OOOOOOOHHHAAAAA!!

The adventures continued into our second week in Borneo, and as we settled into the routine of bar life, we found plenty of time to explore the greater Kuching area.

With a couple of other volunteers Jo and Ashley, we went out of town to kayak down Sarawak River for the day. Located right next to the Indonesian border, it was great to get out of Kuching and explore a little more of the surrounding area and dense rainforest by boat! Semadang Kayaks were a really professional and organised company who arranged the day for us, including a delicious local lunch and experienced guides. The trip started off smoothly and it was peaceful gliding through the jungle, as we hoped that the guides weren’t joking about this river not having any crocodiles.

Shortly after lunch, the daily torrential downpour hit and the river started flowing a little faster. Blinded by rain, all we could do was laugh and enjoy the waterfalls streaming into the river as we tried to navigate around logs and small rapids, continuing through the storm for a couple of hours. We felt freezing cold for the first time in months, and the excitement of paddling through the storm made it a super fun day out!

Stoked to enjoy a hot shower back at home, it was a quick turnaround to find dry clothes before heading out to our friend Letty’s village for a local cooking lesson. Jo and Carla joined us, and it was so great to share the experience with them. Letty is a local legend, and although around 4ft3, she is hard to miss around town! A regular at Monkeebar, she is a friend to all and welcomes volunteers and travellers alike with open arms. We are so grateful to have Letty as new family in Kuching!

As our flatmates back in Christchurch can vouch for us, our cooking skills have moved from strength to strength since living at Colombo St, from absolute basic to above average. We can now semi-confidently add Sarawak Laksa and Roti Canai to the menu on our return! Kind of kidding ..they were a little challenging but we will definitely make an attempt. Luke became a master of twisting and throwing the roti dough and Jelley was just stoked not to cause any injury in the process The night was filled with a lot of laughter and fun with our new friends followed by a shift at Monkeebar.

Spending a night on Pulau Satang Besar (Turtle Island), we had the opportunity to hopefully see a turtle lay eggs, snorkel, kayak around the island and just chill out on a near-deserted island with only 4 other people including the rangers. It was an absolutely amazing way to end our time in Borneo in a high!

To stay on the Turtle Island, you need permission of the families whose ancestors lived here, and Letty was just the right person to know! She was the absolute best host and took us along with Jemma and Baz who had just arrived from the UK, out to the island for the night.

From our slightly limited research of this region of Borneo, we hadn’t realised that an island like Satang existed, and it was so refreshing to swim in the warm ocean and kayak around for the afternoon. With thunderstorms raging on the surrounding mainland throughout the afternoon, we were blessed to somehow avoid this and then be treated to a stunning sunset across the ocean. Letty’s cooking did not disappoint again, and we shared a beautiful dinner of local cuisine before meeting the local rangers of the island and discussing the plan for the night.

Quite reasonably, the turtles prefer to lay their eggs at high tide so they can avoid a longer drag from the water to the sandy beach. It was going to be a hit or miss experience, with turtle laying not guaranteed every night on the island, so we stayed up as late as possible before succumbing to sleep, then being woken at 4am with the news of a turtle landing. Often turtles will create ‘false nests’, where they dig out their nesting hole in the sand but aren’t ready to lay their eggs just yet. The most common turtle to lay eggs on Satang is the Green Turtle, but we struck it lucky with the critically endangered Hawksbill Turtle arriving to lay 119 eggs before returning to sea. This was the first time this turtle had visited Satang, so the rangers took her measurements and basic tracking information before allowing her to return back to a sea that illuminated her shell with bioluminescent sea plankton.

It was an amazing experience, but we were soon put to work to count the eggs and move them to the hatchery. The hatchery here is actually still on the beach, but in an enclosure to allow the eggs the best opportunity to survive from predators – the main predators here being monitar lizards and humans! Amazingly, the gender of a turtle can be determined by the temperature the egg. Eggs that are placed in the sun will typically hatch as female, and conversely, eggs placed in cooler temperatures will hatch as male (so goes the expression “hot chicks and cool dudes!”). With the Hawksbill being so endangered, the rangers decided these little eggs were destined to be female and we buried them in the sun exposed beach area.

It was so beautiful to experience and learn more about the plight of the declining turtle population in this region of the world, and we really hope our little turtle chicks survive and make it out to the ocean in a few months time!

After a couple of hours sleep, we went out on a local boat to check out some snorkelling around the island. While the visibility was limited due to the storms from the day before, it was awesome to see a lot of live coral, and further around the island a larger variety of fish species. There is no avoiding a bit of sunburn whilst snorkelling and we probably fared better than our British friends, but still caught the rays.

One key part of visiting Borneo that we did not have the opportunity to experience was a visit to the local longhouses of the tribal villages in the surrounding area. We would love to return and experience this with our local friends in a future visit, but with just one day to go, we decided to head 45 minutes north of Kuching to the Damai town, home to the Sarawak Cultural Village. Described as a ‘living museum’, the Cultural Village is really well set up with 7 different types of longhouses not only on display, but with tribespeople interacting and teaching about the way of life in their cultures. The longhouses here were at times only small versions of the real thing, although they were still massive! One of our colleagues at MonkeeBar returns to her village where there can be up to 100 families living in just one longhouse at a time!

It was really great to learn more about the different tribes and ways of living, and the Cultural Village visit was concluded with a performance from the different tribes. Jelley was selected as the random volunteer to participate at one stage, and learnt to use a traditional blowpipe, often used for hunting. She wasn’t quite a pro with it, but it made for an entertaining conclusion to our day out!

During our two weeks in Kuching, and working at MonkeeBar, we have observed a lot of unique ways of life, interesting people, amazing food and learnt a lot about the history of the area. Here is a quick overview of some of our lessons, in leiu of our usual ‘Now We Know’ segment of the blog.

‘MEOW’ we know:

• It rains every single afternoon in Kuching. Not just rain, but torrential rain.

• The infrastructure of Kuching blew us away. Well maintained multi-laned highways, a Hilton & Pullman hotel, modern buildings and flash shopping malls. The only thing missing is the population and the tourists .. it felt so empty at times and we barely had any issues being stuck in traffic

• Health Care is surprisingly affordable in Malaysia! Flying to Malaysia for a $30 xray might actually be worth it…sorry USA.

• The food is AMAZING! We will miss it SO much, especially the Sarawak Laksa.

From working in a bar…

• We have never been more excited to hear the song ‘Closing Time’ at 3:00am.

• ‘oooooooooohhhhaaaaaaaa’ means ‘Cheers’ in Malaysia.

• We have never been less excited to hear the song ‘Bailando’ 3 times a night every night.

• So much respect for anyone who works in a bar or nightclub.

This concludes Chapter 1 of the adventures of a Kiwi & a Cali, but there is a lot more fun, laughter and tears to be had along the road! We have parted ways for the next chapter of the journey, with Jelley heading to Germany for her first Eurotrip, and Luke returning to the USA for the first time in 14 months to catch up with friends, family and embark on an epic cross-country cycle trip with some of his best mates.

It has been amazing travelling together, and while challenging at times, worth every moment! We have learnt so much more about each other, how much we can’t handle the heat of SE Asia, about different cultures and ways of life, how much we appreciate life in New Zealand and how grateful we are for this amazing opportunity to explore more of our wonderful world!

Jelley will be continuing the blog through Europe, hopefully with updates from Luke along the way, and will stop typing in the third person haha. It has been an epic adventure so far, hope you’ve enjoyed following it, we can’t wait to share more of our travels with you and then be reunited in New York City in August to continue the journey together!

Until then,

A Kiwi & A Cali xoxo