A monkey here, a monkey there, a monkey everywhere

I'm now in Kota Kinabalu in the Sabah region of Borneo. I flew here from Kunching after 3 days in Bako national park. I've just sent off all my clothes to get laundered, everything is dirty and wet...

Bako was SO beautiful and amazing, but a bit wet. I've got a fair bit of rain while I was there, and most of the trails were quite wet and muddy. At times it was more like walking in a small stream than along a trail... Bako is not a big national park, but have lots of different type of vegetation like proper rain forest, swamps, mangroves, sandstone/cliff forest (kerangas). Most of the trails are narrow and steep, and you have to do a fair bit of climbing over rocks and tree roots. Not that easy when it's raining... However, despite the weather it was a great experience, the rain forest is so beautiful! I won't even make an attempt at trying to describe the atmosphere and beauty of it. I saw lots of butterflies, lizards, squirrels and birds. But mostly I saw lots and lots of proboscis monkeys. They're quite big monkeys with huge pot bellies and a big sausage-like nose, and they're only found on Borneo. It was fantastic to see them, and you could come quite close, especially during late afternoon when they would come down to eat in the mangrove trees close to camp. Such beautiful and gentle creatures.

The macaque monkeys are completely different. You could see them all over camp and around the beaches, and they would steal anything left for just a second. In addition to the macaques, there were also a couple of bearded pigs that came close to camp. The bearded pigs are probably the most ugly and funny-looking animals I've ever seen: they're quite big pigs with a very long face, sort of like a hippopotamus, with a beard and a small snout at the end.

The last night at the camp, I've got really bad bites on one leg. I've got maybe 30 bites on my calf, all infected and filled with pus. Not very nice. It's not mosquito bites, and don't look like the bed bug bites I've got before when we had bed bugs in our flat in London. I hope that the bites disappear soon...

To get to Bako, you need to take a 20 min boat trip back to the village. When I went to Bako, the sea was very quite and I had a nice ride there. Going back was a different story, quite rough sea. Stupidly I had put on my last dry clothes before getting into the boat...

I'm going to stay here in KK for a day, and then head to Mount KK national park, I hope the weather is going to improve a bit...