Gloat Monkeys...

Day 10. My leadership... is over today. About time! The day started well with our room lockout (NOT my fault I tell ya!), before going on to see the monkeys at the Sepilok sanctuary. They were good to see, but there were too many tourists around, making everything seem a bit fake. Meh, I suppose their money (and ours) helps protect them! We saw about 7 or 8 or 9 wild orang-utans, including a baby, and several macaques - some just dangling overhead, ready to shit on us! It felt like the hottest day the earth had EVER had whilst we were there! The sweat came like a flood merely standing and looking, let alone doing any sort of moving! Seeing a gazillion ants in a huge conga line heading somewhere along a railing, we went back to the main sanctuary centre, watched some video on rainforest protection in a pleasantly cool building, and walked around an orang-utan information centre. Who knew they had such big hands?!
We left monkeyville, waited at a bus-stop for ages then took the groovy (got musik!) bus to Sandakan, a city in the very North of Borneo. At the vibrant city of Sandakan, we walked around a few markets including the live fish and all-sorts-of-other-odd-sea-creatures market! From there, we headed towards a huge modern mosque overshadowing a sprawling water village. The buildings in this village were on stilts and went off into the sea, over mud-flats which the local children ran over in low tide. It was an odd experience just wandering over their walkways, through the place where the inhabitants live largely in poverty. Despite the far-from-ideal conditions, everyone seemed very welcoming - especially the children! The coastal stilt village seemed very fragile and precarious, with many parts of the buildings and walkways rotting away. I couldn't help thinking about if a similar tsunami to the Boxing Day 2004 one hit here, it would all be instantly wiped out.
So we wandered back out of water village, past the lurvely dead dog in the bin. We had a failed fish BBQ idea (thanx anyway Kyle!), and headed back to the centre of Sandakan. After some shopping for provisions, we re-boarded the groovy bus, with butter sweetcorn this time, and headed back to Sepilok.
After the extensive journey, which included some seemingly pointless diversions and a thunderstorm, we were back at Sepilok. We were in time for some grub too! We had more restaurant food and Mirinda... Zoe's fave! It's this very flavoursome soft drink in two flavours... either orange and some kind or berry i believe. It rivals Milo (local hot chocolate) as the drink of choice!
After the meal i was de-briefed (no pants!) from my wonderful leadership. That basically meant having a talk from Adam and Su the "true" leaders about how i thought I'd done whilst i was in charge of everyone. We concluded that i was too laid back, but had put some effort in.... something like that anyway!
Back in our cabins, we somehow ended up playing chirades, imitating each other (more like piss-taking!), whilst eating stupid amounts of tasteless coconut flesh...
I also decided that, instead of venturing out and about into the dark and spider-infested toilet, I would take a shower more closely to our cabins. So, using the nice cold rain that happened to be falling and leaky guttering, I had a lovely drain shower! It did the job...

Sleepy-pooz, no home-sick-ness yet...

(The big spider was squished tonight... R.I.P.)