Happy New Year/ Decade

It has been brought to my attention that I have not made a very auspicious start to the new decade when it comes to all things blog and update. I will now attempt to rectify that by distilling the past few weeks into a few easy to digest paragraphs!  Photos will have to follow at a later date as I am under duress to apply a draconian edit to the last batch...

So....last update was Christmas eve.  aka 'the day before'.  Christmas day was a rather boozy affair thanks to aforementioned Ritz champagne brunch.  The day started off rather fabulously: the sun shone and the three of us headed down to the pool for a Christmas morning swim.  After that, we all felt rather smug and got ourselves dolled up for the Ritz.  Lunch was amazing - the food was great and it came a very close second to the traditional family time, I think we were all glad to have each other there.  Once we got over the emotion of the day, we got on with the serious task of drinking (only so that Andy would feel that he had received proper value for money, you understand).  At one stage, I had champagne, pink champagne, red wine, a mojito and port in front of me.  I think they were also serving food.  I'm not sure.   The rest of the day passed in a lovely blur of calls home, making lots of new friends (including getting a picture with a newly married couple) and a little spot of discovating until 3am.  Boxing day was horrible.

Since 29th December, we have been making our way up through Borneo - from Kuching in Sarawak through Brunei to Kota Kinabalu in Sabah, which is where I am writing to you from now.  Kuching was interesting (despite the cat museum) and I got my first taste of jungle there with a little trek through Bako national park.  After that I decided I'd probably had enough jungle and I may have had an 'I'm a banker, get me out of here' moment and booked myself into a spa resort in the middle of the trip while Catherine got involved with the biggest, scariest, longest, tallest, widest etc caves in the world.  In my defence, my last cave experience had not gone well at all and I wansn't even in spider Borneo then! 


New Year's Eve was spent at a rather cheesy disco at a hotel in Kuching, complete with live band and INTERNATIONAL ARTIST.  You'll be pleased to know that I got myself dragged on stage by the band after busting some moves to MC Hammer.  She's still got it...

New year's day started ridiculously early as we had to be at the port to get a boat at 7.30am.  Well, actually, we didn't, as the boat didn't leave until closer to 9am but we were totally fine with that.  The next few days were spent: on boats travelling upriver through Sarawak sharing some tuak with the locals; on the back of a four wheel drive through the rain forest hiding from spiders; in Brunei; and then on more boats back into Malaysia and Sabah. 

Our time in Sabah has been mostly about seeing Orangutans. We spent a morning at Sepilok sanctuary, where we saw two orangutans as they came in for feeding.  The centre rescues the animals and then gradually releases them into the wild, so the ones we saw were part way to freedom.  After that, we were picked up for a tour that we'd organised into the jungle to stay in a lodge on the Kinabatangan river for two nights (here).  During our time there, we were lucky enough to see orangutans in the wild three times along with hornbills, macaques and proboscis monkeys.   We also saw a LOT of rain.  The river rose two metres during our time there and on the way back today, our bus had to go through a river that wasn't there two days ago.

We're back, dry and showered now and looking forward to our next adventure - our flight to the Philippines leaves on the 20th Jan.

Highlights: Orangutans, the boat trip from Kuching to Belaga, staying in a longhouse with skulls from the headhunting days, NO SPIDERS!

Low points: seeing the devastation of the rain forest: it is truly unbelievable how much of borneo's forest have fallen victim to palm oil farms, hearing that orangutans might be extinct in 10 - 30 years- i was woefully unaware of that, leeches in the jungle shower, not having a shower for three days, losing my phone