Andrea Brandle's Travel Blog
The front page of The Strait Times newspaper reminded me that it has been a year since the King of Thailand died. The article ended with, “As a final tribute to King Bhumibol, and to mark the end of the year-long mourning period, more than 2,000 artists were scheduled to perform the traditional khon – or masked drama – as well as puppets shows and musical repertoires featuring his compositions.”
I know that the title of this post is going to upset a lot of people but rest assured our ‘hunt’ was like a treasure hunt. We were hoping to find and photograph three of the species of monkeys that live in the Klias Wetlands of Borneo. My camera battery was kaput so I didn’t get any photos but David was able to get some ‘award-winning’ photos. I have included a few here but it was difficult to choose which ones to include because there were so many really good ones.
The Klias Wetlands are a few hours drive south of Kota Kinabalu. After our daylight river cruise where we were able to see Proboscis monkeys and Long-tailed Macaques, we had a buffet dinner at the base camp Our guide told me that the Silver-leaf monkey is very shy and rarely sighted.
After dinner, we returned to the boat for a firefly cruise. It wasn’t as exciting as ‘hunting’ monkeys but seeing a whole tree lit up as if with fairy lights was quite magical.
If you, or friends of yours, are planning on visiting South East Asia (and I highly recommend it) please be aware that there is no duty-free allowance for tobacco or alcohol if you are coming into Singapore from Malaysia. That means ‘zero’, ‘nada’, ‘niente’, ‘none’!
A few days ago our bus was delayed because some young backpackers were trying to bring alcohol into Singapore from Malaysia. We ended up leaving them at the border crossing in the middle of the night. I was reminded of an incident a few months ago when our bus was delayed because a middle-aged woman thought the open package of cigarettes she was carrying did not apply to the NO duty-free allowance law.
I have travelled with Singaporean friends who threw away their cigarettes before going through immigration. Trash receptacles are provided. Although most countries allow for some tobacco products to be imported without duty, Singapore does not. Some alcohol can be imported without duty but NOT from Malaysia. It doesn’t matter where you purchased the alcohol if your last port of departure was Malaysia.
Wishing everyone safe travels!
Day 4 (Sunday, 5 March 2017) – The street in front of the Jesselton Hotel and a couple of the streets next to it, are transformed into a street market every Sunday morning so, after breakfast, we went shopping!
I bought a fabulous pearl necklace that looked like one that the woman in front of me on the Silk Air flight from Singapore to Kota Kinabalu was wearing. It consists of big, baroque, pearls in slightly different colours – some are a bit greyish, some quite pink, and some are white to cream. One has a big flaw. They were quite cheap (250 MYR) but I think they are genuine freshwater pearls.
I also bought some fridge magnets and bookmarks from a Bornean artist who describes his style as “naive”.
Saturday, 4 March 2017 – Reynald, our guide from yesterday, came back and got us but not so early this time so we had time to have a nice breakfast in the tea room of the Jesselton Hotel. The hotel’s name comes from the British name for the town before it was called Kota Kinabalu.
Today was our ‘beach’ day and we all agreed that Manukan Island was nice enough that an overnight stay would have been great.
We were all going to go on these bubble head ride things but as soon as my bubble went under the water and I felt the pressure, my heart started to pound!! I tried slowing my breathing but it didn’t help so I signalled the guy that was towing me that I couldn’t do it. I think he could tell by the look on my face. 😦
David got some great videos of all of the fish and I managed to get a little bit sunburned while snorkelling. Day 3 was a really good day! 🙂
