We woke up very sore. Dad made us get out of bed at 730 since he was already awake that mean everyone else had foo. We went back down to the restaurant for breakfast, our choice of Malaysia (fried rice or noodles) or American (toast, sausage which is really a fried hot dog, eggs, and baked beans and fruit) and we chose the American which also came with tea and watermelon juice. The tea here is all local, grown err from somewhere in Sabah or the mountain. At the museum in the park, I think I talked about seeing the gigantic beetles that were the size (bigger with wing spam) of my palms that could trip us, as Max put it. Anyway, we saw one today at breakfast! It was buzzing around a light post, but it was like a bird buzzing around a small lamp. HUGE. It was creepy and gross!
We went down to the springs for another try at securing a private bath but there was nobody there and the closed sign was out though we were half and hour into their proclaimed opening time. We decided to try one of the open baths. In the end, we all jut jumped into one since the water would have taken hours to fill the tub so we just sat in about two inches of it and splashed it onto ourselves.
Dad and I decided to go wander through the botanical gardens in hope of seeing a rafflesia, which Max stayed behind because he thinks flowers are gay lol. The gardens ended up bring a large plot of fences off jungle with wild and caged animals in it, still cool. There was a small cage off to the side before the entrance which I believe was the site for the rafflesia, but all I saw was a large orange-red bulb, so I'm guessing their out of season. It is only march and we're a mile up so its not super hot.
Our first encounter was a Gibbon monkey in a cage. He was along and had a nice set of bananas there to eat. He was swinging all over the cage and his ropes making cooing sounds. He followed dad where ever he wandered around the cage, he was too cute! Next, we happened upon an aviary. There were two type of birds in it said the sign, one that looked like a pheasant but had a larger tail and was colorful like a peacock. The other was a green dove. The birds were scarce, but we did see the doves flying above and a little family of peacock-like birds running around in the stream flowering through the aviary. Then we found the monkeys. The bad moneys that were wild. We think they live here, and they're wild and not apart of the exhibit. Dad was standing inside the bird net and outside were 3 monkeys. 2 were playing on the trees and other was staring at dad hissing. He was pissed. We had to go out that way, so we did, the monkey came closer. He was baring his teeth and hoofing and puffing while the other 2 were jumping through trees. Then he got even closer. He was about 30 feet away and we decides let's go NOW! King of scary.... He would have definitely attacked us....
The rest of the cages that held various animals were empty. There was a nicely kept cage for a slow loris, but the cage door was opened, I'm not sure if by accident or not, so he wasn't there. We saw deer tracks everywhere through the mud and dad and I each caught a few leeches sucking on our toes, just small ones about 1/4 of a worm. We found the deer eventually. There was a part of the gardens where from the outside you could feed them. The whole heard, maybe about 12 deer (males and females) were waiting inside for food. But we were on the inside too, but they didn't seem too concerned. They just stared and lied there. On our way back out, as we did a giant circle, we came across the pissed off monkey again. Immediately as soon as we were in viewing distance, we head the huffing and growling. Then I spied a baby monkey, very tiny, all caged up in the air. This monkey was the momma protecting the baby. After realizing this, we didn't stay around to watch her get closer to attacking. We saw a snake (in a cage) and that was it. Don't get me wrong though, it was a nice multi-acre jungle and it was beautiful and we saw many really cool things, just hard to explain, you need to see photos.
We wet back for a quick nap, Max and I ran down the road to some local shops to get cheap water and we met our transportation back to the city.We stopped at the mountain's HQ to pick up some more people, Americans who were on a three week vacation, who we talked to the whole time back down 3 hours to the city. We are here now, with Internet getting caught up again with the world. The guys are transferring through the Narita-Tokyo airport in two days and we had to call United to make sure it was still okay and it is. Tomorrow we have a 1500 departure to Singapore, so we'll wander the city until then :)
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