THE TRAVELS AND PHOTOGRAPHY OF WFOGG

Around Uganda in 16 days: Kampala – Lake Mburo National Park – Lake Bunyonyi – Mgahinga National Park

2011-10-22T11:48:00.000-07:00

We're still in Kampala, without many new adventures, and so I thought that I could tell you about how to make a trip around Uganda in a couple of weeks; but I'll do it bit by bit, you know, no hurry in Africa.

Since Zuzana had finished her contract and her brother Tomáš came to visit us, we decided to take a round trip around Uganda for a couple of weeks. Holidays. And besides, it's also a way to get to know the country a little and see places where I'll have to return for a longer time.

We were planning to make the first part of the journey on our own, travelling by public transport, and then we would meet with Óscar, a Spaniard who lives in Uganda and who has a travel agency (with which I have an agreement to do some promotional pictures) and with whom we would travel the second part of the trip until Kampala.

We could start at the beginning of the journey, from Kampala up to the Mgahinga National Park.

View Around Uganda in 16 days - Part I. as a larger map

A) Kampala
B) Lake Mburo National Park
C) Kabale
D) Lake Bunyonyi
E) Mgahinga National Park
F) Kisoro
G) Mt. Sabinyo

Everything is ready, let's go.

Day 1.

Our plan was to take a bus from Kampala, the Postbus, which is a bus you should try to take whenever you can, better than any other company. The majority of buses here are “high-speed” buses, but the Postbus takes it easy, takes longer, but is safe(r). Fortunately my friend Amos had to go to Kabale on the same day by car, and because the Lake Mburo National Park is on the way, he took us until the crossing where you have to take the road to reach the park.

From the crossing we took boda-bodas – with the backpacks on our backs – to cover the 23km of dirt road up to the park (if you come this way, it's around 10.000UGX).

Already from the motorbike, as you are coming closer to the park, you can see some warthogs (like Pumbaa in The Lion King), antilopes or buffalos… We arrived to the park, put up the tents in the camping next to the lake, and decided to leave the walking safari for the following day and spend a calm day next to the lake, resting after the trip and after getting up at 5 in the morning. And so we sat on the terrace of the local restaurant to enjoy the view.

In a while a school “bus” appeared, bringing a few children to visit the park and see from a boat the hippos, or the birds which are in the park.

And afterwards… well, let's say we weren't very lucky in this park. In the afternoon a group of nice Ugandans arrived, with one convertible and one Mercedes. Probably they were a bit confused and went to the park thinking they were going to a bar, and that's why they enjoyed the nature by listening to music at full blast and drinking until something like 2:30 in the morning. Lucky Tomáš and I had that small siesta in the afternoon... sorry for Zuzana.

Here I am going to send a small reproach to UWA (Uganda Wildlife Authority) so that it improves this aspect and makes sure that this type of incidents don't happen again, because the pak is worth it and this kind of things can ruin your experience.

And because we couldn't sleep, while we were waitng for a hippo to come and eat our lovely neighbours, we decided to watch the stars and take pictures of them.

Day 2.

The following morning we got up early for the safari. Lake Mburo National Park is one of the few parks in Uganda where you can do a walking safari. You go with a guide and an armed ranger with a gun, just in case a buffalo gets too friendly.

One of the reasons why we went to Lake Mburo is because, together with Kidepo, it is a place where you can see zebras. But to continue with the lucky streak in the park, and because you know that animals can't be booked on the telephone, we hardly saw anything during the safari. I don't know if it was partly because of the loud music of our nice neighbours, but the fact is that we had to be content with seeing a few buffalos, antilopes, warthogs and birds. Not a trace of zebras, of course.

In any case, don't let this discourage you from going to the park, this is not usual, both Óscar and other friends told us that they saw herds of zebras and antilopes from close up. We will have to wait until the next time.

After the safari we took again boda-boda to return to the main road, and there we took the first bus which was passing in the direction of Kabale, the city where we were going to spend the night. We weren't lucky enough to take the Postbus (which would probably still take time to pass by) and we took the Jaguar Executive Coach which goes to Rwanda. The bus is comfortable and much better than what you could expect in Africa, but we could really experience in person that the buses are high-speed.

In Kabale we also took it easy, we left our things in our hostel and we went to spend the afternoon at the terrace of Edirisa hostel, a very pleasant place with quite good food. One thing deserves a special mention: their very generous portions of home-made freshly baked sponge-cake for 1000 UGX (less than 30 Euro cents). It's a sponge-cake, nothing very special, but soft and spongy, and it's worth trying.

Day 3.

The following morning we got up, had a long breakfast at the terrace of Edirisa and left for our next destination: the Lake Bunyonyi.

The Lake Bunyonyi was formed when lava from one of the volcanic eruptions which ocurred during the formation of the Rift Valley closed out one valley, which then filled with water, creating a lake with several islands. It is not one of the main attractions of Uganda, but it's a nice and pleasant place where it's worth spending a few days, if you have the time. Maybe it's more of a backpackers destination, and it is more left out by the big tourism packages.

We spent two days in a place called Byoona Amagara, very recommendable. It is on one of the islands, and it is a perfect place to relax and do some activity in the area. To go there you take a canoe and you enjoy the lake while you paddle between its islands.

If you feel a bit lazy and you don't want to paddle, you can also get a canoe with a motor.

When we reached Byoona Amagara we decided to do one of the main things you should do there: chill out, and we spent the evening playing cards, eating and talking with people there until we decided to go to sleep.

Day 4.

Our plan was to rent a canoe to go from one island to another, stopping when we wanted and swimming in the lake (because there's no bilharzia in the lake Bunyonyi), but the day wasn't sunny enough to feel like swimming, so we decided to go hiking to find a place with a nice view of the lake. And this is where we arrived.

Photograph: © Zuzana Kazdová

I didn't take my camera, because I had taken my running shoes and clothes to go running around the area aferwards, and thought it would be mean to leave Zuzana and Tomáš the 5 kilos of my equipment to take back. The run a little bit too much, especially one part up the hill, which after a curve turned out to be much longer and steeper than what I could do with the pace I was running until then. Than night I ate and slept really well.

Day 5.

The next day we left towards the Mgahinga National Park, where we were planning to climb the Mt. Sabinyo. On the peak of this volcano the boarders of Uganda, Rwanda and Democratic Republic of the Congo come together.

So after having breakfast, we took a canoe and then a taxi back to Kabale, did some shopping for the hike of the following day, and we started to look for transport to Kisoro.

The options to move between Kabale and Kisoro are limited. There are some odd buses (which probably won't fit with your schedule), and it seems that the matatus don't run here, so your options are reduced to a special (a taxi just for you), or a shared taxi, which is the same as a special but with more people. And that was the option we chose. Do you know that joke: How do you put 4 elephants in a Mini? – Easy, two in the front and two in the back. So this shared taxi thing is the same: How do you put 8 people in a taxi?

Easy…

It seems that we were lucky because sometimes they put even 5 people at the back.

When we arrived to Kisoro, we took another taxi (this time just for us) to the entrance of the Mgahinga National Park, where UWA has a community campground with a few bandas (huts/cottages), which is where we were going to spend the night.

It's a very quiet and pleasant place, I remember getting out of the banda to go for a dinner in the small bar-restaurant, and enjoying the sound of the trees moving with the wind (which was the only thing you could hear). I stayed for a while watching the trees while listening to them… and of course, I took a picture to make sure the moment would stay in my memory for years to come.

We had a tea… and some local food for dinner enjoying the warmth from the fireplace…

… we ordered breakfast for the following day and, because we had read in several places that the Mt. Sabinyo hike was tough, we went to sleep to be fresh the following day.

Day 6.

As we had agreed with the park guards the day before, at 7:15 in the morning of the following day we had already had our breakfast and were ready to leave, as it's common with the schedules here, it was already 8:00 when we managed to start our hike towards the peak of the Sabinyo, with a guide, another guide who was being trained, and a ranger with a gun. The park office is approximately at 2.300 m above sea level, and the peak of Mt. Sabinyo is at 3.669 m, and so we had something like 1.300 m of altitude gain on 7 km of distance ahead of us, going there and back in the same day.

Before starting the guide gave us bamboo poles as walking sticks, and offered us the possibility to take a porter. Here it is fairly common that you are offered porters to go to the mountains, but we reached the conclusion that we didn't need one.

At the beginning the path goes through a relatively flat area which had been recovered for the park after being cultivated for some time, it's a swampy part which must be quite difficult to cross during the rainy season, but in July it was in good condition.

After a quarter of an hour walking we stopped for a while in front of the Mt. Sabinyo, and the guide offered us again to hire a porter, saying that there are people who can't reach the top and that my backpack was heavy even for him.

We looked at all the way ahead of us (we were going to climb the mount from the left side, until reaching the third peak, which is where the border between the three countries is). At that moment the memory of the Pinnacles in Malaysia passes through my head, while a few drops of cold sweat ran down my temple. And because two days before I overdid it a bit when running, and I was carrying in the backpack the food and water for me and Zuzana, some clothes and, apart from my backpack, I also had the 5 kilos of the camera and lenses… I decided it wasn't worth taking the risk and that maybe it was a good idea to take a porter. The guide called the office, and five minutes later he told us that the porter is on his way, so we decided to wait for him.

After 15 minutes waiting the guide calls the park office again, and after talking to them for a while he tells us that today no porter is available… ??????????

Anyway, it doesn't matter, I already know you have to keep your own pace, walk slowly if it's necessary and without getting obsessed. I take my bamboo stick and the one of Tomáš, who is not going to use his, and we continue our hike.

We follow the trail until we reach the primary bamboo forest, the path is still quite flat.

Further on the trail starts to go up the hill and our pace slows down, at least mine, but we keep on going up without problems, stopping now and then. We thought that we were going slowly, at least compared to other hikes we had done, but during one of the stops the guide tells us that we're going fine, that our pace is good and that if we continue like this we would easily reach the top and return before it gets dark. Great.

The path up to Mt. Sabinyo is very beautiful, passing through a forest with trees full of moss and lichen which give it a feel of a magic forest. It is good to stop once in a while and just look around.

Bit by bit the trees start to disappear and mountain vegetation with thicket takes their place. After a while we reached the first peak, where we stopped to rest, eat something and enjoy the views of Rwanda on the left and Uganda on the right, looking up at the second peak which we were going to climb in a while.

Because the trainee guide was going to stay on that first peak, we left with him everything we didn't need and we continued our way.

We quickly descended from the first peak and (not so quickly) climbed the second one, from where, looking back, you can see the first peak of the Sabinyo and the other two volcanoes, Mt. Gahinga and Mt. Muhavura, the highest of the three.

Without stopping we made the second descent and we reached the climb towards the third and last peak, leading to the border between the two countries. This climb is a little more complicated, and the most of it is through ladders.

Finally we reached the peak of Mt. Sabinyo, where of course we asked the guide to take the obligatory picture: Tomáš is in Rwanda, Zuzana in Democratic Republic of the Congo and I am in Uganda.

We ate something enjoying the views of the three countries, though the sky wasn't as clear as we would have liked. In any case we can't complain, anywhere you read about somebody who climbed the Sabinyo, it seems that it always rained, before or after, while we had the perfect weather, sunny during the whole day.

After a while we started the way back, I went first because I wanted to take some pictures while the others were climbing down. We reached again the first peak, where we picked up the guide who had stayed there, and we continued the way down without problems until the park office.

We expected it to be more difficult. We didn't have the impression that we walked fast, we stopped quite often to take pictures and to rest, and even like that we did the whole hike in a time which is considered normal.

After the whole hike, when we reached the camp we got some hot water to wash in (fortunately, because it gets quite cold in the evenings), and we enjoyed the evening and the dinner while resting our feet, again around the fireplace in the dining room.

And that is how we finished our mountain day in the Mgahinga National Park.

We were ready to continue the next day our journey towards the Queen Elizabeth National Park, our next destination.

Budongo Forest and Murchison Falls National Park

2011-05-10T18:46:00.000-07:00

After being in Kampala for this long I finally had a chance to get out of the city and go for a couple of days to Budongo Forest and Murchison National Park (also known as Kabarega National Park, although this name is hardly heard). I had an agreement with Great Lakes Safaris, a local tour operator which owns a lodge in Budongo Forest, to take pictures of their lodge during my trip to the national park for photos for my project. Fortunately Zuzana could also come and to enjoy the time there.

We were leaving from Kampala at 11 in the morning, so we were told to be at the office of the tour operator here in Kampala around 10:30. Amos, the owner of the tour operator was going that day to Gulu, a city in the north of Uganda, so we were travelling with him for the first part of the journey, until the junction where the roads to Gulu and to the park separate. From there a car would be waiting for us and we would go straight to the lodge.

We arrived to the office at 10:30 and... well, one thing you have to know is that here in Africa schedules are just a reference, so it was 12:30 when we were leaving the office heading north to Budongo Forest. And I have to say that Amos is quite punctual, we usually go running together and he normally arrives sharp on time.

After a couple of hours we arrived to the junction, but there had been a problem and the driver who should pick us up couldn't arrive there on time, so we decided that instead of waiting for him we would take a taxi to the next town where the driver would be waiting for us. Amos arranged the transport with the taxi driver and booked the whole back seat of the taxi for the two of us (plus our backpacks) while in the two front seats there were sitting the driver, two women and a child. It is the first time in my life that I saw two people sitting in the driver's seat.

20 kilometres later we arrived to Masindi, the town where the driver was waiting for us. We changed to his car and in less than half an hour we arrived to the lodge. The place is nice. The lodge has a main building with the common area and several cabins around in between the trees, which makes you feel like being in the middle of the forest.

And the fact is that you are in the middle of the forest, you can hear all the sounds of the forest: monkeys, insects, birds... especially at night, when everything is quiet but you still feel that the forest never sleeps. You can have an idea about how much in the forest it is by taking a look in Google Maps.

The small lighter green things that you see are the roofs of the lodge, and a bit on the left you see the road crossing the forest. I guess that there is a point to the lodge being called Budongo Eco Lodge.

Budongo Forest is the largest mahogany forest in East Africa, it has around 800 square kilometres and an incredible biodiversity, with several endangered species, it is also one of the best places in Uganda for bird watching. But on top of that, Budongo Forest is famous for being home of a population of over 600 chimpanzees, and that's why since 2006 Jane Goodall Institute has been carrying out an ecotourism project in Budongo Forest, and Budongo Eco Lodge is part of it.

Chimpanzees live in groups, and some of these groups in Budongo Forest are habituated to humans. What does it mean that they are habituated groups? Habituated animals are wild animals, they live free and behave as any other wild ones. The difference is that if you meet a non-habituated animal in the wild, it is highly probable that it goes away, but habituated animals are used to seeing humans around and they don't identify them as a threat, so they might stay and continue their normal life. One of these habituated groups lives in the area around Budongo Eco Lodge, and it has been monitored during years so we can learn more about how chimpanzees live. This group is the one that is visited by tourists (accompanied by a guide and in groups limited to 8 people and 1 hour of contact with the chimps) and at the same time guides observe their behaviour, which is registered afterwards in a chimpanzee diary.

In our planning, the activity for the first morning after our arrival was chimpanzee tracking. Before leaving, the guide explained us a few things the forest, how to behave there, how to find chimpanzees following different tracks, how to act when we meet them and that it is probable that we will find them but that, of course, it is not guaranteed.

A group of chimpanzees owns a territory of 10-30 square kilometres, fortunately the one close to the lodge is only about 10 square kilometres. It is possible to start the tracking from the lodge, in fact it is quite common, but that day other guides had spotted some chimpanzees at 4 kilometres from the lodge, so at 7:30 we got into a car and took the road crossing the forest to start tracking the chimps from another point. Once we reached there, we entered the forest and started to look for the chimpanzees.

Well, the fact is that it is highly probable to see chimpanzees in Budongo Forest but, as I told you before, even if they are habituated they are wild, and you can't book wildlife. We spent almost 5 hours hiking in the forest but that day we hardly saw any chimpanzee track. Just when we were heading back to the lodge we heard clear chimpanzee calls so we headed in the direction of the calls. We must have been close to them, because we could even smell them, but we couldn't see anything. The guide told us that they were probably another group which is not habituated. The boundary of the territory of the habituated group is close to the lodge and sometimes it happens that when a group of chimpanzees goes deep inside their territory, another group may enter their territory to steal their food. So if they were this "rebel" group and they saw us coming, they probably went back to their territory.

Fortunately, there are more things to see in a forest than chimpanzees. To begin with the forest itself, it is really nice to hike in Budongo Forest, it is beautiful and it is flat, even if the temperatures rise a bit during the day, the weather isn't really uncomfortable, so hiking in Budongo is quite pleasant. And besides, you can enjoy more animals, like big snails climbing on branches:

Or birds like the black-and-white-casqued hornbill.

Or the olive baboon, which you can see in the forest or sitting in the middle of the road.

We also saw another monkey called black-and-white colobus monkey. It is a pity I don't have a clear picture of them, but sometimes chimpanzees hunt them so they are really fast and nervous. And I have the feeling that they don't like being photographed. There was a tree close to the lodge where from time to time you can see some of them eating, but as soon as I grabbed my camera they would run away. So far this is the best I can show you, hopefully I will be able to show you something better next time I go back to the forest.

After the whole morning in the forest we went back to the lodge, had lunch and then I spent the afternoon taking pictures of the lodge. It is not a luxury lodge but it is a nice place to stay and it is very environmentally friendly, with solar power (even for the hot water), water supply from rainwater, composting toilets, sustainable waste management... and at the same time it supports the local communities by training and employing locals, commissioning vegetables from their farm, outsourcing the laundry service or selling their handicrafts in the craft shop of the lodge. Even the cabins have been built with sustainably harvested pine wood. I have to say that I liked the place.

The next day we planned to go to Murchison Falls National Park, which is known for its falls and the wildlife you can see in its savannah. The best time to watch wildlife is always early in the morning and late in the evening, close to the sunset, so we got up really early because we wanted to arrive to the park in time to take the first boat crossing the river at 7:00 to enter the park. After 56 kilometres we were the first car waiting for the ferry.

This was one of the great experiences in Uganda, reaching the bank of the Nile at sunrise while you see some hippos shyly sticking their heads out from the water. A magical moment.

The Nile? Does the Nile River pass through Uganda? I guess that at this point we could talk a little bit about the Nile. If we follow the river from its delta in the Mediterranean Sea, the Nile flows through Egypt, where it is most known. Upstream from Egypt it enters Sudan where, close to its capital, Khartoum, it splits up in two: the Blue Nile and the White Nile. The Blue Nile has its source in the Lake Tana in Ethiopia, that is clear; while the longer White Nile still has a long way ahead of it, a way which is not so clear.

