Glenda Larke

Subtitle: Being Noramlyed* again…

There’s an island off the southern coast of Sabah called Sebatik. As the sea swallow flies, it’s not that far from the famous diving island of Sipadan, but it’s closer to the coast and the town of Tawau. My sister and I have just come out of the forest and want to head to Wallace Bay, a village on the west coast of the island facing the mainland. Getting there, though, was a fascinating experience in how NOT to travel…

Start the journey not knowing which wharf the boat is leaving from, and your fun begins. Try the ferry wharf, the fish market wharf, the customs’ wharf, the marine police wharf, the fisherman’s wharf, and anything else that looks as if it has boats, until you finally end up on the, um, well, banana boat wharf?

It is nearly nine o’clock, one hour after due departure time, but we have found more of our group and they assure us we are at the right place. Really.

The folk who drove us there disappear to look for their boat; they have a vessel with fast engines and expect to arrive several hours before we – who are about to board a borrowed vessel – can. What they don’t know, is that they have already been Noramlyed. They started the trip with us, after all.

The port is bedlam, and our boat is not there. There is actually no wharf – just gangplanks linking seawall and boat decks. So we wait.

We pinch a few cocoa beans from a gunny sack and eat the chocolate seeds. Delicious, crunchy. Bananas and salt sacks, a heap of kitchen gas tanks, young oil palm plants and a wheelbarrow loaded with long beans – even a washing machine – pass us by, to be shouldered or humped on to one or another of the long wooden “tongkangs.” A bridal party flutter past in shiny silken colours, fingers thumbing handphone keys in silent chatter.

In spite of the occasional modern touch, the scene – smells, produce, noise, heat, colour, sweat – is straight out of Conrad’s “Lord Jim.” I am half expecting a red-faced, sweating white man in a topee to come striding up to berate the Lascars… No, maybe that’s a bad image, considering what happened to Lord Jim’s ship. And anyway, the sweating, red-faced sahib is me, although I can’t find anyone to berate.

Finally our tongkang arrives, but cannot find a berth along the crowded waterfront. We wait some more and finally our boat nudges its way in and we load up. It’s a strange vessel; like most tongkangs, it is wooden and looks homemade. This one has such high sides it is hard to see out – bit like the traditional depiction of Noah’s ark, except the super structure (which is, in fact, only the loo) is at the stern, not amidships.

We are all on board within minutes, but still we don’t sail. All the fuel has to be put on board. Carried on. In jerrycans. The boatman siphons the first lot into the fuel tank, starting the process by personally sucking the fuel along a plastic hose. He then smokes a cigarette.

Then when that is done, another plastic hose is connected from the shore to bring water on board into two large plastic barrels. Finally we are off. One of our female passengers has a stomach ache and disappears into the loo.

Oops, we aren’t quite on our way even now. We have yet to negotiate a number of boats of varying size and speeds, scurrying along like water beetles through the port. Then we stop. And anchor. We wait and wait. “What are we waiting for?” one of the expedition members asks one of the two crew on board.

Seems one of the crew is not coming with us. He needs his bag – which is in the loo. We wait some more. And some more. Finally the loo is vacated, the man retrieves his bag, and disappears towards the shore in a small boat.

Still we don’t leave. What now? someone asks. Seems the boatman sent crewman to buy him some cigarettes. The boatman puts his head down on the jerry cans and snoozes. I wonder if you can get high on petrol fumes.

Eventually he has his cigarettes. The anchor is raised – slowly – by hand. Very slowly. and finally we are off. Only thing is that this tongkang is a heavy vessel. And it has one engine. One outboard engine. A 75 hp engine at that. It takes us fifteen minutes just to clear the port. We could already see Sebatik Island, even before we left the dock. For the next two hours, it grows no closer.

Three hours later we arrive in Wallace Bay. (That’s us in the last pix abandoning the boat at the Wallace Bay jetty).

And if you want to know what happened to the other Noramlyed boat, I’ll tell you tomorrow. Believe me, they got the worst of the Noramly curse.

*a term invented by my daughters’ long suffering men, to cover what happens when you travel with a member of our family…

Ok, I’ve gone all the way back to “the feminist in a non-technological society” topic, back on 17th January, and caught up with the comments, often leaving remarks of my own.

My thanks to all who have left your opinions and your wisdom over the past year. My life is the richer because you were here.

Still catching up here.

I intend to go back through all the recent blog entries and the comments, so watch out for that in the next few days.

I intend to get my blog index nicely up to date so that you find it easy to find ‘stuff’. I intend to answer all those emails languishing in my inbox.
My sister has gone home, you see, and I haven’t got Song of the Shiver Barrens back from the copy editor yet, so I don’t have any more excuses.

So: Glenda is putting her nose to the grindstone (the nose job), her shoulder to the wheel (who knows what that will do for my arthritis), her best foot forward (the one she didn’t wreck paying attention to a waster monitor in the bin); she has her mind on the job, her eyes on the road, her hands on the , um, no, her shoulder’s there already. Wherever – and she is going to get all those irritating little time-consuming tasks done. Once she gets untangled.
In the meantime, some more photos from the joint Sabah Parks – Universti Malaysia Sabah expedition to Tawau Hills Park. These are from the campsite at 700m, halfway up the mountain. And no, I didn’t actually get to the top. I blame my knees, darn ’em.

Photos, in order:
Eating (my sister Margaret and I are in there).
The cooks. I like the t-shirt: we are not tourists. We live here. I wanna get myself one of those…
The dining/working area.
Where we slept.
The bathroom.

Off to look at some Rafflesia today.

In the meantime, here’s another tree to look at (and, oh, yes, my husband’s in there too somewhere.) They grow ’em big in Tawau Hills Park. Trees, that is, not husbands.

Photo: My sister and I chat about whether we really should get on to a bright pink bus with fringed pink curtains and blue seventies plush seating, while student Fiffy – who will spend a large part of the next 10 days collecting mammal shit – chats on the phone.

I have just spent 10 days or so gadding about the rainforest and assorted islands and forests and mountains and so forth, most of it out of telephone range, let alone internet connection.

(Sorry, Tash, did try to phone from assorted
places, including the mountain, but couldn’t get through…)

Will regale you all with my numerous mishaps (missteps?) in the next few days, as soon as I wade through 590 emails, and dispose of 580 of them, and get a mountain of washing stuffed into my pocket-sized washing machine. The smell emanating from my back pack practically fuminated the house on our return… wet sweaty clothes stuffed in the bottom of a pack. Nothing like it for killing roaches or curling your hair.

Anyway, all of you, thanks for bearing with me and returning to my blog after my absence! I shall be reading all your comments and replying soon. In the meantime, here’s a glimpse or two of what I’ve been up to. It all started with the bordello bus from Kota Kinabalu to Tawau, down in Sabah’s south-eastern corner not far from Indonesia…

And included braving leeches
and climbing mountains
and one part involved lots of bananas

Back tomorrow!