What do monkeys, elephants, and mud have in common? This blog.

This has been a tiring day of blogging. we've been sitting in this internet cafe for hours! Actually its a computer gaming room and all we hear is gunshots and explosions. It's time for some lunch so this will be brief.

Finally, here are some of our jungle pictures:

Jason getting ready to battle the leeches.

Corinne winning the battle against the leeches (but not the rain).




Proboscis Monkeys (found only in Borneo)



Apparently the lady-monkeys fancy a man-monkey with a big nose.

Jungle elephants! It was getting very dark and difficult to photograph, so this is our least blurry picture.



There is a little elephant in between the two big elephants who didn't want us to find their little elephant. As you can guess, they were making their elephant noises.

Finally, if you look close, you can see an orange, hairy, man-like figure. This is our best photo of a wild orangutan. They are tricky to spot, and harder to photograph. I think this is a bit like a bigfoot photo, but it is a real orangutan, believe us.

That is all. Who knows when we will blog next? After this marathon, it won't be for awhile, especially with photos. So slowly enjoy all that we have given you today. Maybe take a few days to slowly examine the material.

Leeches suck... blood... the proof!

We promised you gore, and now you get it! Please take your children out of the room.

Look at that sneaky bastard trying to escape. It was so full of blood that it could barely move! Also, I found out about 30 minutes after this photo was taken that there was another one happily feasting between my pinky and ring-toe.

Bonus Footage: underwater video!

Our Danish friends took some videos too. We used our limited software and made a little movie to share a few underwater moments with you.

Most of the stuff is self explanatory. About three quarters through, you'll see lots of fish. Those are barracudas.

Get out the popcorn, its cinema time!

Underwater adventure photos

Alright faithful blog buddies...

We think that we owe you some pictures. So, without further adieu, photos!

But first, a small adieu. So, I suppose this is with further adieu, but you gotta adieu what you gotta adieu. That is Jason's humor in summary. People I hear this kind of stuff daily, so please feel sorry for me!

Some background info that we have not yet told you about:

We went to a teeny little island called Mabul. It is supposed to have amazing snorkeling. It did. The island was a little fishing village and we stayed in a little hut-shack built on stilts over the water. This is old news.

Corinne is telling Jason that we've said this already. Apparently the water pressure got to his memory.

So we took our open-water dive course. We are now officially padi-certified open water divers. It was sooooooo cool. While we were learning our basic skills (which are often done in swimming pools) we saw sea snakes, eels, fishes, turtles, and more fishes.

Then, we took our first dive as certified divers. Our first day of diving was at one of the best dives spots in the world: Sipidan. We didn't have a camera, but our Danish friends did and they gave us their pictures, and we saw what they saw so its like we took them.

For a little technical info, water diffracts light... red is the first colour to disappear, so that's why underwater photos often look so green, as these do.

Now, without further adieu (we promise this time), the underwater photos:

Us, underwater-style!



We found Nemo!


This is a lionfish.

Turtle! (Corinne likes watching them glide in the water.)

Lifelong goal number 357: Swim with sharks. Check.

That is all... but more pictures are on the way... soon!

monkeys are nice, but fishes are too!

Two things that are in abundance in the Borneo rain forest: rain and leeches. We're not particularly fond of either of them.

We decided that we have to get into the jungle and getting deep into the jungle is not an easy feat to accomplish. We had to let our independent spirit take a hit and we signed up for a three day stay at a jungle lodge on the Kinabatangan river. Aside from the rain, it was amazing. Actually the sheer amount it rained was pretty amazing in and of itself.

While at the lodge we went on four river cruises, a jungle trek, and a night walk through the spooky night jungle. It rained the hardest during our three hour trek. In fact, it rained so hard that although we were careful not to let puddle water spill over the tops of our rubber boots, the rain found a way to fill our boots with water.

You might be wondering, did we see any wildlife? Of course! We were in the jungle! Leeches aside (hundreds of them), we saw lots of pretty birds, six kinds of monkeys (including a rare gibbons monkey and a real-life wild orangutan!). We were in one of two places in the world where there are 10 species of primates living in the same area. It was pretty cool. But what was the coolest thing we saw? You might think that it must have been pretty cool to beat a wild orangutan. It was. We saw a pack of wild jungle elephants! It was so cool! They gathered around the little elephant and raised their trunks and did their elephant noise. Wow.

