World Stories: January 2023

In this Blog I will explain to you how we got from Borneo to Thailand, what was in Thailand, and what it was like. Here’s were the story starts:

One peaceful afternoon in Borneo at a really comfy hotel I was laughing joyously at the fact that we didn’t have to move for another 5 days! But my joyousness was cut short when my parents burst out the news that they couldn’t survive 1 more day in Borneo. They had booked a plane out of there that was leaving in 4 hours! And I was just shell shocked, on the floor with my Legos, gaping at this awful news that they just chucked at me. And it is so unreasonable that I didn’t even believe them. But sadly, it was true. So in 4 hours we were on a flight heading towards Thailand.

It turns out that Thailand is pretty cool. The whole time that we were there we stayed at crystal clear water beaches! There was one beach that I especially liked called Banana Beach. This beach was awesome because it had beautiful shells, cool sea glass, places to snorkel along the cliff, and best of all it had super cute hermit crabs! I saw many different types of fish to, one was a GIANT blue-green parrot fish! Those were just some of the wonders that I saw at Banana Beach! I also got really great pictures of the beach on my camera! Some of the other beaches were cool also, there was one where we got to see sunset a couple times. One last cool thing about these beaches is that most of them had pretty rough waves so I had fun diving into them.

Other than the beaches, the street food and drinks were pretty good. For the food, there was a lot of food stalls and tables. Many of the stalls sold meat on a stick and when we tried it, it was pretty good! My favorite stalls, though, where the fruit/fruit smoothie ones. All of the fruit smoothies are really good and most of them have no added ingredients! They are delicious and healthy! That was my favorite of the things that were put into my belly. And the fruit ones were good because they were good and cheap. Plus I LOVE fruit.

That was our whole time in Thailand, renting a motorcycle and cruising to beaches that we were going to swim or hang out at! Looking back Thailand was pretty sweet! That’s all for this blog. -SilaG

Pics (in some of these pictures that you will see, my dad just happened to be in the pose and I somehow took the pictures fast enough):

Banana Beach!

Beach sunset

My dads IG photos

IG photo

Sunset

Me and my dad on the beach

Our motorcycle. (Squid)

Another IG photo

IG photo (there’s a ton of them so I will just call them IG photo, FWI they are all on Banana Beach).

A beach

IG photo

beach sunset

This blog will be about Borneo! Borneo is a island off the coast of Malaysia and that island is where I will take you right now to the beginning of my adventure there.

As soon as we flew into the airport in Mulu National Park (where we are staying) we took a very short car ride deeper into the jungle to our lodge ( the Gunung Mulu National Park lodges) 🏠 . Once we were there we settled down for a little while and then we got ready to go to Deer Cave https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwju2rzQ4Ln8AhVW3nMBHcSDDOwQFnoECEEQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.alamy.com%2Fstock-photo%2Fdeer-cave.html&usg=AOvVaw1ygloScVA6gWuXE5-WZr9H. At Deer Cave, it was pretty breathtaking 😮. As soon as we got in the cave we were on this boardwalk with these awesome rock formations that looked like all sorts of things from people to frogs 🐸. The cave also had a rock formation that when you looked at it from a certain side it looked like Abraham Lincoln’s face 🥸! The last thing about this cave is that if you come a certain time of day, 3 million bats flood out of the cave in search of food and they stay in formations as they’re rushing out 🦇😲! That was it for this cave, but there are many more cool things that happened in Mulu National Park.😄

For the rest of the time we were there (6 days), we visited some other caves including the following: Lang cave, Fastlane cave, Clearwater cave, and Cave of the Winds. They were all pretty epic👍! One of the cool things that we did near Clearwater caves is we got to swim in this natural spring💧. It had crystal-clear water, beautiful mossy rocks, and a little sandbar🪨🏝! We also did a Night Walk, which I probably liked the most because I LOVE night time photography: just seeing all the spiders, frogs, scorpions, and millipedes🕷🦂🐸. I like photographing frogs the most, though📸. The last thing that I will say about Mulu is there was a awesome little doggy that followed me everywhere 🐶! Gunung Mulu National Park was a great experience, and I would recommend it to anyone who is visiting Borneo🇲🇾.

So that was the end of our adventure in Mulu but not the end of our jungle adventure. We flew into a little town called Sepilock✈️. While we were there, we visited the Orangutan center and the Sun Bear center🦧🐻. At the Orangutan center we walked around the little board walk loop that they had. After we walked around for a little, we visited the feeding of the orangutans! The feeding was really cool, and the first one in the morning had a-lot of little monkeys (long-tailed macaque) and only a few small orangutans🐒🦧. Later in the afternoon feeding, a huge orangutan came and no little monkeys. It seemed like the little monkeys knew not to try to steal food when the big guys wake up in the afternoon. The feeding was awesome🍌! All of the orangutans came from ropes in the trees to this little platform, where they got fed🌲. They are some really cool monkeys! Fun fact: the orangutans share 96.4 percent of their DNA with humans! 😱

The Sun Bear center was very cool👍! We got to see the Sun Bear feeding, too. The worker there threw them cantaloupe and other assorted fruits🍈. The Sun Bears are the worlds smallest and least known type of bear, and they are very endangered because people either think they are cute so they buy one off the black market or somewhere and keep them as a pet💸. They end up receiving very little care because as they get bigger people put them in metal cages and they get very poor treatment and usually end up dying☠️. The other reason why they are endangered is because the Chinese use their gull bladder for traditional medicine and end up killing the bear💊😵. They are so cute! You can tell if it is Sun Bear because they have a yellow V-shaped marking on the front of their chest. The Sun Bear Center was awesome and I would highly recommend it😁!

The next day we flew into Kinabatangan National Reserve (still in Borneo). That reserve had all types of things and activities you can do. We only stayed there for 3 days but had a-lot of fun🥳. Some of the activities that we did were river tours where you see animals on the river from a boat, jungle walks where you trudged through mud up to your shins in the jungle, and night walks which were way better than the ones in Mulu🚣. On the night walk I trudged through the mud at night and I saw all sorts of amazing things. What we saw on the night walks were a frogs, spiders, a webbed scorpion, a stick bug, and a Tarsier🕷🌜! The Tarsier was an amazing discovery because they are so rare😮. The night walks were miserable, hot, and there were a-lot of mosquitoes, but it was worth it in the end🦟. That was pretty much it before we got out of the jungle and into a small beach-side town, which I will tell you more about in my next blog🏖🏘! That’s it for this blog. By:SilaG 😄 I spent 2 hours on this blog so you better enjoy it.

Pics:

Big orangutan