After their stay in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, the Sixglobetruckers stop off in Borneo.
One question arises: how should they continue their trip?
Borneo: administrative hassles for our truck
It's in Borneo that we finally leave winter behind for good, feeling on arrival the crushing heat we'd left behind in Uzbekistan... We spend a night in a guesthouse so we're ready to pick up our truck the next day. But no one there sends us a message... no news... We manage to track down the number of a local contact, who struggles to work out who we are on the phone, and gives us a vague appointment for 3:30pm. When we meet her, she spends a quarter of an hour on the phone with various people trying to sort out the paperwork we'd need to get our truck back and leave the port... and tells us that all the offices close at 4pm, so we'll have to come back the next day to actually get things moving. So the next day, we go through the various procedures and the truck can finally leave the port. We then discover a front cab that's been thoroughly searched during the night (the keys are left in the ignition all night and the doors are always left open)... our radio and its speakers have of course disappeared, as have many of the good-luck charms we'd received as gifts during the trip and left there, thinking no one would be interested in them...
Then, as with every arrival in a new country, comes the moment to find insurance. But this time the process turns out to be more complicated — most travellers enter Malaysia via the Thai border on the peninsular part, so insurers are stationed at that border, but very few enter, as we did, by boat at Kota Kinabalu. We try 3 international companies, but none of them agree to sell us insurance without Malaysian plates... In the end, it's the boss of a 4th one who takes the trouble to dig a little deeper into the regulations, and sells us cover for 3 months, the minimum required.
The Sultanate of Brunei
We then start our descent through Borneo, which forces us — since it's the only existing road — to cross Brunei. A small sultanate nestled in 2 separate geographical parts within the Malaysian state of Sarawak. Getting to the capital, Bandar Seri Begawan, therefore means crossing 3 borders first! For our 1st entry into Brunei, we run into our first border problem: to our great surprise, we're asked for a special document for "modified vehicles" that we've never heard of and that has to be ordered from the Ministry of Transport 10 days in advance!! We're pretty stuck, since we can't go around this sultanate... The other option is to go back and wait all that time in Malaysia... But after swapping a few jokes about well-known Belgian footballers, and showing our Carnet de Passage guaranteeing a temporary import as a possible way out... the customs officers seemed rather sorry for us and understanding. Two stamps in the Carnet later, we were on our way again, with bags of marinated chicken and sweets thrown in for good measure, as if to apologise for making us wait!
Arriving in the capital, we discover the magnificent Omar Ali Saifuddin Mosque and the whole park that has recently been laid out around it for the sultan's birthday. Opposite lies Kampong Ayer, the largest floating village in the world, organised with a water purification plant, fire stations, schools and petrol pumps on stilts.
Sarawak
Back in Malaysia, this time we visit the state of Sarawak. Here you'll find the impressive Niah caves, still worked by two ethnic groups: the first harvests the guano, and the second dangerously climbs long bamboo poles and ropes to retrieve, more than 60 m up, the swallow's nests so prized in Chinese medicine. We wander through the town of Kuching, marked by its colonial past and the rule of the English White Rajahs, and visit an eco-museum showing the dwellings, dances, outfits, recipes, games, songs, instruments and skills of the state's various tribes. The children particularly enjoyed the alu-alu game, where you have to jump over bamboo poles being clapped rhythmically by two people on the ground without banging your ankles, and quickly became quite good at blowpipe shooting.
What's next for the "Sixglobetruckers" adventure?
While enjoying Borneo, we spent a lot of time reorganising for the end of our journey. We gathered information as we went along and changed our minds about a new route roughly every week... We had sent our truck from Osaka to Borneo, planning to cross the land border from Malaysia into Indonesia on this island, and then hop between the various Indonesian ferries all the way to Timor-Leste. From its capital, Dili, it then takes 3 days by boat to reach Darwin, Australia. But there are snags. A single company holds a monopoly on this route and charges a very high price for such a short distance. We'd also increasingly heard about the Australian quarantine process: to enter, the truck has to be perfectly clean, like new, without the slightest speck of dust, including in the engine, without a single insect, including in all our personal belongings, not the slightest grease stain. On arrival, if it's not absolutely spotless, the inspectors' repeated visits quickly push up the bill! More than one traveller has had to pay an extra €5,000 for this with small 4x4 Land Rovers. And doing our sums, we find we'd hit the exact end of our budget by the end of March, which is after the year of travel we'd planned.
So we hesitated between: borrowing money to keep going all the way to Australia anyway, storing the truck in Borneo and working somewhere to save up and continue the trip later, or selling our truck in Europe to buy another one in Australia and working in between... and in the end, it's this last option we're going to go with!
So we're changing course: we're going to take to the sea again to get from Borneo to the peninsular part of Malaysia, taking the opportunity to do the loop through Southeast Asia that we'd originally planned if we'd crossed China, while a job offer takes shape, and we'll send the truck back to Belgium from Kuala Lumpur or Bangkok to sell it at that point. As for us, we'll then continue our route towards the south-east and Oceania, looking for work in New Caledonia! As soon as we've saved up enough, and with the sale of the truck, we hope to then make the final leap to Australia and find a new vehicle there!
So we're organising the shipping of the truck from Kuching to Kuala Lumpur, and during the 3 days crossing without our vehicle, we set off to discover Singapore!
To be continued…
