At the end of our month of volunteering it was with a sense of relief that we escaped into the departure lounge of Trichy airport to wait for our Air Asia flight to KL and then on to Kuching in Sarawak.  At Kuching airport we got a familiar red and yellow taxi to the Basaga, our old favourite haunt when staying over in the provincial capital.  Breathing in the warm and humid air en route to the hotel my pervasive feeling was one of coming home. Next morning I had a wander round the town and got a haircut and was reminded what a cool place Kuching or Cat City really is.  Culturally diverse with Chinese and Malay communities and tribal influences everywhere.  There is now a new bridge over the Kuching River to the Sarawak parliament house, a kind of Asiatic county hall. That evening we dined with Mr Steve, Sue’s old colleague from our time in the little town of Saratok, a few hundred miles further up the coast.  Steve has stayed here since the British C...

I'm now back in the UK and hopefully looking at the home run to selling dad's house.  It was good to spend time back in Miri following our holiday in Vietnam.  One evening Sue and I did a walk around the Shell residential campus near her apartment.  We'd often done this walk before, but now the bungalows are steadily being demolished and the area turned into a nature park.  The last time I'd been was the evening before I set off to be at dad's bedside in February and we had seen hornbills flying in the distance. While I was in the UK Sue got to see more of the hornbills, who seem to be a nesting pair and on this occasion they posed for us in a tree only thirty or forty metres from where we were walking.  I got my camera out and snapped loads of photos as the two birds hopped around the branches striking a variety of poses for me.  They are the strangest of creatures and who'd have thought they have such beautiful eyelashes? Getting such a good vie...

The morning after the visit to the Deer and Lang Caves a smiling Larry guided us upriver by canoe to yet more caves and a Penan village.  The Penan were originally nomadic, but are now largely settled in villages.  In the Penan village in Mulu National Park they make some income by selling their craft work and other souvenirs to the passing travellers.  I bought this mat. After lunch by the river we were taken by boat to the start of our trek.  Here Larry left us in the hands of Hafiz, who works for him, for the nine kilometre walk to Camp 5 where we were to spend the night.  It's a gentle trail through rainforest and most of the way it chucked it down so that the hundred or so trekkers in various parties arrived at the camp soaked to the skin. That night we all slept as best we could in the damp dormitories of Camp 5, while a large bat circled around the rafters catching insects.  Next morning I, Hafiz and my Dutch companions set off the "Headhunte...

We flew from Hanoi to Miri, via KL on Saturday 26th July.  Miri felt like unfinished business as I had to leave there in such a rush in early February to get to dad's bedside.  As our budget airline dropped down to the coast over the oil rigs and offshore service vessels and towards Miri Airport I felt both sad and excited to be back.  My stay didn't last long before I returned to the airport on the Monday to take the short thirty minute flight up to Mulu National Park.  Sue was back at work so I thought I'd use the weekdays constructively by visiting Sarawak's only World Heritage Site and doing a three-day trip along the "headhunter's trail". The trip had been arranged for me by Sue's colleague Kerry, who is a friend since our days in the small Sarawak town of Saratok in 2011-13.  The trip is run by Larry a local guide and entrepreneur with his finger in many pies.  Like so many things in Sarawak the tour had a fairly haphazard feel to it.  I was ...

I woke up about one am this morning and for some reason checked my emails and found one from Sue only a few minutes old.  She'd just woken up when her hotel room in Kota Kinabalu started moving and things falling over.  I checked the internet and then got another email from Sue confirming there'd been an earthquake under nearby Mount Kinabalu.  Now there is more information that there are some people missing and killed on the mountain, including someone our friend Kerry knows.

Sue had to spend a couple of weeks in Kota Kinabalu ("KK"), the capital of what was once British North Borneo and is now the Malaysian province of Sabah.  Over the weekend we decided to travel to Sandakan on the far side of Sabah to visit her fellow Project Manager Suzanne and her friend Mindy.  Sue took a plane and I hired a 150cc motorbike from the good people at "Gogo Sabah" http://gogosabah.com/transportation/ . I had a great 300 kilometre blast up winding mountain roads to Mount Kinabalu National park then down the other side on a road that became straighter and dominated by palm oil trucks pumping black diesel fumes as they laboured to the nearest mill.  The town itself is a charmless frontier outpost at the arse end of Malaysia facing the Philippines, which it eyes suspiciously.  The Sabah hotel does however have one of the finest views in the world from its bedroom windows. It rained for most of our two-day stay which we spent failing to get into the...

After Christmas we drove back to Miri, stopping in our little town of Saratok for a few days en route.  Morgan, the British Council mentor who now rents the house that was our home for two years, kindly let us stay there while she was away for the holidays.  It was lovely to catch up with teachers Sue worked with and some of my old students.  While out walking around the rice paddy and palm oil plantations by the river, this lovely man gave me a bunch of the most tasty lychees I've ever eaten.  Kind of sums up the kindness and generosity of the locals. Back in Miri our friend Kerry made the excellent suggestion of going to the beach to watch the sunset.  This we did accompanied by Kerry and Iain, another of Sue's mentors working in Miri.  Shortly after sunset we were joined by Iain's partner Sian, (another mentor) and their lovely daughter Ixsora.  Kerry also brought beer and wine and best of all a large bag of salt and vinegar crisps. Whil...

