Travelling Wearily

The Horizon Hotel in Kota Kinabalu has lovely rooms.  I must try sleeping in one at some point.  After a five hour delay reaching Kota Kinabalu and an hour and a half getting through customs I didn't reach my room until 2.30am which left me just enough time to shower and change before I had to meet my friends in the lobby at 4 for the taxi ride back to the airport to catch a plane to Sandakan.

My friends had, in my view unwisely, invited me to join them on an animal pestering expedition to Borneo.  If, over the course of the next four days, an animal somewhere in Borneo didn't get its privacy invaded it was no fault of ours.

I mentioned friends, there were two of these; Amanda who I have worked with on and off for years and her Italian body servant Daniel.  Greetings were low key as they had just got up and I hadn't slept in nearly twenty four hours but each of us managed to convey an absence of disappointment that the other had actually turned up and we bundled ourselves into a short, rather fat aeroplane that took us to Sandakan.

According to the Australian government's travel website Sandakan isn't somewhere you should be going right now.  There's a bit of a pirate situation right now.  The pirates come from (and presumably return to) the Philippines.  The sea border with the Philippines is quite close to Sandakan and a damn sight closer to the island we would be staying on to watch the sea turtles.

Of course the possibility of pirate generated unpleasantness would have caused my parents to have some concern about my well being, so I didn't tell them.  I've also delayed posting this blog entry until four days later when I'm safely back in Kota Kinabalu.  So if this entry actually reaches my blog you know I survived.  Unless the Malaysian navy retrieved my notepad from my bullet riddled body and decided to publish it as a cautionary tale.