Diving Sipidan

Hello everyone.

Here is a bunch of photos from our diving in the Semporna region of Borneo. It was a great week but we both have colds now. I had to stop diving after number 14. I'm not to bothered though we had some great dives and saw some spectacular stuff: Turtles so big you could fit Sueann inside their shell, lots of sharks and a school of hundreds and hundreds of barracuda.



Nemo!







All the islands we dived from were beautiful. Proper desert islands :)





Sueann.







Me.







White tip reef shark cruising by, (it's about 6ft long if you're wondering).







Grumpy looking turtle. This ones about 4ft long but we saw bigger.





Right, that is us up to date for once. We leave for Kuala Lumpur tomorrow.

Cheerio.

More from Borneo

Hello again from Borneo,

After getting down from Mt Kinabalu we headed South to Sepilok and the famous Orangutan sanctuary. We stayed there for a few nights so that we could go to more than one feeding. (we ended up getting addicted and going to 4 in the end) The Orangutan are incredible. They are so gentle and we were surprised to see that they were really scared of monkeys half their size. There is a feeding platform and twice a day the park rangers bring out fruit from them to eat. The monkeys try to steal the food so the rangers have to stick around for a while to make sure the Orangutan get their fare share.












On the left is a photo of a mother and baby. We were really lucky to see the baby a few times. At one feeding we saw at least 8 Orangutan and 20-30 monkeys. It was quite a sight.
The other photo is of a monkey sneaking around a tree to steal some food!

After Sepilok we then headed to the Kinabatangan river and jungle. We stayed in a pretty basic jungle lodge with all sorts of bugs running around outside. The guide found a scorpion just outside our room. Thankfully the only thing that actually made it in to the room was a teeny little frog.

It's rained quite a lot since we've been here so the jungle was a giant mud swamp. We hired some wellies and leach socks for the trekking, but Matt still managed to get a leach attached to his hip. Here is a photo of his wound. It was quite a surprise how much blood there was!!

Fortunately it wasn't all trekking in the mud, we did have some very beautiful boat trips down the river. We saw Orangutan, Elephants, Proboscis monkeys, and a giant monitor lizard (and a ton of other stuff) The best bit was the really early morning trip for sunrise. Photo below.

We're diving all of this week so will be back to tell you all about that in a few days.

Hope you're all well :)

Falan Falan Jalan Sueann!

Hello.

So we have begun the Borneo leg of our trip. We are planning on spending the majority of our time in the Sabah region because of Mount Kinabalu and the tons of wildlife to see.

In case you are wondering the title of this entry is a badly spelt bit of Malay which was a great piece of advice while trekking up Mount Kinabalu. It means 'slowly slowly walk'.

Okay, firstly we arrived in Kota Kinabalu where we planned to organise ourselves for the next few weeks. Instead we discovered that our bank cards didn't work and we were running out of cash fast. It turns out that the bank fraud office had cancelled all the cards because it was out of the ordinary that we were using them in Malaysia. This would usually be a good move on their part, but on this occasion we were about to go to Mount Kinabalu, which has no ATM's, and it was to late to exchange any money. We had a word with the bank and they said they would be able to get the cards re-activated in 24 hours, then a nice person at the hostel dragged a money exchange man away from his dinner to change all of our spare pounds and dollars. We had just enough to get us through the next few days until we got to a town with an ATM again.

The only rooms available at the park at the base of Mount Kinabalu where deluxe rooms. It was lovely, more like an apartment really, so we booked into our deluxe room again for when returned from the climb.

The first day involved a 5 hour walk to another accomodation 2km from the top of the mountain. We ate a bunch of food, watched an amazing sunset from above the clouds (picture below), and tried to get some sleep.














We were due to get up early the next morning for the final climb so we went to bed at about 8pm. Firstly the room was like an oven, but luckily the heater shorted out giving Sueann a small fireworks display of sparks. The other people in our room decided to get up at this point and have a chat in the corridor. Rats where running about above the ceiling. I still managed to get a few hours sleep but Sueann had altitude induced insomnia so didn't sleep a wink.

We got up at 3am (half an hour after most people) had a cup of tea and set of to climb the final 2km by torch light. We don't have any pictures from this stage as most of our brains were taken up with putting one foot in front of the other and trying not to fall asleep. Some parts of the climb involved pulling yourself up steep inclines with ropes not knowing how far away the ground was if your were to fall.

After a hard slog we reached the top as the sun was coming up. There was no dramatic sun rise, which most people hope for, but it didn't matter. The mountain top and the surrounding view was breath taking enough. Here we are at the top of the top, 4000m above see level.














As we were just forgetting the pain of the assent we started heading down. The scenery was amazing. Here's me with an amazing rock formation thing in the background. It may look like I have drifted off to sleep but I'm pretty sure that was a blink.












The rest of the day was spent getting all the way down to the bottom. Sueann had a dodgy knee from all the downward climbing on the Inca trail and within a kilometre she was feeling it again. It took us a while to hobble down but it was all worth it for the view from the top. For a few days afterwards our legs ached quite a bit and we avoided walking down stairs where ever possible.

Then we moved on to Sepilok to see some orang utans...

news

Hello all,

This news is slightly delayed as we had to wait until Christmas to tell my parents but we are both very happy to let you know that we got engaged while we were in Japan.

After 10 years of being together Matt finally proved that he has some romance in him. We were staying in the most beautiful ryokan when he got down on one knee and proposed. I was gob smacked..... he even had a ring!! It was a really perfect moment until he informed me that he'd kept it hidden in socks for the past month to make sure I didn't find it!

We haven't got to the point of thinking about the wedding or dates as we're too busy traveling to world. We'll think about that when we get home :)

Here is a photo of us looking happy and another one to prove I have a ring :)

Happy New Year from Borneo!

Happy New Year everyone. Hope you all had a great festive holiday.

We had a very lazy couple of weeks in Jomtien, Thailand. My parents rented us a really lovely little apartment in the same complex as them. We had a huge swimming pool right outside the door and the beach was a 2 minute walk away.....bliss!

We managed a day of diving while we were there but the visibility wasn't too good. It was still great to get back in the water and it was a nice easy couple of dives to get started with.

We had a really lovely Christmas day in Pattaya with Lobster and Sea Bass sitting next to the sea. It was our first taste of Lobster and it was cooked to perfection :)

Sadly I was a bit under the weather on New Years Eve so we ended up staying in. Luckily Mum and Dad's apartment has an amazing view (see sunset photo below) and we were able to see all of the fireworks from there. We have video footage of it but for some reason the blog doesn't seem to want to upload it :(

We are now in Kota Kinabalu in Borneo and it's very humid indeed. We are heading to climb Mt Kinabalu tomorrow so we'll let you know how that goes in a few days!