After about five hours on a bus we were in Sandakan which was going to be our base for a bit as we had a number of things we wanted to do in the area. 

The journey was beautiful as we drove past Mount Kinabalu surrounded by cloud at the top and through jungle and forest to get there. Up and down across hilly terrain. Very excited to be here! 

We spent our time organising and booking things we wanted to do over the next week. 

Tom was excited that we could see both McDonalds and KFC from our bedroom window! Ha! We were staying in a relatively nice spot right on the waters edge. There were also lots of street foody places right there too which was handy. 

We were originally thinking that we would have time to go to Indonesian Borneo later in our trip to hopefully see orangutans in the wild. Though after looking into it you couldn't actually fly across the border from the Malaysian side to Indonesia, huff! The only way to get to the South was to endure a number of horrendous bus journeys or to fly from Jakarta or plane hop from Kuala Lumpur into a random airfield in the South and then on to where we needed to go. We weren't going to be at either of these places any time soon. It seemed like quite a bit a hassle and lots of expense to get there sadly. 

So we thought we had a plan for the week and then at the last minute Tom said we should go do a river trip in Kinabatangan, stop over night and come back in the morning so we could get some experience of being out in the sticks in the jungle and see some wildlife. Hopefully orangutans too! I didn't think we'd have time to do something like this. We'd have time if we left right at that moment and hired a car and drove ourselves there in time for the afternoon boat trip at 4pm. So we did and it turned out to be the best decision ever!!!!