Well, we've finished our volunteer work, not long till we leave Borneo!

The 'Tropical Garden' where we've been working is on the Sabah tourist trail as part of the 'Poring Hot Springs' facility. There are also Bamboo and Orchid Gardens, A Rafflesia (the world largest flower) center, Butterfly center, Canopy walkway, waterfalls and bat caves and of course, the hot springs themselves. The tropical garden didn't have many animals - an eagle hawk, turtles, more birds, Deer, Monkeys and a semi-wild/Rehabilitated Orangutan named 'Jackee'.

Jackee was great! Shes free to come and go into the jungle whenever she wants, shes very dolcile and friendly (although cos shes massive she can also be a little intimidating when shes running towards you!), shes also a big fan of bananas ;) Apparently the Tropical Garden (TG) has rehabilitated 5 other Orangutans in the past, although Jackee is the only one that comes back for supplemental feeds.

We've spent most of our time either with Jackee, looking for reptiles or designing and producing signs and brochures for the TG, cos thats something their seriously lacking. We had some success on the reptiles hunts. We've seen millions of lizards, skinks, and 3 snakes (damn elusive are snakes!) one of which i nearly trod on as we were making our way back fom the restuarant at night! We looked it up when we got home and ID'd it as a highly venomous Malayan Striped Coral Snake.... close one!!!! Our best find was a beautiful Oriental Vine Snake, which i knew wasn't dangerous and so was able to pick up and save from traffic on the road where we found it.

We've also been on long walks to the local waterfalls on the weekends. One of the trails has bat caves along the way. We were standing by the entrance to one of these, watching and listening (and smelling!) to the hundreds of bats inside when they produced this particularly loud fluttering noise. Kim suddenly turns, hands over her head, crouches down and screams "They're coming out!!!!".... they weren't. I laughed ALOT.

(Kim takes over) Tom would only describe the kittens screaming anyway! lol We found a very young abandoned kitten and ended up hand rearing him. It was a lot of hard work and sleepless nights but amazing when he finally got how to eat from a syringe and magical when he gave his first purr. Theres a happy ending aswell as he's now suckeling his adoptive mother cat dry and being looked after by an awesome charity called the SPCA in Kota Kinabalu.

(Back to Tom) So yeah our time in Poring has had its ups and downs, the work got boring at times but there was lots of other things to do. When it came time for us to leave we went into work to hand them a copy of all the work we'd done, our volunteer passes and the keys to our free volunteer accomodation. Boy, did we get a nice suprise! Everyone from the whole place was there for a big meal in our honour. We were presented with gifts, there were speeches, then (shock, horror) we were asked to give speeches, which we oh so successfully improvised ;) All in all it was a great send off and to cap it all off we were given a free lift (19 kilometers) to the bus stop to head back to the capital city of Sabah, Kota Kinabalu, for our flight out of Borneo.