Asia Trip 7 Part III - Through Borneo
Published March 26, 2024
KL Again
By the time I boarded the flight to Kuala Lumpur, it was hard to tell which way it would go - 70% I'll be better by the time I'm in bed in Chinatown, 30% medical evacuation, incubated, fighting for life.
The flight was relaxing, the green wing tips grooved the line and I sat there in my hat. Day and night. Light and dark. I took some dick pissing pics in the bathroom and dreamed.
We landed in the hot dark. Malaysia again. I had a long night, morning and day ahead.
As I was inflating and deflating my lungs, 'Seize the day' by Avenged Sevenfold started playing from the store next to me and a beautiful Chinese-Malay girl began swinging her leg my way.
I popped a lozenge and sent my mind into my chest for a talk. And so to the soundtrack of 2006 rock and roll I rallied the troops for the fight.
I was sick for most of that time in KL, only finally starting to come out of the soup on my last full day in the city.
I repeated my new mantra often - REST. RELAX. RECOVER.
REST. RELAX. RECOVER.
REST. RELAX. RECOVER.
REST. RELAX. RECOVER.
I had been in Malaysia early in the year at the end of ‘An Asia Trip’ and the previous year for the beginning of ‘An Asia Trip’, I was also here four years before, before the pandemic. KL was becoming my main home in Asia.
The highlight this time around was a walk I took in the warm afternoon rain. Still sick, still coughing…
I set that all aside for a few hours though and enjoyed some time in one of my joyful places.
I walked every floor at least twice. Probably more, looking for a kaya toast joint not stacked to the ceiling with humans.
Looking for the best choice for some real toast.
I was now better and walking around the vastly unnecessary but fucking fantastic airport mall of Klia2.
I found a branch of The Old Town White Coffee without too many sweaty crust-munching people and went inside. They have three? of these things in the same mall, just like they have three? of everything in the same mall.
I enjoyed my 'enriched' hot chocolate and kaya toast with thick finger sticks of butter before going through security. The amount of butter in this thing was super-fucking-overkill. For the artery plaque budget, it's a once a year indulgent injection, maybe once a decade.
Sovereign. Sarawak. Brad Nicholls. James Brooke. A mountain. A frog.
I knew I would love Sarawak and Borneo long before. The third largest island in the world, covered from head to toe in humid rainforest. The romance of an Englishman sailing up river and single handedly stealing a large part of it all. One dude with a boat and beautiful NPD.
CUNT SOCKS. I'LL SHOW YA!
In the centre of the city of Kuching is a giant Sarawak flag, flying from the tallest flagpole in southeast asia. And it was days away from its official unveiling.
I was surrounded by a SARAWAK! This was Malaysia in name only.
Sarawak was still a country, just one currently resting within a Malay federation. It's confident too, patient, with no significant independence movement to speak of.
It will be sovereign again. It is still very much its own thing.
Laying in bed in that room in Kuching, the start of the trip felt like years ago. Romania? Istanbul? I actually went to those places on this same trip, that was weeks ago, not years. Travel is magic, the time distortion is real and one of the reasons I ultimately - despite all the bullshit - do love to do this.
I walked across the bridge and past the new parliament. No-one was here. This side of Kuching seemed completely abandoned to the tropical fauna.
I was on my way to the Brooke museum, located inside Fort Margherita, built to defend Sarawak from the native Dayaks.
I took a look at The Astana on the way. Despite once being home to the White Rajahs and now home to the current governor of Sarawak, close up it looked abandoned to trash.
James Brooke was audacious.
From the moment I learnt of him, long ago, I recognised a bond between us.
I have a need to do things my own way, regardless of the current spot in history, in time. Brooke was similar.
If I were alive then I would have founded America, or I would have ruled the Empire, I would have found a way, or I'd be in Sarawak King of Paradise.
I spent a long time in the museum and longer alone on the roof. This was a meaningful place.
Before I left I walked the plank walkway of the fort's walls. Planks were missing and broken, I reached the end to a
CAUTION NO ENTRY sign. Funny shit.
The sun was still below the horizon and the sky a deep dark blue. The Bornean Streets were warm and empty, I went to get some cash out before heading to 7-Eleven for mountain snacks. I decided one day of dirt and sweat and blood and mud was needed. An hour later I took a car to Mount Santubong and began the ascent up the mountain.
It was a long arduous steep scramble up rock and rung-deprived giant metal ladders to the first summit, where things turned from difficult to psychedelic.
Hiking up a rainforest mountain in tropical humidity and heat does things to the brain, especially when you're out of shape and have a heart condition.
I hit my head and lost consciousness. Just as I took my phone out to record to camera, I went over and landed head to ground. I woke some time after. And it must have been some time after for the white puffy clouds and clear blue skies were now no more. Vicious black air threatened hell.
I met a frog. Deep black and dark green with militant patterns, serious patterns, bumps all over. White, beautiful eyes with black slit pupils. It was hugging a tree, hanging out. It stayed there with me for a long time, I got the sense we held some connection, some place else, in some other time, we had known each other. And here Frog was, here before the rains came, here to give me a sense of happiness, here to agree with me, to be by my side.
We linked together our conscious experiences, it was cosmic and beyond this spot of reality.
YOU JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND!!!!
The clouds above opened and in an instant hell in the form of water existed. A ferocious pounding violence.
The hours back to civilization were a constant danger. Water attacked rung after rung of ladder after ladder. It was a treacherous drenched incline for kilometres. That unrelenting rain pouring down, the dirt footholds now pools of mud. At some point after it was all over, when I finally got my phone from my backpack, I wrote 'whatever, I'm alive' in response to all the hell. My soaked passport, bloodied and bitten body, aching deeply.