It flows through Sudan and enters South Sudan, first as Bahr El Abyad (which means White River in Arabic), afterwards changing its name to Bahr El Jabal, until it enters Uganda where it takes the name of Albert Nile.

If we follow Albert Nile, we reach Lake Albert, on the border of Murchison Falls National Park, from where it continues as Victoria Nile, which is the river we crossed. The Victoria Nile then finally reaches Lake Victoria in what it is known as the source of the Nile, close to the city of Jinja in Uganda.

But that's where the problem begins. Where is the real source of the Nile? There are different opinions for that. It was John Hanning Speke who in 1862 discovered the source of the Nile on the northern shore of the Victoria Lake, and Stanley, after meeting Dr Livingstone (I presume), who in 1875 confirmed Speke's discovery, establishing the source of the Nile in the Victoria Lake. But of course, Lake Victoria gets its water from many other rivers, so if you want to find the furthest headstream from the Mediterranean Sea you must follow one of these rivers.

The longest course follows the Kagera River through Tanzania and Rwanda. But this river splits again in two: one is the Rurubu River, and its tributary Ruvyironza River is often referred as the furthest source of the Nile, in Burundi. The other one is the Nyabarongo River, which flows through Rwanda, changing its name first to Mwogo River and then to Rukarara River.

An expedition in 2006 claimed to have reached the source the Rukarara as the furthest source of the Nile. But in my opinion, they will have to do another expedition to the source of the Ruvyironza River, otherwise how can they claim anything with certainty?

Since it seems that it isn't quite clear, meanwhile they reach a conclusion, for me the source of the Nile is in the Lake Victoria, as discovered by the great explorers of 19th century, and the furthest headstream of the water flowing through the Nile must be somewhere in Burundi or Rwanda.

Back to our trip to Murchison Falls, at 7:00 we crossed the Victoria Nile, a guide from the park joined us in the car and we started the game ride.

We spent the whole morning driving through the roads of the park, watching and taking pictures of the animals. Bylon, the General Manager of the lodge was driving the car and every now and then I was asking him to stop or go back a bit when I needed. Around noon we reached the Lake Albert, where we had lunch with a nice view of the hippos in the lake. I think it is better if you see all this by yourselves.

There are also lions and leopards in Murchison Falls, but they are not seen too often. They can be easily found in other parks of Uganda, like Kidepo National Park, in the north east of the country. It is definitely much easier to see lions in Kenya, but you will probably feel like in a zoo surrounded by cars. Here in Uganda it is not so overcrowded and most of the time we spent in Murchison Falls our car was the only one we could see all around.

After lunch we came back to the jetty where the ferry left us in the morning. There we took a boat for a cruise through the Victoria Nile heading up to the Murchison Falls.

From the boat you can see again hippos, buffaloes, elephants, crocodiles, different kinds of birds...

Finally the boat reaches the point from where you see the Murchison Falls. After everybody on the boat sees the falls and takes pictures, the boat takes you back to the jetty. But there is another option, instead of going back by the boat, you can make a short hike to Baker's Summit at the top of the falls.

The boat left us at the beginning of the trail and we started the hike. I highly recommend it, we took our time, we were taking pictures and enjoying the landscape.

I had already seen the falls on many pictures, and I always thought that they were nothing special, and maybe you will feel a bit of the same when seeing these pictures. Now I know that you really have to be here to appreciate them.

Maybe you can get an idea if you think like this. Take a look at the Victoria Nile.

It is a big river, wide... Well, now think that all that water has to pass through that "small", only about 10m, crack between rocks. The river narrows and roars and starts to run faster until it hits the rocks, and there it boils and roars, all the power of the Nile compressed in a small opening between two rocks. It is impressive, and it makes you feel how powerful the river is.

We spent some more time taking pictures and enjoying the river.

You can also reach the top of the falls by car, there is a parking just couple of minutes from Baker's Summit. As you can imagine, I was taking pictures there as long as I had some light, so by the time I finished and we got to the parking there was only Bylon waiting for us. After paying the fees for the hike and talking a bit with the staff there, we left the parking heading to the lodge.

It was already getting dark and we were already thinking of the shower, the dinner and resting after the long day. But the last adventure of the day was still to come.

A bit after the parking, there is a point where the road goes steeply uphill and is full of gravel. And that is where our car refused to keep going and after several tries it got stuck in a ditch. Fortunately we were still near the parking so Bylon could go back and ask the people working there to come and help us. After one hour pushing and pulling the car and removing earth and gravel with a spade we finally managed to get the car out of the ditch and continue our way to the lodge, sweaty and tired.

My plan for the next day was going on habituation with the chimpanzees. There are two kinds of activities in Budongo Forest. One is chimpanzee tracking, which is a half day activity where, as I told you before, you go with a guide in a group of maximum 8 people and the stay with the chimps is limited to one hour. The other option is called habituation. It is a full day activity and it is limited to one or two people accompanied by a guide. This was my activity for today.

Since Zuzana couldn't see any chimpanzees the first day, we agreed that she could join us with another guide during the morning for chimpanzee tracking and then she would return to the lodge for lunch.

Around 8 in the morning we were leaving the lodge and entering the forest. That morning the humidity created a thin mist, which together with the morning light was giving the forest a magical appearance.

After hiking for not a long time the guide told me: "there, a chimp, on the track". Again, another very special moment. It was still early in the morning and there was not much light. About 20 metres in front of me there was an area with some thick vegetation making the forest a bit darker. I looked carefully and in between the mist I saw a figure sitting on the track and slowly moving. I had no specific expectation about what a chimpanzee is like, and even though I know that chimpanzees are not small monkeys, I found it surprisingly big. After a few seconds, it got up and slowly and quietly started to move away from us until it disappeared in the shade.

As we kept on walking, we saw more chimpanzees, following those we saw on the ground or following the calls we could hear in the forest. At that time of the day most of them were on the trees feeding with fruits.

After some time Zuzana returned to the lodge and the guide and I continued observing more chimps, trying to get a clear view of them, so I could take as many pictures as possible.

After midday, when it becomes hotter, many of the chimpanzees climb down from the trees to rest and interact with other members of the group. Maybe I was lucky that day, but I had the feeling that it is really worth going for habituation instead of chimpanzee tracking. During that time I spent there I could see how chimps live, while if you go for chimpanzee tracking most of the time you will see how chimpanzees eat. I could see how they interact between different members, how the alpha male rules the group... It was very interesting.

Later, when the sun starts to get down and the heat is disappearing, the chimpanzees go back to the top of the trees looking for more food. Then the afternoon group of chimpanzee tracking came and they were watching them eating while we were again trying to find a clear view of them so I could get more pictures.

Around 4 pm, after spending more than 7 hours with the chimpanzees, the light between the trees started to be too dim and the guide and I decided to go back to the lodge. I really had a great time that day.

After the whole day in the forest with the camera in my hands (almost 2,5 Kg) pointing to the trees I was quite tired; happy but tired. It was the perfect moment for a shower, relaxing, having a dinner and going to sleep.

And then it was time to go back to Kampala, to stop being photographer and to become manager again. We were driven to Masindi and from there we took a matatu to Kampala.

I will have to go back again (fortunately), one day shooting wildlife could be enough if you are really lucky, but this was not the case. If everything goes well and the project goes ahead, I should be spending more time in Murchison Falls and photographing chimpanzees.

I am already looking forward to be back in the savannah and in the forest.

First impressions

2011-03-14T14:32:00.000-07:00

Time goes fast. It has been almost one month since we arrived. We found a place where to stay, we waited for the elections to pass and we have been trying to reach our goals here in Uganda. One month here... How has it been?

Once you arrive to Kampala there are some things you have to get used to: chaotic traffic, which can be horrible at certain point, pollution, which is far much more than we get in Madrid, rubbish on the streets... All the typical stuff I heard you have to get used when you come to Africa. Oh, I almost forget it, the red dust which is all around.

But there are also some other things which are really easy to get used to here in Uganda, for example the weather. It is just wonderful, Kampala is almost at 1200 metres above the sea level, and that makes the weather quite soft, even if we are almost at the equator; even now when the dry season is getting too long and everybody complains about how hot it is, we might have like 30ºC, and at night it gets fresh. Let's say that we have around 25-27 degrees during the day and around 18 degrees at night.

And something else which really defines Uganda is how nice Ugandans are. Everywhere you go and whoever you talk to, there is always a smile waiting for you. Especially children, you can hear all around children telling you "Hello muzungu!" while waving their hand. That's even more usual if you get out of Kampala, where children are very curious about muzungus.

Right, so we are in Kampala. What should I show you? Where shall we go? Well, that is actually not so important now, the point is not where, but how will we go? Let me explain.

Distances in Kampala are long, you look into the map and it seems that things are just around the corner, and they are, it is just that the corner is a bit too far. If you don't have a car you have two main options in the public transport: matatu and boda-boda.

Matatus, locally called taxis, are a very common means of transport in Africa. Basically they shared taxis, minivans that have a fix destination and once they are full they start the trip while people get on and off all along the route. It is like a minibus, and there are matatus for long distances and short distances. Here in Kampala most of the matatus go to the centre, going from and to Old Taxi Park or New Taxi Park and surroundings.

I am going to introduce you Old Taxi Park. It is a wonder of the transport engineering. Imagine a square, a big one. Now fill it with as many cars as you can. Right? Ok, now do it in a way that they all can enter and get out in order through many different ways... It's complicated, isn't it? OK, that is Old Taxi Park, the organised chaos.

Welcome to Old Taxi Park:

Here you are two pictures so you can see that I am not exagerating about how many cars they can fit there.

What you see in the second pictures is about half of Old Taxi Park. To tell the truth yesterday, when I took the picture, it was not very full, you still can see a lot of the ground. If you want another funny point of view you can take a look at Google Maps (by the way I guess you have noticed that "red dust which is all around").

I have to admit that I really like Old Taxi Park. Sometimes it can be difficult to cross, but even then you find people all around in between the taxis selling everything you can imagine, from water, sodas, chips and ice cream to newspapers, fruit, belts, cotton buds, earrings or anything else you may need.

Matatus are cheap, but they are not always the best option. Sometimes the traffic is too bad, and other times you don't need to pass through the city centre. There are also what we call taxis, here they are called cabs, special hires or just specials, but they are usually far too expensive and we only use them at night. In any other case your option is a boda-boda, or simply boda.

A boda-boda is a motorcycle taxi. They started as bicycle taxis taking people in between the borders of Kenya and Uganda. They offered "border-border" service, shouting "boda-boda!" to people crossing the border, and they ended up being called boda-boda.

Now they are all around and they usually ride a motorbike instead of the bicycle. You can either stop them on the street or get one in one of the many stages which are all around the city. In a matatu most of the times you get the right prices, but with bodas you will have to negotiate. At the beginning it is a bit difficult, but after a while you get to know the normal prices and then everything goes smoothly. You offer the right price and if one doesn't accept it the next one will take you, there are really many of them.

Of course, boda-bodas can take one or two passengers.

Of course, a motorcycle doesn't have to be use only by so few passengers. A motorcycle is a perfect mean of transport for the whole of the family. In Europe, when you have a child, you by an MPV, one of those family vans, because that's the only way to carry your family; here, when you have three children, you buy a motorcycle.

Yes, look closely, there are three children.

Boda-bodas are a very useful way of moving around the city, but let's face it, it is a bit dangerous. So there are some things you should care about when taking a boda. It is not a bad idea wearing a helmet when riding a motorcycle, so we have bought helmets that we always take with us when we are going to the city and we know we are taking a boda. And it is also highly recommendable having a boda whom you can trust, so when you know a good one you get his telephone number and call him when you need him. We have Walter, the best boda in town. He is very punctual, he knows the city, drives carefully, he always gives you the right price with no need to bargain... he even uses the indicators! I guess that's why many muzungus use his services.

Once you get to know how to deal with all this, you are ready to live in Kampala, the city where instead of sparrows, as we have in Europe, you have pterodactyls.

They are called marabous and the first time you see one of them flying low over your head not knowing where it is coming from, you think that there is something wrong. Even now that I am used to them, when I see one on a lamppost I think it is going snap.

After one month in Kampala, we have our everyday life, we enjoy the time with our housemates, we made some new friends, we go out from time to time, or we go to the cinema, or to the theatre... We are starting to know the city and, somtimes, little by little, getting out of Kampala.

We will keep on discovering Uganda together.

A place to live in Uganda

2011-02-28T07:43:00.000-08:00

When you move to another country, the first thing you need is a place to live. But from Spain, maybe it is not so easy to find the right one. I was trying to find something before arriving but anything I could find could be classified into two options: You know it is good, but it is too expensive (around 1200$ + VAT), or it has a reasonable price, but then... how do you know it is good enough?

So we decided that, for the beginning, we could find a backpackers' place for a couple of days and search for a place once we were in Uganda. We checked a little bit on the Internet and we thought that a hostel in Kampala called Red Chilli Hideaway could be a good option. And it was.

It is clean, nice, and the staff is really helpful. It's a good budget accommodation. And on top of that, it is a funny place. You can enjoy sitting under a tree reading your book while you enjoy all the nature around you, including the monkeys that can come from time to time, the goats that are around, or even that big pig which is sleeping most of the time.

Photograph: © Zuzana Kazdová

This is fine for some days, but you can not stay there forever, which is why from the very beginning we started to look for a place to rent. We were checking notice boards, asking everybody we are meeting here, looking for through Internet, and then, visiting different houses and rooms.

I think we were quite lucky, in less than one week we decided that one of the places we saw was nice and we decided to take it.

So here we are, sharing a house in a local estate in Kampala. It is nice, clean, safe and relatively close to the centre. We are living with young Ugandans; they are very nice, and it is always very interesting living with local people: you get to know better the local customs, it is easier to know where you can have your shoes repaired if you need it, you can know the right price for the public transport no to pay the muzungu price (we are muzungus, that's how we foreigners are called in Luganda, the local language) and it is definitely the best way of knowing the local food, especially if you live with Brendah, our housemate, who really likes cooking, and you bet, she can cook.

This is Brendah.

This is Brendah cooking.

And these are some of Brendah creations:

Pilao with vegetables

Chapati with beans

Liver and vegetables with chapati

Photograph: © Zuzana Kazdová

Chicken in two peppers sauce

She cooks almost everyday for all of us, and from time to time her fiends and she cooks for everybody. For example, her fiends came to spend the elections day at home, so Brendah cooked for all of us. And don't think she did precooked pasta; she prepared five different things which put together in the plate made a typical Ugandan meal. So we all had a nice lunch in the backyard.

That's the backyard. Do you want to see where we live?

Welcome to our home, please come in....

Photograph: © Zuzana Kazdová

This is the living room:

Photograph: © Zuzana Kazdová

This is our room. Now we have a mosquito net on the bed:

Photograph: © Zuzana Kazdová

And this is the kitchen:

Photograph: © Zuzana Kazdová

Do you like it?

You are welcome to visit us whenever you want!

Uganda, the pearl of Africa

2011-02-20T07:41:00.000-08:00

Or at least that is what Winston Churchill said about Uganda. Let's discover why he thought that. This is our first time in Africa (well, apart from Morocco and Tunisia), and here you are our first contact with this part of the world. Here we go!

The adventure had already started in Spain, apart from packing everything in our apartment and moving everything, a small problem raised. We booked our flight with the cheapest option to fly from Spain to Uganda, especially if you want a more flexible fare, as we wanted. That means that we were flying with Egyptair through Cairo. What a coincidence, just at the time when Egypt people decided to change the history of their country and Hosni Mubarak decided to decree a curfew, so our night flight from Cairo to Entebbe (the airport of Kampala, the capital of Uganda) was cancelled. Egyptair only wanted to refund the price of the ticket, but that was very inconvenient for us, so we had to negotiate hard with Egyptair so that they rebooked our flight from Madrid to Kampala. Finally on Monday Zuzana managed to get a new ticket for the way there with Brussels Airlines while keeping the ticket and the flexible fare with Egyptair for the way back.

There was only a little problem, we planned everything to fly at 15:05 with Egyptair, and now our flight with Brussels Airlines was at 6:40. That made the last two days being even crazier than expected, as a result Zuzana slept 15 minutes and I had to stay awake my second night on a row. The next day I was literally falling asleep on the plane while having breakfast.

We arrived to Entebbe at 22:45. First get the visa on arrival (queue), then get out through the scanner (queue)... ups... it's already midnight.

We got a taxi to the hostel and when we arrived to the parking the car was out of battery. After a couple of minutes, a friend of the driver came with jumper cables and they solved the problem. We were ready for the 46 Km from the airport to the hostel. After a while we were lucky enough to reach a tailback due to a convoy transporting the ballot boxes for the elections, and as you can imagine it was escorted by the police so it was not allowed to overtake it. "Fortunately" the convoy was following the same route as we were until almost the hostel. We managed to get rid of the convoy but that was not all. When we were just one kilometre from the hostel the car crossed a big pot hole on the road (full of water) and we got a flat tire. Great! It didn't take a long time to change the wheel and we finally reached the hostel.

I have to admit that I like this kind of adventures, as long as they are not too complicated. I usually think: "if in 6 months, I will tell my friend the story of this sitting in a terrace while drinking a beer and having fun, then it's fine". So when we were already in our room I knew that all that meant that we are going to have a great time here in Uganda.

Since then we are getting used to the life here, the transports in Kampala, looking for a place to live... but... I guess you are not expecting me to tell you everything straight away, are you?

Let's say that I still didn't have the time to take my camera for a walk, and explaining you all this country without pictures is not that funny. So... keep in touch and keep on reading!

Welcome to Africa!

Why are we in Uganda?

2011-02-20T07:29:00.000-08:00

As a travel photographer, what I would like to do is develop photography projects on different countries to show everybody the world through my eyes. That's how the project on Malaysia started. But of course, as a professional (photographer or whatever) you can not rely on just one project. So what about another country?

But the world is full of countries, you can't imagine how many of them there are. How to choose the right one?

First of all, I am not alone in the world, so the chosen country should be a country which could be suitable for Zuzana and me. Other important key to choose a country is Fitur, the International Tourism Trade Fair in Madrid. It is a good way of knowing which countries could be interested in promoting themselves. Last year I already had several contacts with the tourism board of some countries, and this year the fair was going to be in January.

We wanted an English speaking country with a good NGO and development institution presence, stable, safe, with a minimum of infrastructures and, at the same time, it should be interesting from a tourist point of view and not too known in Spain. If you put all these things in a cocktail shaker, what you get is Uganda. It has a lot of things in the sector of development cooperation, and for me it has nationals parks in the savannah, with lions, elephants and so on, it also has mountain gorillas and mountains over 5000 m, in fact the third highest mountain in Africa is in the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Plus a lot of interest when talking about the different people living along the country, in terms of culture and tradition. It seemed that Uganda could be a good place to go.

