Exploring the natural wonders and rare wildlife of Sabah’s southeast is a must for any adventure traveller.
AT first glance, one finds it hard to believe that Sandakan was once the capital of British North Borneo (now Sabah).
A ramshackle jumble of rusting corrugated-iron huts overlooking the Sulu Sea, this gateway town of some 350,000 people is right now in the throes of redevelopment. Its formal declaration as a city in 2008 was the first move in a drive to put Sandakan firmly back on the South-East Asian map.
Long before the arrival of the British, Sandakan was a trading port of the Islamic Sultanate of Sulu, based in the south of the Philippines. Then, after more than 90% of Sandakan’s buildings were razed by the Japanese in the last years of World War II, the Brits moved the capital to Jesselton (now Kota Kinabalu), on the north-east coast of Sabah.
Sandakan was rebuilt – more or less – and was then left to rot in the steamy equatorial heat for the next 50 years or so.
It is tourism that has revived Sandakan. To Australian visitors, the major place of interest is the Sandakan Memorial Park, commemorating the infamous Sandakan-Ranau Death March of World War II. I found a visit to the Park to be full of poignant moments. The very simplicity of the park, with its chapel and memorial set amongst gardens studded with lotus ponds, brings home the brutality and hardships of the march with stark immediacy.
On the 250km march, around 4,000 Malays and Indonesians and over 2,000 Australian and British prisoners-of-war died – and amongst the Allied troops, only six Australians lived to recount the horrors of the experience.
But Sandakan is not just sad memories. Near the Memorial Park, the Sepilok Orang Utan Rehabilitation Sanctuary is about hope. At the sanctuary, orphaned orang utans are cared for, nurtured and taught survival skills, before being released into the wild. Maybe as a result of this constant human contact, they are disarmingly friendly towards visitors.
Over 300 baby and juvenile orang utans are in residence at Sepilok at any one time, spread out over some 4,300ha. At feeding times, large numbers of them converge at the feeding station – a series of raised tree-platforms connected by rope swings. At the time of my visit, many of the monkeys appeared to be mocking us spectators – and given our voyeuristic demeanour, maybe they had reason to do so.
In Sandakan town, public spaces are undergoing a much-needed, major clean-up. A new fish market graces the waterfront, selling the finest produce of the Sulu Sea – super-fresh tuna, red snapper, garoupa, mackerel, rayfish, mangrove crabs and tiger prawns. The fish market forms part of the new Sandakan Harbour Square, which when completed late this year will be home to a new central market, a town square, a mall and a convention centre.
But the most atmospheric part of Sandakan is undoubtedly the Buli Sim-Sim water village. In neighbouring Brunei, the famous water village of Bandar Seri Begawan is home to over 10,000 people, who live in stilt-houses perched over the Brunei River. Buli Sim-Sim is a little smaller, but is just as colourful.
Buli Sim-Sim consists of three sections – the original Malay section dating from 1879, the “new” Malay section established in the 1970s to provide cheap housing (neat and colourful rental houses go from as little as RM60 a month), and the Chinese section.
My guide around Buli Sim-Sim is Irix Orlando, whose family comes originally from the southern Philippines. He shows me the street-art painted houses of the water village, including the elaborate open-house of shipping magnate Wong Tin Yan. Wong could easily afford a mansion on the mainland, but instead he is content to stay here, where he goes fishing and mends nets in his spare time.
“Why would I give up all this?” he says, pointing in a wide arc out to sea.
Then we visit the old Malay section, usually off-limits to visitors. And understandably so! The boardwalk timbers are rotting; rubbish is heaped up in large piles by the shoreline; and it would appear that paint is unknown in this part of town. But when I most undiplomatically voice my opinions, Orlando chimes in:
“I was born and grew up in the old Malay section”, he says. “There’s a real feeling of community here. And kids are taught how to stay safe on the gangways even before they can walk.”
Sandakan is also the gateway to the rainforest wonders of southeast Sabah, best accessed by speedboat along the Kinabatangan River. Several monkey species live along the Menanggul River (a tributary of the Kinabatangan), and some visitors are even lucky enough to spot the rare Borneo pygmy elephant. Among the monkeys is one of the most bizarre-looking creatures ever to come out of the jungle – the proboscis monkey, with a huge, bulbous nose, a giant belly and a long white tail. On spotting one, I thought that nature had been taking lessons from Salvador Dali.
After dark, the Menanggul River wears a different face again. The nocturnal animals of the rainforest are wide-awake while others sleep. The colourful blue-eared kingfisher somehow manages to rest by turning totally blind at night-time, so that you can go up and shine a torch in its face without evoking the slightest reaction.
But the forests of Sabah are severely under threat. Demand for palm oil has seen vast swathes of rainforest cleared to make way for palm oil plantations. The time to see Sandakan and the nature wonders of Sabah’s southeast is NOW, before industry wreaks its inexorable havoc. By Graham Simmons, The Star
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