Day 97
We are breakfasted and out early so we can catch our morning flight to Borneo today, so so excited about this! We grab public transport there and get there with loads of time which is good as we spend a good half an hour searching for an invisible gate 19 before we realise out boarding passes have been printed wrong and it's actually gate 9.
This flight has to be the most beautiful for views, we are flying over the mountains, that one of which Ben will hopefully be climbing in a few days and I'm in awe of it. Sandakan is nice and hot when we arrive and we stuff ourselves into a taxi with two other back packers to save in cost, though I don't think the driver was too keen taking 4 and huge bags. The ride from the airport is about 30 minutes and we pull into the main town to realise it's just the Borneo version of Harwich. It's dead and has a strong smell of fish but it's meant to be a base for a few days travelling around so the quietness doesn't really bother us at the mo. We check into our hostel who don't seem to know we are arriving into our first shared dorm of the trip...to find no other guests are staying, sweet. We grab a few bunk beds and try to log onto the wifi to find it doesn't work, hmm. Then place also has a strong smell of wee and it's unbearable hot. Big hmmm. So we go out and grab some free wifi in the cheapest place we can find (Mc D's) and try and work out how to utilise this one horse town.
We head back to a sweltering hot room that we can't cool down with the windows and both fans on and try to play cards to distract us, it's gone mid night when we finally put our heads to pillow but the heat is too much to bear and I lay awake as I know Ben does trying to think of cool thoughts and ice boxes.
Day 98
In the early hours of the morning, I decide that lying on the floor would be my best option to get cool and I finally get a few hours sleep. I'm back awake at 4:30am though and there's no chance of getting back to sleep as I feel like I'm in a furnace. Ben wakes from his sweaty slumber at 6am and we both decide we are only having one more night here and it's going to be with air con. The breakfast is probably the only winning feature of this place as its a large gooey syrupy pancakes, hmm. We snaffle that, move rooms and then go to the snazzy hotel to steal the wifi and to actually book some of the plans we thought about yesterday.
This takes all morning (honestly we spend so much our time booking things) and we give in at lunch and go find some Roti Canai to fill our stomachs. Now that we've got some plans set in stone we decide it's now time to make use of Sandakan and go see some of the wildlife around it. We want to go see the Proboscis monkeys but which taxi drivers charging us £60 return and having missed the last shuttle (urg for not being organised) we got for our second options, a Orang-tangs. This we can get a public bus to so much more in our price range. It's takes about 45 minutes and is a really lovely place. It's a centre for orphaned ones which they hope to rehabilitate and let back into the wild. We get there just in time to see some of the Orang-utans feeding and it's amazing to watch. Next we take a trail around the corner and find ourselves at the nursery. This is the final human interaction state before they are set free and it's full of climbing frames and ropes and the teenage Orang-utans remind me of toddlers. We are a little late getting here so can't go on the trek around the forest or see the sun needs next door but as we wander out of the forest we hear the call of two adults and it's an amazing sound.
Our bus back doesn't turn up so we grab a taxi with a German couple, the taxi driver is pretty cool and quite enamoured with my hair so we organise for him to pick us up for our early airport run tomorrow morning. We grab some internet in the hotel again and then back to the hotel for a delicious pumpkin curry, a weird lettuce warm roti (not so delicious) and then sleep in our cool, double beded room. Bliss.
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