Simply cycling around
This is it, finally after one week staying in Kuala Lumpur with Sabariah an Amir’s family, we are on the road again. Thanks for your welcome guys :-) It was nice! I wish we would spend less time front of our screen and more outside but we were sooo later on our blog. Today we want to reach a town where we can observe fireflies in their natural environment. Hope it’s nice.
Now everything is fixed, we can leave Kuala Lumpur tomorrow morning. This time IS the real one. Tomorrow we leave for sure. The place where I bought the filter is not far away from Batu cave so we decided to do that today more than tomorrow morning. Batu cave is free and just around the city centre of KL. Lots of people come here naturally.
Today we are going to visit the Niah cave. We had to come back first to the “long distance” bus station. Now we know there is a public bus going there. The trip to Niah junction (where the bus stops on the highway) cost 15 Ringgit. Then we had lunch had to catch a local taxi (15 Ringgit each for one way). Finally there is a 4km walk in Niah national park to get to the cave.
This is the highest summit I’ve never been onto :-) We are the first two guys to get there with a Spanish guy. We did it without any torch which was even better (actually, my battery run out after 30 minutes this morning). Without any light we could enjoy the stars and feel all the atmosphere. The moon’s brightness was enough to see where we were going. We left this morning around 3am and arrived 2 hours and 15 minutes later. We now can see all the other guys walking slowly down there. The temperature up there is, I guess, between 0 and 5 degrees and it’s slightly windy. I won’t be able to stay too long up there because I will get cold if I don’t move.
As planned, well… not really, we stayed another night. I did not want to spend money on diving or snorkeling at first. The thing is there is no much else to do here. I’ve hesitated and finally paid a snorkeling session for 50Ringgit. Too bad I did not bring the GoPro with me because there is so much different fish here with amazing shape and colors.
We woke up this morning and figure out that we will stay another night. This island is beautiful and really controversial. A part of Mabul island has been bought by Sipadan Mabul Resort in the early 90’s to develop tourism and since that time, many other resort has been developed around the tiny island. The Mabul backpacker is situated at the “border” between this luxurious resort and the authentic village. There is a community of people here (mainly from philippines) who live on their boats. This place is a community where rich and poor people lives next to each other, not really together. The landscape is wonderful but it doesn’t feel right.
Today we are travelling from the Kinabatangan river to Mabul island. Stephane wants to go to Semporna because he knows there is one of the bests spots on this planet for diving and snorkeling. We share our thoughts with Mr. Aji who said that we should go to Mabul island which is very beautiful and a good base from where water activities start. Okay, sounds good, let’s do that :-)