Malaysia

My first stop in Malaysia was...guess... Kuala Lumpur. I didn't arrive there by plane, however.
I arrived by nightbus from southern Thailand.

The well-known Petronas-towers offer 5 minutes of mild diversion.

In Kuala Lumpur, every building looks like a mosque. Except the mosque, which looks like a spaceship.

The Colonial district is a quiet alternative to all the modern skyscrapers and the ultramodern shoppingmalls.

Kuala Lumpur was the only place I visited on the penisula of Malaysia the first time.
I only went there to get a quick flight to Malaysian Borneo. Later on, I would come back...

I landed in the city of Kuching on Borneo: A nice, clean and friendly city.
Here I met a Malaysian photographer who lived in Kuala Lumpur and was bored.
He said: If you pay the fuel, I'll drive you around! He also turned out to be an excellent cook!
One of the first places we visited was Kubah National Park (see below).

The Malaysian guy (Nik) was an excellent photographer!
He has made most of these photos.

For us, Kubah truly turned out to be a rainforest.
Rain was pouring down when we were about to go back! Leeches crawled up our legs constantly.

An other trip was to a crockodile farm!
Although it has much in common with a zoo, I enjoyed myself more than I expected!
They had some other animals aswell:

Hi there!

Feeding-time!

An other trip we made, was to an Orang Utan rehabilitation centre: It also had much in common with a zoo.

Not all of them are as cute as WWF makes you believe!

Later on I went by myself to Baku National Park. It is a more beautiful alternative to Kubah, but also much more touristic.
It is famous for its "Orang Belanda", or Dutch monkey. It is called so because it has a huge nose.
So the photo below is really bad. I guess the monkey was ashamed of its nose.

I met some Australians in the park.

A flesh-eating plant (above) and a freshwater turtle (below).

Next national park would be Niah.
It was the place i started to suspect that all Malaysian national parks come down to plankwalks.

Niah offers a few things: Plankwalks through quite nice rainforest,
plankwalks through enormous caves (mainly the cave-openings are huge!),
and the chance to see a traditional village with a longhouse.

I didn't really get the charm of a longhouse.
It is simply a lot of identical crappy houses that are connected to eachother, forming one long house.
If one burns, all burn! The house was in this village, but i didn't find it photoworthy.

A nice little bonus I got when i came back:
One of the guys working at the headquarters showed me some luminicent fungus and mushrooms!
I tried to photograph one (see below), but that was hard in the dark!

Then Mulu National Park was on the menu. The park actually required a flight to get to!
It is like a huge version of Niah: One of the cave openings is the largest in the world.
The cave complex as a whole is amongst the 10 largest in the world.

When night is about to fall, millions of bats fly out of the cave!
It looks like a computereffect (a fractal). Sometimes birds of prey fly into the stream.

The little animals all together make a sound that resembles the sound of the wind!

In an attempt to get away from the plankwalk, I made a trip by boat together with an American, an Englishman and a Malaysian.
This trip was truly wonderful! The clear water flowed gently past the boat and beautiful scenery loomed up around every corner.
Sometimes when the waterlevel was too low, we had to get out of the boat and push it

The destination of this trip was to the so-called pinnacles:
Razorsharp stoneformations that stick up like daggers out of the landscape.
On the way we encountered dudes like this one (below). However, in general, not much wildlife.

We met this little dude too; a mix between a squirrel and a mouse or something!

There were headquarters at the base of the pinnacles aswell. This place had a wonderful pool to swim in (see above)!

We visited a longhouse on the way back. I don't get the charm of these places...
Nice view of gungung Mulu, however (gungung = mountain).

This is the boat we used!

The huge caves of Mulu are very hard to get proper on a photo:
If you make a photo with flash, you only see total blackness!
You need to have a very low shutterspeed.

But not even the photo below pictures the hugeness of the place well.

Once past Brunei, I went to the far eastern edge of Borneo to have a Robinsson Crosoe experience.
The attempt failed however, as we didn't get a signature from the police.
So instead, we went on a tour to an island inhabited by sea-gypsies and encrusted with coral.

Sea-gypsies are beautiful people! Very dark skin and wild-looking.
They often have western clothes that look like 20 years old!

One of their villa's!

One of their less expensive villa's

They sure have found one hell of a place to settle!

They practise some voodoo aswell! Like the Blair Witch went to paradise.

Now we make a jump forward in time:
After completing Borneo, I went back to Thailand to be together with the girl again.
At the end of my trip I went through the southern tip of penisular Malaysia.
First stop would be Melakka: The cultural highlight of Malasia, they said.
The average little village in Holland has ten times more to offer culturally.

The gravestones of some Dutch colonists!

This was the only nice place I could discover in the city: An old Chinese house turned into a museum.
It was quite interesting to tour this place. It had brightcolored walls with dark wood carvings
and Chinese motives of dragons and trees.

My next and last stop in Malaysia was Pulau Tioman (Pulau means island).
This place is wonderful! No cars and modest development. No big resorts for instance, just simple bungalows.
It is a tax-free zone, meaning that you can drink beer and whiskey at bargain prices!

This place is really recommendable! It has beautiful beaches, quite good snorkelling and excellent hikes in the rainforest
(without plankwalks!). This photo (above) is made from the jetty: big schools of fish were swimming there all the time.
Later I snorkelled through it: It was like snorkelling through a wall of fish.

I also went on a snorkeltrip that had a stop on a bountyisland.
Expedition Robinsson was recorded here somewhere aswell!

Monstrous!

Nice island, i really liked it!

Underwater camera

In Borneo (at the same island as the sea-gypsies), i rented an underwatercamera together with the American I was travelling with.
Here are some photos we made: