Day 9: Sun Bears

Our stunning hire car

We all slept in today - why not, we deserved it after yesterday!  We decided to have an easy morning, so had breakfast and then headed to the pool with Ali as we hadn't been in it for 2 days, much to Tom's disgust!  We had it to ourselves and spent a pleasant hour in it, Tom with snorkel (don't think he will ever contemplate swimming without it now) and us in goggles, trying to be good and doing some lengths.  We got out, back to the flat and packed ready for tomorrow, the downside of multi-centre holidays: the constant messy suitcases (we don't unpack properly - what's the point?!)

Once we had done most of it, we got the car and headed back to Sepilok.  We had noticed that the Orang-utan place had a restaurant attached to it, so we wanted to patronise it, mainly for the sake of the orang-utans.  It was a really good restaurant actually, food was fresh and tasty.  Tom had a prawn omelette, Matt a beef curry and me a veggie noodle soup.

The Sepilok Giant - the tallest tree in the area

Once finished we headed to the Sun Bear Sanctuary which is mainly for maltreated bears - ones that have been captured for pets or even worse for bile production.  This is a little slice of heaven for them, they live in a fence area of rain forest (a large area of course) and are looked after and fed until they are ready to return to the wild.  Guess who we bumped into...Elod from yesterday.  He seemed happy to see us.

We were expecting to see one or two, but there were loads.  A walkway above the forest floor took us around a couple of the enclosures from which we could spot them and loads of long and short tailed macaques - well there was a lot of free food around for them to steal - which they did!  You know yesterday when we saw macaques we were amazed, today we were almost blasé about it all, however, saying that we did stop to watch them for quite a while and Matt got some more fantastic photographs.

We stayed at the sanctuary a good 2.5 hours, watching the bears.  Most of them were up in trees, but one pair came down to eat some food right in front of us which was very kind of them.  Sun Bears are the smallest of all the bears and called so because they have a golden mark on their chest - every one is different - so like a finger print.  They are very cute and look very cuddly, we could have watched them all day, even though the sweat was dripping off us whilst doing so.

We finally broke away from them and headed in to have an ice-cream and watch a video about them.  Tom bought a toy sun bear with his holiday money (this is where the orang-utan place fails because they didn't have any soft toy orang-utans for sale.  I'm sure if they did, we would have another one by now!)

Sun bear cub

We then headed up the road a little to the Rain Forest Discovery Centre to go on some walkways above the canopy to see what we could see.  We didn't get there until after 3.30 so were hoping to see the same sort of wildlife we saw on the river yesterday, but it wasn't too be, not sure if it was because it wasn't there or because we couldn't see it without a guide to spot it for us.  Tom did see a Giant Tree Squirrel and I came across a tiny snake, but apart from that we didn't see anything.  We heard plenty though - mainly insects but I'm sure some of the noise was coming from birds and primates too.  We walked all the walkways and climbed all the towers and went to see the biggest tree in the area, and all the time it was hot, hot, hot and ridiculously humid.  We were hoping for a rain storm to cool us down, but it didn't happen today, it just remained hot and humid.  Yuck.

Bear in a tree

At 5pm we gave up, we didn't think we would be able to find anything, maybe the lack of rain and wind and coolness meant the animals weren't out.  We drove back to Sandakan via Giant Supermarket to get some snacks for the coach ride tomorrow as we aren't sure if we will stop en-route during the journey (I did ask when we booked tickets, but the ticketing lady didn't understand me).  It can take up to 7 hours, so I figured we needed supplies just in case.  Oh and this time the non-halal section was open so we managed to get some beer for the evening - yahooo.  Not that we need a drink to enjoy ourselves, but we are on holiday and a drink before bed after spending the day sweating is a nice treat.  Must say thought that we are loving the culture of soft drink mocktails and freshly pressed juices here, they are all delicious and sooooooooo cheap, we are practically living on them and loving them.  Wish they were available like this in the UK.  Not sure a mocktail bar would work in Ingleton though!

Short tailed macaque

We got back, had much needed showers, put on clean clothes and then headed to the local shops for tea.  This time we thought we would go back to Mel's Fresco Bites as the food there was good.  Tom and Matt ordered fried rice and I ordered something Malay (Google translated it as wet fried chicken?!) Whilst we were waiting we had some freshly bbq'd chicken wings for a starter - they were delicious too.   Then we waited and waited and waited and waited for our mains.  They didn't come.  Everyone in the cafe got served their food including those who arrived after us and still it didn't come.  Then we noticed that the waiter who served us had disappeared!  I made it very obvious with my body language that something was wrong and the girls started to go through slips whilst pointing to us.  In the end they came over and asked if we were waiting for something!  Ah ha!  We had to re-order.  Tom's came first, then Matt's and then finally mine.  (It was noodles with chicken in a gravy).  It was all very tasty, just a shame we had to wait so long, especially as we had promised ourselves one last mocktail at Cafe Classico to say goodbye to our friends.  Tom decided he had drunk enough, but I had a calamansi mojito (really yummy) and Matt a Classico Breeze (watermelon thingy).  We said goodbye and headed back to the apartment to put Tom to bed - it was past 9pm.

We leave Sandakan tomorrow morning, shame as we have really loved it here, we are in such a great location, fabulous apartment, lovely people all around us.  Think we would have happily stayed a week if we could!  Oh hum, a long coach journey to KK tomorrow.