Monday, 24 May 2010
We got up and headed to the cafe we had lunch yesterday to find that the Idly had again finished, I am under the impression it never started as we were there at 7:00am. So we had a great dosai and Kopi and then headed to the bus station where magically our bus is there and it is swish, never been on anything this good. We are seriously thinking this just can’t be, but yep, we boarded and left the bus station on time.
Of course only to go around the corner and spend 20 minutes filling the bus up at the petrol station. Anyway before we knew it we were on the main road where we sat for the next 5 ½ hours watching palm oil plantations on both sides of the roads whizz by.
There is absolutely no jungle left. Even Scott said it was just totally depressing. There appears to be no locals left in the area, as all the areas have been bought by big companies and it would appear to be managed etc by company staff. All in all just tragic to have come to this – everyone should make a stand and demand palm oil free products. The roads were in good condition except that the constant use of the heavy palm oil trucks were causing the sides to collapse and the traffic was held up with the stream of trucks moving the fruit and oil. Why can’t people think of the consequences of their actions, it is so frustrating that people don’t see what actually happens to the environment.
Anyway, back off my soapbox, we arrived at the long distance bus terminal and got straight into a taxi (very cheap and very plentiful here – unlike Perth) who took us straight to our hotel (May Fair Hotel) who actually had our booking. This travelling around in Borneo seems to be so easy it is scary. Our hotel is clean and the room is big – it also has the world’s largest tv and dvd player. The hotel owner has a massive collection of dvd’s. We dropped off our bags and headed to the tourist information office for a map etc (these people seem to be perpetually happy to help). We ended up booking a taxi to take us to Sepilok and Labuk Bay and the Sandakan Memorial for tomorrow, as it seemed easier than trying to work out the variety of buses etc. We left there and had a walk around the town, well it is really a city, it is huge. We have decided to fly back to Kota Kinabalu in a few days as another 8 hours of palm plantations just may cause me to go postal, so we went to Air Asia and got a price and then made the huge mistake of going to Malaysian Airlines where we did a booking online to have it not process the payment, so we had to wait in the queue for over an hour just to pay (funny considering the flight is only 45 minutes). Oh well, lesson learnt. We then walked back to the main waterfront area and had a snack before heading back to the hotel and finally having a nice hot shower and some clean clothes (yippee). We are off to the night market for dinner so can’t wait.
The walk to find the night market lead us along the waterfront where young couples were beginning to meet. The night market was easily found and was bustling with vendors and families. We took a couple of laps to see what was on offer before Tracy started with a freshly boiled corn cob, Scott had a couple of chicken satay sticks. We found a table near one vendor and order our main courses, mee sop (soup, with bif (beef) for Scott) The lady working the wok magiced our order in just moments, and she wasn’t even sweating! After our soups, we did another lap to find a dessert and found a row of stalls selling (something) which was a deep-fried batter roll, sliced open, spread with butter and a sweet jam-like substance (akin to maybe dolce de leche) then sandwiched together with a little more jam over the top; very sweet, but very morish. A three course meal for 9 MYR (just over A$3). Full and happy, we wandered back through the night to the hotel to rest up before a big day tomorrow.