"Life" in Borneo

This Spring Break one of Ryan's many sets of parents, Mike and Renee, came out to visit. Let me be clear....it was Spring Break for me and Ryan. Mike recently retired, so instead of saying "break" or "vacation," he just calls his trips "life." 100% jealous. After spending a couple of days touring the sites in Hong Kong, we headed to Malaysian Borneo. 

We started our journey in Kota Kinabalu. A day tour took us to see the most important part of the island....the tour owner's hometown. There really wasn't much to see in the town itself, but we did have to walk over the town's very scary bridge. Why? Our guide told us that as Westerners, we have very safe bridges, so the owner believes that everyone should experience a rickety bridge.

After surviving Scary Bridge, we headed to Mt. Kinabalu. Unfortunately, we couldn't climb it because of my delicate condition and Mike's bad knees.

We got so lucky! The mountain is often covered in clouds, but
this day was beautiful and clear.

And speaking of scary bridges, our next stop was a canopy walk through the rainforest. Renee is not a big fan of heights. Nor is she a fan of the metric system. About halfway through she said, "What are we, like 20km up?"

Renee put on a brave face....

....but this is how she really felt.

Being 20km 100m up is not nearly as bad as it seems!

One more cool thing about this day...we got to see the Rafflesia flower. It's not the prettiest flower, nor is it the best smelling. In fact, it smells like a rotten corpse to attract flies for pollination. But at  20km  1m across it's the biggest flower in the world. And it only blooms for 4-5 days every 1.5 years. It really was our lucky day....we caught a glimpse! 

No rest for the weary. The next day we caught a 7am flight to Sandakan to visit the Orangutan Rehabilitation Center. The center does great work. It finds baby orangutans that wouldn't survive because of habitat loss or a deceased parent and rehabilitates them to live in the protected wild rainforest around the center. 

We then headed into the rainforest to stay at Sukau Rainforest Lodge. We'd booked a 3-night stay that included multiple boat tours to see the animals that lived along the river. 

Unfortunately, it was the first day of this stay that a blood vessel in my nose decided that it would be a good time to burst. After dealing with my fifth 2-hour nosebleed, Ryan and I decided to head back to Sandakan to seek medical attention. I wasn't all that impressed with the emergency room doctor, as he whipped out his mini keychain flashlight and opened my nostril with a pair of tweezers to look inside. Luckily he knew the limits of his primitive tools, and he sent me to the Ear, Nose, and Throat specialist. For a half hour I was poked and prodded with long metal tools, but the doctor fixed me right up by cauterising the blood vessel and sticking what seemed like a tampon in my nostril "as extra insurance" to make sure it didn't bleed again. Fortunately, I felt a lot better than I looked. 

And a night in the hospital to boot! 

Ryan was sure to get a second opinion on everything the doctor did (Web MD), and it all checked out OK! I'm very grateful to the ENT doctor at Sandakan hospital. And the entire ordeal, including a one night hospital stay, cost around $50. And the medication? It was free. FREE! Take that, US health care system. 

While I was enjoying the Hospitals of Borneo tour, Mike and Renee stayed back on the river and took advantage of all the rainforest had to offer. Below are some of the photos they took. 

They also saw a wild orangutan and her baby, some pygmy elephants, and river crocodiles. Unfortunately, the point and click camera doesn't do them justice! 

Mike and one of the Sukau guides. He thought Mike looked
like Jack Nicholson.

Sunset on the Kinabatangan River.

We headed back to Kota Kinabalu for one more night of "life."