I'll Be There Dreckly: In Hot Water

Lupa Masa Jungle Camp, and Poring Hot Springs, Malaysian Borneo (map)

In this blog: a stay at a remote jungle camp, a night walk, and some boiling hot springs

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Somewhere in there lies Lupa Masa Jungle Camp

With three days to fill before a diving trip on the other side of Sabah - the state which covers the north east of Borneo - our Borneo travel gang decided to head half way there, stopping on the way at the town of Poring where there was a couple of fun sounding places of interest. Natural hot springs and a stay at a remote camp sounded potentially amazing, but for once we left feeling a little blasé about the experience.

We started out from the city of Kota Kinabalu around lunchtime, the weather being reasonably humid but a just pleasant-enough 30°, with a few clouds in the sky and a light shower late in the afternoon - a fairly typical day for Borneo. We left much later than planned - it seems to take forever to get going from somewhere when you have a group of four people of different paces - and then squeezed into a modern Nissan minibus along with a couple of locals, which set out along flat forested coastal plains before winding it's way up into the mountains. Logging was even more more prominent than the past few weeks leaving ugly scars all over the green rainforest, the mountains were higher than we'd seen recently, and we passed fairly primitive tin and wood hut villages, and roadside markets. A poorer side to a Malaysia than I'd seen before.

After three hours or so we reached the service town of Ranau, and as we had to find our way up the dead-end road to Poring, got out to find the local minibus and taxi drivers immediately vying for our business though not with any of the urgency and desperation that I saw in India. With all of us having recently travelled in Asian countries where taxi drivers try their hardest to rip you off, we instinctively were all on high alert and bargained for the journey, but it turned out it wasn't really necessary as ripping-off isn't really a part of the Malaysian mindset. Arriving at the tiny hamlet of Poring way later than planned, we skipped the hot springs for the day, found a hostel and relaxed for the evening.

Scenery on the bus journey there

A 53 year old lone Aussie backpacker was already in the dorm room; a cheery bearded chap called Rob who claimed to have spent the past thirty years on-and-off backpacking around the world. A character with this sort of experience often means in-your-face stories, one-upmanship, disgust at the use of guide books and other such snobbery, but Rob was very self-effacing - a really nice chap, and we all shared stories equally over dinner in a local cafe that evening. He's nearing the end of a year-out to travel most of south-east Asia and had some interesting stories to tell, having passed through the odd dodgy area. I was surprised to learn he travels by religiously visiting only the list of highly-recommended places in the Lonely Planet guide book and nothing else - something I thought only travel newbies did, as it often puts you on the beaten path that everyone follows, and whilst I prefer to forge my own route it does make sense in many ways.

Into the wild

A few days before in KK, a local had recommended visiting a remote spot in the jungle where thanks to deforestation in the surrounding area the wildlife population was more concentrated than you'd expect, so the next morning it was off into the jungle for the night at the nearby Lupa Masa jungle camp. After some patchy communication, the Camp manager met us in Poring to lead us to the camp, the man in question being a tattooed, dour, miserable Scottish guy in a football short called Mike who having formerly worked as a roofer and been made unemployed, changed career completely, married a local Malaysian girl, learnt jungle survival skills and now ran the camp on behalf of a British guy who owned it but never visited.

Mike gave no introduction of himself, just some grunts and a snappy response to something he didn't like. His misery was infectious, and on the walk through the jungle we were all glum and silent, ocasionally looking at each other wondering why we'd bothered. He later told us that he was the perfect guy to run the camp as it takes a certain person to live so basically, his only flaw being that he had no people skills. He'd also not slept the night before. At least his honesty was refreshing even if he wasn't.

With Max, Rene and Tof, Hanging out in
the lounge area at Lupa Masa

Leaving the tarmaced road in Poring, we walked for forty-five minutes up pleasant narrow paths through the jungle, crossing bamboo bridges over streams and ditches and passing through a small banana plantation in a clearing, before finally reaching Lupa Masa - an isolated small collection of simple bamboo huts near a river - a really beautiful spot. Mike then became even less helpful, vaguely telling us of a couple of things to so before disappearing out of sight whilst we relaxed in hammocks, chatted and for some dozed for a couple of hours on a raised wooden deck. The nearby river was wild and untamed, and a good place to do some rock hopping and bathing in it's pure waters. We found a strange pleasure in the tiny fish which would nibble lightly at our feet and legs when you stood in the less turbulent shallow waters. There was a small waterfall nearby where you could stand underneath and even sit behind the falling stream, with the water falling with a weight that felt like a cross between being pummelled with stones and a therapeutic massage.