After some research, I met with Santi Jimenez in Barcelona, who is the only person in Spain managing visas with the Ugandan Embassy in France and the focal point for contacts between Spain and Uganda through the website "Uganda in Spain", to explain him the project in a meeting we had he told me that he thinks that it would be a good project to do in Uganda and he gave me some contacts.

One month later, in Fitur, I had a few meetings, with the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA, the institution managing all the National Parks in Uganda), with different tour operators and with the Chairman of the Association of Uganda Tour Operators.

At the same time, Zuzana started to make a research on the development cooperation sector in Uganda, and she found a lot of possibilities to try.

So here we are. Zuzana will try to find a job in development cooperation and I will try to show you all how nice this country is.

I hope we can see a lot of it and that we all like it.

What in Uganda do you want to see?

2011-02-18T15:22:00.000-08:00

There is not much to see about Uganda yet, but still, there are some thing to read about it...

Uganda, the pearl of Africa

First impressions

Budongo Forest and Murchison Falls National Park

Around Uganda in 16 days: Kampala – Lake Mburo National Park – Lake Bunyonyi – Mgahinga National Park

What in Malaysia do you want to see?

2011-02-18T15:09:00.000-08:00

If you want you can take a look on all the entries on Malaysia or, if you prefer, you can read the one(s) that interest you most. Go on and choose

Welcome to Malaysia

Getting started...

Javi and the fireworks

Merdeka!!!

Borneo

Gunung Mulu National Park

Why does Javi travel back and forth in Borneo?

Activities in Kuching

Kinabalu National Park

Formula 1 in Sepang

Karamuak

Karamuak

2011-02-13T05:06:00.001-08:00

After climbing the Mount Kinabalu, on Sunday evening Zuzana went back to Kuala Lumpur. But as I still had one week before the trip to the interior of Sarawak, on Monday morning I decided to go to the Sabah Tourism Board to ask for sponsorship. At that point I was already quite used to asking for it. I had a meeting with a woman there and she told me that she would call me in a couple of days.

After that I decided that in the afternoon I would go to Sandakan, in the eastern coast of Sabah, to take some pictures in the areas around. I went to the hostel, I packed everything, I went to the bus station and I took the first bus leaving to Sandakan. At night I was already there looking for accommodation; I found a hostel with a clean dorm at a reasonable price and I went to bed.

On Tuesday morning I planned everything I was going to do during all the days I had in Sabah. First I went to the Sandakan Tourist Office and later I took a walk on the city looking for travel agencies to see what they offered. While walking the city I found the travel agency of a local photographer called Cede Prudente, I got his telephone number and after a short conversation we decided that we could meet in the evening.

In the Tourist Office I got information about places near Sandakan, especially about Turtle Island, Sepilok (the other rehabilitation centre for orangutans) and the lower Kinabatangan River, one of the areas with widest wildlife diversity in the region. But the most important thing I got from them was the address of the offices of the Yayasan Sabah Group in Sandakan. This governmental organization is in charge, among other things, of the management of the conservation areas of Danum Valley, Imbak Canyon and Maliau Basin. These areas, in the interior of Sabah, are the biggest natural reserves of the state; and visiting Danum Valley was one of the things I wanted to do.

So the first thing I did as soon as I left the Tourist Office was going to the offices of Yayasan Sabah Group. As I told you, I am very used to asking for sponsorship, but this time, since I already spoke with the Sabah Tourism Board in Kota Kinabalu, I only went there to get information.

In ten minutes I arrive there, I tell my eternal story about the Spanish photographer, and one minute later I am sitting in the office of a very nice man called Barnabas who is asking me to tell him about what I am doing. I tell him in short what I do and I also tell him, among many other things, about the trip I am going to do in Sarawak sponsored by the Sarawak Tourism Board and that I have been talking with the Sabah Tourism Board… but just as a part of the story. I don't know what happened, it must be that I tell the story very well, because Barnabas started to say that it is very interesting and that he has a program of homestay in Karamuak, a small village in the upper Kinabatangan and that it is a very good promotion for him.

In a couple of seconds Barnabas has already called the 6 people of his department and I look at all of them standing in his office. I was sitting in front of Barnabas desk while he was telling them my story and he is asking them about how much time I would need to see what they do in Karamuak. After a while everything is clear, on the next morning I will go to Karamuak, they will cover all the expenses and there will be three people coming with me to assist me in all I could need. But... If I just wanted some information...

I also asked them about the conservation areas I wanted to visit, which is why I went there, but the time you need to visit them is too much for me, so I will have to leave it for the next time. In fact I asked if one week would be enough to visit Maliau Basin and the answer was "roughly to cross it". Ok, with the time I had then, it is not possible.

When I left the Yayasan Sabah Group offices, I went to the office of Turtle Island. To be able to visit that island there were two problems. The first one is that you have to book quite in advance, and by now you must have noticed that I can not do plans in advance because I don't know where I will be at any time. And the second problem is the price. Going to Turtle Island usually costs from 120€ just one day and one night, besides, travel agencies usually book for a minimum of two people, so I would have to pay double the price. Sometimes you can bargain the price, but in a destination with such a high demand… impossible. So my only option is asking them to let me go as a photographer in exchange for some photographs. After talking with two people they told me that it is not possible. Well, what can I do, not always everything is going to be ok.

From there I went to the office of the photographer, Cede Prudente. While I was waiting for him I took a look on his pictures, some of his books he had there and his postcards, they were very good. When he arrived he gave me some advice about what should be interesting for me around there. After talking with him I thought that it could be a good idea going with him to the hostel he is running in the lower Kinabatangan to see some more wildlife, and when a bit later he told me that I would have a special price, we agreed that when I came back from Karamuak I would go to his hostel.

With these plans for the next four days, and realising that I didn't have much more time to visit anything else around there, I decided that after visiting the lower Kinabatangan I would go to Miri, where my trip to the interior of Sarawak should start. Since I still had a couple of extra days and I needed to leave the country to renew my entry (as a tourist you can only stay for three months in a row), I thought that instead of flying from Kota Kinabalu to Miri I could pass through Brunei, so I could also take the chance to see it.

At the end of the day I had already planned all I was going to do until I reached Sarawak. That night I went to the cinema with a girl who was in the same hostel. There was not much to choose from, since you have to forget about all the Asian movies because Malay subtitles are not very helpful. We finally ended up watching a romantic comedy that I don't even remember the title, I only remember that I expected it worse. At least cinemas were decent, and a cinema evening is always a pleasure.

I woke up early in the morning and when I arrived to the offices of Yayasan Sabah Group, everything was ready. The driver, the three people coming and me, we all got into the four-wheel drive car and left towards Karamuak. After driving around 120 km on the road through palm oil plantations we took one of the many tracks disappearing into the palm trees. It is at that moment when you realise why Malaysia is the second producer of palm oil in the world. It is not something I had never seen before, when flying, for example, but somehow being for such a long time in between all those plantations makes you really realise it.

During many years, the logging industry and palm oil plantations have been the two biggest reasons for the deforestation in Malaysia. When travelling across all those plantations, it is difficult not to think that once all that was the rainforest.

It is not easy for me just to mention this topic and not to say anything about it.

Those of you who know me know that I love nature, wildlife... I recognise that I feel a bit sad when I see such a wide surface which is not rainforest anymore. And know that I write you back from home, I can assure you that I miss the rain forest. During the last months in Malaysia, the extremely long rain season last year didn't allow me to go to the rainforest as much as I would have liked, but the few times I could get close to it and listen slightly to its sounds... It fascinated me again and I kind of felt like home.

During all the time I spent in Malaysia, I spoke about the problem of deforestation with several people, especially with Cede Prudente, the local photographer I met in Sandakan, who collaborates with World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). So, even if I don't have much information about it, after listening to all of them, my opinion is that these days it is necessary to understand these industries without which Malaysia could not keep the development status which has. As far as I know, Malaysian government created new laws to prevent further deforestation, creating protected areas and preventing the decrease of the surface of the rainforest. Let's hope it works.

During our trip in between the plantations I was asking from time to time the driver to stop so I could take some pictures; since they were there to help me, every time I asked him, the driver would stop or turn back to take me to the place I needed. After a long way crossing plantations and rain forest we reached the area which Yayasan Sabah Group manages. But… What does exactly Yayasan Sabah Group do?

This organization was originally created to manage the logging industry in the State of Sabah in a way that all the population could get a benefit from it, specially in order to support their education. But nowadays its activities are not limited to this sector; its different departments manage different areas such as conservation areas, oil palm plantations, gas, petrol or biotechnology among others. In this region, through the Community Forestry Centre that they manage in Karamuak, they run two main activities: ecotourism and, most importantly, helping the local communities to survive in the new conditions the live in. People living here used to live from the rain forest and the natural resources they got from the river. But now the environment is not the same as it used to be and they have to adapt their customs to the new resources, such as palm plantations to produce palm oil.

That first day they showed me the facilities they had in several places, all them were quite nice and were located in beautiful places.

They also showed me a place with a few small waterfalls where people go to have a bath, but don't think it was a place where you could really swim.

Finally, we arrived to Karamuak; the woman who managed the centre was waiting for us. I was given the key of my place and as soon as I left my backpack she took me for a walk so I could see all they have there and how they used it.

In that centre they have several classrooms that they use for two different purposes: they teach the locals how to use the new resources and give them basic education; and when they have visitors, they show them how the area is and how it is managed.

In the centre they also have the different accommodation facilities for the homestay programme. These homestay programmes, which you can find in several places in Malaysia, try to stimulate rural tourism. The idea is to visit a village, spend some days there together with the local people, seeing their customs, and enjoying their hospitality. People in Malaysia are very kind, especially in rural areas. A homestay programme usually consists of basic accommodation in small villages where some activities are prepared for the visitors so that they can get to know better how the locals live. And it is also one of the best ways of getting to know the real popular gastronomy.

They took me to see the different types of accommodation they have, and I was taking pictures of them. Then she took me for a walk around the centre, and even if the centre is not in the middle of the rain forest, it is not a bad place for a walk.

Karamuak is quite in the interior of Sabah, but even though you can reach it by car (better if it is a 4wd) and it is not really in the middle of the deep rainforest, which makes it seem to be more developed than other villages, it still has its limitations. For example, this girl was waiting for an sms.

Mobile phones are hanging there because it is one of the few places where, from time to time, there is a bit of mobile network coverage. Even like this, after 15 minutes, she left without any message, leaving the mobile hanging there, where they are all the time… unless it is raining.

In the evening I had some free time before dinner, and from the car I saw a place from where I thought I could see a nice sunset, so I decided to take a walk by myself and enjoy the sunset.

I arrived there before the sun set and I had time to take a couple of pictures. It was a pity that there were not more clouds because the place was nice and quiet. But even if it wasn't the nicest sunset in history I spent a very nice time there.

After that, and before it was dark (remember that there is no electric power in the middle of the rainforest), I walked back to centre for the dinner. One of the girls who came with us from Sandakan was the cook, although I guess she had more tasks to do. She was not the only one cooking there, there was always somebody helping her, but you can be sure she knew what to do in a kitchen. It is not that she cooked anything really sophisticated, I guess that all she cooked during the time we were there were normal dishes for them, but I really liked them all.

In the next morning we went to a hike they normally do with the visitors who come to the centre. Close to Karamuak there is the mount Tingkar (this time it is only 768 metres above the sea level). In 1962 a helicopter crashed on its top, and the pilot and the geologist who was with him had to walk all the rain forest down the hill until they reached Karamuak. It is the peak which you can see on the photograph of the sunset.

It usually takes about 2 or 3 hours to climb it, and it didn't really seem to be very tough to me, but I was a bit more trained after the last two weeks in Mulu and climbing the Kinabalu. But one thing is for sure, from all the hikes I had done so far, this was the most "real" from all of them. In both parks, Mulu and Kinabalu, the trails are a bit crowded and it is easy to follow the path. This trail was not so "touched", in fact, the guys going first had a machete and sometimes they had to re-open the path, clearing the plants that had grown in the middle. Don't think this was anything like Indiana Jones though.

After three hours walking up the hill and stopping to take pictures, we reached the top. Once we were there we took our meal packs and sat close to the helicopter to enjoy the food and the views.

When we arrived back to Karamuak, again soaked in sweat, of course, I took (yet another) shower and sat to have a rest for a while in the terrace of the hut where I was staying. I think they gave me one of the best ones.

That evening they took me to meet the "mayors" or the "chiefs" of the village. I was told that there are 2 chiefs (changing every few years) who are in charge of different tasks related to the village, the relation with other governmental institutions and who take decisions to solve small problems of the people of the village.

Apart from these two people, I was also introduced to a third person. They told me that he was the owner of the plantations and he was in charge of improving the access roads to the village and several other small projects.

I think there is a difference in between them.

Alterwards we went back to the centre for a ddinner. Here, as in the Iban Longhouse, I was the first one eating when the meal was ready, and after I finished, the rest of the people started to eat. Of course I was telling them that it was not necessary to do it like this and that I preferred them to eat with me. That night I told them that I would like to have the dinner all together because it was my birthday and I would like to celebrate it with them, even if it was only having dinner all together. That night the power generator didn't want to work, so we had a nice birthday dinner under the light of the candles.

It is funny, I remember how, when we were finishing the dinner, I could hear them at the end of the table talking between them to sing the "happy birthday", but they had some problems remembering my name (here, in this kind of trips, people usually call you "sir"). This happens to me quite usually in Malaysia. In the end I think they felt a bit embarrassed and didn't sing anything. I felt as happy as if they had singed it.

The next day they showed me what Yayasan Sabah Group had done in the village until then. Thanks to them now in Karamuak there is, among other things, a small jetty, a church (you would be surprised how many indigenous people in Sabah and Sarawak are Christian), a small medical centre and several schools for boys and girls of different ages.

After the walk through Karamuak I was taken to fish a bit in the Kinabatangan River… well, or rather to see how they fish, I confess that I am not too keen on fishing. They also showed me a bridge that Yayasan Sabah Group built over the Kinabatangan River and we went to another village where they had more projects running.

After having lunch there was no more time for anything else, so we packed our stuff and went back to Sandakan so that I could be there before 6, when I had to be in the agency of Cede Prudente.

During those three days in Karamuak for sure that I didn't visit the most spectacular landscapes in Malaysia, but I did experience a part of the country that you miss if you only visit the typical destinations. I met really charming people and, above all, I really had a great time. And that –when I look at it from a distance, after a long time as I see it from here, while I am writing this, that– makes me appreciate it even more.

So if one day you come over here and you feel like spending some days in a different way, I really recommend you to pass by Karamuak.

Formula 1 in Sepang

2009-04-08T08:50:00.000-07:00

Ok, just for a change I am going to tell you some of the latest news.

This last weekend it has been the Malaysian Formula 1 Grand Prix in Sepang circuit. So now that I am here, that I am showing the most important aspects from Malaysia and that the Formula 1 is the most important sport event in the country, at least I could go and take some pictures, don't you think so?

I tried to get an accreditation from the FIA, but they didn't give it to me. FIA is very strict with accreditations, but even if it annoys me I recognise that I understand it. If they gave an accreditation to every photographer in the world applying for it, there wouldn't be space enough for the cars in the pit lane. I don't have a big media behind supporting me, so even if I had a recommendation letter from the Director of Lunwerg (the publishing house supporting my project), I ended up without a press pass.

What I did, two weeks before the race, was going to Sepang circuit to talk with the Media Relations Manager (who I already knew from the last year) and I told him my story (again). He told me that FIA gives only a few accreditations, they just have 12 accreditations for Malaysian photographers, and Sepang circuit already has 2 photographers. For the rest of photographers that can not get the accreditation, what they do is giving them a pass to access all the areas of the circuit so they have more chances to take pictures. He told me to send him an email with my data and they would prepare one of those passes for me.

That day in the evening I sent him the email with my data and the next day I sent him another email with the recommendation letter from Lunwerg and asking if everything was correct or they needed anything else. They didn't reply, but since then I started to receive all the media release from Sepang circuit, so I consider it done.

The weekend of the race come and on Friday I go to Sepang to see the two first practice sessions. When I get to the accreditation office my name is not in any list. I talk with the man who is in charge and after explaining him everything, he asks some people through his walkie with no result, we try to contact the Media Relations Manager but we can't get him through… so what he does is taking my business card and go into the paddock to find him and ask him about my pass.

After a while he calls me on the phone telling me that the Manager didn't receive my data and my picture. I tell him that I didn't send them the picture but that they did receive my data, that I had tried to contact them several times to confirm if everything was correct but that they didn't reply me. Finally he tells me that the Manager said that I should send him an sms with my picture and my name and they will make the pass.

Just after hanging up the telephone I tell one guy in the accreditation office, who has a mobile with camera, that I have to send to the Media Relations Manager an sms with y picture and my name. He takes the picture, we write the message and he sends it. After a while the man in charge comes and tells me that I will have the pass but that I have to wait until the next day.

That day the entrance to the main grandstands was free, so I didn't really mind. I went there and I started to take photos. I was taking some panning pictures of the cars from different places. I took hundreds of them but all of them very similar. To be able to take many of the pictures we are used to see, you have to be at the track level, from the stands there are not many options.

In the evening, before going back home, I went again to the accreditation office to confirm that this time everything was right and on Saturday morning it was not going to happen again the same thing. I talked again with the person in charge, who couldn't get through the Media Relations Manager again and told me to call him later.

When I arrived home I called him again. He told me that he could talk with the Manager, that he hadn't received the sms and that I should send him again an email with my data and picture. I sent him the email and I also sent him an sms to be sure that he would read it. And then, I called again to the man of the accreditations office to tell him that I already sent the email, just in case.

On Saturday morning I went again to the accreditation office and the man in charge tells me that my pass is ready but that it is still in the office of the media department and I should wait for about half an hour. During that time we talked about photography, he is also photographer and shots weddings to get some extra income. At that moment Ralf Shumacher gets into the office to get his accreditation. There is a small stir in between the guys working there and in the end I take some pictures of him with the guys.

This is Dean, the man in charge for accreditations.

Alter a while my pass arrives. It is a pass which allows to access the public areas of the circuit. No access to the pit lane (as I knew) and no access to the paddock (I recognise that I had some hope). Anyway, it is not so bad, I can access to any of the stands of all the circuit, from the cheapest one to the most expensive seat.

I decide that I am going to check different areas of the circuit to see from which one I can take a good picture. The first place where I go is the grandstand in front of the first curve of the circuit (K1 in the map).