Whatever, I was alive.
The next day I dried off my shoes on the concrete outside, stole a pair of flip flops and stuffed them in my bag and left Sarawak for Brunei.
The smell of the rainforest is an interesting one. Salty dirt. It's a smell that stubbornly refuses to leave you. I still get whiffs of it, in my arse, in my eyes.
I'm in Brunei, this is Brunei
At the airport I wasn't in the mood for humans.
Dumblings. Human dumblings.
I met so many.
I met three, but still...
HUMAN DUMBLINGS!
For a country I already knew I probably wouldn't love, it was trying real hard to turn into one I definitively hated before I even boarded the plane.
The silly woman at check-in had to call a silly suit who in turn decided he had to "check with Brunei immigration" …
The response he got was a cookie cutter text message with the usual requirements. He slowly went through each point and tried hard to understand them. I told him everything is fine EVERYTHING IS FINE! and he disappeared back into whatever lowly level of reality he came up from.
The Bruneians I met at the gate were equally strange. Scoffing at each other and walking into walls, licking their elbows. I was becoming even more glad Brunei would be a two day experience.
"I'm in Brunei, this is Brunei." I said to myself walking through the empty car park.
I arrived at night and walked to my hotel down the highway from the airport. Brunei was a new kind of hot. This little wedge of land was somehow hotter than everything that surrounded it.
My hotel room was odd, large and emotionless. I felt something strange about it. It was heavily bugged or there were ghosts in the walls, or maybe the aliens are kept here, in an airport hotel in Bandar Seri Begawan.
I woke up, same room, same feeling - this room had memories of Nigerian hookers chopped up for market, clowns smoking the insides of televisions.
I took a nice long shower and then I walked to the airport bus station.
I was at the airport bus station for over an hour. Sitting front row on a plastic chair, every one of the twenty other plastic chairs empty behind me.
The FUCK IS THIS.
Bruneians would walk across the scene and politely shout things like "the bus is coming," and "the bus gonna be here."
Bruneians didn't know how their own airport worked. There was no bus. Not here at the bus station anyway.
I was getting ready to leave when I saw two flip flops poking out from under the bus stop sign. I turned the corner and there she was. An angel. I asked if she was getting the bus and she said no, she was there to offer me a ride. We pulled up outside the Terrace Hotel and I left the car. I have no faith in humanity, so I won't say 'faith in humanity restored' but there are a few good ones. A small percentage of literal angels, that appear out of the Earth and provide what's needed in the moment. I shall bless them forever, I shall remember them forever.
What was Brunei? One guy's tropical farm with a bit of oil? A once grand empire of the seas reduced to an effective city-state by a long dead Englishman?
I started off not liking it very much. But it did have its charms.
I spent a day seeing the mosque and the city. I invited a girl over to fuck but then cancelled. I didn't feel like it. And I had already said I was saving my beautiful penis until I got to the Philippines. So I broke her heart. And the dreams of her cunt. Poor cunt.
I'm such a nice guy. The nicest.
There wasn't much to do in Bandar. With one clattering exception. The former capital of an empire, built in the river on stilts.
The boat rushed me across to a dying community of broken wood.
I walked one flippy floppy step after another across the broken, decrepit planks. There were plenty of gaps for my flip flops to get stuck in and send me flying off into the croc infested dirt-brown waters below. My feet were sweaty now, as were my hands. Each time I took my phone out to take a photo or record a video, the timeline where it slipped from my fingers and into the river was present in my mind.
The concrete ringing the water town was better, concrete doesn't decay so easily. What a stupid idea. Let's all build our houses on the river! yeah! Ya! I really didn't like it. I can't lie. I can lie. But I won't lie.
I'm sat at Bandar Seri Begawan International Airport reading about British food, looking at British food. It is by far the best in the world. And I've visited 57 countries now, and I know full well what the cuisine of my 58th produces, and although other countries do have delicious dishes, nothing compares to the food of the British. I may want the country of my birth to be exploded into a trillion pieces, but one thing I will always love is this damn beautiful food.
kota kota kina kina KINABALU
I landed in Kota Kinabalu and got in a Grab to my hotel. I had this night and the next day until I boarded my flight to Manila.
I opened the door to the room to a party of cockroaches. The cockroach is a truly disgusting creature, and yet somehow it has its moments of a kinda perverse cuteness. I stayed ten minutes. Got a refund, fingered the receptionist, booked a new car and headed to a pod hostel downtown.
The next morning I woke up, shit, showered and checked out, probably in that order.
At the desk the pretty receptionist was making a big deal about me trying their breakfast. I didn't want to try their shitty breakfast, and she didn't care about me trying their shitty breakfast, she wanted to get fingered too.
Some minutes later the world turned brown.
Eh!?
This was high stakes, tropical hell. I searched the floors of the mall for a 7-Eleven, for anything, for some Thing that could become toilet paper. It was a five minute walk but it was the longest walk. . . . .
7-Eleven, two packs of tissues and some mentos.
Mentos for the victory, for when it was all done.
Just as I made it back to the toilet, some high schoolers were coming out of the one western stool. Inside it was flooded with water, toilet water, arse water, clear shit juice.
The brown finally lessened, wipe after wipe after wipe, but finally the brown lessened and all the colours of the world returned... blue, green, pink, opal fire.
Opal fire.
Through several walks in that day's hot sun, I saw quite a lot of Kota Kinabalu. And I liked it, not a bad town.