Malaysia, truly Asia

Here's the wrap up to my post about our CNY trip to Kota Kinabalu, Borneo in Malaysia. The name of this post stems back to a joke Trent and I have thanks to the programming on our sweet Filipino satellite, of which there are 5 channels in English, where they always play this one commercial for traveling to Malaysia and throughout the commercial they sing "Malaysia, Truly Asia." After we booked our trip we decided it was because of their stellar tourism bureau and that commercial. If you have the Filipino dream satellite, you'll know exactly which commercial I'm talking about! Anyway, it was amazing to visit the rain forests in the country that is home to the world's oldest rain forest. We saw a beautiful sunset every single night we were there, I don't even think my photos do them justice. I also loved the Only in Borneo base camp, where I of course found and photographed the resident kitty. It took us several hours drive to get there, but it was incredible to see the scenery along the way. The houses were all brightly colored and many had flags with different symbols on them in the front yard, which, we learned was because they were about to have a political election. We went to the Only in Borneo base camp before going on the river cruise to look for the probiscus monkeys. As we pulled into the base camp we saw row after row of oil palms. The palm oil comes from the red berries in sacks that you'll see photos of below. Malaysia is the second largest producer of palm oil in the world. After we saw the probiscus monkeys, we came back and had dinner and then went out again on the boats in the pitch black to see a tree full of these huge incredible lightning bugs. If we had to leave paradise to come back to work and reality in Shanghai, that last evening was the perfect way to end our holiday. Hopefully, we can go back again and visit the other side of the island where there are orangutans and clouded leopards still living in natural, protected habitats.