It's a long way to Long Pa'Sia

After our adventures mountaineering and diving - which Si assures me he's writing about and not just looking up football scores - we headed to Long Pa'Sia which Si's mentioned briefly before but I'll go from the beginning because it's a pretty cool place.

If you take the map of Sabah and go south from KK you come to Sipatang (this was a two hour drive in one of the as per usual racing taxis - a few evil looks in the rear view mirror seemed to help). Sipatang is a rather non-descript little town on the sea but served good roti (thin bread pancake things). The roti milo I had (milo is a chocolate drink powder over here) was particularly good - even with (or despite) the curry sauce they provided with it.

From Sipatang we jumped into 4x4s and started the four hour drive south east to Long Pa'Sia. Again on the map, you can't get much further south in Sabah and we were pretty much on the Sarawak border. We were on our way with Pip, Sam and Julia (all staff from expedition) and all had been in Danum Valley like Simon, ably accompanied by a great guy called Hanry.

Hanry lead some of the Raleigh trekking groups and is a proper jungle warrior having grown up running round with his parang in the jungle (NB Parang = big jungle knife). After our bumpy ride in (you don't get in without a 4x4) we arrived in the most magical place I'd seen in Sabah (except maybe the top of Mt K). The prettiest and most well kept village (flowers rather than litter as I was familiar with) although under the surface still all the aspects of village life I'd got used to whilst being here. Volleyball at 5pm, the cheeky kids, and the same wooden stilted houses with their verandahs outside and large spacious rooms inside where generations of the same family stay.

That first evening we had dinner at Hanry's family house - fresh locally grown greens, rice and soup before a beer on the verandah and an early night ready for the morning. Just a couple more words about how they live - most of the homes in the village have solar panels provided by the government since they are so far off ever being able to be on any form of national grid. They seemed to have a good water system (my new speciality!) with piping leading to a tap just out the back of the house where we also had the bucket shower / portaloo / fire to cook on outside etc.

Starting our Stroll
The trek was a three day trip. We trekked out at the very civilised time of 9am on the Saturday morning and did a pretty easy trek. The jungle is primary rainforest - that means that it has never been logged and is in its original state. It is gorgeous, so many shades of greens and shapes of leaves and fungi and just things to look at. Although not a lot of animals or bugs to see (Alex would be coping just fine so far). Before leaving we'd had a go at making the traditional banana leaf wrapped rice. Simon was surprisingly better at this than me and, although I don't think Hanry packed our attempts, we had this wrapped rice for lunch with some chilli sauce and curried meat.

The guides with us were amazing. There was (from left to right) Hanry, a guy called Nooh (even more of a jungle warrior than Hanry) and two porters - Harry and Johannes. The porters would go ahead before each stop we had and make benches and all sorts before we got there. You can give these guys a parang and they'll build anything. We had spoons and cups made from bamboo, a sofa by the river on the first night to sit on and generally they find a way of sorting out any luxury item you need.




So the first day we reached our camp for the evening at about 2pm. We set up hammocks and bashers - Si and I had a brilliant 'bunk bed style hammock' set up that we put together with a bit of guidance from Hanry - it was four months ago that we first learnt it! That night the guys went out hunting but unfortunately didn't get anything in time for dinner which was rice, wild garlic, fresh water shrimps, chilli. And Tiger beers. They even put candles out for us! It felt very weird being treated as guests after so long. Although not altogether unpleasant.

Our Jungle Sofa

The guides went back out hunting later on and brought back a mouse deer (a small deer) which we had curried for breakfast. The second day was a tougher trek a lot of ups and down, scrambling and climbing around a bit but it was well worth it. We saw some ancient sites of importance in the local culture. The people form an ethnic group known as the Lundayeh people and they have some interesting legends about their forefathers. They were a head hunting tribe - collecting the heads of neighbouring tribes would demonstrate their strength and prowess. Fortunately they don't do that now although there were definitely stories and secret things that they still wouldn't share despite them being very keen on the whole to share their stories and lives with us. One thing I particularly liked was a tradition of having a long crocodile of rice on a table at a wedding with many dishes around it that everyone then ate together. The head of the crocodile would be a boars head or something similar.

Bat Cave
We had the pleasure of visting the Bat Cave on Sunday, another experience ticked off the list. It required a 15m abseil down to get in - no harness or anything just a big thick rope and leaning out from the muddy and slippy wall. Unfortunately our picture of the glowing orange eyes starring down at the mad humans who had invaded their cave for 10 minutes or so doesn't want to show up properly on this page - so this is another bat picture.

