Borneo: Part 5

I awoke refreshed, stiff and sore and then remembering my massage managed to drag myself out of bed. After a quick breakfast I marched over the little hut by the beach collapsed onto the massage table and let the masseuse work her magic. It was potentially the best 45 minutes of my life. She massaged nearly every square inch of my body from my pinky toes to eyebrows; when she was done I nearly said just do it again.

Reluctantly I departed and went to tell Ian all about it. After my ravings he decided that perhaps he would have a go after all, but upon finding out that he could only have a male masseuse he chickened out, saying that was too weird. I said he was ridiculous and missing out and spent a great deal of the rest of the day reminding him how amazing my massage was.

We logged a few more hours on the beach and had fun splashing in the waves. We sadly made our final trip to Buntal and enjoyed an absolutely divine meal of salt & pepper prawns, butter crab and steamed rice. We went back to the first restaurant we had tried in Buntal as it was quite easily the best.

We noticed that the girl who seated us spoke remarkably good English, we asked her if she had spent anytime in the UK and she told us that she had been living there for the past 11 years and just returned home two days ago.

We found this pretty remarkable; here was this young girl from a tiny fishing village in North Borneo whose parents own a tiny local restaurant and don’t speak so much as ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in English and managed to send their daughter off to the UK to study of all things, ballet.

It was pretty clear that her parents were beyond delighted to have her home and as we were backing out of the parking lot she was doling out gifts from the UK to what I assume were her younger cousins, nieces and nephews.

Borneo: Part 3

We awoke to more rain but unable to do anything about it, packed our bags for our next destination, Damai Beach. We took a wrong turn on the way driving past a woman with a several large tubes of bamboo roasting a fire.

Ian’s curiosity got the better of him so we pulled over to check it out. The tubes were filled with rice that had been soaked in some sort of green liquid and then roasted over the fire. We purchased one which the woman removed from the fire and then she peeled away the bamboo with pliers leaving the rice intact and held together by a very thin almost paper like layer of bamboo and then sliced the tube of rice into segments, just like sushi. The rice was tasty and I cannot begin to describe it or think of anything with which to compare it. Ian greatly enjoyed the novelty of the whole experience.

We made our way to our resort which is lovely, but the rain makes even the most impressive resort seem downright depressing. So we dropped our bags and went to explore the area. We drove through a couple of local villages ‘kampungs’ and found our way to the little gem that is Buntal. Locally quite famous, Buntal is a tiny village full of nothing but homes, fruit and veg stands and seafood restaurants.

We picked a restaurant at random for our lunch and were richly rewarded. The crab was clearly a local speciality so we asked the woman at the restaurant which was best, she didn’t speak much English but knew what we meant so she pointed to crab with egg. We also ordered some salt & pepper prawns and sat back and waited for our food to arrive. Shortly thereafter we received a huge pile of prawns fried and served on a heap of sea salt and the famed local Sarawak pepper.

Our crab came next, a mountain of cracked crab stir-fried in some sort of sauce which definitely contained egg and 5-spice, but after that I’m lost. It was delicious and messy. Fat and happy we returned to the hotel to digest and have a quick siesta. When we awoke it wasn’t exactly sunny, but there was at least a large patch of blue sky over the beach so we took a stroll and spotted some sea otters and decided that we should most definitely return to Buntal in search of our dinner.