Pygmy Elephants in the banks of Kinabatangan River in Sabah, Malaysia

As many of you know, my wife and I spent a couple of weeks in Malaysia. One of the things I knew going in was that we were going to spend a week in Malaysian Borneo and that the internet connection would be essentially non-existent. I was very concerned about my own well being under those conditions.

I am happy to tell you that we survived being unplugged. The reason was that the unplugging was only for the first three days and even during that time, I could go to a cafe in the rainforest and after many retries, at least get to read my email.

I know that many of you feel I am crazy to be checking email on my vacation. Guess what, we are absolutely fine with it and we still enjoy our vacations tremendously. The added advantage is that I don’t have a mound of email to deal with when I get back. Anyways, these are personal preferences that we don’t have to go into.

Our first stop in Borneo was Gunung Mulu national park. It is a rainforest with some of the most impressive and massive caves. We spent three days there. We walked a lot in humid and hot conditions, took a night walk and saw some insects. However, our imagination of what a rainforest would be turned out to be very different from what it really is. For one, there was no rain for three days and though you could hear a lot of bird sounds, we did not see many of them. The canopy walk was interesting and a very early morning walk up a watch tower with a newly bought pair of binoculars yielded pretty much nothing. Nope, you can’t blame it on my inexperience with the binoculars. A gentleman from Holland who accompanied us has a lot of experience and he reminded us that these are not “sure shots”.

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