The day before I had been in almost all the areas of the grandstands in front of the two main straights of the circuit (marked as Mall Area in the map, the V-shaped building in orange) and I found this stand much more interesting than the other ones.

I stayed there waiting for the beginning of one of the races which were going to take place on Saturday: the first race of the GP2 Aisa Series. While I am waiting there, I started to pay attention to the big screen that you can see from there, which was showing at that moment a image of the curve in front of me. But… the view of the curve on the screen was not as I was seing it, it was much better on the screen. Where is that camera?

I started to look for the camera all around, behind me, at the back end of the stand... until I looked up. There, at the end of the structure of the roof I could see two small platforms. I took a look from the edge of the stand and it seems that yes, the camera seems to be there.

I waited for the begining of the GP2 Asia Series race, I took some more pictures during the first laps and afterwards I went to the main area to take more pictures.

From the main grandstand I checked that the camera was exactly where I thought. And I also checked that besides to the platform where the camera is, there was another platform, lonely… sad… abandoned… poor platform. That was going to be my place.

I took some more pictures during the race. In this race there were also some Spaniards. This is Roldán Rodríguez, who finished in fourth position on Sunday, in the second race.

After this race there was another race, the Formula BMW Pacific, and later on the qualifying session for the formula 1 in which, for a change, I kept on taking pictures. I have pictures of every colour under the sun, from here, from there, from far, from close… but all them from the stands.

That was all, alter the qualifying session I went home to have a rest for the next day.

On the evening, I burned a CD with the pictures of the guys of the accreditation office with Ralf Schumacher to give it to them on the next morning. And I thought that then, I could also ask them about the platform of the camera. I was almost sure that it was not going to be a problem, but it is always good to be able to turn to somebody from the organization when you are going to do something which is not allowed to everybody.

On the next morning I went to the circuit with time enough before the races. First I went to the accreditation office, I gave them the CD and they told me that there was no problem if I wanted to go to the platform. Even one of them told me that he would be around there half an hour before the race to open in case the stairs were closed.

Very nice these people from the accreditation office. Here people like very much taking pictures, so after being with them for a bit of time during the three days, when was about to leave, one of the girls working there said that she wanted to take a picture with me. After a second we ended up taking pictures all together with all the cameras around, you know, this thing of "wait, wait, now take it with mine". And of course I was not going to be the only one without the picture, I also wanted to have a memory of all that time spent with them in the accreditation office.

Then I went to the main area again, and you know, more of the same: more photos. The first race was the second race of the GP2 Asia Series and, before it could start, it began to rain. The start was delayed for almost half an hour and in the end it started when it was still raining.

The rain stopped later and the second race of the day, the Formula BMW Pacific, could start without problems.

It was the time for the Formula 1 race. The people were arriving, the stands were starting to be full and it was possible to see the ambient already.

When the VIP arrived, the drivers came out for the track parade, which means that they get into a double deck bus and they are driven all around the circuit while they are waving. In the meanwhile a group of people appeared to make a beautiful performance with drums, flying Chinese and people running with big flags.

After all this, the preparations for the race began and I started to walk towards the first curve to climb up to the platform. The pass I had was nothing special by itself, in fact it is the same one that all the people working in the main area have, it doesn't matter if they are cleaning the windows or selling hot-dogs. But apart from that pass, I also had the pass that Tourism Malaysia gave me in August for the Independence Parade. Do you remember it?

Having that pass (the one on the right) helps, people usually make things easier for the media. When I arrived where the stairs were, the man there told me that the media should enter trough the other side, and I replied "no, no, I am going up to the platform", while pointing out to the stairs, and then the man said "ah, ok, ok… you can go". I waited for a while to the man of the accreditations to come, but when I saw that he was not coming (something I thought it could happen) I called Dean, who told me that they couldn't come.

The staris were open, so I told the man there "I am going up", and I went up.

Mi idea was being there for the beginning of the race and the first laps. Then I would go in front of the pit lane for the laps 15 to 25, when the first pit stop was expected, and then I would go to the end of the last straight, to be in front of the entrance of the last curve before the finish line. And also ,at that point there is another big screen, so I could see the race in other areas of the circuit.

But no way. When I reached the platform and I saw what you can see from there I thought "where am I going to go better than here". I could see almost half of the track. Definitely better than any seat that you can buy.

Besides, I had already been thinking about it the day before. I don't need "the photo" of the race, an overtaking or something similar. If I can take it, great, but what I need is a picture of the formula 1 for the book I want to publish, a photograph representative of the circuit. The most representative image of the circuit is from the tower in the last curve before the final straight, in between the two main straihts, with the structure of the roof. It is very similar to this one.

But I can not take this picture, for that I would need to be in the outside of the curve with the wide-angle to take the picture with the cars and the tower, and if it si possible with nice blue sky and white clouds. Since I can't take that picture, I think that the most representative picture I can take is from up there in the first turn of the first lap, although the cars were not so big in the picture.

So there I was, ready to take the picture and looking at all the official photographers below, who where in front of the fence ready to take their pictures.

There should be all of them but one, who also had the happy idea of going up to the platform and at that moment was on my left. But something was for sure, no blue sky and white clouds for us this time. At that time, even if the sun was still shining, you could already see what was coming, and from up there you could really see it coming, from far.

The race started and I took the picture I wanted to take (well, better said a couple of them). I stayed there taking pictures of the cars arriving to the end of the straight and also enjoying the race. I found it quite interesting, specially from there, that I could see many parts of the track.

A bit later I started to think on going to the main grandstand to take pictures of the pit lane, but it was starting to rain and I though that I was not going to have time to reach there before getting soaked, so I'd better stay there.

And yes, it started to rain, as it rains here from time to time, it rains as if it was the end of the world for a while and then it stops. And of course, with all the cars dancing around the track or going out the track to enjoy the meadows, the race was stopped. That is how I "saw" the moment when they stopped from where I was.

And that was it, we were waiting there until they decided that they were going home. A bit disappointing, I would have liked to see the end of the race, maybe next time.

What I was worried about at that moment was if they were also going to cancel the concert that Sepang circuit had organised after the race, and that I really wanted to see. It was not raining, but here you never know.

It rained again a bit before the concert and during the first groups, but then it stopped. I didn't know that there were support bands, in the advertising campaign Sepang circuit only announced the main artist. First there were a Malaysian DJ and then another Malaysian group called Maliq & D'Essentials, they played ok. But then, it was amazing. Seven black guys that I had never seen before came out to the stage and they started to sing a capella in a really wonderfull way. Their name is Naturally Seven. Maybe you already heard of them, but for me it was really a wondereful surprise.

And then the concert that they had announced so much started. I recognise that it is a concert which I would have gone even if I had to buy the ticket, but like this… even better. When the concert finished I went back home, after a long weekend, taking the bus to the airport and then the train to Kuala Lumpur. I had been really worth it.

So, here you are, two of the pictures of the concert that I took. It was not allowed to the media to enter into the area in front of the stage, but I got a good place. I guess there is no need to say that the concert was great, I would have liked to enjoy it with you, I know some of you like him, but nothing is perfect.

And now the question is:

You are Spanish... Don't you have pictures of Fernando Alonso?

Of course I have.

Running on the track…

Running closer...

Waving…

Or what did you think....

Kinabalu National Park

2009-02-17T23:39:00.000-08:00

This is the other Park of Malaysia that, together with Gunung Mulu National Park, which has been included in the World Heritage list by UNESCO. In it you can make many things, as Tomaš and me did when we were here. But from all those things, there is one which is the most important thing you can do at Kinabalu National Park. Because the Mount Kinabalu, with its 4095 metres high, is the highest peak in South East Asia, or at least that is what is written in many places, but depending on where you check it can be even the fourth one in this list.

Zuzana and I like hiking mountains, so when Zuzana knew that she was coming to Malaysia and she looked for some information about the country, she decided that one of the things she wanted to do was climbing the Mount Kinabalu. It was then when we decided that as soon as she had a long weekend we would try it.

As I told you, the Muslim New Year (the Hari Raya), coinciding with the end of the Ramadan, is one of the most important holidays of the Muslim year... no wonder, as a professional big eater as I am, if I was not allowed to eat during daylight for a whole month, I would also celebrate the day Ramadan finishes. Obviously, the Hari Raya, in a Muslim country as Malaysia, means public holidays, more precisely two days of public holidays, which, this year, were Wednesday and Thursday. Just on Thursday the week before Zuzana knew that she was going to have the Friday off, so she called me to ask where she should book the plane ticket for those five days.

I was going to spend the Hari Raya in Kuching with Nadim, the local photographer, who had invited me to go to his neighbourhood to see how it is celebrated there. Zuzana called me on the phone ,but just at that moment I was dying trying to climb the Pinnacles. Digi, the mobile company I use here, has no coverage in the Pinnacles, as in many other places, but even if it had had it, I don't think I would have had the strength to take the mobile out from my pocket.

Zuzana could not contact me and she booked the ticket as we had spoken before, that we would climb the Mount Kinabalu. Two days after, when I came back to the headquarters of Mulu Park, I met in a path one of the girls working in the offices and she told me "Hi, Zuzana called you and she said that she is Singapore and she will be arriving to Kota Kinabalu on Wednesday morning". Imagine my face at that moment, when somebody tells me that sentence in the middle of the jungle. So the Hari Raya in Kuching was not going to be possible and I will go climbing the Mount Kinabalu instead. ¿You see? Changing plans again, I can not plan anything.

I called Anddreas to see when we can make that trip to the interior of Sarawak. Then Zuzana and me got in touch as we could (between Mulu and Singapore) and we decided that as soon as Zuzana arrived Kuala Lumpur on Sunday she would book a plane ticket for me to fly to Kota Kinabalu.

Once in Kota Kinabalu I tried to book all we needed to be able to climb the Mount Kinabalu, but of course, in a long weekend like that, everything was fully booked for the three days when we could climb it.

Even like this, Zuzana and I decided that we will go to Kinabalu Park on Friday morning with the first transport leaving Kota Kinabalu and we will be at the waiting list, in case somebody doesn't go and there are some free places.

To be rested before climbing the mountain, we decide that on Wednesday we would just take a walk on Kota Kinabalu to see how they celebrate the Hari Raya. People wear traditional dresses, men and women, and the city becomes full of bright colours wherever you go. Besides, there are many celebrations where people wear their best clothes.

We also decided that on Thursday we would go to the islands that you already know close to Kota Kinabalu. Since I had already been there and I also wanted to spend the day with Zuzana not been worried if I have to take a picture here or there, I gave myself tha day off and I left the camera in the hostel. Obviously, since I don't have the camera, when we are in Sulug Island (the "desert" island where Tomaš had his foot incident), we see a beautiful gecko besides our bags which I can't take a picture of. Well, at least I leave you here a small video I took with the compact camera that Zuzana takes in her job, so you can see a bit of the island and the small gecko.

That evening, coming back from the islands, it started to rain, but one of those funny tropical rains. When we arrived to Kota Kinabalu we were already soaked, so we decided to go walking, better said, running to the hostel. I was really funny, when crossing the streets the water was up to the calf.

On the next morning we are at seven o'clock in the bus station ready to take the first whatever going to Kinabalu National Park.

As soon as we arrive to the Park we go to the offices and we ask if there is any free bed in any of the mountain refuges, but... nothing, everything is fully booked, and without a reservation in a refuge it is not allowed to go up. Almost everybody already arrived and there are not much places left, but anyway we put our names in the first position for the waiting list. Moreover, the woman in charge of the accommodation is one of those cold people who don't care if you ask if it is possible to sleep on the floor in the café; the expression in her face doesn't change at all, there is no way to convince her.

It is supposed that people arrive at 10, but we have to wait until noon in case there is any delay. After one hour we ask again... nothing. We are not going to get anything from that woman, so I try to ask somebody else. As soon as I see that the woman is attending anybody else I go to the desk to ask another girl, who looks nicer, if there is any cancellation, even if I know that there is not because we are the first ones on the waiting list and they would have told us. When she tells me that there is no cancellation I ask if there is any other way to go, even if there is no free place in the refuge. Then she tells me that they can't do anything about it, that it has to be authorised by the chief of the Park Rangers. This is what I want to know, who can allow us to go, who can take the decission.

Then I go to the counter where you have to pay the Park taxes to ask for the chief of the rangers, waiting for a moment when there is no queue, but there is always somebody. Then I go to the entrance of the Park rangers' office and somebody comes to ask what I need. And here I go again, I give him my business card and start the speech that I have so well prepared: "I am a photographer from Spain...". The man calls the chief of the rangers, who comes and he tells me that there is an agency managing the "via ferrata" in the Mount Kinabalu and they have some places reserved for them, that I should talk to them to see if we could get any of them.

We go to the office of the agency and they tell us that they have free places but that we should contract any of their activities. Well, it seems that things are getting better and we will be able to go up after all. When we are getting out of the office of the agency my telephone rings, it is from the Park office, there has been a cancellation of two people. Yes!

We talk with the girl of the travel agency which had the cancellation and we decided to keep the two beds. We pay the Park taxes, we look for a group to join and share the expenses of the Park guide and the transport to the beginning of the path (you can start from the offices but believe me, it is not necessary, the normal trek is enough) and we move off.

Climbing the Kinabalu. The general opinion is that it is not as tough as the Pinnacles, but that it is also quite demanding. You start climbing at 1886 metres high and that day you walk 6 Km until the refuges, which are at 3272 metres high (don't do the calculation, I tell you, it is 1406 height difference). On the second day you climb to the top, but there is a small detail, you climb to see the sunrise from the top of the Mount Kinabalu, at almost 4100 metres of altitude (if you are lucky and it is not cloudy, in Mount Kinabalu you never know). So what you do is starting the hike at 2:30 in the morning, yes, you read well, at half past TWO in the morning. The objective is to ascend in a bit less than 3 Km the 823 metres to the top and be there at 5 in the morning to see the sunrise. After that you go back to the refuge, where you have lunch, and then you hike down to the starting point; in total 2229 metres of descent.

So, let's go.

During the first day you walk through all the different kinds of vegetation which exist in Kinabalu Park. At the beginning you start hiking in the rain forest, but when going up, the weather becomes more fresh, humidity decreases and the jugle turns into a forest, and slowly, the forest becomes less and less thick and changes to the typical high mountain vegetation all surrounded by bushes. Clouds change and move very fast here, it is probable that during the ascent you can see
all kind of images as a resutl of the mix between them and the Sun.

The path is easy to follow; the only problem is that the people who built it were either very tall or very lazy, because the steps sometimes (too many time) are as high as your knees.

During this day you are meeting everybody coming down after reaching the top (or maybe not). Since we had to find the accommodation, we started quite late, and we are meeting the last people coming down. They look really tired, so we realise that the walk is going to be long.

During the hike we stopped several times, to eat the picnic pack that the travel agency gave us, to have a rest, to drink some water... it is very interesting, you talk with people, where they come from, why they are travelling... in this part of the world, in South East Asia, there are many people travelling for long periods of time, from 2 months to several years. I imagine that if you come in an organised trip, it will be more difficult to meet them, but if you are not so "conventional" (just a little bit less) you would be surprised of how many people do this kind of things.

Finally, in the evening, we arrive to "Laban Rata", the refuge where we have the beds reserved. The pack we have with the travel agency includes meals at the refuge: the dinner for that evening and the lunch for the next day after coming back from the top. Both of the meals are buffet, and you can be sure that we appreciated it, and it is not just because of me, that I love eating, but recovering the energy spent during the day and getting ready for the next day is really important.

Laban Rata, together with other refuges, is in the area where almost everybody who climbs the Mount Kinabalu spends the night. They are several wooden houses in a privileged place. After dinner, you can come out to the terrace to enjoy the sunset over 3000 metres of altitude.

In a short time we go to sleep. Even if it is early (around 8 or 9 in the evening), it is not difficult to fall asleep, the day has been long and we are tired.

Two in the morning, we are so sleepy.

After achieving to move away from the bed and wrapping us up warm with all the clothes we have, we meet our group and the guide and we start the hike to the top. The day before, since I was a bit "fit" after the week before in Mulu and Zuzana was not so trained because in the office she doesn't practice many sports, we decided that I would take most of the stuff in my backpack. That morning we only took the small bag with the minimum necessary, so Zuzana said that she would take it. Without the backpack, only with the almost 5 Kg of my photo gear, I have to say that I felt like new, like a child, jumping from one stone to other. There was an area where there were some ropes to help yourself; I didn't care, without even touching the ropes, stopping to change lenses and trying to take a picture. My camera works very well in low light conditions, but at night, in the middle of the mountains... there is not much it can do.

Zuzana was quite tired, and thanks to the guide she managed to keep on going up. I took her bag and then I stopped running all around, but even like this I was quite fresh compared with other days.

We finally reached the top of the Mount Kinabalu, 4095 metres over sea level. And we took the picture, of course.

We did it quite well, I would even say that we were one of the first groups reaching the top. When we arrived up there it was getting light but it was still dark, so we found a place to have a rest and protect ourselves from the wind. Because of course, if you think about it, in the highest peak in South East Asia there is nothing in miles around to stop the wind. And being in the tropic doesn't make a difference, 4000 metres it is quite high anywhere. How cold that was! it doesn't matter how much you protect yourself from the wind, there is always some wind blowing around you, and your t-shirt is wet.

After a while, at the break of dawn, we could admire sunrise from the top of the Mount Kinabalu.

Don't think that taking this picture is just grabbing the camera and shooting. As soon as your hands are out of your pockets they are frozen. And when you have been taking photos during half a minute, with all this cold wind blowing, you don't feel anything at all. There was a moment when I had to take the pictures with the middle finger because with the index one I had no sensibility at all and I didn't know were the shutter was.

After a while we started the way down. Much better than the way up, besides, since you go up at night and then you go down with daylight, it is absolutely different. The Mount Kinabalu is not in a big mountain range, is like a single mountain in the middle of nothing, so the views are amazing.

At ten in the morning we were in Laban Rata again. Since we had time enough, we decided that, instead of going down immediately, we preferred having lunch calmly, sleep a small one hour siesta and then walk the rest of the path.

So we did. After the siesta and packing again, we started the way down to the head offices of the Park. Then, as it had happened to us the day before, we were meeting all the people climbing to the refuges to reach the top on the next morning. We were always trying to encourage them and make them see that it can be done.

Other people you pass by when going down are the porters. As I told you before, meals at Laban Rata are buffets, and there are many people climbing the Mount Kinabalu everyday. Somebody has to take all that up there, and for sure it is not going to be by car. Local porters, men and women, carry big, better said, huge backpacks or just packs on their backs. And they climb up to the refuges on their sandals, flip-flops, whatever. So when you see them, then you realise than it could be much worse.

