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2010-06-04
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Finally the pix are online! :-)

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Diary - 2009 December (Indonesia)

2009-12-22 to 2009-12-31

Bali

Travelling makes you tired! For non travelers this might sound odd, but changing accommodation everyday (including searching and finding one, negotiating the price), looking for the right transport means, finding restaurants where your stomach says yes to the food, organizing the next destination, flights, excursions, etc, it's not like sitting in a deckchair the whole time. So every now and then you need a timeout, a retrieve, a place where you settle down for some time. And this time the place was one of the best spots for doing nothing – Bali island in Indonesia! Bali is a beautiful island but most people do not come here for the beauty but for the surf and for the party! And the party is in Kuta.

LP description of Kuta
We arranged a hotel in advance to be on the save side to have a bed to sleep when we arrived at about one o'clock in the night on Bali and used the next two days to find a nice and cheap accommodation for the next one and a half months. And we were more than lucky, when we entered a nice little street just leading to a hidden set of accommodations in a garden, where we got a room for 1.500.000 Rupiah (US$ 150) per month! The room had a small but nice terrace a living room and a bathroom with cold water - all we needed on hot Bali! And the best of the room was the neighbor: Brice! A French guy from Biarrize, who came to Bali for the last 22 years and so knew everything from the cheapest laundry service, internet cafe, bars, etc. and introduced us to his bunch of friends. So the party was set for the next three weeks! :-) With X-mass around the corner and Eva's birthday on the 25th of December the first two events rolled in, following by NYE and the daily routine of meeting at Brice's or our balcony during the day, gathering in Adabar in the evening to later go to Bounty and ending it with a early morning splendid meal at Mc Donalds. :-)

2009-12-17 to 2009-12-21

Singapore

Loving Hong Kong and considering myself as a city-person I was quite looking forward to come to Singapore and spend some days there to fully explore the city. But as always as it comes with expectations, when they are too high, you will get disappointed. And so it came with Singapore. All the traveler I met told me, that this is quite a boring city with not much to do there - and they all were right! I definitely cannot recommend to go there and would indeed say it's a waste of time and money! Sorry Singapore!

The harbor area is - to be honest - very nice and so is the CBD (Central Business District) and the Singaporean Zoo you definitely can list under the top ten Zoos of the world – but that does not make it worth to come here!

For Eva and me the best thing was the Austrian Wuerstelbude (Sausage stall) we found in China town - thanks to a friend of Eva, who gave us the directions. Thanks a lot!!! Gerd was a typical Vienna sausage seller, who was one of the best storyteller ever and so giving us a perfect time while we enjoyed the perfect mix of 'Eitrige', 'Bratwuerstel', Pretzels and the right Austrian mustard!! Ah, we loved it!!!

Meeting some guys I met three months before in China showed me again how small the travel world is! :-) Exchanging stories of the time in between is always the best to think back and let the time pass again.

2009-12-15 to 2009-12-16

Kota Kinabalu (KK)

The best thing of KK was that we met two very nice guys from Munich (Stefan and Thomas) which whom we could finally speak German again (quite a nice retrieve after just talking English the whole time) and just had a very good time chatting until the early morning.
The next day we wasted with a boat trip to a nice island where it started raining cats and dogs and we had to gather up with 20 locals in a small shelter freezing and waiting for out boat back.
Quite an early evening and a easy way to the airport ended our trip to Borneo – and island we did not expect the beauty of the nature the kindness of the people and the variety of impressions we gathered.

2009-12-12 to 2009-12-14

Gunung Mulu National Park

The Gunung Mulu NP is a big area of limestone rocks covered with splendid tropical jungle. With limestone - sensible to water - usually a lot of caves occur.

Limestone
Limestone gets his name from its color; it's nearly white, a little bit yellowish. The material is calcium carbon hydride. The calcium comes from crumbled corals which reacts with in water solved carbon hydrate to become a stone like material. In deed it is a stone - as stones on planet Earth consists either of

crumbled material under high pressure (usually in deep sea)

baked material (high temperature surrounding volcanoes)

minerals in chemical reactions.

With eruption, earthquakes or water caves are formed. Depending on the concentration of carbon hydrate water contains when in contact with limestone it can wash away material and so from caves. Also with air in caves, the solved calcium in water can react back again into limestone. Dripping water so can form stalactites and stalagmites – depending on the speed of the water and the concentration of carbon hydrate in the air. The more carbon hydrate and the slower the water is dripping the more stalactites (building up from the top and growing down) are getting created. Vice versa stalagmites will build up their way from the bottom towards the water source. Normally the speed of growing is approximately 30 years for one cm!

With all these forming, deconstructing and creating a big variety of cave forms and limestone buildings can occur, thus giving us spectacular impressions when exploring caves.

And exploring caves is what you can do best at Gunung Mulu NP. The most famous one is the so called Clearwater Connection Caving Tour. You need to be an advanced caver or you have to show the guides at a test tour, that you have the ability to walk through it. Where the 'walk' is the tricky part, as it consists of climbing, abseiling, squeezing through narrow pass ways, passing under ground rivers and the combinations of all of these.

