Bloodsucking creatures

No, I haven't encountered any vampires, but got a few leeches after a night trek along the Kinabatangan river, gross!!! The river itself was beautiful, and during the daytime boat trips we were lucky enough to see wild orangutans! We also saw proboscis monkeys, macaques and silverleaf monkeys, and lots of birds, eagles and commodores. I had hoped to see pygme elephants and crocodiles, but was not lucky enough to do so. Like I said, we went on a night trek through the jungle surrounding our camp, and it was a strange and wonderful thing to experience all the sounds of the rain forest at night, and we saw lots of sleeping birds. Unfortunately it was a little bit hard to focus on the experience whilst worrying about leeches. Despite double long socks and rubber boats, I still had some leeches that managed to get through all my clothes and bite me on the side under my arms. Not fun. I didn't sleep very well that night, felt like the whole bed was full of leeches...

The next day after a boat trip at dawn, I headed to Semporna. Semporna is a bit of a dump really, no point being there except for the amazing coral reeves outside. I signed up for first a day of snorkeling and then a couple of dives. When I was leaving the dive shop, it was dark and not much street light. There was also a gang of aggressive dogs. When I tried to avoid the dogs, I instead fell down a hole in the sidewalk! I fell down to my waist into the ditch under the sidewalk (luckily a ditch not filled with sewage but dry and empty), and injured my hip and broke one of my big toes (not the one I broke a few years ago, but the other one). Painful! I was a bit worried about my hip at first, thought that I might have a hairline fracture as it was very painful to walk, stand, sit down, really to do anything. But now that the swelling and bruising is going down, it is much better. However, I missed out on the diving and snorkeling as there was no chance that I would be able to force down my foot into a fin, or manage to get into a boat or wear a weight belt with my hip. So I decided to leave Semporna and go to Tawau for a few days before heading back to Kuala Lumpur. In Tawau I stayed at a quite luxurious hotel, I felt I need a bit of comfort to compensate for not diving, and after a a couple of days of recuperation I felt a lot better and ready to go to the Philippines!