Going on safari through the jungles of Borneo sounds like heaven to me and at last Peter and I made it there.

And needless to say, it didn’t disappoint.

The trip was amazing, made more so by a group of young Malaysians who take their guiding seriously and are very knowledgeable. We’d heard about Uncle Tan’s through the traveler’s grapevine and willingly (Peter not so willingly because he had a cold) put up with the very basic accommodation with its inevitable moldy aura for a week to view the wonderful animals, birds and creepy crawlies in their natural habitat.

Twice a day we took a boat safari, one at dawn (which I have to say initially was a bit of a struggle!!!) and then another again at dusk. Each time our guide Tony amazed us with his incredible jungle vision, spotting things we would never have seen by ourselves. Here we have a Great Egret, Tony, a White Breasted Eagle, a very rare sighting of a Borneo Gibbon, a Silver Leaf monkey, two Rhinoceros Hornbills, an Esturine Crocodile (and there were LOTS of those, apparently gobbling up at least one local a year!!!!), an Orangutan watching us from the river's edge, a Snake Necked bird, a Large Billed Kingfisher, another Hornbill and the beautitful and much less frequently seen red billed version)

We also got to see lots and lots of Proboscis monkeys, which was amazing because I’ve been waiting for years to see these guys and they were everywhere!

Between 10am and noon we walked around the jungle looking at the local flora and fauna: a Moniter Lizard taking a nap up a tree, a stunning Lantern Bug, a Flying Lizard (and I confess this picture is not one I took, because when you see them just sitting around on a tree they look nothing special, but in flight they’re so fast they’re near impossible to photograph, so this is a picture of someone else’s picture!), Pill Bugs which curl up into a tight ball when they're threatened, the apparently rare Four Lined Frog, a Cotton Bug and Cotton Bug Lavae swarm and later the butterfly they turn into, baby Borneo Blue Tarantula houses and about 30 feet up the tree an adult (called the Indian Black and White Striped Tarantula by the locals before an English conservationist recently “discovered” it) which must have been a good 6-8 inches across (!), a Harvest Spider which isn't really a spider at all, a 2-3 metre yellow bellied snake napping inside a tree (the name of which I have forgotten - oops sorry, I lost my note book), a Bearded Pig and Moniter Lizard enjoying a paddle together, and an Orangutan with its baby, which was an incredible sighting, but then later we saw another one - a youngster who came down towards us to swing around the canopy about 10 feet above our heads. Unfortunately that was the day my camera pooped out and I didn’t get any photos (needless to say I was gutted!),

And at about 9pm every evening, we did it all again. Here we have: the largest Scorpion I‘ve ever seen, a Buffy Fish Owl, a Blue Eared Kingfisher sleeping, the very funny looking Pointed Nosed Lizard, a White Lined Frog, a Tractor Centepede which felt very funny walking over your skin, the very poisonous Millipede (you don't want to wake up with one of those in your sleeping bag at night!!), a Red Legged Millipede, the very aggressive Hammerheaded Worm, a Stick Insect, a Bull Frog sitting comfortably in the top of a tree stump, a Cricket Frog, a mean looking red spider protecting her eggs, two Whip Scorpions facing off and a pretty crummy picture of a Reticulated Python which was hanging out by the river’s edge one night but it was a beautiful beast which Tony estimated to be about 3 – 4 meters long (a mere tiddler considering a recently spotted one was about 10 meters long – gulp!).

The local life around the camp was interesting too, with Bearded Boars snuffling around and Long-tailed Macaques trying to break into the huts on the scrounge, not to mention the ENORMOUS Huntsman Spider that liked to catch things right outside my hut every evening (uugghh!). But my last night there was the most exciting, as I had a sighting of a Civet Cat that came into the open-air dining room see if there was any scraps of food that had been overlooked.

We also had some very unfortunate sightings. Most of the time we never saw anyone but Uncle Tan's people on the river which was never more three boats twice a day, but the first shot shows what we saw early one morning on our way back to the camp: logs being brought down the river. It was our understanding that the timber business had stopped in this area, but then again illegal logging is rampant in Sabah. The next one is a Bearded Boar that had been caught in a deer snare and the locals just refused to deal with the situation. When we arrived, the lower part of his leg was barely holding on by a tendon. Another day we saw a Boar swimming across the river as fast as his little legs would propel him, probably very aware that the thick brown murky water holds predators of the long, silent and enormously jawed kind. We had already seen a boar who had run into an early demise and it wasn'd dead on the banks long before it was dragged down under to be eaten. The last shot is the most shocking. The World Wildlife Fund estimates that there are less than 1,000 Borneo Pygmy Elephants in existance. This is a photograph of a young one that we found (approximately three years old), freshly killed, on the side of the river one morning. It had been shot. The guides told us that the way the wildlife parks are set up in Sabah is that between the huge palm oil plantations there are small pockets of protected forest. These little pockets are connected by very narrow corridors that are usually on either side of a waterway. The problem is elephants can't read the Keep Out signs, and since there are no fences, they tend to wander onto the plantations and eat the yummy palm flowers and tender new shoots. It is illegal for these protected animals to be killed by anyone, but the plantation workers are allowed to shoot a gun to try and scare them away, but obvously that doesn't seem to be effective enough for them. One common ploy is to shoot these endangered elephants while they cross the corridor waterways, so they'll float down the river and end up on someone else's property. This is a disgusting practice perpetrated by the plantations who have already ruined the countryside to make their fortunes and now they are ruining the wildlife. The locals are forced to turn a blind eye because the plantations have so much power, and of course, as in most countries in SE Asia, the man with the biggest wallet prevails.