Born-izzo Part tres: Bako madness

Here goes the final installment chronicling our week in Borneo, late as usual. After our time in the long house, we made our way by car, bus and river boat to the awesome Bako National Park.

Our adventure began quicker than we had expected on the river boat ride to the park. The South China Sea was a little stormy that day and before I knew it, I was soaked by spray from the quite large waves we were rolling over. Kaela, being on the leeward side of the boat, managed to make the journey completely dry. At least the water was warm. The boat ride finished, we pulled in to the park headquarters dock in the middle of a mangrove swamp surrounded by dramatic limestone cliffs and thick jungle.

The park headquarters consists of a mediocre cafeteria, a handful of chalet rooms and dorms and a fenced area for camping, all facing a long white sand beach with the jungle behind them. Within a couple of hours of arriving, we had already seen a wild bearded pig, a good sized monitor lizard, a huge troop of long-tailed macaques, and even a family of proboscis monkeys.

The proboscis monkeys were really cool to watch leaping through the trees and we managed to watched them for a while up close when they would move through some of the lower branches on the beach.

The macaques on the other hand, were fun to watch for about 2 minutes until we realized how much of a pain in the ass they really were. The people running the cafeteria had to spend all their waking hours guarding the guests and their food with slingshots. Not to be deterred though, the one of the sneakier monkeys managed to grab Kaela's muffin and toss her noodles all over the place in the process. After that, we stayed vigilant and always ate with a flip-flop in one hand to threaten the monkeys who would eye our food. We weren't even allowed to set up our tent until sunset, when the monkeys settle down for bed, because otherwise they have been known to explore people's tents with their claws and teeth.

Our first evening there was pretty uneventful, we went for a short walk before dinner and saw a couple of pit vipers sleeping in the trees and a flying lemur (colugo) which was pretty cool.

The next day our plan was to hike across the park (the map said 8 hrs), camp on the beach, then hike back the next day. In reality, it did not go so smooth.

The day started great, about 4 km in was a great waterfall that we stopped at for a while. We lounged around and let the sweat dry on our clothes.

Partly it was due to a late start and lots of breaks but mostly I think it was that we underestimated how tiring hiking in heat and humidity could be, especially with backpacks not made for backpacking, but at around 2 pm we hit our point of no return and decided that we would have to really really rush to make it to our beach before dark so we thought 'why not go instead to a closer beach just 20 min away and still have time to relax in the sun.' 20 minutes turned into an hour and it turned out that after a kilometer of steep, treacherous trail to get to the beach you had to navigate through some impenetrable mangrove that becomes flooded at high tide (and possibly crocodile infested). Needless to say, we didn't make it to the beach.

By this time it was too late to push on to our original destination, so we were forced to trudge back to park headquarters. We ended up getting back just before dark anyways and were super disappointed that our plans had failed so hard. After a week of lugging around our packs full of camping gear for that one night on the beach, we were not happy to be back at the headquarters. Upon waking the next morning to pouring rain, however, we realized that it may have been for the best that we didn't make it as the return trip would have been exponentially difficult had the paths been soggy.

Looking back, it was well worth it to go to Bako national park. It is a very interesting place, with so many different landscapes and environments, and all of them are filled with crazy and endangered animals.