For Christmas we decided to drive down from Miri to Kuching and stay at one of our favourite hotels - the Basaga.  It's an old colonial house away from the touristy riverfront with beautiful gardens which make it a green oasis amid the mouldy concrete of Kuching, which oddly means "cat" in Malay. On Christmas day morning I went for my customary run, which took me along the riverfront as far as this culvert and then inland back in the direction of the Basaga.  On the way I passed St Thomas' Cathedral, Anglican I think.  It was packed with worshippers, including an overspill standing on the steps outside, all singing carols.  All these people devoted to a church that originated in England made me feel a little embarrassed to be an English atheist.  If they had known I guess most of them would have been terribly shocked. Mostly in this society I keep my beliefs to myself, not because I feel scared or intimidated by people's faith, be it Christianity, Islam...

Sue left yesterday afternoon for meetings in Kota Kinabalu and Kuching, leaving me with an empty apartment and a new car to explore with.  I started my day with a run in the opposite direction to my first run two days ago. I headed towards the bridge that links the peninsula to the centre of Miri, passing en route a large and completely deserted housing estate owned by Shell.  I ran into the estate, saying hello to several patrolling "auxiliary" policemen en route.  None of them challenged my right to be there - old white blokes seem to have a free pass. The estate is in idyllic pine woodland next to a palm-fringed and empty beach and is perfectly maintained - roads swept and hedges trimmed, although no one lives there anymore. Shocking when I think of how many people in Sarawak live in tumbledown shacks.  But then multi-nationals like Shell have the money to do what they want and they always look after their assets. On the return leg I ran into the Boa...

Seventeen days after getting a dawn bus for Rome in Locorotondo I finally arrived in Miri with Sue yesterday. This morning I pulled on my running shoes and went for an exploratory jog around the strange peninsula where Sue's apartment is located.  You can see from the map that Miri has a river which snakes inland and creates a long tongue of land between the main city centre and the sea.  This tongue is home to a bizarre combination of smart apartment complexes, like Sues, a golf course, a fishing village, an idyllic but rubbish-strewn and sandfly infested beach and the moorings for literally hundreds of oil rig service and supply vessels, some the size of largish oil tankers. I ran around the edge of the golf course to the tip of the tongue, where I spotted a couple of paunchy expats finishing a hole while a tanker the height of a four-story building slid slowly down the river behind them.  Then I turned around and ran back up the tongue before stopping to take t...

The last few days in Saratok passed in a whirl of packing and ticking off jobs on lists, all the time my view of our little town shifting from the present to the past.  On Sunday 22nd September Sue drove me to Sarikei to get the boat to Kuching.  I looked out of the window at the jungle, the banana plants and the roadside shops and longhouses thinking this may well be the last time I see them.  As the boat surged up to the pontoon I said my goodbyes to Sue and passed my luggage (a rucksack and my bicycle encased in a large cardboard box) up to some helping hands on the rear deck. This was the start of three days of relentless travel by boat to Kuching, then a plane the next morning to Kuala Lumpur followed by a dash across the airport to catch my flight to Heathrow.  At Heathrow I got a taxi to Sue's brother Mike's house in Uxbridge where I left the bike.  After a pleasant night catching up with news from Mike, Tina, Adam and Tim, I got the bus on Tuesday t...

After three wonderful days at Batu Ritung Homestay I really felt sad to leave.  Supang gave me a farewell present of Bario rice and a rice scoop and showed me, William and Michele around the family museum, a room where Supang and her husband keep heirlooms and mementos.  Including the battered old leather briefcase her father used to use. After saying our goodbyes Matteo came to guide us back to Bario.  Instead of walking the water buffalo trail it had been decided we would travel by canoe.  This is the route most supplies take to get to Pa Lungan and still involves a fifty minute walk before reaching the boat, then a two kilometre drive at the other end. It turned out to be an eventful trip as the river level was very low and instead of a thirty minute journey we bumped and ground our way over shallows and half submerged trees for about an hour and a half. At the end of our river journey we were met by Stephen Baya of the Junglebluesdream Homestay, where w...

  As a paid up carnivore there is no flesh I love more than wild boar.  It's pork with all the flavours turned up, fantastic in rich sauces, sausages or straight off the barbecue, dribbling in fat so good you could drink it by the cupful.  It's a staple meat for the villagers of Pa Lungan and as luck would have it they had killed two the day I arrived and I got an invite to the barbecue the next day. So on Sunday afternoon I joined Stephen and his family and friends around the fire.  The combination of woodsmoke, fatty meat and thin crispy crackling was divine.  The hunter-gatherer ambiance was completed by the salivating dogs circling around the group, waiting for tossed scraps, a reward and an incentive to do their job on future hunts. The following day Stephen's brother Matteo, the village Headman, took me out for a day trekking in the jungle, accompanied by Supang's young dog Baddei. We ate lunch by a stream.  Mine was fried rice and wild boar...

Life moves at its own pace in Bario with no compromise for visitors on a tight timescale.  Douglas' promise that he would get a guide to come and see me at De Plateau Homestay finally materialised on my second morning there, by which time I was climbing the walls with frustration.  Liam is an amiable middle aged local kelabit who has returned to his roots after taking a "package" from Shell down on the coast.  He quickly disabused me about the availability of guides and trekking routes, which have dwindled as a result of logging activity.  During a chat with Liam I conceived a plan to walk to the village of Pa Lungan about twelve kilometres away, on a track which can be managed without a guide. I set off soon after my meet with Liam and followed his fairly vague directions.  It turned out to be a delightful walk through a small village, alongside quiet streams and paddies and into gentle woodland.  I had expected a track negotiable by four-wheel drives,...