Around Borneo in Thirty-One Days

Climb the mountain! Kinabalu is great if tiring for little legs, it's a fantastic experience and (once recovered) you'll want to do it again. Secondly, shop. I hate to sound like such a city princess, but the markets, especially in KK, are truly incredible.

Quick Tips:

Get over your squeamishness. Even I - a staunch vegan - took great pleasure in squashing cockroaches flat.

Best Way To Get Around:

Taxis/hired minivans are great, if tiring. As exciting as a rollercoaster ride, we flew along without seatbelts, on the wrong side of the road and so fast that the engine smoked.

Cheap and cheerful. Though cliched, the De Centrall fits both like a glove. Cheap because 13 of us stayed there without breaking the bank, and cheerful because the staff were delightful and I still miss the huge swans (sparkly and fantastically tacky) which hung from the reception walls. The first floor is infinitely superior to the ground, with hot showers, bigger televisions and generally more space! Home to the first intrigues, the first romances and budding feuds...De Central Inn will always hold a special place in my heart!

P.S. It's wonderfully close to the shopping mall for all secret shopaholics.

Give it up for PKBs! So much fun for such a little place. The people who work there are so lovely, even if they are a little proud of their 'six-packs'. We stayed here during the 'Rest and Relaxation' part of our trip, and R and R we did! Skip breakfast though, which is served in a cafe round the corner, for the extra 2RM find a decent place (some near High Street Inn serve pancakes). The hostel was a great place and very open, we would hang out playing chess/reading the sex advice articles out loud from Cosmo/trying on clothes, and backpackers dropping in and out were delightful!

Wow! Okay, it was just an Italian restaurant, but after a month of just noodles...it was great. With plenty of vegetarian for us 'vegetables' but a healthy meat offering, everyone was happy, and when you're with 12 people- that's pretty rare. Charming waiters who didn't mind taking 13 photographs of the same scene or the fact that we were too poor to drink anything but tap water on our second visit! A great location for hitting the town afterwards and near to the ocean, it's a great place. Food was delicious, I've never tasted better pizza outside Italy and the pasta was pretty scrumptious too. The one person who could afford dessert assured me that it was marvelous. So if you're ever in KK with some spare cash and an urge to escape the noodles...you know where to go!

Lambir is the coolest place! We arrived on a hot, sunny afternoon and I needed the toilet, desperately. The main public block had no windows and no lighting...bring on the head-torches! However, unperturbed by peeing by head-torch, I went on to fall in love with the place. Only a fifteen-minute walk from HQ is a little waterfall that we swam under for hours upon end. The food served at the canteen was superb even if it took two hours for all 13 of us to be served. Prices were ridiculously cheap (it worked out at 35p for breakfast) and the park was beautiful. The walks are tiring due to huge, giant-size steps that you have to (when my size) crawl up, but with beautiful sights, well worth the effort.

One word of advice- don't try and find the Oil Well. Whoever signposted 0.8km lied and the damn thing...does not exist.

I'm afraid this journal is sort of going to go backwards, as I've recently arrived home and am missing travelling so much that all I want to do is dwell on the past thirty-something days. So, I'm not going to follow the trip in a neat, precise order, but randomly describe the best moments of the trip if that's all right with you?

So, let me introduce you to my team. We're a bunch of school kids from London and the southeast. We're accompanied by three adult leaders, one of whom detests children and disappeared from the moment we landed to the moment we departed. The other two were lovely, but rather fond of Tiger Beer and each other, and tended to drift off only to return occasionally with utterly useless tipsy advice. There were ten of us kids, three boys and seven girls all ranging between 16-18 and with the exception of one, still at school or preparing for university. The three boys were T, determined to hide a soft heart beneath a tough exterior, J, the mystery man with strange and sudden mood swings but a great sense of humour, and O, the sweet, charming if blunt and tactless one. The girls could be grouped, the two close friends, the delightful S and F. The older two, infinitely wiser and more elegant De and Di. That leaves the two sweet and crazy Year 12s, R and JM, and of course, myself, A. So now you know us, let me prove to you just how much of a fantastic time we had!

Driving in Borneo is fantastic. Not that I drove, of course, but even being driven in Borneo is great. This is because, used to the cautious 30mph of my mother's driving, I found Malaysian drivers absolutely crazy. They have clearly never read their nation's Highway Code (if indeed, it exists), as they seem to break every speed limit and love to overtake on corners on mountain-cliff bends. They assume every car that approaches to be signalling a race, calling for a sudden burst of acceleration and then, in due course, a slam of brakes as we come within inches of a pile-up.