In about 4 hours we were back at the begining of the path and we took the minivan to the offices of the Park. There is another meal waiting for you to recover all the strength you left in the Mountain during last two days, it is also buffet, of course. After lunch we went back to Kota Kinabalu with some other people we met during the way up and down.

In Kota Kinabalu, that night, we decided that we deserved a feet massage. It was really relaxing. And the next day, one more session of islands to finish the recovering process before Zuzana goes back to work on Monday, and before I continue with my adventures.

One last thing. If any of you is thinking about climbing the Mount Kinabalu, you should know that there is another option than the one we did and most of the people do. Every year there is an event called Climbathon and that you can imagine what it is about. It is a race consisting on climbing up and down the Mount Kinabalu, running, of course. It is 21 Km long, like half marathon but a little bit steep, in fact, if you think about it, the accumulate different of height is negative (according to the map race). People usually makes it in a bit more than two and a half hours, so it shouldn't be too difficult.

So, come on, who wants to try?

Activities in Kuching

2008-12-13T00:00:00.000-08:00

Hello again, my abandoned English speaking friends. Here you are, the entry I began to write almost two weeks ago.

Again quite behind the Spanish blog... When I started all this I knew it would take time but... it takes more than I thought. I really couldn't write you before, and it has also been a long time since I don't write in the Spanish one. Now I am in London, with jet lag, it is Saturday, 8 in the morning, and I am already in front of the computer translating for the blog (and I have already replied a couple of mails). Somehow this jet lag thing is quite useful.

You might have seen that there are two new entries in the Spanish blog, one of them is about when I am coming back (Ok, I tell a bit about some other things) , too late for that one, and the other one is the one I am writing here.

You already know that I have been twice in Gunung Mulu and that in between these two times I have been doing some activities that I had contracted with an agency. They are those activities I told you a loooong time ago when I began to write about Borneo.

And what are all those activities? I visited a rehabilitation centre for orangutans. I was two days and two nights in an Iban Longhouse. And I also visited Bako National Park. After a month of this, I went back to Bako with Zuzana so she could also see it and I could take more pictures, because just one day was too rush. I will tell you about Bako some other day... when I find the time.

The rehabilitation centre for orangutans is called Semenggoh and it is located close to Kuching. In Malay, as in many other languages, the name is the same, but it is written separately: orang-utan. In Malay "orang" means "man", and "hutan" means "forest", so you know where the origin of the word comes from. A long time ago, orangutans lived in a wide area of South East Asia, but nowadays they can only be found in Borneo and Sumatra. During many years, orangutans were hunted by the aboriginals because of heir meet, this reason itself is not enough to decrease its number so dramatically, but together with forest fires, deforestation due to logging and palm oil industry, and the hunting for souvenirs and illegal trade as pets, all together makes that orangutan is an endangered species. Nowadays orangutan is a protected species.

In Malaysia there are two centres of rehabilitation for orangutans: Semenggoh in Kuching, Sarawak, and Sepilok in Sandakan, Sabah. In these centres they educate orangutans which are found in captivity to reintegrate them into the jungle. They are also an information and rapproachement point for the people to learn about orangutans. But there is controversy about how they work. These centres are not closed, they are open to the rain forest without any fence or barrier, and they have fixed feeding times for the orangutans, so if they are hungry they come at those times to eat. This makes that detractors of these centres see them as a tourist attraction making orangutans go to eat habitually and missing their natural feeding habits in the rain forest. I think that things are not either white or black. It is true that at feeding times what you see there is a little bit as a show for the visitors. But the fact is that there are orangutans that can not be reintegrated because they are not able to adapt themselves to the groups or wild orangutans. This happens, for example, with orangutans which have been living for too much time in captivity. So these orangutans still can live free in the rain forest close to those rehabilitation centres, otherwise they would die in the rain forest. If in this way it is possible to collect funds with tickets and souvenirs, I think it is no so bad.

From there we went to the Iban Longhouse. When I asked the travel agency in Kuala Lumpur to prepare this trip for me, I told them that I wanted to be there alone rather than going with a group of tourists, even if I had to pay extra. What I wanted was being able to take pictures of their normal life and not to see how they behave in front of tourists.

So after four hours by car and half an hour by boat upstream we arrived there. this was my first longboat ride, and it was one of the things I liked the most, going in that long, narrow, wooden boat through the river in the middle of the jungle.

Iban people, as many other aboriginal people in Borneo, live in villages where the main construction is called Longhouse. A Longhouse, as its name suggests, is a very long building and the concept is very similar to what we call "terraced houses". Imagin a Longhouse, empty inside, and divide it in two parts lengthwise (now you have two long thin parts); now you take one of the long parts, divide it in many parts (as terraced houses) and leave the other one empty. So this is approximately a Longhouse, many single-family homes in the same building sharing the same common area. This is the common area of the Longhouse I visited.

This area is protected from the heat and the rain, but through the doors there is enough light entering so they can work inside. Here is where they seat to make the carpets, baskets and many other objects that they use for their normal life or that they sell as handicraft.

It is also the area for social relations. When they don't have anything else to do, they seat here to talk between them or simply to be there calmly. These people don't know what stress is, and I mean it in the best sense of the word, not as a criticism, and in general they are not as expressive as we are, I guess due to the kind of life they live. Many times you could think that they are bored, but they aren't, are just there, watching life go by. Some times I wonder what is in their minds, what they are thinking about... I can't get to the idea, I don't know how their perspective of life is, or their needs, their ideas or what their worries are... because for sure they are not the grades of the child at school, the mortgage, the car insurance, the next holidays, the politics... the world economical crisis...

And I absolutely can't think that during all this time their thoughts are something like "it is going to rain". I find fascinating how they can have such a simple life so easily; of course it is because I am used to the life in Madrid or now everyday going here and there. Maybe they think how we can have a life like this in a relatively easy way, because definitely our lives have many more worries than theirs.

That evening I was taking more pictures and then, at night, they performed a typical dance they used to perform when warriors came back after cutting a couple of heads or just after a long journey. I had already told them not to act in front of me, that they didn't have to do things that they didn't want to... it didn't matter. The feeling of "we have to do it" that I had while they were dancing was continuous. First the man made the typical dance and afterwards the girl did her dance, both quite interesting, yes, and I can even understand that it was useful for me and to take pictures, ok. But putting us (me and the guide) a hat with feathers and making us four dancing in circles... that was absolutely unnecessary. The only one having fun there was the guide because he didn't care at all. In the Spanish blog some of my friends were asking for one picture of me, so here you are. You can see the happy face of the man, I think the girl and me... well, we did what we could.

Next morning we went through the river upstream so I could see some of the things they usually do. First they collected some bamboo canes, they took some small shoots to be cooked in the evening and one big cane.

We reached an area where there was a small river with more clear water and they were fishing to get something for the lunch. They caught three small fish with a fishing net, and diving with old goggles and a rudimentary harpoon they got a river prawn. All this is to be put in a branch and then it is ready to be cooked.

With that and some other things they had taken from the village they prepared the lunch in a very interested way. The menu was: some meet, the fish they caught (and more fish they took from home) and, of course, rice. All this is cooked at the riverside with all that mother nature provides you in its huge kitchen. Why using a pot when you can use a bamboo cane to cook the rice and the meet?. Recipe for bamboo cane rice: take a big leaf which you have previously let dry up and wrap the rice in it. Put it aside.

Now let's go with the bamboo cane that you have just taken from the jungle. Cut it in smaller pieces taking care of leaving a knot in one of the ends of each one. Now put the dry leaves with the rice in the small bamboo canes.

Go to the closer river, take some clear water and fiil the pieces of bamboo. Cook on a moderate flame.

Once the rice is cooked, open the canes with your machete and serve yourself, with the hand, of course, as much as you want to eat with the meet you have just cooked in the same way.

As I told you, the guide took some more fish because obviously he knew they were not going to fish enough for me, for him, the man taking us and his three sons.

When we came back to the village, I kept on taking pictures of the people there until I was shown two new things: how to use the blowpipe and cock fighting. I found the blowpipe quite interesting because it was easier and more precise than I expected. I am quite useless with all this aim stuff and I hit the target on the first and the second try. I failed on the third one, but I even like this was quite close.

Cock fighting is a tradition which is illegal in Malaysia nowadays, especially if they are about gambling. Cock fighting can only be celebrated with a special permission in some festivals or in touristy demonstrations such as this one. But anyway they have to finish before one of the roosters is injured, or as soon as possible.

Every time I see this picture I can't help thinking that it is the rooster "Trinity" of Matrix and my mind tries to turn around the frozen roosters in the air.

Anyway, illegal cock fighting still exist in Malaysia, it is only a matter of knowing where, but if you want you can spend your money in cock fighting every week.

A bit later we went to have dinner. In this kind of trips, the guide takes food for the tourists and the family "hosting" them. Even if in my case I was not sleeping in the family's home but in another hut close to the Longhouse, there is always a family hosting the guests. The guide cooks with collaboration from people of the family and they cook several dishes for everybody. That night they cooked the bamboo the got in the morning and the usual dishes: rice, curry chicken, fried vegetables... During my visit, the procedure was always the same: The food was cooked, everything was put on the floor and I was always the first one beginning to eat. I imagine that if there is a group of tourists there, they eat first and then the family, but in my case I started alone and after a while the rest of the people were coming. That night the guide asked them if we all could have the dinner together, I absolutely preferred it like this, but even then I was the only one sitting and I started eating alone.

In Malaysia (as in many other places) many people eat with their hands, well, better said, with the right hand. But don't think it is only at home or in small neighbourhood restaurants, it is even like this in weddings (in the nice ones, like the one we went in August), so don't think that it is only the Iban or aboriginal people doing it. Oh! And there s something else, what you are not going to see ever, unless you go to a special place, is a knife; here you eat everything with a fork and a spoon. In fact the first thing I am going to do as soon as I arrive home is throwing away all the knives. Or if not, the first Malaysian visiting me, I am going to take him to eat a big steak and I will give him just a fork and a knife, and we will see what he does with them.

After dinner we stayed talking around an oil lamp, or maybe I should say that I stayed there looking how the talked in between them, because so far... I am not really fluent speaking Iban language.

In many of the villages they have power generator which they switch on at night. So now there are people watching television or movies in DVD or VideoCD (here it is quite usual). But many people keep on doing their normal life, meaning that they meet in the common area of the Longhouse to talk. Again, sometimes you see some people sitting around a candle not saying anything, just being there.

Next day on the morning we went back to Kuching. Just when we took the car from the small jetty and driving through the gravel road, the car suddenly stopped. And that's how I got my first experience driving on the left and with the steering wheel on the other side. I woud have never thought that it was going to be like that: driving a Proton (national Malay brand) which was falling apart, with more kilometres than the Transiberian, borrowed in an Iban Longhouse from a friend of the guide and through a gravel road. That's life.

The problem was in the fuel pump. The car could be repaired in he same day and we went back to Kuching in the same day with the car stinking of petrol. We stopped for the dinner in the way back and we arrived on time for, at least, the visit to Bako national Park on the next day.

What happened afterwards, you already know it: Many stories happening ni Kuching and changing my plans for the next month. At least I told the agency that they didn't have to take me to the airport on the next morning...

Why does Javi travel back and forth in Borneo?

2008-11-12T03:05:00.001-08:00

Finally I dedcided to buy a small laptop, not only to write in the bllog, but like this I can also work a bit with the pictures. I am writing sitting at the entrance of a small bungalow in the middle of the jungle in Taman Negara, the biggest National Park in Malaysia.

But today I write to tell you about some things that happened to me in Borneo. Because telling you about all the places I go is quite ok, but if I only tell you this kind of stories you miss the small details which make this an adventure. So before going on, I am going to tell you a couple of things so you can understand why my trip across the north of Borneo has been a bit chaotic (this doesn't have many pictures).

My plan after leaving Zuzana and Tomas in Miri was going to Kuching, in the south of Sarawak, and start visiting the two states going to the north-west. The idea was that after finishing the activity I had with the agency in Kuching, I would go to the Sarawak Tourism Board (STB) to ask for some information and see if they would be interested in buying any picture. After that I would be traveling north towards Mulu Park stopping in the interesting places. Then I would go to Sabah where I would visit the most interesting places, and from there I would fly back to Kuala Lumpur. As you can see, all was very well thought and organized.

The last night of the activities with the agency, when I arrived to Kuching and before going to bed in the hotel they booked for me, I went to look for a cheap hostel for the next night. I found one which looked nice and I booked a bed in the dorm for one night.

When I came out from the hostel I remembred when I went to the newspaper in Kuala Lumpur to show my pictures from the independence celebration. The photo editor of told me that when that when I go to Borneo, I should call him and he would give me the contact with their photographers there so they could help me. So I called him on the phone, we talked a bit and after a while he sent me an sms with the telephone number of Nadim, a local photographer in Kuching to whom I called and we decided to meet the day after. On the next morning (Friday) I woke up and I went to the hostel… and there, everything changed.

Just arriving I met Anddreas, a local guide who loves photography. After talking a bit and telling him that I wanted to go to the STB to talk about my pictures, I got a piece of paper and wrote there the name of a friend of him who is working there and he tells me that I should talk to him and tell him the he gave me his name. Since I see it seems to be a good opportunity I decided that when I go to the STB I will also ask about financing for the book I would like to publish with pictures of the trip to Malaysia.

In the meeting with the STB it seems that, about support in Sarawak, it could be a good first contact. I filled in the applying form and the guy working there tells me that he will submit it to his boss I they will let me know. To make it easy I leave my trip quite open to fit in whatever they could need. But unfortunately about the fund-raising for the book, the STB is not the right place because they don’t sponsor with money. For that he suggested me to go to the Ministry of Tourism and he gave me the address of the Ministry in Kuching.

Just coming out from the STB I call immediately to the Ministry and a woman pick up the phone, then I automatically start telling her the story I tell everybody: “I am a photographer from Spain, I am working in Malaysia for 4 months and bla, bla, bla…”. 15 seconds later she stops me and says “but what are you exactly looking for?”… then, from the very deep in my heart, not even thinking about it, a single word comes out clearly: “sponsorship”. After two seconds of silence she transfers the call to a man to whom I explain everything again, he asks me for my telephone number and tells me that they will call me back. A bit aggressive the “sponsorship” answer, but like this there is no doubt, they know I am going to ask for money. After 20 minutes my phone rings, it is the Ministry of Tourism, I have an interview on Monday at two.

After all this, you understand that I decided to stay in Kuching for the weekend to see how all this goes. During the weekend I spend my time with Nadim, the photographer, or with Anddreas listening stories about Sarawak and enjoying the ambient in the hostel, which is quite ok. The hostel is managed by some young Iban people. The Iban are one of the aboriginal people of Sarawak, maybe the most known of them, and if you ever go to a longhouse it is likely that it will be an Iban Longhouse. These guys are quite modern, they play guitar (almost every evening) and wear casual, well, many times without t-shirt. During the days I was there they made a birthday party for one of them and all we were invited.

Other day Anddreas thought that it could be funny having a dinner for all the people in the hostel, so he went to buy food for all of us and then they cooked several typical dishes (Anddreas is the one wearing in yellow).

And almost every evening the guys from the hostel ended up playing guitar in the terrace... after some days I knew the songs by heart.

I spent there a good time having fun and making new friends. I was nice.

Two of the guys from the hostel also have an studio were they make traditional Iban tattoos. In fact all them working in the hostel have Iban tattoos. I think it is nice because like this they try to keep alive the tradition of Iban Tattoos. Nowadays these tattoos are getting lost because in the tribes there is no "need" to show off the deeds of the trips they make or the skills as a headhunters, which is what they were showing years ago. During that weekend, Ernesto and Robin were going to make a traditional tattoo to an American guy who lives in Korea and he had gone to Borneo to get the tattoo (and then visit Malaysia). So they told me if I wanted to go and take pictures during the tattoo session. These traditional tattoos are made with two sticks, one of them has a needle (there are different sizes) and with the other one he hits the first one to draw the tattoo.

On Monday morning I talk with Nadim about the interview in the Ministry and he asks me if I have long trousers, because it is better to wear them or they wouldn't take me seriously. As you can imagine, the way I travel and the places I visit, I didn't bring many smart clothes to Borneo. So Javi goes to the shopping mall, ask two of the shop assistants to help me and I finally buy long trousers and... a shirt!! May be that some of you don't know me very much, but seeing me in shirt is not exactly the most common thing. But don't panic, the shirt I wear it loose. I bought both things suiting my leather trekking boots, because, absolutely, I am not buying new shoes.

Then I leave the hostel absolutely ready and with time enough to the address of the Ministry that Anddreas just gave me in the hostel. I arrive there and I start asking everywhere where is the man I have to meet (as it si usual here, asking several times until you reach what you are looking for). After 15 minutes I look for the address that the friend of Anddreas gave me in the STB and it is not the same place... ups. I get out to the street and it is raining one of these nice tropical rains. I take another taxi and I give the driver the new address, it is 13:55 already. Half a minute after I get a call from the Ministry, the man I should meet has just finished a meeting somewhere else and it is not possible to meet him today. So we change the appointment for the nezx day at 9 in the morning. I go to the hostel.

In the evening I try to talk with the guy from the STB but he is not in the office. Definitely I give up today, tomorrow's another day.

The next morning I am at 9 in the Ministry and I have an interview with two people. Unfortunately they can not help me with the book because I want it to be a book about the whole of Malaysia and not only about Sarawak, so they told me that I have to apply to the central offices in Kuala Lumpur. It is a pity because I think if they cold have decided anything they would have given the subvention, we were talking for two and a half hours and they seemed to be quite interested in my project. They even told me that I should say in the STB that I had been talking to them, because they knew the boss of the guy I was talking to. This is more important than it seems, because the Sarawak Tourism Board depends on the Ministry of Tourism when talking about their budget, so a good feedback from the Ministry is a good thing when taking decisions in the STB.

From there I went to the offices of the STB, but the boss was on a business trip and they wouldn't know anything until he came back on Wednesday. On the next day I didn't need any feedback from the Ministry, I met Anddreas' friend and he finally told me that the STB will sponsor me with 200 ringgits for my trip to Mulu and with 1000 ringgits (something like 250 € all together) for a trip close to the border with Indonesia, with Anddreas as a guide, to visit different ethnic groups, and one of them will be the Penan. The Penan are the group which most has defended its customs, its traditions and its lands in front of all the colonizers passing by Borneo; that's why they are considered as one of the most authentic ethnics groups of Malaysia.

After all this I decide to leave immediately to Mulu Park. I book a flight on the next morning from Miri to Mulu and I take a night bus from Kuching to Miri (only 12 hours trip).

