Things that Suck

WARNING: IMAGES ARE BLOODY

The leech story.

I feel like this, this story, is the entire reason I made this section of my blog, well that and to discuss Japanese cities and their treasures that I become acquainted with...which I am not doing such a good job of...

Anyways, as I may have mentioned in the Rafflesia post, I went hiking through a forest to find this rare and elusive flower. And one of the things you need to be exceptionally wary of, is leeches. I was wearing pants that cinched around the ankles, but alas, it was to no avail.

My partner was never once bit, because he said that he could feel them. They felt cool and water like to him he said. And he could always catch them the moment they started crawling up his skin.

So a thing or two about leeches.
They have an anti-coagulant in their bite. This means that your blood will keep flowing into their bodies and if you knock them off, it will just flow all over.
Unless you are pretty sensitive, you probably won't feel them. They feel just like the wet leaves of their surroundings, and once they attach themselves and start the blood works, you don't feel them there either because only their mouth is attached to your skin. They sort of hunch themselves and touch you as minimally as possible.
Do not put salt on them like you would a slug. This will achieve nothing. They will spit their blood back out and flail around and probably open you a new hole (to suck out of). You might think that this will force them to release their coagulating agent that they disperse when they are finished feeding. But that isn't the case either.
Just let them feed. When they are done, they will release the coagulating agent and fall off.
Otherwise, if you knock them off, you could bleed for days. You have to get something to stopper the blood. And let me tell you, band-aids won't cut it. What does stopper the blood is newspaper. When newspaper gets wet and and is allowed to sun-bake, it dries. But tissue paper takes much longer to dry. The dryness of the newspaper helps to stopper the blood a bit. it will absorb the blood, stick to the skin, and dry that way. But be warned. if you remove the newspaper, it will start bleeding again.
These bites don't leave scars and will be gone in about a week.

the culprit

Here they are attached to my skin(and yes I did say, 'hang on let me get a picture of this') and the right one is after we pulled it off ...and stepped on it. But know this, it didn't die after that. It just reached out in search of more blood!

This one looks worse than it is. I wasn't kidding when I said that it would not stop bleeding. The left is a picture of the bit of newspaper I was attempting to still the blood with, and if you cant tell from the surrounding dried blood, it was working. And the right picture was taken a day or two after wards showing you just how small the bite was. A pin point really. And they cleared up in a week or less. 

Rafflesia

Rafflesia is often best known for its smell. Which is said to attract flies and zombies alike.

No joke. This thing is known as the corpse flower and is also the largest known flower in the world.

In Borneo, I made it my mission to find one of these things. It was nearly my whole purpose of going to Borneo (though lo-and-behold, Borneo turned out to be my favorite part of the trip). >Rafflesia are flowers that are red to maroon in nature with many white or cream colored freckles and spots all over. Theyare more of a recent discovery by a scientist and his team of university researchers. What attracted them first to this flower, well it can't have been its smell. But I am certain that was a key player in its discovery. These flowers have no real root system, no stems, no leaves, no predictable blooming cycles and pretty much grow where they please. So you can see the difficulty in finding them. Their buds (these little tortoiseshell looking things) last for months at a time before unfolding into the glory that is rafflesia, which will then only last a few days (about 5) before withering away. When they wither, they turn black and disintegrate and form even more of a crater-like appearance; it really looks like someone set fire to it. What a strange life.
Their texture is a hard spongy, almost plastic-y feeling. Almost like a harder, more tough version of a mushroom. They will have 4 to 5 petals  and a large crater in the center with what I can only assume is their pollen and stama inside. And as I said they are the biggest flowers in the world, they are somewhere between 20 to 100 centimeters. It depends on the species. The one I found was somewhere more than 30 but I think it was under 40...or maybe 45. And where they are actually renowned for their smell, the ones I found had no scent. Which was amusing seeing as my travel companion kept claiming how he could smell them from the start (he kept saying how close we must be since his nose was so good. we had to walk 3 kilometers and they had no scent! hah!).

