Simon's grand day out

As Andrea has already said, I ventured alone on a trip yesterday without her which was a little strange to say the least. The trip was a river cruise along the jungle in south western Sabah to see some of the wildlife there. Like the last trip it was in the guides car, but this time there was two other people doing the trip too. One of the girls was from Sydney and was tattooed and pierced to the hilt, surprisingly she was a tattoo artist. The other girl was from Spain backpacking round the world, she'd come via India. It amazes me just how many people we've met (girls and boys) that are backpacking on their own. Anyway, the car journey was unfortunately 2 and a half hours so i managed to get some snooze time in.

Getting to the jetty i donned my suncream for my baldy head and sprayed the mossie repellent(orange flavour) all over. I now smelt like a giant orange, so whilst repelling all the bugs i was now a magnet for hungry monkeys. We got on board the boat which was like a flat bottomed speedboat and then we headed up river. The first creatures we bumped into was a giant posse of Macaque monkeys that were fishing by the shoreline. We threw them some water mellon to munch on and some of them even swam up to the boat to grab some ! The more you looked at them, the more monkeys you saw, they were everywhere on the ground, in the river, in the bushes and in the trees. I got the feeling that we were the ones being looked at. Heading further into the jungle we then started to spot the big Proboscis monkeys which lived high up in the trees, again once you spotted one you could then see more and more of them. They're funny looking creature because of their floppy nose, big white tail and bum, and the males had a big red ying yang. The reason for them being in the trees was because the leaves acted like viagra for the males. The locals call them the "24 hour monkeys"...hehehehe. After a few hours of travelling and more of the same monkeys we headed back only to encounter a herd of wild water buffalo cooling themselves in the river. They looked just like cows to me, but the guide assured us that they were wild.

Getting back to the jetty we had a lovely meal of rice, chicken, some green stuff and water buffalo ! I'm guessing that they might be wild, but they're not protected ;) It was beef really though. After dinner we then walked along the river to find these two trees which were inhabited by thousands of fireflies. They give of a flashing white light which just made the trees look like decorated Christmas trees...quite cool really. I thought at this point I would be donating a lot of bloody to the local mossie population, but lo and behold the repellent actually worked ! woo. That will come in really handy for our next leg of our journey....Left turn Clyde ! yay!