Borneo Part 2: Disney Princesses in the Rainforest
On New Year's Day of 2020 left Kota Kinabalu and headed toward the town of Sandakan on the other side of the island, where we would spend the next couple of nights. In what I guess was just ominous foreshadowing of the rest of 2020, things didn't go entirely as planned from the start. We arrived at the airport to pick up a rental car, only to find that they'd set aside the wrong car for us (I'm not good at driving stick shift, to my eternal shame). Once that was sorted out and they'd found a proper car, we set out. The plan was to take a detour through the Crocker Range , the spine of mountains running down Borneo's west coast that's the home of several birds that are difficult to see anywhere else, including Bornean Barbet and Bornean Bulbul. What we weren't aware of when we were making plans was that construction along the main route to eastern Sabah meant that the road through the Crocker Range went from being a peaceful two-lane scenic mountain det