So seeing their unpredictable and ellusive nature, where to find them right?
There are actually centers for them. No, they cannot grow them. But they study their habitats and their favored growth environments and have made a center around it. I don't know what you are thinking, but I was thinking something like a natural terrain green house. How very wrong I was. The center is no more than a building with some interesting facts and photos as well as original wood productions from Borneo natives. But you have to pay the center to be able to take a tour. It turned out you had to pay them quite a bit too! I want to say like 50 dollars to enter. And they were trying to ask 100 from us at the start and we just didnt have that much money. And these were not the ususal scam prices. They were set prices. The reason they offered us a cut in the price was probably one they felt sorry for us, two, they realized they were NOT going to get our business for that price ( we really didn't have the money), and most importantly, they told us the only flower in bloom was already withering. The reason you have to pay so much in the first place is that you need a tour guide. And the moment you think you don't, just don't even go.
We set out on the trail, which was concrete at first with stairs and slopes, but at some point, perhaps a kilometer or a kilometer and a half along, out guide starts off into the wild. You didnt think these flowers would grow around a concrete walk did you? Of course not! Then they wouldn't be anywhere near as elusive and everyone could see them! Well we hike down the mountain at a very interesting angle. And then back up portions of it. Each time he points out areas where there are buds of flowers. These little collections of tortoise shells. They have them labeled, plot 72, plot 63, plot 121. They don't grow them here, merely observe them and note what stage they are in so as to note where to take their visitors when they come looking to see one of these beauties in bloom. We walked all over as he searched the plots to make us happy. At the start of the trail, we had the luck of meeting the only other visitor that the location had for the day and what luck we had then. He told us there was one in bloom. At the perfect time too! Day 3 of its 5 day blooming cycle. His guide told our guide what plot it was. However that plot seemed to have either been forgotten or not often viewed for how much hiking we had to do to find it. Climbing over trees, vertical slopes, scaling using vines, and all throughout the leech infested forest. But that is a story for next week. We finally find it near a fallen tree and a good 5 feet down an 80 degree slope. We jump down and brace ourselves against the trees and take our pictures, and our sniffs, and our feels all in. Seriously, this flower might have been feeling a little violated after we were done with it. Our flower was bigger than my face and scentless. Meanwhile our guide took a smoke break.
The way back was not so easy as our way there. We had to hike mostly up the mountain and if we were without a guide...well for one, we would never have found the flower, and secondly, we would surely have never have found our way back. We had to scale back up all the ground we descended, which was extraordinarily mountainous and hike all the way back to the trail, for which we actually took a different (and less taxing as our guide informed us) route and finally made it back to the concrete path.

Getting to and from this center.
You can take a taxi there from the Kinabalu 'bus' terminal. This taxi is essentially a bus, as there are other people in it too, but again there are no regular times for it. The price was also the same as the buses (15 ringit). Getting back though. We had to ask the center to call us a taxi (which again was full of people) to take us back to the city, which was no problem. But we had to wait an hour for it to come (probably they were trying to fill out all their seats). ugh.

Hiking Mt. Kotakinabalu

Mt. Kinabalu is one of the world heritages of Malaysia. It is a very serious mountain. No playing around here! It is the largest mountain in South East Asia and even towers over the Japanese's proud Mt. Fuji, with over 4000 meters of elevation. The highest one I hiked in Korea was not even 2000 meters and I was suffering with that one.