So... that was then but what is now? The jungle (and the rain) was a little too intense for us. And the smell of our own wet, jungle-funk riddled clothes drove us back to civilization.

We found ourselves a nice little tropical island with a nice little shack built over the water and spent a bit of time there. It's not as pretty as it sounds though... it is a little fishing village shanty town with a little shanty-town style hostel. But that is in some ways better than a swanky hotel.

All of the houses on the island are actually held up on wooden poles over the ocean. You can see the water through the floorboards of our room, and when you are sleeping at night you can feel the building sway with the waves. Many of the houses are interconnected by wooden docks so its kind of like making your way through a mini maze of ocean shacks. We are loving it! When we asked the man at our hostel which way to the snorkel beach his instructions were something like this... "see that coconut tree there, the tall one not the short one... yeah take a right there"

Anyway, the plan was to spend four or five days chilling out, do a bit of snorkeling and and work on our sun tans (or, as it turns out, burns). But after two days of hearing the diver crowd go on and on and on and on about the diving in the area, we decided to splurge on a diving course! We start tomorrow! WOOO YEEA!

We're 5 days away from diving at one of one of the top three dive spots in the world! It is a little island called Sipidan, if you want to google it. Oh, and its hammerhead season!! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH, Corinne is so excited!!

But, as of right now, we don't have a clue how to scuba dive. The course is pretty intense. I think we need to know more for this course than for getting a drivers license. We have to make our way through a 250 page text book before we get in the water tomorrow. What are we doing blogging??!!

Yegads... we've got homework to do!

-Jason and Corinne

PS does this little island have internet? How are we blogging? No. Diving is expensive. We had to boat to the mainland for a money run and we're blogging from our hotel. Without the big diesel generator, our island wouldn't even have electricity, let alone internet.

Mystery destination revealed!

As our plane touched down on the runway, we were greeted by heavy rain falling from clouds so dark that the street lights were on. It was 3:00 in the afternoon.

"Oh, jeez", we thought. Welcome to Borneo.

So there you have it. we're on the third largest island on Earth, and probably the one with the greatest biodiversity. There are more plants here than the whole of Africa. Borneo is also home to the largest flower in the world, and apparently its flagrant aroma most closely resembles rotting flesh. We sure are looking forward to seeing (and smelling) one of those!

Borneo is not a country. It is an island shared between three countries: Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei. We flew into the Malaysian corner of the island, into a city called Kota Kinabalu (KK). After the rain stopped, we found that the streets of KK were bustling with activity. Not too many humans, but lots of lizards, cockroaches, and at least one rat.

We were worried about the heat because Borneo straddles the equator. The best remedy: taking a local boat to a tiny tropical island for some hardcore snorkeling action! My oh my, it was a welcome change from our year of winters around the world. (Note: we are bad planners. NZ winter, followed by decent Chinese autumn weather, followed by Korean winter. ) We saw some pretty amazing corals and many colours of tropical fishes. Corinne touched one! Also, us whiteys and tropical islands... we thought we were so diligent with our sunscreen, but, alas, from the rear we look more like pinkys now.

We just left KK, and are doing some jungle walking in Mt. Kinabalu National Park. It is mostly quite nice and jungley. Remember the possible themes for this trip? Well, so far no orange men have stole our babies but Jason quickly proved the hypothesis that "leeches suck... blood". We have the gruesome photos to prove it, but that will have to wait for another day.

That brings us to another point... it turns out that Borneoan internet capabilities are a wee bit on the limited side. When we do find internet, it is usually so slow that anything other than quick emails are out of the question. So, we will try to blog when we can, but the photos will have to wait until we find a quicker internet source.

We must leave now... we just finished a delicious Malaysian dinner and its time to remove Jason's bandages and see if the bleeding has stopped. And just for the record, Corinne was a smart jungle trekker and wore socks. And just for the other record, Jason thinks that her socks will do her no good tomorrow if its rainy. Soon she'll be a bloody mess too! Mua ha ha.

-Jason and Corinne

Jason Santa!