The Adventures of Doug and Bec: Kuching

Our third tour organised by Daphne was a day trip to Bako National Park. We knew this was a must, as the wildlife and scenery is something we had heard about before the trip. The trip itself was probably the most expensive one we had done (about 200 Ringot or $70 per person) but was well worth it.

The day started with a 45 minute van ride to the little riverside village from where we would take a boat to the national park which is unreachable by road. The river itself was quite small, but from the height of the wharf, we could tell that the area has very large tides. The main wharf itself was about 6 metres above the current water height.

We headed downstream for about 5 minutes between mangroves before coming out into the South China Sea, and heading along the coast to our destination which took about 20 minutes in total. On the way we saw some amazing cliffs and jungles and also many fishing net structures out off the coast. We arrived at the main beach of the National Park, and due to the low tide we had to disembark on the slightly muddy beach as the wharf was high and dry!

From the beach we headed up to a large modern building which we found was the information centre and cafeteria, and shortly after arriving we were directed to the jungle right next to the building which had several monkeys moving around the canopy. These were the larger moneys on the island called Proboscis monkeys which are a protected species and only found in Borneo and have a long large nose, that looked like a beak and are orange in colour.

We spent the following two or three hours seeing a number of monkeys of different breads, a lemur up in a tree and also a large Pit Viper snake in a tree right next to us... which we learnt was extremely deadly! Unfortunately for Aussie tourists its looks just like green tree snake... so at first we were not too worried....

We walked during the morning, which involved walking through mangroves and climbing through a small hole in the rocks, and found ourselves at a small beach with several over tourists. Here I had a swim, upon the advice of our guide, with several of them (trying not to remember the crocodile warning signs back at the boat ramp) before we headed back to the cafeteria for lunch.

After lunch we spent an hour or so around the main beach, watching the many monkeys and wild boars. We found a group of boars in which one had an injured leg and it was sad to watch it get bullied by the dominant boar who obviously did not want the others in its territory.

In the afternoon we headed to the wharf which was now surrounded by water, and headed back to the boat ramp before a van ride back in which i think we both fell asleep once or twice after an exhausting day. As our tour explained, the day had been one of the hottest he had experienced there and was high 30's with 100% humidity!