Before leaving, I talk with Nadim to tell him how was everything. Nadim is Muslim and in those days we were in the Ramadan, that time when Muslims don't eat, drink or smoke, and reduce some other activities from sunrise until sunset. Ramadan changes its dates from one year to other in the Gregorian calendar (the one we use), but it always finishes with the new year of the Islamic calendar. In Malay "New Year" is "Hari Raya", and we could think that it is something as our Christmas as long as celebrations is concerned. This year the Hari Raya was on the 1st and the 2nd of October and, as in many celebrations in Malaysia, it is celebrated with openhouse activities, in this case in Muslim neighborhoods. So Nadim invited me to join him for Hari Raya and enjoy the openhouse days in his neighborhood during the next week, when I came back from Mulu.

Hmmm... I just wanted to pass by Kuching and... I almost find petrol here.

Gunung Mulu National Park

2008-11-05T23:04:00.000-08:00

Again a long time since last time. But here I am again.

I finally left Borneo after a trip full of improvisation in which the originally planned 4 weeks turned into 7 weeks travelling three times in Sabah and three times in Sarawak. There are som many things to see here... Borneo is the forth largest island in the world only behind Australia, Greenland and New Guinea, (I am not going to discuss if Australia is an island or a continent, it doesn't matter) I have only been in the Malaysian part and you can be sure that I could stay here for a whole year taking pictures I would still need more time... Amazing.

Today I am going to tell you how I enjoyed Gunung Mulu national Park. this park is one of the two UNESCO World Heritage parks in Malaysia. The other one is Kinabalu Park. I already talked about it in my last entry, but I am saving the main course for later. These two parks deserve an entry for themselves, so let's go.

During this time I have been twice in Mulu Park, the first one was with Zuzana and Tomáš. For those of you who could be worried, his foot recovered quite fast, we didn't do any difficult hike and he could walk with us (now his right foot is ok).

On saturday morning we took one of those propeller airplanes which fly over the rain forest. Because if you want to go to Mulu, either you go like this or you have to take one bus and then a boat and who knows how long it takes until you reach the park (and moreover it will probably be more expensive than going by plane). After half an hour flight we landed in a small airport and we went to the park to spend the weekend there.

When you arrive to Mulu Park the first thing you do is going to the headquarters and planning your stay there deciding all you are going to visit. One of the main attractions of the park are "The Pinnacles", rock formations shaped as needles by the erosion which stand over the trees in the middle of the rain forest. We really wanted to see them, but to reach the viewpoint you need three days and two nights and we didn't have such a long time, what a pity, next time. So after checking in our room we are ready to take a walk and see how is Tomáš' foot. Everything is ok, Tomáš can walk almost perfectly and we are getting used to the heat, the humidity, all the plants around there...

...and even if Gunung Mulu Park is not the best place to see wildlife (in fact it is quite difficult to see something really interesting), we meet some small animals such as tiny ants or some lizards.

The other great attraction of Mulu Park are its caves, for that we do have time enough. The cave network in Mulu is over 300 Kilometres already explored (and all which is still unexplored). In fact, adventure caving is one of the activities which attracts people to the park. Whithin its hidden treasures you can finde which is considered the largest undreground chamber in the world, the "Sarawak Chamber", in it you could fit up to 16 football fields or 10 jumbo jets in a row (the number of football fields or planes widely vary form one site to other, but it must be pretty big). This cave is not in the usual tours and if you want o visit it you need previous skills in adventure caving and approval by the Park manager. However, if you like caves, you won't be dissapointed.

That evening we joined the guided visit to Langs Cave and Deer Cave. Langs Cave is a small cave with interesting stalactites and stalagmites formations, it is nice and it is a good appetizer for Deer Cave. From Langs Cave you go directly to Deer Cave (they are quite close to each other). Deer Cave is the largest passage cave in the world, meaning that you could enter on one side and get out through the other side. In the tour you go in and aout through the same entrance, but you reach a point from where you can see the other entrance of the cave. The dimensions of the cave are definitely quite big.

But not only that, Deer Cave is the home of more than 2 million bats (the small spots in the upper part of the picture). Every day, at dusk, thousands of bats come out from Deer Cave looking for food forming never-ending streams. Nearby the entrance of the cave there is a view point from where you can see the spectacle.

The way back to the headquarters is through an illuminated path when it is getting dark. One of the things I missed in this trip is an mp3 recorder. I would have liked having one so you could listen to the sounds of the night in Mulu. It is really a pitty, you will have to go to be able to listen by yourselves the amazingly wide variety of sounds that you can listen in Mulu at night.

On the next morning we went to the Canopy Walk of the park, which with its 480 metres long is the longest in the world. Before taking the plane back we took a last walk in the park and another one to the airport, it is not so far.

One of the things I asked in the Park is about the famous photography permission. Well, it is necessary to have a permission in Gunung Mulu Park for professional photographers, especially to be allowed to take the tripod into the caves because otherwise it is strictly forbidden. So I was told to apply for it in Kuchint to the General Manager of the Protected Areas & Biodiversity Conservation of Sarawak Forestry Corporation (yeah, it must be a very important person).

From Mulu, Zuzana and Tomáš left to Kuala Lumpur and I began my adventure alone through Borneo going to Kuching. In Kuching, apart from some activities and some changes that I will tell you in other occasion, I spoke to that Manager (the one with the long position in the business card) and he told me that I don't have time to apply for that permission because it takes more than one month to get it. So he told me that I can not take the tripod into the caves but since I come from so far away I was allowed to take pictures in Mulu. He wrote his mobile phone number in his business card and he told me that, if anybody had any objection, they should call him and he will explain them that I am allowed to take pictures as a photographer.

Two weeks later Javi comes back to Kuching, mainly to climb the Pinnacles and take the essential picture I need if I want to write an article about Mulu. To see the Pinnacles it is neccesary to take a boat for about half an hour, and then you have a hike of almost 9 kilometres through the rain forest to reach a place called Camp 5. The next day you climb up and down the path to the viewpoint and sleep again in Camp 5. On the next day you usually hike again the 9 kilometres path to the river, but you can also do some other hike from Camp 5.

Just after arriving to Mulu I met Casius and Alison, who were waiting for somebady who also wanted to do the Pinnacles. Because from the park headquarters you have to pay the boat to go up the river. And it is not allowed to climb to the viewpoint without a guide (that I perfectly understand), and that also has to be paid. So it is better if you go as a group to share the expenses. One hour later we are getting into the boat, with the minimum necessary in our bags, gioing to Camp 5.

At this point it is not the first boat ride I take, but I really like enjoying the jungle from one of those longboats in which you are sitting in a row. The hike to Camp 5 is not complicated and we reach Camp 5 before dusk.

That evening, before going to sleep, we have a talk with our guide. The usual talk that every guide has with its groupd before climbing the Pinnacles. Among other things, the guide explains us that there is a point with a rock called the minipinnacle which we should reach in less than one hour, otherwise it is considered that we are going too slow. He also explains that at the last part we will have to climb some ladders and ropes, and if we don't reach the first ladder before 1 pm we won't be allowed to continue because we wouldn't have time to arrive to Camp 5 before it got dark. Finally he tells us what we should take in our bags: food, energy bars (or similar), a torch in case it gets dark, raincoat and the most important, water, three litres per person. He tells us that it depends on every person, but they recommend three litres each one... he sais that he takes just a small bottle of half a litre but he is used to it. Honestly, I have no problems if I can't drink, I stand it very well, and since I already had almost 5 kilogrames of photography equipment, the torch and food, I decide to take only one bottle of 1,5 litres.

On the next morning we get up early to have a good breakfast (noodles, of course) and we are ready to leave at alf past six. The path to the Pinnacles is only 2,4 Kilometres long, but you climb up 1100 metres through a path full of roots and sharp limestone rocks in which there is hardly any flat stretch or any place where you could step flat. How could I explain it... I guess that it is all together, that it has already been four years since I don't go running and I am no so fit anymore, that we started a bit too fast... but the thing is that climing the Pinnacles is, by far, the most difficult hike I have ever done in my life. I didn't expected it to be so tough.

I quite like hiking, and even if I don't go very often, I have done some good hikes before. I hiked the Grand Canyon with two bottles of water, one gallon each, in the backpack, plus tent, clothes and some food. And last times I have been in the mountain it has been quite ok... besides I did run marathon once, which is physically quite demanding. After all this one thinks that with some effort you can face almost anything. But now I know that it is not true. Before reaching the minipinnacle I thought several times that I couldn't do it. Hiking the rain forest, with all the heat, the humidity... it is very different to any other type of mountain. You sweat a lot, really a lot, the t-shirt and the shorts were absolutely wet, and when I say wet I mean it literally, not humid, it was as if somebody threw a bucket full of water over me.

After a break in the minipinnacle (which we reached in less than 45 minutes), having a rest, and drinking some water, I could see things a little more clear; it was going to be hard but taking it easy and with patient it would be a matter of time. A bit later, Casius realised that by mistake he took three bottles of water instead of two... I will always have the doubt if he did it on prurose because I only took one bottle, but in any case I felt it was marvellous that he had that extra bottle. I drank half a litre of water, Alison also drank a bit and we left the bottle in the path so we didn't have to carry it and we could take it in the way back. I could have done it only with my 1,5 litres of water, for sure, but the bottle of Casius was a godsend to me.

After four hours of hiking up the hill I arrived (the last of my group) to the viewpoint of the Pinnacles. We sat there to rest and enjoy the food and the squirrels which come out from time to time to check what these crazy people who dare to come this high leave around.

When we reached the top it was clouded, and we should remember that the main reason for me to climb up the Pinnacles was getting pictures, othewise how could I write an article about Gunung Mulu Park without a picture of the Pinnacles. After a while the sun started to shine and I could take some other pictures, but not with blue sky. Anyway, in the Pinnacles there are not many options, there is a point from where all we take almost the same picture. If you could be there at down or at dusk, it could be possible to take a more interesting picture. But at least, I got the picture.

Casius, who had been the first arriving to the top (with the guide), was the first one to start the way down. Then Alison went down, and I stayed a bit longer waiting for the sun (the guide always goes down with the last one). The way down is as tough as the way up and usually takes the same time as you need to go up. As I told you, there are no flat places to step on, and your legs are already tired, so you have to be very careful not to roll your ankle. In the way down we reached Alison and after another 4 hours we arrived to Camp 5. Of course, Casius didn't take his third bottle thinking that we would need it more than him.

The first thing I did as soon as I arrived to Camp 5 was going to take another bottle of water and immediately going to the river. I took off my hiking boots and socks, and I put my feet into the river while I was making with my mouth that sond "ssssssshhhh". At that moment Casuis came to ask how I was and he offered me to prepare a cup of tea with a lot of honey... mmmmhhhmmm... hoooneeeey... It is incredible how your body reacts to the stimulus of sugar when it needs it. Quite nice this Casius, after some minutes he was bringing a cup of tea which I enjoyied as one of the best cups of tea of my life, drinking it while I was looking at the views from Camp 5 at dusk.

The next morning we woke up early again to hike the 8,8 kilometres of the way back to the river, because we wanted to see two more caves: Wind Cave y Clear Water Cave. Together with the two caves that I had already visited with Zuzana and Tomáš, these two caves are the ones which are in the typical tour cave in Mulu Park. So visiting these caves was a very good idea for me.

After all this I decided that I neded to recover myself a little bit. So in the next two days that I had left in the park I made an easy hike looking fo insects and I went to take more pictures of the bats coming out from Deer Cave. But this time I took the pictures from inside the cave, from a point where you can see some rocks with the shape of Abraham Lincoln.

Something else I did there was the night walk. It is very interesting, you can see different kind of insects, spiders and some other animals. It is incredible how guides, in the middle of the night, absolutely in the darkness, suddenly they turn, point with their torch and say: there, an owl.

There are some other trails that I would have liked to walk in Mulu, but time is limited so I finished my visit to the park. But... is that all you can do in Mulu?... certainly not. If you really like hardcore experiences and you want to enjoy Gunung Mulu National Park there is something else you can do. In Malay "gunung" means "mount", so Gunung Mulu National Park actaually means Mount Mulu National Park. There is a trail which is called "Summit trail" and which goes to the top of Mount Mulu. The trip takes 4 days and three nights and you have to carry in your backpack all you will need: sleeping bag, sleeping pad, clothes, food and water for 4 days... When guides talk about the trail to the Pinnacles they say that it is relatively easy, that the hike to the summit... that is really tough. If the trail to the Pinnacles is 2,4 Kilometres long, in the hike to the summit you have a journey 7 Kilometres long up the hill with a heavy backpack on your back.

What to say... as I told you before, now I know three are things I couldn't overcome, with training I could, of course, but right now... after the Pinnacles... the Summit trail is a bit too much for me. If somebody feels like...

Borneo

2008-09-29T23:12:00.000-07:00

How long since last time, is't it?

I am sorry you have some dealy from the spanish blog, but I don't have so much time here in the hostels in Borneo.

But honestly I think a lot of you all, this blog thing is really nice, I feel that I can talk to you directly and with the pictures I think I can tell you more than I could only with a big massive mail. The only thing I don't like is that it takes me a longtime to update it and I can not do it as often as I would like to

I am going to tell you the important things and a bit in short, because when I started to write a draft in the notebook I take with me, and when I had already wroten two and a half pages, I realised that there was no point in it and that the best option is writing it directly. So, since I am writing you from Borneo I think the best I can do now is telling you how things are happening here. The rest from Kuala Lumpur I can tell you later on, and moreover I have not here the pictures from those days.

So let's go all of us to Borneo!... In Borneo Island there is a big part wich is the Indonesian part. There is another part in the north with is the Malaysian part, where you can find two of the therteen states of Malaysia: Sabah in the northeast and Sarawak in the southwest. And in between these two states, in the coast, there is Brunei. Here you are a map, so you can see where I am going.

On Tuesday November the 9th, Tomaš and me took a plane flying to Kota Kinabalu, in the west coast of Sabah. Already on the plane, when we were looking through the window, we could already see what we were going to find here.

The first days we had some things organised with a travel agency. Let me tell you: In one of my visitis to the offices of Tourism Malaysia I got the contact of one Directive of a travel agency with clients in Spain to know what was more convenient for me to visit here in Borneo. They are helping me and the only thing I had to pay was an excursion we made with them; for the booking of the hostel in Kota Kinabalu, all the advises to visit places in Borneo, or the organization of my trip for the week after with another travel agency, they didn't charge anything at all.

So we arrived to Kota Kinabalu, we went to the hostel were we had the booking, then we went to meet the guy from the travel agency here, and after talking to him we decided that on the next day we were going to visit Kinabalu Park and on thursday we would visit some islands around here.

That night we walked a bit around the city. There is not much to see in Kota Kinabalu, but it has a night market which is the one I liked the most so far. There you can buy fresh fish cought during the day, fruits, vegetables... and there is also a part in which you can seat and eat something.

On the next morning, the people from the travel agency pick us up to go to Kinabalu Park. We got into the minivan and we were incredibly stinking insect repelent, of course, everybody noticed it as soon as we entered. It was funny.

The excursion was ok, a bit touristic but acceptable. You know I like more travelling on my own, but Kinabalu Park is not exactly close to Kota Kinabalu and if you want to go by bus, in one day, you probably won't have time to see all we saw. We were walking a bit through the botanical garden and one of the paths of the park while the guide was explainig us about how aboriginal people use the plants from the rain forest. Taking a good picture in the rain forest is a bit difficult, here you are one which is a normal one, but at least for you to know how full of plants this is.

After that they took us to see what is considered the biggest flower in the world. It is the flower of a plant called Rafflesia and depending on the spice it has bigger or smaller flowers, but in any case much bigger than daisies.

And to finish the excursion we went to a Canopy Walk, which consists on hanging bridgesd between trees, so you can walk at the highth of the braches. It is interesting.

When we got down from the trees we took a bath in the termal spring water swimmingpool around there.

Back in Kota Kinabalu, again a night walk and go to sleep.

The next day we went to visit three of the islands the Tunku Abdul Rahman National Park, very close to Kota Kinabalu. Well, what can I tell you... it is better if I show you a couple of pictures and you decide by yourselves...

I hope you are not seeing this from your job, so it is not too cruel.

This is Manukan Island, it is quite ok, of course, but on the weekend before we had been at Tioman Island which we liked a lot because the part of Tioman Islad in which we were is not crowded and full of tourist. So this island, which is very well prepared for tourists and there are more people on the beach, didn't impressed us so much.

After lunch in Manukan Iasland we took the boat to our next island: Sulug Island.

We did really like this island. Especially becuase this one, on the contrary as Manukan Island, is a "desert" island; the boat leaves you there and you tell the man on the boat at what time you want him to pick you up. Even if the beach was not the best beach I had seen ever, becuase it has many coral pieces and small rocks... how cool... imagine an island just for you with nobody else to bother you... I really liked it a lot. After some time three Italians arrived, but the island was big enough for the five of us.

But... not all could be perfect. After a while we both were in the water when something bit Tomaš on his foot. We don't know what it was, there are several theories but none of them is for sure. What is for sure is that Tomaš had never felt before something which hurted like that in his whole live. And Tomaš is not precisely the weakest person in the world. His foot began to swell and, since misfortunes never come alone, that morning I had gone into the water with my mobile in my pocket so it was dead (but absolutely dead, I had to buy another one on the evening). Of course none of the italians had a telephone, so Tomaš had to stand the pain until the boat came to pick us up more than half an hour after.

When we arrived to Kota Kinabalu we went to the hospital and then they inyected him several cocktails of whatever and he didn't have to stand the pain anymore. Here you are a picture I took the day after, when his foot was much better... can you guess which one it is?

In the meanwhile I went to the hostel to take his passport and his insurance. And later I went back again to take some clothes because it was better if Tomaš stayed during the night in the hospital to see that everything was ok.

But even from the worst experiences you can always get something positive, and that day Tomaš could experience the hospitality and kindness of the people here in Malaysia. When I went back to the hostel for the second time to take the clothes and buy the mobile (20€, just that, new one), the woman of the hostel told me that they were leaving at 7 and the hospital was in their way, so they could drive me there. When we arrived to the hospital she came out of the car and told me that she would like to enter at least to say hello and see how he was, and in the meanwhile her husband stayed waiting in the car.

