Best Creature Ever...

Day 24. Sweet bejesus! 10 hours of new scenery! We started walking at 7a.m. sharp. Leaving Long Dano was hard, and we took ages saying our goodbyes to their kind faces. With the longhouses in the distance, we were soon past the green pastures surrounding the village, back into the jungle...
One early notable event was the viewing of a dead and gutted Sun bear, freshly hunted and killed by poachers, or maybe locals. But I think the bear was endangered. After acting like paparrazi, we continued our march, with leeches waving at us to pick them up! Saturated and drowning in my own sweat, there was lots of hill-slip-falling as we went up hill, reached a peak, went down hill, reached a river, crossed it and began going up hill again... This cycle continued all day! We got good views of Pa Dalih and Pa Ramadu villages before crossing a waist-height and refreshing river in sandals... Our lovely guides took our bags for most of us, as they feared that if we carried our own kit, we'd trip, be dragged down by their weight and never be seen again!
As we'd prepared ourselves for 10 hours walking, mentally, and to a lesser degree, physically, we preserved our energies and minds better. We even walked for an extra one and a half hours, cuz we're good! And got ahead of our 10 hour schedule. I can't remember exactly what happened as exhaustion had long set in, but overall, the day's walking was around 10 hours in length... but the extra 90 minutes walk wasn't scheduled... so perhaps we'd only planned to walk eight and a half hours... oh i don't know! Basically we walked for ages, got really tired, pissed-off and sweaty with only short breaks every so often! "I'm too sweaty for my shirt... so sweaty it hurts!"
Samira even got a bum leech!
At 5p.m. as darkness began creeping in, we stopped walking. Thank feck. Setting up hammox and tents was knackering as you can imagine, and everyone wanted to just sit around and die. But we couldn't, or we'd simply be fucked! No hammock = no bed = no rest = no fun! Now time for a feast... we ate a nice rice & tomato & tuna & sweetcorn dinner. One of the nicest jungle meals I've had!
The day was GREATLY improved by playing with a dinosaur... kinda... i meant a stick insect - The Sabah Thorny Stick!!! Woop! It was the best creature EVER, built like a tank, with clawy claws! I want 1 or 2 or 3! It crawled from one of my hands, over my shoulders to the other hand, whence it tried to escape! But no... I made it do the journey all over again! After playing with it (forcing it to walk on me) for about half an hour, I realised that I should maybe let it return into the depths of the jungle. I was like a mother leaving their child on the first day of school! I followed it (slowly) for a while... until I had to intervene when I saw it heading towards danger - moving deliberately towards the campfire! Maybe to tot itself?... it was the only way of getting away from me... Much to it's dismay, I picked it up and saved it's life. It's legs a-flailing, I placed it on one of the trees my hammock was tied to, hoping it'd visit me during the night. It never did...

"Jungle Boogie, get down on it!"

Today's Leech Count: a whopping 4! including at least one Tiger leech (the vicious, jumping kind!)
Total: 9