Borneo v.2: Vegetable/Animal

And now for round two:

Next stop was Danum Valley, a jungle conservation area that has a resort that's a two+ hour drive in on a run down and extremely bumpy logging road (in fact, on our way in, a bridge had collapsed, toppling a logging truck and delaying us until another car could come from the other side and we could cross on foot). Once we were in, though, Danum Valley turned out to be one of the coolest places. It's the furthest place you can go into the Bornean jungle as a tourist. Mom and I have never stayed in a resort before and so everything that might be expected by more experienced resorters came as welcome surprises to us. It wasn't just the resort, though, it was also the incredible diversity and magnitude of wildlife that we saw. We spent two nights and one full day there (we both thought this was much too little) and enjoyed jungle treks, a canopy walk, night walk/drive, delicious meals served in a big, wall-less lodge facing a river and a beautiful, fancy room with an outdoor tub (shielded from human eyes).

Here is a condensed list of the animals we saw: wild boar, long-tailed/pig-tailed macaques (monkeys), red-leaf monkeys, flying squirrels, black hornbills/Rhinoceros hornbill (Bornean birds), mouse/sambar deer, giant squirrels, a whole host of lizards/bugs/birds, and…(drum roll, please)…a family of wild elephants (twice) and two wild orangutan (separate occasions, but both relatively young and medium sized). We also heard the warning call of a huge adult male orangutan, which was very intimidating and powerful. So, yeah, Danum Valley. Pretty awesome, yes?

Note: the other creature we saw in abundance was tiger leeches. These are very different than the fat and black fresh-water leeches that appear in many films. Tiger leeches look like elephant trunks that are standing upright and moving their nose around searching/smelling for an unlucky mammal to feast on. When they want to move, they put their nose on the ground and creep like an inchworm. When they eat, they suck from one end and slowly fill up long ways until they’re nice and fat. I got a couple on me but was able to pull them off before they broke my skin and Mom apparently got “leeched” but didn’t notice until we got back to the room and she was bleeding. Another nightmare-of-a-time (literally, I had nightmares about leeches and would wake up and remember that I was in an impeccably clean room where they could get me, thank goodness), we were getting ready to head out again after a between-trek-rest and Mom found a leech crawling around the inside of the shirt that she was about to put back on (it had been hanging in the room for about an hour). Interesting creatures, leeches, but not ones that are the best to have around.

Speaking of creatures! The next ones we witnessed were all underwater because Mom and I ended our trip on SIPIDAN! Well, actually, we stayed on Mulu, an island nearby, because a few years ago everyone was kicked off Sipidan to preserve the nature and use it as an army base. Sipidan, if you haven’t heard, is one of the top dive spots in the world and is currently up for election for the 7 Wonders of Nature. Basically, it was awesome. Our dive masters and the boat captain were really fun and patient and the diving was INCREDIBLE. I’m not even going to write about the resort we stayed in 1. because it didn’t compare to Danum Valley and 2. because it just doesn’t even matter when it comes to talking about the diving we did. The island is basically surrounded by coral reefs that drop from 6meters to 600meters, so most of the dives are wall dives, which, I’ve discovered, I prefer. Some dives were pretty deep (25 meters) and some were shallow but all of them were amazing.

Picture this: you’re swimming through a school of some pretty big, really colorful fish while checking out some smaller fish swimming around the coral and you go in to look at some brightly colored sea stuff, maybe a clown fish in some anemone, on the wall while still moving slowly and then you realize you’ve come across a turtle, not more than three feet away, that is taking a nap in a little nook. You stare for a bit, but don’t want to disturb him and then you turn around just as another massive turtle is swimming out from the coral right in front of you and you watch it swim up to the surface and then back down and as you’re looking down, you realize there are white-tipped reef sharks that are swimming below you surrounded by some other fish that are almost the same size as the sharks. Whoa whoa whoa. I kid you not; we did nine dives of about 40minutes each over a course of three days that were ALL like this. It was crazy. The problem is, I have no idea what most of the stuff I saw is called. Literally, the ENTIRE cast of “Finding Nemo” was there, including all the extras and about a thousand of each character. Plus, we saw a gigantic eagle ray (they swim rather than settle on the bottom), several puffer fish – including a huge pregnant one and a little orange one with blue spots, an angel/paper fish thing, a small octopus (that was coooool), huge schools of barracuda, a million turtles of all ages, orangutan crabs, several kinds of cuttlefish, big tiger fish, eels, really big sea cucumbers/slugs, gray reef sharks (those are bigger than the other ones) and the list just goes on and on.

Our last day there, Mom and I had to skip the last dive because we were flying too soon afterwards and so I went snorkeling out on the drop-off instead, near where the dive was happening. Even snorkeling was amazing. As soon as I put my face in the water, I got to six turtles before I lost count and they were swimming right next to me, so close I could’ve touched them. I ended up finding the divers and swam over them for a while. I noticed one white-tipped reef shark that swam startlingly close to me but still far enough away but later I found out that when I was looking at that one, the divers were watching another one that was directly under me, so close that I didn’t even see it. Haha, whoops. Lucky for me, reef sharks generally leave people alone.

As you can imagine, mom and I feel pretty spoiled by all we got to see and really, I’m just going to be disappointed by the dives I do after this. I’ll have to keep an open mind and remember that everywhere has something to offer, even if it’s not Sipidan.