Quick stop; Bako National Park!

After a great days rest mooching around Kuching, we headed off for a couple of days and a night away at Bako National Park.  Its only an hour away but the final approach is by boat only, so staying a night seemed not only cost effective, but would also give us time to do a fair few hiking trails.

Almost immediately, staying the night was a god send - it was only ~8am but we were able to check into our hostel room at park HQ, we put our bags down and the heavens opened. Big time.

Typhoons around Japan had finally started to affect the weather round southeast Asia and this was the first evidence we saw of it [much more to follow in that regard unfortunately].  We laid around in the spartan hostel room until the rain relented around 2pm.  A quick bite to eat in the HQ and we finally got to go and explore.  We were not disappointed!

We selected an easy route (due to the rain) to another beach 45mins away but still saw a ton of wildlife.  Walkways across the now receeding tide gave us great views of mud skippers, hermit crabs of all sizes and, unexpectedly, a whole troop of silver langurs (including ultra cute bright orange babies hanging on to mums) as they used the walkways all around us to short cut into another section of jungle! [I'd love to share the video, maybe one day I may experience broadband again!]





On the jungle path proper we saw skinks aplenty, more exploring hermit crabs and Bex managed to spot two dung bettles busily shifting monkey poo about! Great stuff!  Finally, at the destination beach, we saw plenty of proboscis monkeys and their young in the surrounding trees.  Neither of us, nor anyone we have spoken to, can quite fathom the draw of these creatures.  Personally I'd attribute it not merely to there unusual appearance, but more so to there grace and attitude.  They don't act like lesser more common monkeys (long tailed macaque, for instance, are just a nuisance), more like apes in the way they lounge about, slowly traverse the trees and sceptically (it seems to me) view us and what we do.  In a nutshell, turns out they are pretty awesome and I (and all other people who saw them I think) could be mesmerised in to watching them for any length of time.











Back at HQ bearded pigs greeted us at the beach and, regrettably, this would prove to be almost our last new wildlife spot.  The next day we set out early and completed both a longer and shorter trail before leaving on the 4pm boat.  The longer trail afforded us with great views of the varied landscape around the national park, on the shorter trail we spotted a rather long black snake which Bex was rather unfond of!!  Plenty more proboscis monkeys were watched but, rather too soon it would seem, our visit to Bako, and in fact Kuching was over.

[Almost forgot all the frogs after the rain!]