Up the Mountain, Palm Oil Plantations, Deramakot, Maliau Basin

6/29 – Drive to the base of Mt. Kinabalu.  Stop in a pretty cool market and shop on the way. Settle into the hostel, go on a plant walk with Tony (new guest lecturer).  Nap.  Lecture from Tony and then from a lady who works with the tours of the mountain.  Night walk with Sabrina and Sreekar.  Sleep in hostel.

6/30 – Wake up, breakfast, drive to mountain, receive nametag, hiked the 6 steep km up Mt. Kinabalu to Laban Rata/Giton Lagadan.  Pretty sure that was the hardest thing I've ever done.  It was fun at first and then it was just hard.  We did see frogs and giant purple earthworms, but we also got rained on and were in extreme amounts of pain.  When we got back, we got some amazing help from everyone who hiked faster than us; as soon as we got in, they gave us dry clothes, tea, soup, and first dibs on the hot showers.  It was a good thing, because one of the girls, Dita, got pretty severely hypothermic. It's a good thing Cam's wife Kinari is a doctor.  She knew exactly what to do, and Dita got better with a lot of hot water bottles and some TLC.  We all passed out in bed super early

7/1 – Wake up after a rough night of traveller's sickness.  This mountain is doing a number on me.  Don’t go to breakfast, do make it to the montane ecology lecture and walk around.  Take a huge nap during the day and wake up feeling better. Bekti’s lecture on rhododendrons at 4, dinner, bed early.

7/2 – Wake up at 2am. Hike 2.7 km to the summit of Mt. Kinabalu w/ white rope. AMAZING. Beautiful dense starry sky. Can see lightening in the distance. Can see cities below us and even peninsular KL across the ocean. Saw the sunrise from the top. Unbelievable. Hiked 2.7 km down to pack and eat breakfast at Laban Rata. Then hiked 6 km down to the bottom of the mountain. Hung out in the hostel, had a dance party, watched the rainfall. Took a shower. Relaxed.  ☺

7/3 – Palm Oil Plantation, Drive to Deramakot

Today was nice but depressing. We woke up and got to sit on a bus for 6 hours. That was awesome. Kristina and I rocked out to Disney music and conducted together, lol. Then we went to the oil palm plantation. It’s sad, the excuses that these people come up with. And it’s even sadder how MUCH forest they’ve taken. The figures are ridiculous, something like 70% of the forests on the island in the past 20 years. Cam says with full confidence that within a few decades there will be no primary forests and no large mammals left on this island if this continues. The problem is on SUCH a huge scale, it seems unconquerable. It’s hard to keep reminding ourselves that the little things we do actually DO make a difference – it’s just that EVERYONE on the planet REALLY needs to take a BUNCH of small steps, and some big steps too. Otherwise ALL of this will be gone. It feels real now… I’m looking at this forest right now, and I’m looking at all the miles and miles and miles of oil palm trees that USED to be forest, and I’m thinking of how hard it is to find a wild orangutan, and how easy it was 50 years ago – we are LOSING this forest NOW. It will be GONE within our lifetime if things don’t change. It’s so scary.

Anyway. We left the oil plantation and came to this sustainable logging place. Sustainable logging is great. It’s almost even GOOD for the forest – there are more orangutans here in this sustainably logged area than almost anywhere else on the island. And it’s even a sort of carbon offset, because the early successional forests that grow after you cut down a tree and leave the area alone absorb more carbon than mature primary forests. If you really want to help the environment: BUY SUSTAINABLY LOGGED TIMBER. And get a job at Planned Parenthood, Ross says – there are just too many people on this planet.

Sigh. A sad reality. But hopefully we’re off to fixing it tomorrow!

7/4 – Deramakot

Happy Fourth of July! All the Americans started off the day with a whole bunch of singing patriotic songs ☺. First things first – we woke up at 5:30 to go look for orangutans! Walked in the woods a bit and didn’t find any, but got a TON of leeches, so we turned back. Then we did breakfast, then got a lecture from one of the guys who works here. Then we went on a walk on the educational trail (saw some orangutan nests!!!), then went on a walk on the ecology trail while eating lunch. Sat for an hour looking for orangutans, didn’t find any, but had fun writing a story with Shana and watching Fae tie leeches into knots. Came back, took a nap, then went to a lecture from Rhett about sustainable forest management. Then had a debate about palm oil vs. sustainable forest management! That was fun. Then a fun dinner, some learning Malay, and bed. Yay. ☺

