Peninsula People & Borneo Blues

It’s been a while since I last updated the blog. So what happened in the last three weeks? After some days in Georgetown and a soaking motorbike ride in a tropical downpour around Penang we headed toward Cameron Highlands, located in the Peninsula’s heartland.
To me the Cameron Highlands where a bit, hm.. Let’s use a phrase from the BOOK (Lonely Planet)… uninspiring. Because the overpriced tours in huge groups through the forest and to the tea plantations could not convince us, we chose to do a short trek on our own… it turned out to be one of our journey’s toughest as the path was really slippery, often overgrown and partly very steep… as there was not much to see but trees, it became mainly a sporty challenge…
Next destination: the pristine beaches of Pulau Tioman. If the Cameron Highlands where uninspiring the island of Tioman, just off the Peninsula’s east coast was the opposite… almost perfect! A pristine beach, crystal clear water… and loads of jellyfish.
After a short attempt to enter the jelly fished waters on the first day, on the second day we became more brave: equipped with snorkeling gear we entered the underwater world – at low tide, ahem… and it did not take long, until we found ourselves between clusters of small, but stinging jellyfish – ouch. Despite these odds we took a motorboat to the nearby coral island the next day, where I discovered the enchanting worlds of underwater life for the very first time... it only took five minutes to get me hooked. When the jellyfish disappeared the next day I spent hours in the water going up and down… anyway, Tioman is an expensive place for budget backpackers like us, and so after 4 days we hit the road again… this time to good old sleazy JB, where friends from Singapore, hawker food on the night market and a budget flight to Borneo waited for us…
What became clear to us very quickly, was that the travelers here (mainland Malaysia) are of a different kind then those in Indonesia. In Indonesia, there are just a handful of travelers around most of the time and we would socialize with everyone whilst in Malaysia its sometimes like standing alone in the middle of a crowd…s o in the ten days we spent here we hardly spoke to anyone… besides that, the people we met on the road in Indonesia were more experienced, and, despite the danger of sounding arrogant, more interesting. While the folks we met around the peninsula more seemed to be an extension of the often superficial party crowd from the Thai beaches… mhh sounds like I am becoming arrogant anyways…

So, finally we took off to Kuching in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, on the Island of Borneo… and as this trip also entered its final stage, traveling here was not the easiest part of all… so we were looking for the PERFECT PLACE to chill out and rest for a couple of days or even a week after several weeks on the road, and from that point view Borneo gave us a (to be fair, especially me – me apologizes to Julia for being in a grumpy mood quit often during the last two weeks) a hard time… It seems that there are only two things to do here. These are: jungle trekking and visiting tribes in their longhouses.
At this point there are some things I have to say. Talking about jungle trekking: besides the physical challenge of extreme heat and humidity, to me the topic of eco-tourism in Sarawak turned out to be a very Janus-headed thing: While Sarawak aims to be the worlds number one in ecotourism and forest preservation it also seems to be the worlds number one in logging the tropical rainforest.. As I don’t understand much about this, I will not deepen the topic at this point... anyway we had our fair share of trekking and we were rewarded for our sweat by seeing wild Proboscis monkeys and Pitcher plants in Bako National Park.
Talking about visiting tribes in their longhouses... this exact that kind of tourism I really do not like... taking a tour to visit some locals in their houses. That always seems to me like a human zoo… ok, we visited a longhouse as well, and we really enjoyed the performance of tribal music and dances combined with lots of rice wine… luckily we did not have to take tour to have this experience, but we got a private invitation, which enabled us to visit some Iban people on our own. To visit them we had to travel two days upriver the mighty Rejang.
So while Borneo did not offer us the chill out place we were looking for, it was really interesting experience. And what I have seen here will keep me thinking for a while…

Next destination: Singapore! Really looking forward to enter the plastic city again, and meet old friends. Cheers to: Julian, Sing Pou, Sisi, Maya, Linde... and anyone I might have forgotten….