Some numbers to start with:

• Pictures taken: 1699 [me:1191, my wife: 508]
• Flights: 7
• Leech bites: 4 [all on me].
• Leeches discovered still attached while in the shower: 1.
• Hardware failures: 1.
• Highest temperature: 36 degrees; humidity: 95%. [Accuweather ‘real feel’ suggestion: 48 degrees].

Child friendly; fabulous weather; relaxing walks; bug free. Unsurprisingly, the rain forests in Borneo are none of these. If you are thinking of taking your kids, don’t!

We got back via a 22 hour jaunt on Saturday morning, and it was fabulous, fascinating and frankly exhausting in equal measure. Our time there was split into 4 sections: Kota Kinabalu, the Kinabatangan river, the Danum valley, and the lazy bit at the end – Gaya Island.

We kicked off with a couple of nights in a massive suite in the quite nicely appointed but atmosphere free Jesselton Hotel in KK. One highlight: my wife caused a disturbance in the force by having the temerity to ask for a second cup of coffee at breakfast. The waitress looked at us both blankly, conferred with her manager at some length and returned saying, no, that they didn’t go in for that sort of thing. All down to experience, I guess.

We deliberately left this part of the trip free, so we could give ourselves a chance to acclimatise to the time difference, and try to get used to the weather. We had a walk around a market on the Sunday morning, which was set up in the street right outside the hotel, and it was scalding. We both looked like radishes after about 5 minutes.

We left KK with a short flight to Sandakan, followed by an equally snappy transfer to the Sepilok Nature Resort, which we had one night at.

It wasn’t a bad venue. The a la carte food was very good, and the air conditioned room was spotless. They were doing a fair amount of renovation work while we were there: some sort of platform out onto the small lake that the place is built around. One minor annoyance: our itinerary had left us some free time the afternoon we arrived, and when I asked at reception if there was anywhere in walking distance that was interesting, the receptionist said no, and tried to flog me an orchid garden walking tour. She neglected to tell me that we were about 100 metres from the entrance to the Sepilok reserve. Our fault though: our travel company had given us a detailed document which explained this, but we were both dead on our feet.

We had our first taste of the rain forest with a night walk. Our guide was emphatic about a simple piece of advice: don’t touch anything. We saw a lot of interesting wildlife but beyond the realms of all but image intensifying technology. For the record, the list included flying squirrels, some sort of otter variant, a mouse deer [cute!], and a selection of pit vipers. Oh, and our first ever tarantula and scorpion. Separately, as opposed to some sort of I’m-creepier-than-you bake-off.

This isn’t the tarantula, just a bloody big spider:

And one of the things filed under “don’t touch”: the guide said the filaments on the caterpillar’s back were like pieces of glass, and even brushing against it was extremely painful:

An awful picture of the scorpion. All of these were taken with the macro lens which I was really struggling to focus by torchlight:

We had been advised by our travel company to get some head torches. While generally pretty useful over the course of the trip, using one on that first night walk in the forest was a mistake: every weird flying insect (however weird you are thinking, double it) for miles came over to check it out and then seek consolation by butting themselves to death against my forehead. This was quite unpleasant.

The morning after we went into the Sepilok reserve to see a feeding session for the orang utans. Part of the entertainment was watching the resident macaque [universally seen as a pest] raiding party, stealing the food faster than the orang utans could gather it up. It has to be said that the orang utans were a bit laissez faire about the whole thing. The image of one ape hanging languidly from a rope by his hands and feet, having a poo, sticking his finger up his arse and then sniffing said finger will stay with me for some time. it reinforced the fact that, fascinating as the orang utans are, you wouldn’t want to come home and find an adult one installed in the living room.

Unfortunately, the nursery was off the tour due to someone – staff or visitor, I can’t remember which – having fallen and broken an arm, and that part of the facility was having to be hastily renovated. So our consolation was having a mooch around a very newly established sun bear reserve.

Worth the visit. Despite the fact that they look like cuddly toys, one of the staff there was saying that they will go through you for a shortcut.

From Sepilok, we had one of many Bond-villain style speedboat transfers, taking us from the coast up into the mouth Kinabatangan River. We had a total of three nights in two venues, starting with the Abai Jungle Lodge, and then the Kinabatangan River Lodge. It’s hard to be concise here, because we packed so much in. The lodges themselves were really good fun: great buffet food, simple but spotless accommodation, great guides and just stacks of wildlife. Again, this was a litany of the rare, the weird and the dangerous. Three highlights: pigmy elephants, a 3.5 metre salt water crocodile, and a sleeping blue-eared kingfisher which I got close enough to touch, when our guide spotted it [how?!?] on a low hanging branch on the riverbank. Unfortunately, I had only packed my long lens so had no way of getting a shot of the fella.

We got stuck in the heaviest tropical storm either of us had ever experienced when we were boating it back from seeing the elephants on the second night. It started to get a little tense at one point, as the guide was having to bail water, while we had hugely dramatic thunder overhead. Luckily, we were issued with bin liners to put our bags in. While my Crumpler claims to be waterproof, 50 minutes in an unrelenting torrent would have been too much for it.

