Water, water, everywhere

Kiss the Monkey


My clearest image of Sarawak is an angry sea trying to dash me against the rocks. Also my sister Jackie. Also my sister Julie. Julie hurt her toe. Jackie and I, emerge bruised, bleeding freely, after a bout with the sea. It was so angry, it was foaming. The surf roared. Every time you lifted your head, another wave dashed you against the rocks. We got out of there. Barely. Intact.

Cuts and scratches are funny after the fact. We examine them with interest, tracing the network of scabs on our arms, our legs. A bruise is good for a laugh. Maybe two. The larger the bruise, the more impressive. Jackie beat me there. She fell on her sit-upon and sustained quite a nasty one. I fell through a gap in a wooden bridge in the jungle and was similarly empurpled. Upper thigh. I'll show you if you want. It's still there, purple around the edges, getting better. Mom makes a face when she sees it and suggests Aloe Vera. I tell her she doesn't really care because she didn't wake me up putting Skin Repair on the edges of my broken skin like she did with Jackie.

We squished through a rainforest, to get to a waterfall where the water was red, as if with blood, but it was really because of the alkaline soil (Simon said so and he knows what's what). It was nice sitting on the edge of a little waterfall. Kind of like a jacuzzi. We all slipped on moss-covered stones. I nearly died on the first 750 metres which was steeply uphill, scrambling up slick stones, slipping and sliding and breathing heavily. When you're 20 kgs overweight and severely unfit, that's what you do.

And then it got easier. The ground sort of levelled out. I thought every tree root was a snake. And because of the continuous rain before we came, we squished through kilometres of waterlogged terraces. Mud, by any other name, is still mud. New trainers soaked through. (If you can't tell, I'm too sedentary for the adventurous life...give me a nice book, a notebook, a cup of tea and my iPod, and leave me alone, I will create new worlds. Drag me along on adventurous expeditions, and you'll soon be wishing you hadn't...puff, puff, puff, ache, ache, ache, complain, complain, complain)

We saw some nice proboscis monkeys and Jackie nearly stepped on a snake. More adventures. I preferred the monkeys. Cute buggers with large honkers. We saw them up close munching on leaves in the mangrove swamps. Why are swamps always so wet?

In fact, why is everything so wet?

Water, water, everywhere...I come from Johor...have you seen what they're saying about us in the news these days?

We're drowning.