We knew all this after quite some tourist told us, that it must be the perfect thrill and so it was clear for Eva and me that we wanna do it. When we wanted to book it via internet, we didn’t get any feedback and as we had been quite under time pressure we just decided to book flights to get there and then hope that we get a guide, that we are able to do it and that the water level is alright to pass the under ground river. Well, with a flight out of Gunung Mulu set three days after arriving there we were not given a long time to do all the preliminaries and the tour itself. And that's what they told us at the park headquarter right away. 'It's not possible!', 'We are fully booked', 'The guides are on X-mass holiday!' and 'We have a X-mass party here and therefore everything is closed!'. Well, we didn't go there to just pick up a 'Sorry guys, please book ahead next time', so we started negotiating, begging, joking with the staff, trying to bribe them and really going down on the knees to make them knowing we really wanna do that. Finally we cough attention by the Manager of the whole NP, because we were so much showing our disappointment that she shifted some guides and told us we could do a least one caving, which we would have to do anyway to show our abilities. With our outbound flight set on day three at two o’ clock in the afternoon we then suggested we could do it on the last day, starting very early, rushing through the cave and risking to miss our flight if we need too long time in the cave. This commitment showed them, that we really wanted to do it and so the cut a deal – if they make it happen for us to do both caves (the test cave and the connection) we have to take part at their X-mass party where they have a Miss Gulung Mulu election. And the job we had to do was being judges. Thus giving me the rare chance to watch pretty women and being forced to rate the curves of their bodies and write down, which one I like most! I liked that job! :-)

We mastered the first cave, where we had to climb on some slippery walls, pass some tricky pass ways to show that we are not afraid of height and that we can hold our balance, do some abseiling and squeeze our bodies through very narrow wholes in the limestone. That was all fun for us and so we passed the test easily. Swimming in the nearby river and enjoying the beautiful park made our day.

Day two we did some running and mainly enjoyed ourselves in relaxing and reading. In the evening we had the nice celebration with the whole park staff – around 150 people, because everybody brought of course his family – working as the judges, enjoying some good performances of local dances and games (this is most often very boring, but those were really good and the people had so much fun, that it was really good!), free dinner and funny conversations.

Day three finally brought us to our Clearwater Connection Caving Tour. The name derives from the fact that you enter one cave and find your way through a very tricky way to another cave some kilometers alongside. Set up to least around six to eight hours and guarded by two guides (in case one person gets injured, one stays with this person and two walk on to get help) we started pretty early to catch our flight in the early afternoon. I definitely was exited when it started with some pretty cool climbs and abseiling and our guide set up quite a high pace – well, just for us, to catch the flight. I was quite happy when we stopped the first time, because running in his pace for 5 hours, I would not do! :-) The deeper we got the trickier it became. When some abseiling and climbing’s became really tough, we understood why there was this test caving two days before! Sometimes it got really slippery and so quite dangerous to fall or slide down, sometimes we had to be careful not to fall down into wholes behind tricky pass ways and with just the head torch spending some light it was really a challenge to keep on track. But the best parts and those we loved most were the squeezing points. Big people have definitely no chance to pass and even for us it became tricky when we had to go in narrow wholes with feed first for some meters than go back a little bit to change position to go on backwards lying on the stomach. At the most tricky part we had to climb down a wall for about 20 meters where it was so narrow, that we could not see down, because we could not bend down our head. In this passage I also had very often problems to change the position of my arm, because in trying so my elbow hit the wall behind me showing me, I can not twist it. This also meant, we could not see where to set the next step and so had to find a place just with feeling – and this all in a totally dark environment and slippery wet rocks around us. It was really great!
On the last bit of the track we hit the under ground river, but we were not allowed to swim down the whole passage, because every now and then there are racer sharp rocks in the water and we would have cut ourselves. The guides didn’t like the temperature of the water but for Eva and me it offered perfect refreshing dips after a four hour trek and crawling through dirty, wet wholes! :-)
The end was an easy ascend to a cave where we could show of to group of visitors how cool we were to pass from one cave to another through the dangerous darkness and hidden traps! :-)
Outside we could go for a swim to clean ourselves and had an easy boat trip home to the headquarters. We even had time for a quick meal and easily caught our flight. The guides got a big tip and the manager an Australian red wine for making this tour happen – an experience which was definitely one of the best of my whole journey – maybe the coolest thing I did in my life.

We flew out to Miri where we finally could get rid of our still wet clothes and waited for our flight to Kota Konabalu - the last stop in Malaysia.

2009-12-08 to 2009-12-11

Brunei Daramsalla

The guide book said it already - for most of the travelers it's not more than another stamp in the passport. Me as a city lover and fan of the sultanat for many years I though I will just love it. Well - the guide book was right! They have a perfect mosque there - definitely one of the bests I had seen so far, but all the rest was not at all impressive. The famous palace of the Sultan you can just see from the distance and from there it's not impressive at all. Nothing makes you guess of the beauty of the 1800 rooms the vast convention hall for more then 400 dinner guests, etc. The only other attraction is the Sultan museum where you can see all the stupid presents of the foreign representatives who where guests of the Sultan - well, what to give to a man, who was once the richest man of the world.

2009-12-02 to 2009-12-07

Mabul - Uncle Chang

From Uncle Tan's we went directly to Uncle Chang! :-) The latter has the perfect backpacker resort on island Mabul, base for highest level scuba diving excursions to legend Sipadan island. Here you see sharks, turtles swarms of fishes and the famous Barracuda schools (the one we saw had a least 1400 Barracudas - awesome!!) in crystal clear and turquoise blueish water.

As we had been quite exhausted from the last weeks traveling we decided to relax three days before we hit the water with tech gear. Sleeping long, eating much and doing some running exercise on the small island (took us about 20 mins for the whole round) body and mind came back to normal and ready to gather new impressions.
Uncle Chang made all he could to make our stay perfect. The food mentioned was good all the three dishes a day and in the nights there was a life band performing at it's best. Housing over the sea, that we could see the water between the floor panels and window to the sunset gave us really a perfect time.


	Start: 2008-04-10					Oli on his way from Munich to Hong Kong				End: 2010-05-12