Tomaš was not in the emergency area anymore and she was finding out where he was. The hospital was not from the third world at all, but beds were in big rooms like the ones you can see in some films. So after being some time with us she said that since Tomaš had insurance, why we didn't go to a private hospital where he would have been more comfortable. The thing is that when we arrived to the harbour we asked which was the best hospital in the city and we were told that this was the best one. So she started to make phone calls to her husband and ask him how we should do to change to another hospital. While Tomaš was talking to the doctor her husband parked the car and came up too, in case it was necessary. But the doctor understood perfectly and said that there was no problem for Tomaš to change to any other place. So then Tommy and Veronica (yes, both are Chinesse, as you have guessed) were finding out which was the best place where we could go and they drove us there, and that was not on their way home because it was at the other side of the city.

Even after arriving to the private hospital they stayed for some time with us until we told them that they could go home when they wanted.

I imagine that there is no need to comment. Tomaš was amazed about how nice they were to him evem if they hardly knew him since two days ago. To tell the truth, people here are in general very kind.

On the next day Tomaš came early in the morning to the hostel, bougth some flowers for Tommy and Veronica, we pack our stuff and we took the plane to Miri, which is Sarawak, in the coast close to Brunei.

Since it was friday, in the evening I went to pick Zuzana up to the airport, who was arriving from Kuala Lumpur. That day Tomaš stayed resting in the hostel hoping that his foot would be ok on the weekend, when we were going to Gunung Mulu National Park.

But this, I will tell you some other day, let's go step by step...

Merdeka!!!

2008-09-08T04:21:00.000-07:00

Merdeka in Malaysian means "Independence", and this year they celebrate the 51st aniversary since they waved good bye the British.

Malaysian are very proud of their independence and their flag, and on the 31st of August they celebrate their National Day. They have some concerts and fireworks on the night before and on the 31st they have a performance with children doing all the same (like Chinese on the Olimpics but more moderated) and a parade in which you can see everything which can march.

I could have worte all this last week, but the fireworks issue had all the rigth to be there. So the Merdeka Article will be this week.

All those visits to Tourism Malaysia and the Minsistry of Culture had to reach any point, so I finally got this:

And with them I could access to the parade press area, so I could take pictures of everything and see it all from a good position.

So far I told you all my stories with some pictures, but I think this time it is better if I tell the story in images. So here you are, my particular view of the Independence Day last Sunday in Kuala Lumpur:

All these children with their caps, if you look at them from high (very high), are sitting in a way so that you could see the Malaysian flag.

The Royal Guard arrives.

And they stand waiting for the arrival of the King.

The King arrives, everybody rises.

This man is the King, inspecting the Royal Guard.

The Royal Guard leaves and the performance can start.

Duing the National Anthem everybody rises again.

This must be a very important oath, in Malaysian, of course, because everybody rised again and repeated it aloud.

And here the performance with the children finishes and the parade starts. apart from all you are going to see there were marching firemen, ambulances, dogs, even a boat with wheels.

The King and the Prime Minister.

The Olimpics and Paraolimpics from Malaysia National Team.

I was like them but on the right side, in the first line, I got a good position.

Wives were located in a stands apart, even if they are the wife of the King and the wife of the Prime Ministrer.

As you can see thy really like their flag, even in a normal day you can see many of them on the streets.

The parade finishes and the Royal Guard comes again to stand when the King is leaving.

This is the Royal Escort which goes with the King.

Once the King has gone the royal Guard leaves too.

The parade has finished and the participants are very happy (I don't know if it is because everything went wellor just becasue it finished)

When it finished you can't imagine the traffic jam of cars to pick the VIP up.

Whith all these pictures I went in the evening to the most important newspaper of Malaysia (don't get too excited, this time I didn't sell anything) and there I was talking with the graphic editor. My pictures are ok but that's all, there is nothing that they didn't have yet. Anyway he was quite kind and willing to help. We were talking for a while about photography and he was showing me pictures from when he was in Afghanistan and Irak as press photographer. He also gave me the telephone number of one friend of him who is in charge of the photography department of a national press agency (like EFE or Ruters). I met this guy on Tuesday and we will meet again when I am back from Borneo.

So at least I got a couple of good contacts from that day, I am quite satisfied.

I hope you were not too bored with so many parade pictures.

Javi and the fireworks

2008-09-01T13:09:00.000-07:00

How could I explain you all this…

During August it has been the second Malaysia International Fireworks Competition in which participated teams from Canada, China, Malaysia and Spain. On the 24th it was the turn for the Spanish team, so I thought that I could go to see it and also to take some pictures for my project.

So that Sunday, when we were having lunch before going to Putrajaya (a new city built 25 Km southern from Kuala Lumpur where the most important ministries are and where the competition took place), I thought… “And what if I make an interview to the leader of the Spanish team and I try to sell it to any media in Spain?”. So while I was in the train in my way there Zuzana made me the favour of finding some information on the Internet about the Spanish Team and I was preparing some questions in my notebook (in paper, not a computer).

When I arrived there, you can imagine: no, it is not here, ask there (a trip to the far away there)… No, it’s not here either, better ask over there (another trip to the far, far away other there)… and all this in a light rain. Finally I manage to arrive to one place where telling again the same story, “I am a spanish photographer and bla bla bla…” they tell me to go up these escalators with a security guard at the bottom (who lets me pass, of course).

When I arrived on the top of that escalator (there was still another escalator to go up), there was another security guy who tells me that he has to ask about it. All this without any accreditation, of course. Finally a man called Heng Ken Hau comes (this one doesn’t care about changing his name to Jimmy, Peter or something similar) who is the General Manager/Finance Director of a company called “Global” and which it seems is in charge of organising this whole event. Again, I tell him the whole story and that I want to interview Patrick Brault… yes, that was the name of the leader of the Spanish team. The man tells me that now it’s impossible because the Minister of Tourism and the Ambassador of Spain are upstairs and it is just impossible, that he doesn’t know if the team be there after the show and that the press day was yesterday anyway; I tell him that I knew it (false) but that I was not in Kuala Lumpur (false)... After insisting a bit he tells me to come after the show and then he will see if it’s possible to do something.

So I leave with that feeling “maybe he told me that just to make me go…” while I am scratching my head. So I go out of the Convention Centre and I go to look for a good place to take pictures of the fireworks.

And of course, here it is the best place waiting for me, sure… Even if it was still two hours before the fireworks (I had been walking and asking all around for two and a half hours) all the good places are already full of freaks with their tripods, and don’t even think about the centred ones. And I also knew that the pictures taken from a lateral view… they were not going to be so acceptable for newspapers.

Then I looked for a place more or less in the centre with some Malays who were not too tall (that was not the most difficult) and I asked them if they didn’t mind if I stayed behind them. They told me that it was ok for them and after a while we started to talk (also very kind, as most of the people here). As you can imagine after two hours they had already made some room between their tripods for me and I had a place to take pictures relatively centred.

The show begins and we all start taking pictures like maniacs. After some minutes it started to rain, what a pity, it is not that it was raining a lot, but enough to put the camera away. At least I had time to take some pictures, like this one.

The show finishes, everything was very beautiful, everybody is very happy… wet but happy… and after talking a bit with the people I met and saying goodbye, I go back inside to try again. I reach again the top of the first escalator and I end up again wit Mr. Ken Hau. But this time he tells me: “Now it is possible, they are up there”. So Javi goes up and waits until a Malaysian TV Station finishes the interview with Patrick Brault so I can make mine.

In the meanwhile I am handing my business card out to everybody, of course, just in case they need a photographer and they don’t know to whom they should call.

So when Patrick finishes with the television, we are introduced, I take my notebook and we start talking. Very easy, really, when people cooperate everything is very easy. He was not only answering my questions but also telling me many things about how they made the show, all the problems they had, the rain… so it was not the typical interview like a tennis match (I ask you, you answer me), it was more a whole conversation that afterwards I transcribed into an interview.

We finished the interview, everybody left and I took some notes while the rest of the waiters there removed the tablecloth and the cover of the chairs. When I finally got out of there it was almost half past eleven and there almost everybody had already left. Patrick was waiting to get into the van from the organization to go to their hotel and I asked him if they were going to Kuala Lumpur, but he told me that their hotel was close to Putrajaya. So I went to a woman from the organization and I asked her how I can reach the train station, which is really far away from there (I knew there were still trains to Kuala Lumpur). The woman told me that there was no way to reach the railway station but if a taxi is ok for me they would help me. I told her that a taxi is perfect for me (as you can imagine) so she told the driver of the van of the Spanish team to take me with them to the hotel and then to call a taxi for me.

So here I am, in the van with the Spanish Team, we talked a bit and it was ok, but let’s say that we didn’t finish as close friends. After a while I sit in the hall of the hotel waiting for my taxi and I take my notebook to write down some things while I still remember them.

My taxi arrives and I go home, just 15€ for a 25 km ride, quite ok. Once I am at home I take Zuzana’s telephone (calling to a fix phone abroad is quite cheap) and I think: “forget about little things, let’s do it right, first I am calling to El País” (El País is the bestseller of the newspapers in Spain, apart from the sport ones, of course). So I call them, I tell them the story and... well, a bit disorganized. First they seemed to be interested in it and they even asked me to send some samples of pictures while I transcribe the interview, after some time they ask me one picture in high resolution and they ask me for the caption I want when they publish it. And then, they were going to call me, but they were not calling, I called again… finally yes, they say that probably they would publish it on Tuesday. So I go to sleep with a smile on my face, imagine, in “El País” in the cultural section and nationwide. Great, isn’t it?

On Tuesday I talked again with them and they told me that they are not publishing it because the person in charge just arrived from holidays and bla, bla, bla… I know that on Wednesday anything that happened on Sunday is not news anymore, so I gave up. I admit that I felt a bit disappointed and a bit frustrated, but ok, there is nothing I could do.

Since I was not satisfied I thought (yes, I thought one more time)… “And what if on Friday, when they anounce the winner, I go there and if Spain wins I take some pictures from the price giving ceremony?... maybe they could publish that”. And I decided that so I would do.

The week passes and I am getting ready for Friday. By the way, Tomaš, Zuzana’s brother, arrived on Thursday.

Finally Friday arrives and Zuzana, Tomaš and I go to see the fireworks. We take the train, then the bus and we arrive where the bus stops, which is a bit further than the other side of the bridge you can see on the picture on the fireworks. Well, the bridge is closed because there are installed on it some fireworks (meaning, explosives) and due to safety reasons it is not possible to cross it.

Javi tells again the story to the policeman but this time improved. “I am photographer from Spain, I came last week and I made an interview with the leader of the Spanish Team. I have to go today to the price giving ceremony because if Spain wins the first price it will be news tomorrow and it has to be on the newspapers…”

Nothing, it cannot be. I talk to another guy who is organizer, I tell again the story to him and I take my card holder with the business card of my friend Heng Ken Hau (together with my other cards of people from Tourism Malaysia, the Ministry of culture, the International Film Festival of Kuala Lumpur…) and I tell the organizer that I was with him last week. Everything went far much easier. “Ooooohhh…. Yes… from “Global”… yes… yes…” Things are right now, now there are three people from security with three scooters to take Zuzana, Tomaš and me to the other side of the bridge.

Once there (the same far away “there” from the week before) we walk up to the Convention Centre and I go directly to the escalators from the week before and the person from “Global” down there tells me that the price giving ceremony is on the same floor in a stage which is close to there. I go to that stage and I don’t see anybody around there, so I try to find anybody else to ask.

Then I find another woman, I tell her the story and I show here the card of my very close friend Heng. She tells me that she is not organizer of the Competition,that she workes for the Convention Centre (there were some other events there) and that she is helping me. She makes a couple of phone calls and she tells m that the ceremony is on the first floor. So she takes me to the famous escalators and she tells the guy from “Global” that I know Mr. Ken Hau and that I should show him the card that I showed her before. Immediately the guy let’s me go up and apologized to me (I think he really had no idea about where the ceremony was going to be).

I reach the top of the second escalator and there is another control with some women who ask me where I am from. I tell them that “I am spanish photographer”, “from where?”, “from Spain”, “Aaaaahhh… Spanish Tema?”, “yes”… let’s go inside. Ok, we’ve got it, here we are.

I think that it is because my friend Heng didn’t see me, if so I don’t reach this point no even in my dreams.

So I prepare the camera, I take some pictures, I walk a bit around and I see a man who looks as if he was Spanish and whom I think I had seen the week before leaving at the end of the show. This man.

So I think that I should meet some other photographer because I have no idea about who are all those people around there. Then I saw I photographer wearing a T-shirt with the crest of the Valencia Football Club (???). This is my chance, I start talking to him and after five minutes he starts running saying that the Minister of Tourism is coming. This was a really funny situation. Here I am, with my North Face bag, with all the other photographers and cameramen taking pictures of the Minister of Tourism, there is only a small problem, from all that mass of people coming I have no idea who the Minister is, so I take a lot of pictures with the wide angle really open to the top so nobody is out of the picture.

Later on I would find out just by myself that the Minister of Tourism is not a man, she is a woman. Yes, that small problem with genders in English.

So this woman sits in the same table where is sit that man who looks Spanish, who finally results that he is the Ambassador of Spain. Ups… the Minister of Tourism and the Ambassador of Spain together… there is no doubt that Heng wouldn’t have let me in even though the close friendship that we share.

When the photographers have finally finished shooting the VIP table we move a bit aside and the ceremony starts. The photographer guy I met tells me that I should move fast because there are many photographers and cameramen and when the presentation finishes it is going to be very crowded. So I immediately stick to him and as soon as I see him moving I go with him and we kneel in front of the centre of the stage. That was also very funny. I looked around all those photographers and cameramen all them with their accreditation… and me wearing my T-shirt from the Oceanario de Lisboa.

In the ceremony they start to introduce everybody and afterwards they start giving the prices. One to every team for participating, then the second price and then… the moment arrives… “And the first price, with xxx points out of a total of 400 points is… for the Team of… Spain!!!”

Yes!, yes!, yes!... “Receive the price the Ambassador of Spain Mr. José Ramón Barañano”. For you to have an idea about where I was, here you are a picture of the price giving from the Minister of Tourism of Malaysia to the Ambassador of Spain.

When the ceremony finishes, in case I didn’t have enough I went to greet the Ambassador and I told him if he wouldn’t mind that afterwards I take some pictures of him alone with the trophy. And he tells me that better at that moment because afterwards they will have to attend many people. So he gets up from the table, he takes the trophy and he goes to the centre of the stage to pose just only me.

Well, mission accomplished, I get out to see the fireworks with Zuzana and Tomaš while we are walking down the hill to go home and call as soon as possible. But it was not going to be so easy, if in the way there the bridge was closed, now it is absolutely close. Before opening it they have to check that is completely safe and that there is no firework unexploded. So, since the bus leaves from the other side of the bridge, we can’t take the bus, we can’t reach the railway station and we can’t take the train back. What a pity.

I stop a small truck from the police to ask them but they don’t get the hint that they should drive us to the railway station. I ask another policeman about what we can do and he tells me that we can do nothing, the only option is a taxi, but there are no taxis around there.

So we decided that as soon as we see a car with only two people I will ask them if they could drive us. One minute later we see a car in which a guy is trying to put the camera on the car to take a picture with his girlfriend (or wife); I see it perfectly clear. I tell them the story, I take a picture of them with my camera and since they are from outside Kuala Lumpur I ask them if they could drive us to Putrajaya railway station. We will never know if they really wanted to go to Kuala Lumpur or they were simply so nice (that they were) that they wanted to take us to Kuala Lumpur. The fact is that they left us almost in front of our building (and I think they didn’t leave us closer because we didn’t let them). These are our nice friends.

Once at home I called again “El País” but after all they were not interested in it, at least they called me to tell me that they were not interested in. My second try was ABC, another important newspaper. They told me that they were interested in it for the regional edition of “Comunidad Valenciana”. So I wrote again the text because they wanted indirect speech instead the interview and I sent them four pictures, two of them of the fireworks, another one of the interview with the TV station and the fourth one from the price giving ceremony.

So finally yes, I have something published in a newspaper.

The first thing I saw about it was on the website of the newspaper. It is quite funny, on the Internet they published my text, but they didn’t publish my pictures!!!. I haven’t seen the newspaper yet (the printed version of the ABC from Comunidad Valenciana still didn’t reach Kuala Lumpur), but I know they published one picture (the one of fireworks you have here). So in the end I have to say that am quite content with this.

I think it really doesn’t make too much sense here, but… if you can read Spanish, or you want to see my name on the Internet, you can click here.

Getting started...

2008-08-25T20:44:00.000-07:00

Last friday I finally went for a walk with my camera not worrying about anything else than taking pictures. You have no idea about how much I needed it. Until then I had taken pictures, but it was always because it was on the way when we all were walking to somewhere, or I was going to buy something or to find some information. But not this time, on friday I took all my stuff and I went to see the world out there. But let's go step by step, don't hurry up.

Before telling you anything else, I am going to tell you about Zaid. Zaid is the driver that Zuzana's company contracted here in Kuala Lumpur. He’s a good guy, just for you to have an idea, the other day in the afternoon he was around here, in the flat-office, and since he didn't have anything to do, he made us a salad, and the best thing is that it was really good.

That weekend two cousins of Zaid celebrated their wedding (not between them, of course), and on Sunday Zaid took us all there as guests. It was a Malay wedding, and he told us that they celebrate Malay weddings during three days. We only went on the third day, so I hope to go with Dan to all three days of his family wedding (you know i don't remember if t is his brother or sister getting married). The people there were very charming, thanking us for coming, the traditions were very interesting, the food was good… everything was great. I made just a few pictures because I didn’t know what was going to happen, where the people were going to appear from and besides I didn’t want to be too much in the middle. I didn’t take the flash with me becasuse I didn't want to carry all the things… well, really, they are just excuses not to say that I don’t have anything spectacular, ups…

During the week I didn’t really do anything special. Just for a change, a lot of search of shops and surfing Internet to find information. But one thing’s for sure, the search finally secceeded. At least I found two second hand lenses which I was interested in, and a new camera bag, because in the one I had the D700 was a bit too tight, poor thing. So finally I managed to complete my photographic equipment (so far). For those of you who are more freaks, I’m explaining it in more detail here.

And finally on thursday evening I decided that it was enough and that I wanted to go to take pictures, because that's why I came.

So on friday moning I went again to Little india to finish the walk that we started the weekend before in the street market... and that's how I found out that the market is on saturdays and not on fridays.

What I didn't know, and I don't think I will ever forget, is that in Islam the Friday Prayer (called jumu'ah), which is after noon, is obligatory for all men. On Friday I was lucky to pass by the Hindu Mosque a bit later than one o'clock. When I arrived there I already saw that there were some people ready for prayer. But, little by little there were more people coming until at the end there were there, literally, hundreds of men praying at the same time, an all them facing Mecca, of course. You can be sure it has been amazing.

Once the prayer was finished (and I had already asked somebody to explain me what had happened there) I continued walking, taking pictures and from time to time talking with somebody. Until I arrived to a Chinese temple called Sze Ya.

