The End of the Road

Tawau, Malaysian Borneo (map)

In this blog: the last day in Malaysia, the end of the travel gang, and a flying trip to a national park.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tawau is the end of the road, both metaphorically and literally.

A bit of a grotty little city in the north East of Malaysian Borneo, Tawau is located literally where the main road along the north of Malaysian Borneo ends - Indonesian Borneo is just over the border nearby and the next nearest road is a hundred miles with nothing but jungle between. It's also the end of the Borneo travel gang - the group who I've been fortunate enough to have travelled with over the past month - German Max is heading to Japan, and Belgium Tof is off to the Philipeans, leaving just Canadian Rene and I to head over the nearby border into Indonesia in a day or two. So no, end of the road doesn't mean I'm heading home - there's more wandering in me yet!

The final breakfast - Myself, Belgium Tof, German Max and Canadian Rene

---

After our diving trip, we left the coastal town of Semporna (aka Stinkporna thanks to it's unpleasant aroma of rubbish and fish), and took a minibus seventy miles away to another coastal town - Tawau. It was a nice sunny evening, and we drove through nothing but palm oil plantations for the whole journey. Green and pleasant, but awful compared to the tropical rainforests they've replaced. 

Tawau was a dull concrete box city with slightly grotty backstreets and a rubbish lined seafront. It's definitely not a tourist destination in it's own right and isn't like the other more pleasant Malaysian cities we visited further west, but serves as a handy jump off for the ferry to Indonesia and the nearby airport. It was by no means hell, but it wasn't paradise either.

The lack of decent cheap accommodation meant we stayed in an ageing guesthouse with peeling paint on the walls, but very pleasant and helpful Chinese owners who made up for it. As it was Tof's last night, after dinner at one of the many outdoor food courts, we grabbed a beer and sat on a picnic bench by the rubbish-lined waterfront. When we arrived, a friendly Malaysian family was just finishing off a KFC to celebrate Mother's Day, and talked to us in broken in English for a few minutes before giving us each a slice of chocolate cake, which was nice of them. The four of us then sat down and yarned away for an hour or two, picking out our highlights of our time travelling as a group, a nice end to a fun month travelling together.

The following day we'd planned to go to Tawau Hills National Park, but with other distractions somehow didn't end up leaving until 3pm, saying goodbye to Tof at the bus station on the way. It was a bit vague how to get to this park, with some people saying you can bus it there, and others saying it was taxi-only, which we found to be the case in the end. Our driver was a guy in his early sixties who spoke very little English and considering he does it for a living; a terrible driver - his face glued to the windscreen, foot on and off the throttle all the time when not constantly braking unnecessarily or getting us lost. We got there in the end after again passing through nothing but palm oil plantations, though with only a couple of hours of daylight left to actually see the park.

The palm oil plantation literally went right up to the ticket booth where we paid - there's no land wasted here, and just a few metres later we were in tropical rainforest. Like our other recent experiences in the jungle, we came across ballworms on the ground (which roll up like a hedgehog when you touch them), macaque monkeys, the sound of a thousand cicadas filling the air, and our good friends - leeches - I managed to attract about ten of them this time, though removed them all pretty easily without any blood shed. One even hung about and got me in the car afterwards! 

The world's tallest tropical tree, Tawau Hills

A surprise highlight was that the forest contained the tallest tropical tree in the world - 88 metres tall and a real beast with huge buttress roots. Nearby, we heard the call of gibbons, though didn't managed to spot them. After a nice walk through the jungle along the river, we went back to the park HQ, and sat watching the monkeys fighting with each other, whilst we listened to the soundtrack of the jungle. It wasn't long enough really, but we were satisfied anyway.

Back at Tawau, we went out for stuffed rotis (bread) and a farewell drink for Max, stopping to look in a Chinese run outdoor cafe on the way where their live seafood was packed tightly in tanks, including Tiger Prawns which bizarrely appeared to live their whole lives in 1.5l Coke bottles. We bought a beer at a little shop across the road, and the owner held out an identical bottle of Tiger beer in each hand. 'This one 15 ringgit, this one 9 ringgit' he said. We were a little perplexed, they were identical, so was one a fake or maybe out of date? No - 'this one with duty, this one without' he said - in this shop, tax evasion was your own perogative!

So there we have it, even in a town as dull as Tawau there were still a few things to keep us amused. Tawau wasn't the most beautiful memory of the end of Malaysia, but fortunately the other great things we saw and did over the past month easily push it into the shadows. Indonesia here we come!

Tawau Hills National Park

Live Tiger prawns in Coke bottles - pretty nasty