7/5 – Deramakot

Today was a fun day. Woke up after a great night’s sleep, got some breakfast, and then had an unexpected free hour, during which I did some taxon stuff. (Yay, stick insects! I’m up to 15!) Then it was off to an adventure through the world of sustainable logging! And it was definitely an adventure. First we got our hard-hats and piled into the 4-by-4s. We drove for a little bit, went on a trail, saw a water-hump that they use to prevent soil erosion, saw a tree stump, and then piled into the back of some pickup trucks. Because it rained all afternoon and all night yesterday, it was SO muddy! We all felt like Indiana Jones trekking through the mud! The pickup trucks took us further into the forest, where we watched the fellers sustainably log two trees. It was crazy, seeing those humongous trees fall almost in slow motion down to the ground, land with a huge crash, bounce once, then settle down. We examined the stumps for xylem and phloem and resin and other factors, then headed back to basecamp for lunch.

After that I went for a walk in the forest to find some orangutans. I went by myself because I wanted to be super slow and super quiet, and I wanted to look for more stick insects. I walked SO slowly and looked ALL over the place, for almost two hours, but I didn’t find any stick insects or orangutans. But it was okay, because it was SO nice spending some time by myself in the rainforest. It has a certain rhythm that you don’t really sense when you’re with a big crowd of people. I saw some beautiful butterflies, some very interesting birds, and had some run-ins with many a fly, bee, and mosquito, and I felt like I was really completely immersed in the atmosphere. I listened extra carefully to every sound and tried to trace it back to the bird or squirrel that made it… this sounds really tacky, but I really was trying to be “one with the forest” or whatever… you know, so that I wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb and scare away the orangutans. Even though it didn’t work, I really enjoyed myself and noticed more than I’ve noticed on any other walk.

Anyway. Then had a lecture on paleontology (SO COOL! Remember to take Charles’s OEB class and look into HEB or the bio track of anthro…), and another one on the peoples of Borneo (I love anthropology… once we were finally talking about people and cultures instead of scientific systems, I suddenly found it so easy to concentrate! I’m loving exploring a new field, but this whole trip has definitely confirmed my passion for the humanities above the sciences).

Then a quick walk with Kristina (beautiful sunset!) and a yummy dinner. Then a night drive! Cam called it a safari, but it was way to uneventful to call it that. All we saw was a frog. I heard another group saw a forest cat and a hornbill… oh well. We weren’t so lucky.

Apparently this forest is the forest with the most wildlife out of all the ones we’re going to, so I’m kind of disappointed that I haven’t seen ANY mammals yet. Tomorrow morning is my last chance! I’m going out at 5:30AM with Kristina to find those orangutans. It’s now or never!

7/6 – Leave Deramakot, drive to Maliau

No orangutans ☹ We had a lovely morning just sitting in the forest taking in the sounds, from 5:30AM to 7, but sadly, no orangutans. All we saw was a hornbill. (It was pretty sweet, but not as cool as orangutans.) Sigh. That’s the rainforest for you, I guess. There are only 11,000 left in this whole big forest, so I guess it’s no surprise that one didn’t happen to swing past me. Oh well.

Then we had a LOOOOOONG and rough drive in the 4-by-4s from Maliau to Deramakot. We left at 9am and got there at 6:30pm. I bonded with Ross and Douwe and Jess in the car. Other people like Molly did stuff like plan out the next 10 years of their life, but I just tried to sleep and translate some of Douwe’s Spanish rock-and-roll. It was good times.

Now we’re at the research center in Maliau Basin. It’s GORGEOUS here. Tomorrow’s a day off, and the next day we leave on our amazing 4-day hike through the basin! Can’t wait! ☺
7/7 – Rest Day in Maliau
Today was a fun day! Woke up, ate breakfast, played some Scrabble, then went on a short nature hike with Cam and some of the crew. We got a little intro to the forest here, and we got to walk on the canopy walkway! It was so cool. Saw an awesome black Bornean squirrel, and a REALLY cool hornbill (it wasn’t a rhinocerous, I think it was a helmeted… yellow on top, SO COOL!), and some amazing butterflies and dragonflies (pink, velvet red, blue – awesome!). Good stuff. Then ate lunch and wasted some time, went on computers, played Scrabble, etc… then went on a 20 minute run with Shana. Then got two lectures, one from Swee Peck on ants and Macarangas, and one from Charles on paleontology. Then ate dinner and headed off to bed. Hike tomorrow! ☺

7/8 – Hike from Agathis to Camel Trophy
Wow. Intense but amazing. But intense. Up, up, uphill. Then kind of flat. Carangas forests are cool. Yup. Camel Trophy was so cool. Sat around, learned card games (Egyptian Rat Screw, Thai Tea (Big 2!), Bridge, Texas Hold’em, and more fun), saw a civet (cute little wild cat!), set up mosquito net for the first time, went to bed. ☺

