Borneo 2015 – day 11

Thursday 9th July

This morning, it was up, have breakfast, pack our bags, and we were ferried back across the river to where we’d left our car. We got on the road, and were ecstatic at what we had experienced over the previous 36 hours, but there was more awesomeness to come.
Our next planned stop was Gomantong Cave, which was only 20km or so back along the road to Sandakan. We arrived, paid our money, and headed off along the boardwalk into the rainforest in search of the cave. The cave was typically full of bats, bat poo, starlings and cockroaches. The light inside was also beautiful, as caves generally are. Walking around it, I wanted to shoot it from every angle, but didn’t want to be there all day, plus the smell of ammonia in the air (from the bat poo) was quite overpowering. This was another cave which was unguided, allowing you time to shoot it the way you wanted to, providing you had the time!
As I left the cave (Cath and Max had left before me, as they had foolishly worn thongs!), Cath said that she had overheard some people saying that there was a couple of orang-utans down the path. We hurried quietly down the path and sure enough, there was a mother and a baby orang-utan IN THE WILD! We had secretly hoped all throughout this trip that we might see some in the wild, but honestly didn’t think we would. It’s great to see these creatures in a conservation park, but it’s even more heartening to see them in the wild and to know that they haven’t all been wiped out because of the palm oil industry. I know time and corporate greed is against them, but it was still nice to see some in the wild.
We left the Gomantong Cave park and headed back to Sandakan.
After checking back into the Sabah Hotel, Cath and Max headed for the pool while I sat here writing, and processing images.
Around 17:30, we left the hotel and headed for the fishing village built on the eastern side of the city.
For those who recall my writings about the fishing village in Kinabalu from two years ago, this is a very similar setup. Alley after alley of these barely cobbled together wooden shanties, built on pillars over the water. All the sewage and rubbish is either poured or thrown into the ocean which ebbs and flows under their houses, making a powerful argument for why we probably should cut down on the use of plastic bags.
One of the amazing things about these shanty towns is how much the kids just love having their photos taken. Seriously. They will see you from 2 streets away, call their friends, race through the streets to find you, and before you know it, there’s a crowd of 10 kids begging you to take their image! And then when you show them the instant playback on the DSLR screen, they all giggle, prod each other, and say “Thank you”. And generally then hassle you for another one. You have to know when to move one. Interestingly though, a couple of old guys with great character-lined faces wouldn’t agree to an image. Ce la vie. It was an hour after sunset and the light was fading. Generally, I don’t ever shoot with my a850 beyond 1600 iso. 3200 is ok when you’re desperate, but the noise is pretty bad, and 6400? Forget about it! It’s so bad that you have to be prepared to process to black and white so that the colour noise just looks like grain. But on this occasion, I decided to go to 6400 iso just so I could get decent shutter speeds by the street lights. I made this decision on two fronts.
1. The subject matter kind of lends itself to the extra grain, and
2. I figure that even though TODAY those RAW files look like crap, the day could potentially come where profiles exist for how every camera performed at every iso rating, and there could be advancements in processing technology which will allow those RAW files to produce decent images. Who knows? I live in hope.
Come dinner time, we decided to try something different from the waterfront cafe we’d visited a couple of times already. Cath found reference to a seafood restaurant called “88” on Trip Advisor. It also happened to be located in the fishing village I’d been shooting for the last hour of daylight, so we decided what the heck, we’d give it a go. There was no menu at all. What there WAS, was a bunch of big 60 litre plastic storage bins full of water, and in each, there was a different kind of live seafood… crabs, prawns, lobster, grouper, mussels, oysters and more. You told them what you wanted (challenging, as none of them had a decent command of English), and what method of cooking/sauce you wanted, and off they’d go to prepare it for you. Great food? You bet. Stupidly cheap? Uh-huh. I feel like I’m always talking about what we’ve eaten, but I just can’t get over how good the food here is and how well-priced it is.
As soon as we finished dinner, we headed straight back to our hotel as we’ve got a moderately early start tomorrow morning. A 09:00 boat ride to Pulau Seningaan for some turtle watching.