With the vague directions Mike gave us, along with a lovely French couple who were also staying at the camp, Belgium Tof and I headed off for what we were told was an hours loop walk through the jungle. The scenery was fantastic and it was a very pleasant walk, but the lack of clear directions meant we really had no idea where we were going and ended up turning back after an hour or so, having seen a few insects but none of the mammals we hoped for. We were all feeling a little deflated by evening, having expected an expertly led, all-inclusive jungle experience, so thankfully after a nice communal dinner of sweet and sour veg with rice, a night nature walk lifted everyone's spirits.

Night walk

Manager Mike led the group of us back along the familiar paths we'd been on in the day but things looked very different now. With his powerful head torch he scoured the jungle for things of interest, first of all spotting a palm civet, a small jungle cat with big eyes, sat high up in the trees, followed by a frog hiding motionless between some rocks, and a couple of large spiders sat on leaves. Looking up at another palm civet, someone suddenly realise right above our heads were four very pretty birds sleeping on a branch, a nice surprise. Further along was a lizard sleeping on the end of a small branch, positioned so as to easily detect the motion of any advancing snakes which might try and nab it in it's sleep.

It was around this time that a felt an odd sensation and reached down to investigate, finding that a leech had somehow latched onto my leg, climbed up the inside of my shorts and attached itself to a very sensitive area! It was ever man's worst nightmare, but thankfully it had only freshly arrived and not yet had chance to do any damage so was fairly easily removed with a pinch of the fingers. Close call!

Pit Viper sleeping up a tree. We didn't wake him!

Near the end though things got much more interesting when he spotted a small green viper snake sleeping up a tree. Wow we thought, until five metres later we spotted an much bigger beast - a pit viper, sleeping curled up along the branch. It was a heck of a sight and finished the evening nicely. Back at the camp some went to bed, some chatted, and Mike tried to demonstrate how to start a fire using the traditional method of rotating one piece of wood on another using a string bow, completely unsuccessfully after nearly an hour. He'd better keep hold of the matches for now.

Sleeping on a foam mat in a tent under a bamboo canopy was a novel experience even if I didn't sleep amazingly well, and waking on a sunny morning to hear the river flowing nearby was very pleasant. After breakfast and another swim in the waterfall the next morning, we made our own way back to Poring village, heading for Poring Hot Springs.

Hot springs

The Japanese historically aren't well liked in Borneo thanks to their brutality in WWII, and their development of the natural sulphurous hot springs one of the few positive things they did for the island during their control of the island. However the hot springs I visited in Japan a few years ago were head and shoulders above these, and we all left a little disappointed. One pool had water at air temperature, another so scaldingly hot you could only put your lower legs in for a few minutes, and the open air tubs pointless as you had to fill them yourself which would have taken most of the day had we bothered. There was just enough novelty value to keep us happy though, and it was a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours.

With a mixture of indecision and lack of information about bus times onwards, we whiled away the afternoon using the wifi in a nearby cafe, before it was time to get a lift to the nearby town of Ranau to hopefully catch a night bus to our next destination. It seemed every local was a taxi driver, willing to take us back along the dead-end road at an inflated price and eventually we hopped in with a pleasant chap in his fifties in a battered old Toyota, who had dance music cranked on the stereo, something which seemed very out of character when you looked at him.

The tunes blasted out the whole way to our delight, until a mile or two from our destination the music changed, and he said 'ah, this is one of my daughters'. We couldn't help what came next, our hands involuntarily clapping along together to the music whilst we laughed hysterically - the song? 'If you're happy and you know it clap your hands'. It was a ridiculous but but fantastic moment, and I was left reflecting that the mildly disappointing couple of days hadn't crushed our spirits after all. I guess we were happy and we knew it. Clap clap.