It was at the first lodge that my hardware failure manifest: I’d taken my MacBook Air to process images as we went along. Unfortunately it failed to register either my or my wife’s cameras. The console chirpily reported that ‘Port 1 of hub reported error 0x0002c7 while doing clearing port failure’. Fabulous! The network at the lodges was pretty much what you’d expect in a rainforest [although one of my wife’s FaceBook contacts joked that it was probably still better than he was getting in Norfolk]: something akin to a damp piece of string. Despite a cry for help to home [via an email which took about 20 minutes to send. Thanks for trying James!!], I couldn’t find a fix, so had a steadily increasing number of eggs loaded on an 8Gb Compact Flash card / basket. This is why my image count was pretty low, by my own standards. I subsequently bought a card reader in KK and haven’t bothered to try and fix the problem since we got back.

From the river lodge, we had a 5 hour transfer to the Borneo Rainforest Lodge in the Danum Valley, where we spent 3 nights. This place was astonishing: the room [which included an outdoor bath on the balcony], the food, the staff and service were all right out of the top drawer, and about as good as we’ve had on any holiday.

On the first trip into the rainforest, I have to admit that I thought the leech socks we were advised to wear were a little on the theatrical side. Right up to point when my wife said about an hour in, “what’s that pink stuff on your shirt?” I had unthinkingly gone for the rakish, casual explorer look, and hadn’t tucked my shirt in. The leech bites themselves are, of course, completely painless. It’s more of a nuisance that they continue to bleed for the rest of the day.

This was the most physically demanding few days of the holiday and, for that matter, what either of us had experienced for a very long time. The temperature was routinely over 35 degrees. Combined with the very high humidity, when we were slogging it up some very steep terrain, we had to occasionally remind ourselves that we were supposed to be having fun.

A sighting of an orang utan eluded us right until the last gasp: 20 minutes before the end of the last walk on the morning that we were checking out. Our guide had warned us that the nightly storms we were having were going to suppress movement, and with it the chances of a sighting.

This is pretty typical of the challenges that you have trying to get decent shots in a densely wooded area, and just after dawn: it’s basically a high altitude ginger blob:

But we saw her in the wild, and all but one of the guests we spoke to during our stay were less fortunate than we were. I recorded the event with my little tracking app. The screenshot shows the exact latitude and longitude of the tree that we saw her in. All very academic, but I doubt she’s still there:

Lat & Long

From The Danum Valley, we had a 3ish hour transfer in a serious four wheel drive jeep to the airport at Lahad Datu for the flight to KK. “Airport” is an evocative word, all bustle and industrial amounts of people. For Lahud Datu, think “canteen furnished with a security corner”. bargain of the holiday: the coffees were 40p each there.

The flight itself was pretty eventful. We were circling fairly close to KK which was having some very heavy rain, and it was getting pretty lumpy and bumpy. The pilot held us there for about 15 minutes before giving up and diverting us to Labuan island. We both misheard the message from the pilot and thought we were heading to Java, which would have been fun. But after about 45 minutes in another anodyne waiting room we were on our way again.

The final stint of the holiday was a very lazy 4 nights at the Bunga Raya Resort on Gaya island. It was very nice indeed, it has to be said, being ferried around the place in golf buggies – quite a contrast to the preceding days’ forced marches in the rainforest. The food was merely good, in comparison to some of our earlier hostelries, and pretty expensive. The staff were great though, and we had a couple of nice evenings sitting in the bar watching re-runs of world cup games and chewing the fat.

We did nip back over to KK one evening to eat at a place called the Emperor’s Delight: cheap fab Chinese food, while you watch the chefs expertly wrestling dough into noodles by hand.

We had hung juries with some of the other kit that we got for the trip. Opinions were polarised over travel pillows called ‘travelrests’: these were bought after a good 30 seconds research by me, when  I stumbled on a very good article in the WSJ reviewing some of the better offerings. I thought mine was great but my wife couldn’t get on with hers at all. We also picked up a small pair of folding binoculars for my wife: Nikon Sportstars. Conversely she thought they were great; I thought they had the worst chromatic aberration I’d ever seen. But they were relatively cheap and ticked a box for portability.

I got great value out of one of my Christmas presents, a Sony Action Camera (basically a Go Pro wannabe: much better value). The waterproof housing got a fair workout when I did a bit of snorkelling in the last few days.

Final point on the hardware: my camera kit. It was a pretty uncompromising environment, and I continue to be massively impressed by the 5D Mark III’s ability to perform under duress. It was certainly a lot more challenging than my camera’s last outing, which was a wedding on the outskirts of Swansea. Jokes about hairy primates at both events carefully navigated I think.

Oh, and after my considered analysis of lens usage, and whether or not to take my 16-35 F2.8, I carried it around rainforests and boat excursions and used it precisely zero times. Never mind.