My team and I, especially the boys, found trips incredibly exciting. We'd scream with terror as we'd pull out to overtake, only to see a huge truck zooming towards us; we'd pray as we swung over cliff edges and shriek with excitement as we drove over potholes that had us flying metres into the sky.

Of course, we never emerged completely unscathed- one boy has refused to get into a moving vehicle ever since and I, with my usual grace, managed to put my foot through a plastic bucket on one emergency brake and so am now missing half the skin on my right shinbone. But it's a small price to pay for such a fantastic ride. And with the suicidal urges of the typical teenager, I’d give almost anything for another go!

If there's one piece of advice I'd give to any departing traveler, it would be a) to take an amazing group of people with you and b) to take a fun, if tacky, stash of music (preferably tapes) to keep you going. My group had the odd collection of Sean Paul, a lot of Michael Jackson, The Calling and a lot more Michael Jackson. Now, without condoning in any way the man's filthy sexual perversions, I have to say that he makes one hell of a travelling companion. Nothing beats (if you'll excuse the forthcoming pun) sitting in a speedy truck singing 'Beat It' at the top of your voice. 'Thriller' is another great sing-along, and everyone loves making the scary faces. Sean Paul also comes in handy when everyone is just the tiniest bit tipsy and more than a little willing to 'shake' their thing. And The Calling, aw bless, if anything helped blossoming romances in the jungle, it was the sound of 'Wherever You Will Go' emerging tinny and frail from the sound of R's dictaphone as she dozed in her hammock. So as you prepare to depart, don't forget Sean Paul for the drunken moments, The Calling to kick-start potential romances, but for sheer enjoyment and to really ensure every moment is the best, don't forget your old tapes of good old MJ!

If you're ever in Borneo, make sure you fly from Miri to Bario. It's a truly terrifying experience. Well, it's not really, unless you have a psychotic/suicidal pilot, a fault engine, a broken propeller and your water bottle, well, there's no other word for it, sort of imploding.

Our journey from Miri-Bario had been all right, but our return journey...well, firstly, our group had been split, which left only T and J (both unhappy fliers), myself and the older De and Di. Seated besides T and J, I shared their amusement when only halfway down the runway our engine came to an abrupt stop and a propeller dipped slightly. However, the pilot merely laughed, and on our second attempt, we lifted smoothly into the air. We flew ridiculously low, knocked metres sideways by every breath of wind, and the strange altitude was wreaking havoc with our eardrums and our water bottles. J was looking distinctly queasy and growling at everyone who dared offer concern. T and I were in hysterics as we prepared quite cheerfully to die, whilst De and I congratulated each other on finding the only two vibrating seats on the plane (I swear, you'd pay a fortune in Soho...).

Anyway, our pilot suddenly realised that we were about to miss our airport and so, with typical ingenuity, decided that the only way to get there would be- obviously!- to turn off the engines, save fuel and descend (translate as plummet) neatly onto the runway. It worked...well, sort of...we did arrive in the right place and alive, which I suppose is all you can ask for. Elated by our arrival, T and I helped a miserable J off the plane as De bid a sorry farewell to her vibrating seat. So, when you next see a little 10-seater plane on one of the war movies and think you'd like a ride...unless you (and your pilot) share a death wish...think again.

What can I say...God Bless Tiger Beer. Forgive the blasphemy, but it's the truth. When you're a million miles from home, in a bad mood, and your team are driving you insane...take solace in Tiger Beer. Admittedly foul tasting, often served lukewarm by a sleazy barman and shared by around eight people...it still works wonders. Especially, as in one bar in KK, when sold in 5s. 25RM would buy you 5 bottles, which, when shared around three people, go quite a ways. Especially when the buckets of 5 begin to mount up and a dull evening turns quickly into quite the most fascinating evening you've ever had. But once the 25RM had run out and, on our last night, we were resorting to pooling change and sharing a can, Tiger Beer still soothes troubles away.

Of course, when I arrived home, I was looking forward to some decent beer, only for my mother to buy me a pack to stave off nostalgia. However, when planning a reunion for my team, I was delighted to find a restaurant offering both noodles and Tiger Beer...the two most memorable aspects (dining-wise) of my expedition.