearly
didn’t think it had any business dining with them.
Like orangutans, the proboscis need plenty of territory to
survive, but they’re pretty sociable primates. The
orangutans are more solitary and also much more laid back about
monkey intruders. The proboscis are real climbers, whereas
the bigger orangutans prefer to swing along and swing alone, or
with a baby.
Malaysians seem more prosperous than Filipinos, but they also
seem to have less disposable income or rather seem less inclined
to build super malls where they can dispose of it. Clyde
scouted around for some whiskey to treat his throat, and, even in
a Muslim country, spotted a bottle in a local grocery
store. The alcohol content was questionable, but it helped
his throat.
January 14, 2009 Wednesday
Churchy Changes.
Today, we fly back to Kota Kinabalu and then on to Kuala Lumpur
where we’ll spend the night at the Concorde Inn at the KL
airport. The Sandakan Airport terminal is an A-frame with
beautiful stain-glass windows at both ends of the terminal.
The brief 45 minute flight got us to KK. We brought our
bags up to the quieter mezzanine, found some wi-fi, and
KFC. We went right to bed when we arrived at the Concorde
Inn.
January 15, 2009 Thursday
Warm welcome on a cool morning.
We get up early this morning to catch our Air Asia flight to Siem
Reap, Cambodia. On our early taxi trip to the LLCT airport,
we noticed some construction at the terminal. They had a
white store mannequin dressed up with an orange safety vest
rigged to wave a red flag up and down. That works much
better than a fancy amber electronic warning sign.
