Miri

From Kuching we fly to Miri, but we don’t see the city at all as we are staying somewhere about ten miles away and using it as a base to do a couple of day trips to the National Parks in the area.

Our first trip is to Niah Caves.  The caves are absolutely enormous, it’s like being a mouse in a cathedral.  The caves contribute to the local economy in two ways (three if you count tourism).  One group of local people harvest the birds’ nests, a valuable commodity as the key ingredient in bird’s nest soup.  Another group collects the guano; bat poo that is used as fertiliser.  You would think that being a nest-harvester would be preferable, but only until you see them doing it.  We see a guy balanced on top of a thin 15m high pole, leaning right over and poking the cave roof with another long pole.  It looks dangerously precarious and it is.  Our driver tells us that people get killed doing this all the time, but the nests are so valuable that the practice continues.

Inside the caves you can see hundreds of bats hanging from the ceiling.  If you look at them for long enough, the torchlight wakes them up and you can see them start to fidget and preen themselves before swooping off to another spot.  The caves is so big that the smell of the guano is not too overpowering.  It is like a mixture of compost and HP sauce.

There’s another cave which has cave paintings on the walls.  But they are very faded and you are kept well back with barbed wire so you can’t actually see much.

On the way back from the caves we see some monkeys in the trees, but they are too far away for us to identify which king.  Then the rainforest starts to live up to our name and we get drenched.

The next day we go to Lambir Hills National Park.  We’ve a big trek in a few days time, so we stick to just a couple of hours’ walking.  Lambir Hills is quite small anyway, but we visit a couple of pretty waterfalls, where we have a paddle and some sort of crustacean nibbles our toes.

Back at our hotel, we see a metre-long snake sunning itself on the deck just outside our room.  Later on, we tell the owner that we saw a snake.  “Green or brown?” he asks.  “Orange” we say.  “Orange!  I’ve never seen one of those before!”  Eeep – I’ve been walking around barefoot for the past few days!

More photos from around Miri are on Mr Beet’s flickr page.

Langkawi

From Penang we took a ferry to another Malaysian island, Langkawi. It is a real tropical paradise; golden sands, warm seas and swaying palms. Plus the interior of the island is dense jungle packed with wildlife.

For the first time on our trip we hired a car and explored the island.  We started off at the Sky Bridge.  It takes two cable cars to get up there and the views over the island are fantastic.  You can see birds of prey wheeling at eye level. 

After that we hiked to the Seven Wells waterfalls, where I took a dip. 

We had been planning to do a guided wildlife trek in Langkawi, but we managed to see so many animals just hiking about by ourselves that we wondered if it would be worthwhile.  We’d already spotted.

1.  Macaques

2. Cute dusky leaf monkeys

3. Snakes having snake sex

4. A big lizard

We decided to do the guided trek anyway and we are so glad that we did, although it was not what we expected at all.  Most of the trek went through a hotel resort complex.  What wildlife could we expect to spot there?  As it turned out – loads.  Before we’d even started the trek, the guide waved us over to show us something that he had spotted on his way in.  A young buzzard had caught a lizard almost as big as itself.  It couldn’t carry it away, so it was crouched in the undergrowth right by the hotel entrance, pinning its prey to the ground and waiting for it to stop struggling. 

Once we’d started the proper trek, the first thing the guide showed us was a tree with some lumps protruding from its trunk.  On closer inspection, the lumps turned out to be sleeping flying lemurs, but they were so well camouflaged that you would never have spotted them if you didn’t know what to look for.  The lemurs would start getting active around dusk, so we would come back there later. 

We also saw a giant squirrel, which we’d also seen in Laos and India, but we got a closer view this time, more dusky leaf monkeys and ubiquitous macaques. 

Then we went into the jungle and our guide explained a bt about the types of trees.  He showed us some huge termite mounds and told us that the locals can predict the weather by the termites.  A few days before the rainy season starts the Queen termite produces a generation of winged termites who will leave the nest to set up elsewhere.  If you see flying termites it means that rain is on its way.  

Further into the jungle I spotted a small lizard on a tree.  Just as I pointed it out, another lizard flew in to join it.  These were cool gliding lizards and our guide was beside himself to get such a good view of them.  He started telling us that the male can puff out his throat during courting, something that he’d never seen in the wild, only in documentaries.  Right on cue, the male started puffing out the sides of his throat to show bright red patterns on either side.  

Just before we left the forest, we came across a termite mound that appeared to be frothing.  There were hundreds of termites scurrying over it and hundreds more flying out.  So rain might be on the way. 

Back on the hotel complex we sat watching the sleeping lemur tree, waiting for the sun to go down.  The change from day shift to night shift is a very active time and we hardly knew where to look.  The monkeys were going to bed, the bats were coming out and the lemurs were starting to wake up.  As they began to move about, we could see that two or three had cute little babies clinging to their bellies.  When they fly, they spread out their limbs and gliding membrane so they look like big pancakes gliding through the air. 

We also saw some other flying creatures (it seems that everything on Langkawi flies); flying squirrels and tiny flying pygmy squirrels that we so quick that they were just like little darts. 

We didn’t expect to see this much wildlife before we got to Borneo.  We came to Langkawi for the beaches really, so this was a real bonus.  Speaking of beaches, we got plenty of beach time as well. 

 

More pictures of Langkawi are on Mr Beet’s flickr page, and in case you were wondering, the termites got it right.  Later that night, we were woken up by thunder and torrential rain.

WTF? #13

My insect bite from last week is still festering away, but also the one I got two weeks before that, which had hitherto been relatively small compared to its ginormous cousin on my thigh, has started to get red and swollen again after 3 weeks.  I didn’t like the idea of a bite that’s getting worse after 3 weeks, so I rang NHS Direct for their wisdom.

“Hello, I have an insect bite on my leg that I’m a bit concerned about.”

“OK, bites… bites… Were you bitten by a human or a snake?”

Yes you’re right, now I come to think of it, it wasn’t an insect at all it was a cobra.