There I met two Chineses: Yin Bin and Migguell (this doesn't sound very Chinese, I know). I asked them if they didn't mind that I took pictures of them while making the rituals. And I also asked them if they could explain me what they were doing. They told me that people use to go there to ask for different reasons. For example he was going to ask about his studies. I guess you understand that I am not going to tell you now every single aspect, but I was joining them in all the different ceremonies.

My plan was to keep on walking to Chinatown, but after a while it started to rain and I had to leave. Anyway I had something very important to do, I had to go to pick my business cards up (really much cheaper than in Spain). So yes, I already have a business card to give out around Malaysia. I have no idea which colour you will see on the screen, I have set it with the colour we chose en the printing works (from pantone colors), but you never know. So here you are, my business card:

And yes, that's my telephone number, if you want to call me just dial it.

I think this all, because on sunday we went to a place called FRIM which is a place close to Kuala Lumpur where you can see primary and secundary rain fores. There are some paths you can walk and it is not bad, but you don't really have the feeling of being in the rain forest (well, sometimes a bit).

After all, it seems that this could be taking off...

The technical section

2008-08-25T20:40:00.000-07:00

When I decided to take this way of photography, the first thing I had to think about was what camera I was going to buy. I knew I was buying Nikon, because if I couldn’t find second hand lenses at good price and my budget would only let me buy one new lens, I still could use two of my lenses. In fact I will be using one of them until I earn money enough to give myself another whim. And what the hell, I like Nikon, I use it since I take pictures and it worked well, so I stay with Nikon.

Knowing I was going to buy Nikon I had a doubt: D3 or D300? I was really tempted by D3, of course, being able to take pictures at 1600 ISO not being worried about noise is great, but D3 is too expensive (even in Malaysia). So I finally decided that I was going to buy D300, because even if it doesn’t have a full frame sensor, it is very well considered in all the reviews.

But it must be that somebody in Nikon heard me somehow and on July the 1st they announced the launch of the new D700, the camera that suits perfectly my needs. Basically we could define the D700 as: the sensor of the D3 in a body as the D300 at a price between both of them. For me it is perfect: lighter, smaller (better against thieves, it goes unnoticed), FX sensor… and it has the cleaning sensor system which is not in the D3 (it is in the D300). Ok, it doesn’t take 9 pictures per second as D3, but for my needs I think 5 per second is more than enough.

Buying it in Malaysia it has been almost 1000€ cheaper (yes, one thousand euros) than in Spain (I think Spain has higher prices than other northern European countries, I don’t know why). The only problem is that I don’t have international warranty, but I hope that if it works right during the 3 or 4 months that I will be here, there won’t be any problem rising when I go back to Spain (everybody fingers crossed right now… thank you…). So I started to look for shops in Kuala Lumpur and to find out the date it was going to be released in shops. I was not sure if it was going to be available by the time I arrived. When I knew they were starting to sell it in Malaysia at the end of July I was quite happy. I really have to thank Zuzana that she called like 20 times Jason (a seller here in Kuala Lumpur with quite a good reputation in Malaysian forums) to reserve one for me until the 13th. Later, Jason told us that the demand is so high that after buying mine he got 5 more cameras and he sold all them in one day.

So this is the camera which will be travelling with me, the Nikon D700:

Now I had to start with lenses. However you approach this and whoever you ask about it you will reach the same conclusion: using a good quality sensor with bad quality lenses doesn’t make too much sense. And everybody will tell you that it is worth more to invest your money in lenses than in the camera body. From all this we could have a nice talk about why I decided to spend my money in the D700 instead of the D300, together with the topic “bodies and lenses of DX series” vs “bodies and lenses for FX format”. But we can leave it for the next time we meet.

I wanted to buy some good lenses, but they are so expensive that I had to reduce it as much as possible and look in the second hand market.

First I decided that I was keeping the Nikon 28-80 G from everyday life, I decided it after reading in Ken Rockwell’s site his review and seeing that it is in his Nikon's 10 Best Lenses list. So I only had to look for wide-angle and telephoto. Depending on what I could find in the second hand market, and the money I had after buying the first one, my options were:

Nikon 17-35mm f/2.8D ED-IF AF-S
Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8G ED AF-S
Sigma 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6 EX DG

Nikon 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G AF-S VR
Nikon 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6D ED VR AF
Sigma 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6 EX DG OS APO

I know there are differences between all them, but if I couldn’t find any second hand one and I had to buy both new, then I could only buy one of the first class from one of the groups and from the other group I had to buy one of the second class. All this depending on what shops had and the price they could offer. After several walks around Kuala Lumpur and searching on the Internet, I found this in one shop:

Nikon 17-35mm f/2.8D ED-IF AF-S

Nikon 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6D ED VR AF

Great, isn’t it? Two second hand lenses that I was looking for. And since I bought them in the same shop I could get them both for 7000 ringgits, which means something like 1490€ both together. I think it is quite a good price.

At this point (even before buying the lenses) it was obvious that I was going to need a new camera bag, because the new camera fit in the one I had, but it was a bit tight and I didn’t like it. Besides with the 17-35 the zip shut but not very well, and with the 80-400 attached just forget about it.

I like Lowepro, but thieves also like it, they know when you carry a Lowepro bag there is something interesting in it. But they don’t know Tamrac that much, and I really liked the one I had until now, so I bought another Tamrac. I bought the Tamrac pro digital zoom 7, a new zoom case for the 80-400 and a belt to carry it all when I go trekking (both things also Tamrac). I think backpacks are comfortable but too slow to take the camera, and all this is too heavy to carry only on one shoulder.

In short: too much money, I better leave it before I start crying...

Welcome to Malaysia

2008-08-16T08:22:00.000-07:00

Yes, this is what you see when you live in a flat on the 33rd floor in the center of Kuala Lumpur and you look out of the window. More precisely this is what you see from one of the bedrooms of the flat, the one in which we will be living when we rotate bedrooms.

So it seems that here we are, it looks quite like Kuala Lumpur out there. And it also looks like we have a new camera. Yes, I finally mooved to digital. Those of you who know me better, you already know that it is not that I didn't want to, it just was that I didn't find the right camera. As things have been happening lately, it seems that I bought it because I needed it, but I can asure you that if I had come here on holidays, I would have bought it anyway. What I probably wouldn't have done is spending all the money I am going to spend in lenses. Since I still didn't buy any, we are skiping the lenses stuff for the next time, ok?

So far, sightseeing, what we usually call sightseeing... I haven't gone sightseeing a lot. The first day I managed to buy the camera and to get some informaton from the toursit office (not as much as I would have liked but I already expected that). What was different as I thought is that it was more difficult buying the camera than getting the information from the tourist office. The problem was that the exchange office in the shopping mall was closed so I had to go to the center and come back again to the shop after going to the tourist office. On thursday I was trying to find out more information about the National Parks and searching for lenses. And on friday more of the same, more visits to offices and shops.

But that was not all. On Wednesday I met Dan, well, Zuzana told me that Malays use fake names so they don't have to tell you "Hi, my name is Chung Wan Lao" and then you start a stupid conversation like "What...? Chun what...?" and you spend at least two minutes like that. Dan is a nice guy with whom I ended up having lunch. He told me that on Thursdays and Saturdays there is a local street market that he thinks we might like. We were supposed to go today, but today it was raining one of those heavy rains and we decided to go some other day, what a pity.

Dan also told me that in October his brother (or it was his sister?... it doesn't matter) was going to get married and he said that for sure they will like us going to the wedding and that there won't be any problem if Iwant to take some pictures. Here in Malaysia, apart from aboriginals, there are three main ethnic groups: Malay, Chinese and Hindu. Everyone of them has its own ritual of celebrating weddings. I would like to see one of each one to see how they are. It seems that we are going to go to a Malay wedding, we will see how we manage to go to the other two of them.

Something else I saw the other day, when unfortunately I still couldn't take pictures, was that there were some people making small fires on the street while placing food around. I thought they were selling the food, but yesterday I knew that they were not selling anything. According to the Buddhist tradition, on the 14th or the 15th of the seventh lunar month of the Chinese calendar, they burn paper monies and give food as offerings for the wandering ghosts in order to appease them and keep them away. If you want some more information about it you can read it here.

Yesterday evening, when we were leaving home to take a walk and have a dinner, there were a group of Chinese people making fire on the street. Then I knew what they were doing.

The dinner yesterday was in a place prepared for occidental people, but I resisted the temptation of pizzas and hamburgers and I order any kind of chicken with a strange name that the waiter suggested me. Five minutes later I thought that it didn't matter if the food was going to be cold, because my mouth would keep on burning for the whole night.

The usual menu here consists on noodles (which are not only the thin long noodles, there are several types of them) or rice, and it's not always spicy. You know me when we talk about food... I want to try everything, but these days I feel a bit weird with my tummy (I think more due to air conditioning than food, because I can keep on eating without problems). And it is also that there are so many things that you don't know what they are... Today we were in an Indian street market and they had so many strange things. I didn't take pictures, as I told you it was raining, and I want to go there with a local, so I know what I take pictures of and what I eat (or maybe it is better not to know it until you have tried it). And for my Belgian friends, I think you could survive here with fritur, they have many of those stuffs here which look quite similar to the Belgian ones, but I can not tell you what is inside of all those things the fry.

So this is how days are here, it s not bad for warming up, but telling the truth, I am really looking forward to leaving all this paperwork and preparations, and starting the real adventure. By the way, talking about warming up, it is truth that it is warm and humid here, but I think it is not so bad.

Ok, Let's see how we finish the weekend.

First stop: London

2008-08-09T14:19:00.000-07:00

Somehow it is much easier to begin in this way. You Take a plane and you go to a country that you already know and go to your best friend's house. Besides, you have already been in the city a couple of times and you don't really need to go sightseen or walk around the city during the whole day. In some other moment I would do it, but now I still have a couple of matters to solve, like the blog and the web. So I can enjoy Fernando and Pamela's company. Because since Fernando came to London... already five years ago?, we hardly have seen each other.

So here we are, invading their living room and enjoying some days of realx before going to Malaysia. And I do need to rest, because on tuesday noon (London time) i will be taking a plane to flying to Kuala Lumpur. I will land there at 7:25 in the morning (local time), which means 0:25 London time.. nice, I have to get up when I am supposed to go to bed. After taking the train to Kuala Lumpur and going to Zuzana's place (by metro or by taxi in a huge traffic jam) I will have to go for the camera I have reserved in a shop and then to the Malaysian Tourist Office to fix a schedule that I need for the photography permission.

I would like to be positive, but I am afraid that these two simple things will take a while to be done, especially the steps in the tourist office. If when I will arrive home in the evening, I have managed to have the camera in my hands and I have fixed the schedule for my trip, I will feel absolutely satisfied.

Once I get these two things, my new tasks will be printing my business cards, buying one or two lenses for the camera, memory cards, an external hard drive, probably a good monitor for the computer (maybe i can delay this one), good shoes for treking, some clothes suitable for rain forest, a good insect repelent... and the rest of stuff coming up in my mind.

I think that after all that I will have the ideas more clear and I will be able to keep you up tu date. But now, let's enjoy these days in London before the adventure. Don't you think so?

HOW DID ALL THIS BEGAN?

2008-07-29T11:24:00.000-07:00

Well... it is july the 29th 2008, I finally started with my blog, it is a way of starting with all this which probably will lead me during a couple of years to thousands of places and unexpected situations. What will be all that which is waiting for me?

But... Where does all this come from?

The beginning

It happened that in the middle of May my girlfriend found a job (well, I should say the job found her). Its "office" is what we would call "the planet". It means that she will be travelling to different countries staying there for three, four or five months and coming back to Spain in between them for periods between two and four weeks. That implies that we will see each other for two or three months a year, and a relationship like this, from our point of view, doesn't make any sense. Zuzana is Czech, I don't know if you have ever thought about it, but a relationship between two people from different countries has an immediate implication: at least one of them won't be able to live in his/her country. In my opinion you cannot think it will always be the other one who will give up his/her country.

We both had an interview with the company and we explained to them our situation, it is a very interesting job but there is no job worth finishing our relationship over. So we wanted to know if there was going to be any problem with me living in the flat (house, whatever) that they rent in every country for the team (of three people) working there. We could say that they liked us and that they are very positive about Zuzana doing the job, so... they told us that even if it is not what they thought, it was ok for them if I was coming with her.

The die was cast. When we left from their office in a suburb close to Madrid, we took the car and there was a small traffic jam to get onto the highway. I had a feeling that I will never forget. I looked around and I saw the whole thing: traffic jams, working hours from 9 to 2 and from 4 to 7, planning weekends, shopping at the supermarket... what we use to call normal life. It was going to finish, I was going to leave all that. I had in front of me two or three years which would mean the biggest change of direction in my life. The first direction we were going to take was to Malaysia.

I am a Civil Engineer and I like my job. But I am also a keen photographer and sometimes I do occasional jobs. Well, let's say that this was until now... from now on I will be a photographer who used to work as a Civil Engineer.

And in this way, the dream I had in my mind, that sentence I have told my friends so many times: "what I would like is to travel, to take pictures and to live on them", went from being a "dream" to being a "project".

The project

If you are going to do something like this you have to take it seriously. You can not think "ok, I take my camera and we will see what I get". I think that if you do so you will probably get something, but not as good as it should be (unless you are really talented). Of course that is not my idea, just in case I am not so talented.

The first thing I thought is that I had to change my camera. So far I was one of those weird guys still shooting on film because I had many problems with colors (especially with skin tones), the noise (I use Nikon) and the lack of a full frame digital camera (yes, I use Nikon). I didn't want to spend a huge amount of money because my 19-35mm is not such a wide angle anymore.

But in a trip like this I can not use film. I am definitely moving to digital and the chosen one is the Nikon D700. Now all I do is search for prices and availability. I imagine that I will buy it in Malaysia as soon as I arrive (if it is already available, which I hope) where prices are considerably lower than here in Spain. The first matter I had to resolve is done, for the moment.

The next thing I did was to go to the Malaysian Embassy to ask if it is necessary to get any kind of permission in order to take pictures in any place in the country. I was told to write an email to the consul and so the process began. It seems that I do need permission to take photographs in some areas (especially in Borneo). I think that if you are a tourist you don't need it, but if you are planning to publish them, it is better to do things properly and avoid surprises in the future. At the moment I am in contact with the Malaysian Tourist Office in Paris (there is no Malaysian Tourist Office in Madrid) in order to request the permission and, if possible, any kind of sponsorship.

This, which could seem easy at first glance, is not that easy, I don't have a curriculum as a photographer apart from small jobs, and when there is a field to be filled such as "company", "project description", "publisher" or "target"... it is not so easy.

I also started to search around this new field of professional photography. One of the teachers of a photography course I attended told me to tell him when I am back and we could set up an exhibition. He is a photographer and having somebody who is willing to give a helping hand, is something I really appreciate.

I have also managed to get an interview with the Graphic Editor of the department of corporative magazines of Hachette Filipacchi, which publishes among others "Paisajes desde el tren" (the magazine you would find in spanish trains), Audi magazine or the magazine for Starwood Hotels (owning, for example, the Westin Palace Hotel in Madrid). Here I was quite lucky because when I called them for the first time I was told that the Malaysian embassy had contacted them a couple of weeks before asking if they would be interested in publishing an article about the country. So I was lucky to be in the right place at the right moment, but don't get too excited, this doesn't mean that I have a job.

As a bonus, a friend from my job told me that she could make a website for me. If it is not possible, or if there is not enough time, I will always have this blog. I will let you know the website details when it is ready so you can take a look at it. I am also preparing a business card, I registered in a Malaysian photography forum (PhotoMalaysia)... all those little things...

What is the purpose of all this?

That is the most complicated point in all this. Apart from enjoying what I really like, not having a publisher and being freelance, means that I have no clients yet. In the company where Zuzana is working, they told me that they will try to promote me in, for example, if any of their clients needs a photographer. As for me, I will be handing out my business cards... I will try to get in contact with some other Editors before leaving and once I am there I will see how the photography market is. Right now I do not have any commercial aims fixed.

However, my main idea is shooting a graphic report of the whole of Malaysia: Nature, cities, temples, people, traditions... for example how weddings are, or schools... really getting in touch with the people to be able to grasp the essence of the country and photograph it the best way that I can.

Once I have the work done and I have the pictures, I hope it will be easier to sell them.

But on the top of that, my greatest dream would be being able to publish photography books. After these two or three years ahead (if nothing bad happens, touch wood) of travelling around different countries with stays between three and five months, time enough to know a country, I would like to be able to publish a series of books of the countries I will visit. But this... this is another story, let's go step by step and we will see afterwards what I can do.

A small dose of reality

I imagine that some of you are seeing this as the dream of your life. But I would like you to see the whole of it. What I have been telling you until now is the exciting side of the "adventure". But taking a decision like this also has its inconveniences that I would like to, at least, tell you so you have a better and more real view of all this.

First of all I am leaving my job, which means that my income is reduced to 0. Besides, I will buy a new camera, some lenses, a decent monitor (I hope I can negotiate my laptop with my company)... To all this, add the plane ticket to Malaysia (around 1000€), health insurance, and the expenses of three or four months in Malaysia. I will spend several days in Kuala Lumpur (where Zuzana is), but most of the time I will be travelling around the country. I am not going to keep thinking about it, because I am sure if I try, I will find even more expenses.

Apart from that we are renting a flat in Madrid that we are keeping, because we are not leaving for two years in a row, we will be coming back to Spain from time to time, and I probably for longer periods than one month while I try to sell my pictures. You can't move house every 4 months.

Zuzana is going to earn money, we both know that it will be her salary which will provide us our livelihood, I cannot think that she will be paying for all that I have mentioned. Fortunately I have some money saved which was waiting for a round the world trip, so part of this money will be the "investment" which this project requires.

And if it doesn't work out?

On the one hand I am going to ask for unpaid leave of absence in my company, which allows me to be back in between four months and five years. This is at least a safety net. I am lucky to work in a field in which nowadays there is no unemployment, hopefully it will stay like this throughout the crisis.

But I won't lose sleep over it, I won't die of hunger, as there will always be something I can do.

All this is not the most important, I always try to see the glass as half full, even if there is only a little bit left. Travelling is one of my biggest passions. After all this finishes, even if I don't gain anything as a photographer, I will have lived so many experiences, I will have seen so many places, I will have met so many people... that right now I can't even imagine... And that is something that I will always take with me and whatever happens I will keep from all this. So, even in that case, I have the feeling that this can not go wrong. One of the aims of this "project" is to live it, that will be the greatest experience.

So here we are, ready for the great adventure...

Come with me!