7/9 – Hike from Camel Trophy to Ginseng
So this is the day that I wrote my journal entry on a soggy scrap of paper. Here it is, reincarnated in the computer:

Today was amazing! Woke up, played cards and chatted, ate some delicious donut/pancake-type food, then headed out on an amazing hike. Saw heath forests, lower mixed dipterocarp forests, and – gasp – Bornean Gibbons in the wild! Swing from tree to tree, jumping across trees. Amazing. Our guide heard them calling pretty close, so he started imitating their calls by blowing a whistle through his hands, and it was amazing – they came closer and closer! (Insert little sketches of gibbons swinging and jumping here, because they were too fast for me to snap a picture.) Hiked on crazy downhill slopes (real conversation: “Jeez, this is nuts! Where am I?!” “In the rainforests in Borneo!” “How did that happen??” “Um, you go to Harvard! Opportunities are just handed to you there!” So true.), and crossed breath-taking waterfalls. Saw some crazy nepenthes (huge, different color/size/shape/fuzziness of pitchers!), blood-red-tannin-water. Wow.

Random fact about Malaysia that I keep forgetting to mention: There are SO MANY unnecessary STEPS here! I mean, like, steps from a staircase. They’re EVERYWHERE. Between rooms, up to the toilet, up to the sink, out of the hallway – it’s ridiculous! We Americans keep tripping all over ourselves because we are not used to having steps in all these weird places!

7/10 – Hike from Ginseng to Serya
• Long black and white striped earthworm with this crazy beautiful blue luminescence if you poke it, and it spat nasty green sticky stuff at Mindy when she tried to pick it up.
• Ate a mangostene off a tree in the middle of the jungle – mmmmm! So good! Tasted like a cross between an orange and a lemon and a banana. (Real conversation between me and Cam: “Ew, a seed.” “Swallow it!” “No!” “What do you mean no? This is a rights and responsibility thing! You have the right to eat the mangostene, but you are responsible for swallowing the seed, pooping it out, and dispersing the species!” “Um, it’s big. If I start choking and fall down the hill you have to come get me.” “Eh. Carcasses make good nutrients for the soil here.”)
• We walked through forests that had recently seen a landslide todfay. That was SO hard. That’s when the guides had to break out the machetes (though they’re called “parongs” here). Walked through crazy spiky rattan tunnels, etc. Nuts.
• Maliau falls – AAAAAH!!! See pictures. Nuff said. Too bad we couldn’t swim in it – it rained all night last night, so they were SO rough!
• Took a tiger leech to the armpit today. That was pretty awful.
• That crazy sandstone rock ledge that we climbed down from and then under! Jeez! Totally almost died there, as we got rained on from the dripping water and shimmied around the slippery ledges.
• Aranid – crazy horned spider! Get pics from someone.
• Then got caught in the rain. At that point we had all had enough fun for one day. Douwe: “That’s it! I’ve made my decision. This place can be logged.” “Yeah, give me some Oreos! I want my oil palm NOW!”
• Interesting religious discussion. Yup.

7/11 – Hike from Serya to Studies Center
• Me and Shana were sick. Me still with traveller's sickness, her with some kind of horrible stomach virus. So Cam let us go really slow in the back, and the three of us had some amazing conversations. Cam used to be captain of the Oxfored Undergraduate Competitive Plowing Team. Hahaha.
• Got 2 leeches. In my pants. Luckily, they only bit my thigh.  Some people are getting bitten in way worse places.  These things are getting on all of our nerves.  Douwe's taken to slicing then in half with his penknife, Aywaen's taking to burning them with his lighter, Fae's taken to tying them in knots.  Sheesh.
• Saw that huge, gorgeous, black orange and white butterfly! Wow! Even Cam was impressed!
• Right after Shana and I declared ourselves “Team Ill,” we saw a pig-tailed macacque cross the road right in front of us. AWESOME. Never saw one of those before! Walks like a lion. Then a hornbill flew RIGHT overhead. Wow. That’s our payback for being sick in the woods.
• Showers are amazing. Cold ones. Right after a nasty 4-day hike. Amazing.
• Nap time! Planet Earth marathon tonight! I love Cam! Thanks for entertaining my film love!

Another random fact about Southeast Asia -- so in Indonesia and in some parts of Malaysia they eat with just a spoon and fork, but I found out that in other parts of Malaysia and also in Sri Lanka they eat with their right hands.  There are two guys on the trip who eat like that.  Just mush the food up into a food/rice ball with their hands and eat it.  And only their right hand, because the left is the "dirty" hand that they use in the restroom and things like that.  Interesting stuff.