Bahagian Tawau

It took a long morning’s bouncy travel to reach Tabin Rainforest Lodge, nestled on the edge of the Tabin Wildlife Reserve and close to the coast.

Where our Sukau lodge was quite large and full, with numerous helpful and friendly staff and excellent service, our Tabin digs had only six rooms, a few staff and NO WHITE WINE.

We decided to stay anyway, and late on our first afternoon cruised down the river, past kilometres of nipah palms, to the coast.

The atmosphere was fabulous as we made our way slowly back in the encroaching darkness, then, near to home, we came to the fireflies. What a sight! Hundreds of tiny, flickering pinpoints of light in the trees; they were quite captivating, especially from our peacefully floating viewpoint on the boat.

Then, our eyes becoming more and more attuned to the darkness, we looked to the sky, and had another wonderful moment under the canopy of stars that we city people don’t often get to see.

The following morning we visited two bird hides.

Firstly, the Bornean brown cuckoo, a very obliging bird who turned up with his mate and alternately pecked and looked around until we had taken our fill of photos.

The second hide was that for the Sabah partridge. Here is an excerpt from the diary:

7:30 - arrive at bird hide
7:35 - leaf drops from tree
7:40 - start playing female Sabah partridge sounds over loudspeaker
7:41 - male Sabah partridge shows up, starts calling out expectantly
7:50 - tourists go off to have hot breakfast, Sabah partridge still calling out expectantly
7:55 - Sabah partridge shakes head, looks around and goes home alone and disappointed.

We also took another spin on the river and down to the sea and saw some Irrawaddy Dolphins, then drove up a narrow twisting tributary - think “The African Queen” - to see the flying foxes roosting.

In the late afternoon we took a hot, sweaty walk through the jungle, not seeing a lot but kind of enjoying tripping over tree roots and dodging vines as we stumbled along.

On the morning we left Tabin, we visited one more bird hide, deep into the forest. We clambered through a muddy gully and slipped and stumbled up and down hill until we reached the hide, whereupon they played the female call over and over for forty minutes. Then we all gave up and sweated and puffed our way back to the vehicle. Just goes to show that the twitchers of the world have more patience than we do.

And that was the end of the rainforest adventure. We are now en route back to Kota Kinabalu for some (we think) well-deserved R and R.Read more