Maga Falls

After the bats an all together more magical and not to be too cheesy but pretty special experience. Maga Falls is a beautiful series of waterfalls over a long flattish plateau with jungle rearing up on each side of you. It's my preferred wedding venue at the moment but Simon says it's a bit impractical :-( It won't come over in the photos here but it was tranquil yet awesome at the same time. For once using awesome in the right context.

Enough of that. We stayed the night in a camp that Nooh had built. He found the sight in 1979 as the area was next in line to be logged. Nooh threatened the loggers with his parang and got locked up for a week by the police but in some roundabout way it stopped the loggers short of the Maga Falls area and it is why it is still a primary rainforest area today. The camp was properly plush with an A frame style sleeping area for us (complete with its own resident bat), some seating areas, camp cooking area and the beautiful Sungai Sia (Red River) to bathe in. It was cold but very red from iron ore (I think) in the water.

We got acquainted with a local tipple - a sweet fruity sherry type drink that was apparently 50% but still quite drinkable. We're trying to find a bottle in the supermarket to take to Ko Tao with us at the moment. The guides also performed the local warrior dance for us which we'd seen a couple of times but is always good to see.

The third and final day was a very different walk. We had two river crossings quite early on and were walking through very different forest. Secondary rainforest. It's amazing the difference in types of trees growing and there's an obvious difference in size and height since the area was logged about 30 years ago. It does form a scar on the landscape and towards the end of the walk we were effectively walking back to the village on an old logging track that will take a long time to 'heal'.

Even so as we were trekking that morning we heard an oo oo oo sound from some nearby trees. (That sound effect should be like the oo in who - Simon is much better at all these animal noises than me..) It was a family of gibbons - we could see exactly which trees they were up in and they were clearly talking to some other gibbons in another tree - probably commenting on the strange tall bearded fella walking past. Anyway for the life of us we couldn't actually see them. Si thought he saw the black shadow of them moving and we could see the trees moving and shaking but they were incredibly elusive. Even so, just hearing the noise of these wild animals there around us put a smile on my face and it was a bit of a highlight of the trip for me.

We stopped for lunch on the last day about an hour and half before the village. It started spitting with rain as we ate our tapioca and condensed milk although Hanry assured us it was only a shower. Showing just how much these jungle types know, the heavens opened 5 minutes later and the loudest clap of thunder and lightening shattered the sky just above our heads. We headed back to the village and it didn't stop raining or thundering until we were practically home; we couldn't have got any wetter. It was very good to be back.

Leeches
I've just realised I've managed to write all that without a mention of leeches. Si had had some experience with them in Danum but my experience was limited to one guy, one day in Miruru getting a tiny leech on his boot. So this was proverbially being dropped straight in at the deep end. Every stop we would each pick 5 or so leeches out of each boot and hope they hadn't crawled through our socks. Unfortunately they quite often did. Although I didn't get any actually biting until the last afternoon when one nibbled by big toe and little toe and my ankle (although that hairy ankle isn't mine and is in fact Simons). For some reason I didn't seem to get the profuse bleeding that everyone else got with their bites so I'm a bit worried about my circulation now :o My general conclusion about leeches is 'annoying little buggers' but that's about it. I might have had more to say if - like one of the girls with us - they'd bitten my (not very expansive) cleavage or crawled somewhere else they shouldn't like some of our poor participants....

Back at Hanry's home we were treated to battered sweet potato, brown rice sticky bar things and lots of tea and coffee. His niece and nephew took great delight in trying to use our camera. As you can see by the picture alongside, the little boy (Nathanial) is showing great talent in capturing his subjects.....

Dinner was wild boar, soup, more local greens and rice. It was delicious and felt well deserved after our 3 days in the jungle. That evening this old dude who is the best and most respected warrior dancer in the village came to perform for us.

We had a great time in Long Pa'Sia. The village are trying to encourage a bit more tourism which is a good thing for them. They have a home stay programme and Hanry is going to be pushing his trek leading. Couple of useful contacts for anyone reading that might ever be in the area is to look up Long Pa'Sia homestays and Hanry is on hbaktian@hotmail.com

It's been good to be on email and stuff to people over the last week or so and good to see so many of you reading about our travels! Simon's going to put up some cute piccies of monkeys next and then we'll be off out of Sabah to continue the journey in Thailand for a while.

All the best for now,

Charlotte