Anyways, if your wish to hike it, it is sincerely recommended that you plan for more than a day to do so. Also that you have the proper gear as the top is extremely cold. People always think that oh it won't be such a big deal. It is. The top is actually about 0-5C on a nice day. And on Mt. Fuji, there is always snow on the top. Regardless of season. Additionally, Kinabalu mountain has some generous rock edges that take a bit more than your average mountain to climb. The top is an incredible rock peak where only a rope is placed to help you hike up its face. How steep it is, I cannot attest, nor can I attest to the wind, but I know the wind at the top of some mountains in South Korea was a fierce things to behold. Therefore you might want to add more than just your average tennis shoe to the list of gear you are considering.
Mount Fuji takes about 8 hours to hike...if you are a young high school boy on a sports team, otherwise you might want to give yourself an additional few hours. As Mt Kinabalu is certainly larger, you want to account for much more time. And as it is a forest, a tropical forest, you should be no means be hiking at night. In my small bit of hiking I did, I found poisonous snakes, leeches, sinking mud pits, among many of other things that could be a lot more dangerous once the night fell. Therefore there are quite a few places to stop and refresh yourselves on your hike to the top.
Personally, I couldn't afford two days to hike up and down a mountain, nor could I carry all the hiking equipment all around with me throughout the rest of South East Asia, and therefore I stuck to the smaller trails closer to the base of the mountain, which still too me a bit of time.
As far as getting there goes, once you are in Kota Kinabalu, one of the two information center, or any hotel, or nearly anyone, can direct you to the bus terminal. Don't be fooled. It is really just a parking lot of vans. And these vans are to be interpreted as 'buses'. Anyways. Once there you will find many people trying to sell the extra seats in their cars for tourists looking to see a variety of things. And a good many of them will be for Kinabalu mountain. If you take a taxi, it will be more expensive to do, but the taxi will leave at once, whereas with a bus, they might wait around longer looking to fill the last seat or two in their car, which can really take some time. But it is cheaper. And it is what I did. I took the bus there and was dropped off at the entrance.As far as the price goes, I wan to say I paid like 15 ringit?
Now as far as getting back goes, these 'buses' certainly do make their way back. But as you might guess, their schedule is nowhere near regular. I was told that the last one of the day was around 6pm. And that was about it. There is a small parking area outside of the park entrance that also has a cafe. This is where the bus comes to pick up its returning passengers. The bus comes from another area beyond Kinabalu park and therefore already has passengers. And what exactly happens if there are more passengers than seats? I shutter to think.

Penang in a day

So, I really only spent a few hours here. But I did everything possible in those few hours.

Our bus from Thailand got here at 2pm. And I know you might think we are crazy for bussing around for 16 hours, but it was the only way to reach Penang that day. There were no flights from Phuket to Penang that day or the next day, delaying our trip by two days! Not on my watch! (also transfer flights were not too popular for Penang either and some were just ridiculously expensive).
So we bussed to Penang.
The bus takes you to this enormous mall that is on the brink of Georgetown. From there you can either take the bus around, which is a free tourist shuttle bus. Or walk. but people will say you are crazy for walking. Apparently not too crazy. In the short amount of time we had there, we walked everywhere. I mean we tired to take the bus, but it was simply too confusing. More than half the stops were not even listed on the route map we had and if you weren't quick enough, the bus didn't stop. It was pretty crowded and mostly in Malaysian and well I suppose I just wasn't feeling quick enough to keep up with it. Needless to say, we got off at the wrong stop.
And from there decided to hoof it. We figured waiting for buses and finding the bus stops would probably take as long as walking around anyways. Go us! We were healthy!

Our first stop! This is an ancient house of a Chinese clan. They were among some of the first Chinese settlers in Penang and were a large influence

We found this along the way. A Buddhist temple

These three are a Hindu temple and two Chinese ones. At the Hindu temple, a man ushered us inside and took us around to his gods and had us give money. My smallest bill was a 5 ringit and that was my first mistake. He had us be blessed by two gods and kept asking for a larger donation for the second one because we honored the first so much (I wasn't about to drop a 20 ringit!). But hold your ground or they will just keep taking your money.
The first Chinese temple pictured had 5 massive incense sticks. They were the kind that maybe you could fit both hands around and would have stood taller than my brother. Inside were ornate chinese carved dragon columns where they would stuff these paper prayers in the dragons spirals and teeth.

Here a beautiful Catholic church (Penang is clearly a place of many religions) and Cornwallis at Fort Cornwallis.

This amazingly beautiful house is the Cheong Fatt Tze house

And finally our dinner! Something Penang is a bit famous for: Steamboat. What it is, it is hard to say. If you have been to Japan in the winter and had nabe, then you might understand. It is different foods, in this case, different seafoods, boiled in a broth and you just pluck out the desirables with your chopsticks. It is named steamboat for the funnel on top, which much looks like a steamboats when the smoke billows from it (there is a fire under the pot to keep it boiling).