Sorry about yesterdays blog. I just read it and I can not remember writing a single word of it, so I really enjoyed reading it! I wonder if Dylan Thomas enjoyed his work in the same way the next day?

I did say I was going to write up two days in that session so here goes the lead up for how I came to be in such a state last night.

Our guide book suggested that we try to immerse ourselves in Kadazandusun Culture so we thought OK why not.

We rang the nice people at Monsopiad's village early in the morning and arranged for our visit, we then had our usual breakfast in the Beach house and waited for our Taxi which arrived at about 9:00 o'clock. The drive to the village was about three quaters of an hour into the jungle and as we got out of the car we were treated like visiting royalty and formally welcomed to the village, taken to one of the huts overlooking the river and offered a bamboo cup of chilled rice wine. It was absolutely delicious despite the fact that the sun had only just apeared, never mind passed the yard-arm!

We were then introduced to our guide who led us to the village's special stone which has kept the good spirits of the jungle in the village for the last three hundred years. We were then taken to the chief's hut where we had to remove our shoes and ask the spirits forgiveness for disturbing them before they would let us in. Inside were various prized possessions of the tribe, aranged for visitors to see but in pride of place, hanging from the ceiling were 42 skulls of enemy tribesmen, taken many years ago of course. We were assured that no heads had been hunted for at least eighty years. These skulls gave the Chief Monsopiad special powers untill his death some fourty years ago. They continued to five the village and Monsopiad's decendants good fortune now and aparantly were responsible for leading us to visit their village. Hmmmm.

After the Skulls we were taken down to an area near the river to learn about Kadazundusun hunting techniques. We were allowed to use their catapults at targets and then the best bit for me we were shown how to use a blow pipe. They used to use non-fatal poisons on the darts to put the animal they were hunting to sleep rather than kill it, just in case they accidentally shot the wrong sort of monkey or other creature that was their friend. Anyway, no poison today but we shot at a monkey target and I got it in the head which aparantly was not good but Mandy got it in the neck which was excellent and our guide got very excited!

We were then shown one of the living huts and various cooking and rice wine making operations and then we were allowed to wander around the village whilst our hosts welcomed some more visitors that the skulls magic had attracted to the village. This included crossing the river on a suspension bridge typical of the region, although they now use steel cabels rather than vines to suspend them.

Eventually we were invited to the Mens Hut to wach a performance of dance and music lasting about half an hour it was fantastic and I captured quite a bit of it on video.

We finally said our farewells to our new friends and got a taxi back to Kota Kinabalu where we decided to go for lunch at the rather exclusive and somewhat boring Tanjung Aru Plaza where we followed the advice of our guide book again and had Tapas at Los Playeros Tapas Bar where surprise surprise we had Tapas! This made a nice change from Asian food and was very good although eating in an almost deserted shopping mall was not really our style. We explored a few parts of Kota Kinabalu that we had not seen untill the rain started to threaten and then we decided that we should follow our new rule and find a bar in which to sit out the rain, which we duely did, choosing the Pirates of Borneo Bar on the waterfront. We got into rather bad company in there and to be fair the rain fell most of the evening so eventually we decided to have the bar's signature dish a Seafood Platter ( see Photos, it was amazing!) which was a fantastic way to celebrate our last night in Borneo, washed down with even more buckets of beer and left at about eleven hence me deciding to write the blog when we got back to the hotel and not quite finishing it!

Rating....a five star day.