So Dean has instructed me to update the blog.

Happy New Year every body.

Dean and I are sat in our hotel room in Kota Kinabalu, Borneo's capital, watching the cable delights of 'star movies' and HBO. It's windy and rainy outside, if it wasn't for the humidity I'd swear we were at home.

Luckily the weather has only just turned pants and we've been able to do everything we wanted in Borneo. Listen to me, how British talking about the weather! Anyway you probably want to know what we've been up to the last 3 weeks, well even if you don’t I’m going to tell you anyway.

We flew from Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur just after Christmas, due to shocking planning we had to spend the night in KL airport to wait for our flight to Kuching (in Borneo) So we turned up at the airport ready to settle down for a comfy night in the departure lounge when we realised A) there was no departure lounge as we were at the crappy air asia terminal and B) we had no money on us and the ATM's 'close' for the night...eventually we managed to scrape together enough for a Maccy D's and then found a empty spot on the airport floor. 8 hours later we were in Kuching, the capital of Sarawak (Western part of Malaysian Borneo). This is where we spent our last few days of 2009 and New Years Eve.

Again due to lack of planning we didn't know what there was in Kuching, turns out there was a cinema. We went twice, once for Sherlock Holmes, reasonably good and on New Years we saw Avatar, which was awesome. We are so rock'n'roll! But the main highlight and much more exciting than the cinema was seeing the Orangutans at a local rehabilitation centre. We were really lucky to see a teen and a mother and her new born baby swing down for feeding time, turns out orangutans are big milk drinkers...who knew? After taking about a Million pictures we reluctantly left, I had to keep an eye on Dean as he was pretty close to putting the baby in his pocket.

As there are loads of National Parks in Borneo we decided to pick the best to visit. Mulu was a short flight north and had some of the biggest, longest and highest caves in the world with amazing rock formations and also full of millions of bats, inside there are literally mountains of bat poop...it stinks. Whilst we were there we also went on the canopy sky walk which was a 480 meter walk way that took us right through the forest to look out over the tree tops.

As we were just a couple of hours from Brunei we decided to stop in to see our friend the Sultan. He wasn't home so we went to the regalia museum that holds all the gifts that people sent him for his coronation. Considering Queen Elizabeth and he are supposed to be BFF's she sent him a really naff looking vase. But what do you get for one of the richest men in the world? Brunei is in a word... dull. I think the fact that alcohol is banned here may have something to do with it? We had a day to waste so we took a boat and watched the sunset from the water village (basically a shanty town on water) and we accidentally did a 2 hour trek in preparation for the Mountain Climb. I say accidentally because it would have been just a pleasant walk up and down a hill, but someone....not me….. spotted a path and insisted on following it and point blank refused to turn back. Two hours later the sun was setting and we had just found our way out of the forest and to the foot of the hill. The tiredness though was nothing compared to what to our next big walk....

Some trivia for you. Mount Kota Kinabalu is the highest peak in South East Asia, it's over 4000 meters above sea level and Dean and I had paid money to climb it. Stupid.
I won’t bore you with the details, but it was tough. 4 hours climbing up to the rest stop, then waking up at 2am to scale vertical rock faces to reach the summit for sunrise and then another 6 hours down. The view from the top was amazing and well worth the pain. The pictures don’t do it justice but you could see Kinabalu city 90 km away. We were elated to have reached the top but dreaded the climb back down. It took a week for the pain to stop when walking down stairs.

After the mountain we took a crazy bus ride to Sandakan where we had a nice hotel with TV and DVD player. Apart from going to the Sepilok Orangutan Centre to see more awesome Orangy-booms we sat in and did nowt but watch the box. Boring but necessary, we couldn’t even walk!

Semporna was our last 'must-visit' spot as the dive sites are some of the best in the world. We were lucky enough to get permits for the Sipadan national park dive resort (only 120 are given a day) apparently it was Jacques Cousteau's favorite place to dive! The diving was amazing and we got to see loads of turtles and reef sharks, tropical fish and beautiful coral. We hired an underwater camera to capture the beauty of it, but it's harder than it looks taking snaps underwater so you'll have to make do with the fuzzy pix we took.

Flying to Manilla in the Philippines tomorrow, we've heard about some more great dive sites where you can dive with Whale sharks and Manta rays so they'll probably be our first stops.

Hope you enjoy the pictures.

Love

Katie and Dean xxx