Borneo Highlands – The Journey – Welcome to Sweet Surrender

Borneo Highlands is 60KM from Kuching, about one hour or so drive to reach the foothill. We drove quite slowly as we weren’t sure how to go and it’s drizzling. We started the time calculation from Hong Pin’s office at 5th mile. It was Saturday(3.3.2007) 11.43am and we reached there at around 12.30pm. Just follow the road sign will do. You can go in at Padawan, where you can spot a landmark, sculpture of monkey cups and flowers with the name of the town there. The town is Kota Padawan at 10th mile. Drive into the town and go up straight. There are signboards along the road. The road to Borneo Highlands is called Jalan Borneo Heights. You have two options to go there, you can drive there or arrange transportation with them when you make reservation(s).

The scenery along the way. I’m sure you don’t see this everywhere for those living in the city just like me though I always go to Serian with my family. However, we never use those roads. It was drizzling. Nice mountains. You have to drive tru’ a lot of hills, up and down, up and down… Of course the road isn’t straight, winding here and that but still not that bad. While on the way there, there were landslides (-.-“) scary… One side of the road was closed.

Finally reached our destination. Our cars were parked along the road leading up to the hill. It’s safe to park there. Don’t worry. Since the transportation wasn’t here yet, we had our “picnic” at the carpark. So hungry, we didn’t eat anything for our lunch yet. Actually we could go down to the guardhouse there to wait, they have a room for the guest and a shade too. We didn’t know until one of our friends saw Mr. & Mrs. Chai and their baby went into the room then we knew about it. *LOL* You know who is Mr. Chai? Those Informatics Kuching students, I’m sure you know 😛 hehehe… The one taught us Computer Architecture last time. His wife saw the offer in this blog and she booked it and upgraded to Goldroom I think. Will talk about the room in later post.

*LOL* Jimmy said it’s like the place where people keep the chickens.(-.-“) We were supposed to use the truck on the left picture but it seemed like it couldn’t start. So we had to wait for another one(right picture) to come down from up there. Tell you something. When we reached the entrance, we saw a lorry driver doing his business at the main road. GOSHH!!! I saw the “water fountain” but didn’t see his thing hahaha… And his butt was displayed halfway too. Goodness gracious. Free Show. He could go to another side of his lorry to do his business but he preferred to do it at the main road. Butt facing the main road and his “hose” watering the grass under his lorry. Too bad not in time to take photo of him doing his business *LOL*

Prepare to go up now… We were all fascinated by the views on the way up. The road going up was quite steep but according to my friend, it’s not that bad compare to Genting but road condition isn’t as good as Genting. The road is small too. Along the way, you can see many wild orchids and flowers. So pretty *drool*.

It took us about 15 minutes to see this.

Then along the way, you can see constructions going on. These are properties that you can buy at Borneo Highlands. Houses and land lots. After about 5 minutes, OMG!!! We were oh~ oh~ ah~ ah~ over the view the greeted us. Purple flowers along the way up till to the resort! Damn pretty I tell you! I’ve never seen anything like this. You can’t believe that this is KUCHING! Goshh… SO NICE!!!!!!!! The air was quite cooling too, about 18-28 Celcius.

Finally we reached the resort. We were welcomed by the staffs there. We were given welcome drinks on arrival. Chinese tea I guess. 😛 I’m not a tea guru so all teas taste the same to me. The picture on the right shows you the view you can get at the right side of the counter. We were quite surprise that the air there was so much cooler than other places in the resort, just like you’re standing near the air conditioning unit. So nice…