Previously on “Two Up and Overloaded” -
Marisa: We experienced some underwater magic as we explored the islands around Semporna, East Malaysia. It was one of the richest, most vibrant, and healthiest marine ecosystems we've ever come across.
But now, it was time to head back to shore, into the city of Semporna, where our motorcycle would be patiently waiting for us.
Tim: So the boat did not drop us off at the same long pier that we had come from.
Marisa: No!
Tim: So us and the rest of the tourists were like, "Okay, now where are we?" They're like, "Back into the world." And so we got off. I was hungry, I had to go to the bathroom, and I wanted to lay down as soon as possible because it was a very long day.
[Semporna - East Malaysia]
Marisa: They dropped us off at a completely different place than where we started. I have no idea where we are, and Tim needs to find a bathroom.
So we were dropped off at this harbor pier thing that did have restaurants. And so we were like, "All right, before we go back to the hotel, let's get something to eat. We are starving. And just rest and relax... and use the bathroom."
Tim: It's true. Yeah, we found a place that had noodles without fish. Because 99.99% of the pier places were like, "Fresh fish! We just caught them!" I was like, "Nope, no thank you."
Marisa: I can't wait to eat this dinner of fried noodles. It always comes with a lovely chicken soup broth, and then go back to the hotel and sleep. Tomorrow we are back on the road again.
Tim: So we definitely are going to sleep well tonight and get some good rest before we continue on our adventures of Borneo. And yeah, we passed out because it was uh... it was a long one.
[Southeast Asia Journey - Day 132]
The next day, we woke up, and it looked like it was going to be another beautiful day.
Marisa: Yes!
Good morning everyone. Today we are leaving Semporna, which has been an incredible experience. The weather looks great, and we have a fairly short ride to the city of Tawau. And our plan that day was to go to the most southern endpoint city of the whole Pan Borneo Highway, and it is called Tawau.
Tim: Which stands for just T and W.
Marisa: Yes, the Arabic letters for “ta” and “wau,” it's T and W. “Ta, wau.”
Tim: And there's like KK, which is Kinabalu, there's KL, which is Kuala Lumpur.
Marisa: Yeah, they like their acronym letters.
Tim: Fun fact brought to you by Tim.
Marisa: Fun facts of Malaysia.
It is usually the end of the line for people. The road kind of ends there. If you wanted to continue around the circuit of Borneo, I think from there you need to put your motorcycle on a boat into Indonesia, the Indonesian side. That's not something that we can do with this rental motorcycle. But there is this one road that goes through the jungle. There are no gas stations, no hotels, no amenities on this road, and it's an extremely long, long drive to the next town. But that's what we want to do.
So we're going to go to Tawau today, and then tomorrow from Tawau, we're going to be heading through the jungle all the way across this part of the province of Sabah. Even though the ride there is only about 2 hours to Tawau today, I have a little place that I wanted to stop at that should be an excellent little surprise for the day. So hopefully that'll be nice. The weather looks great, and we're packing up right now and heading off to go.
So we got back on our motorcycle to make our way to the end of the road in Borneo, a town called Tawau. And if few people ever make it to ride a motorcycle in Borneo, even fewer ever get to this distant corner of the island. But we weren't quite done with the coast yet, as we had one more little ocean surprise awaiting us. And this is the story of what we found there.
Intro: Hey everyone! Nice to have you here. We are Tim, and Marisa Notier. I ride in the front. And I’m in the rear. We travel the world and we pack too much gear. Oh, all the places we’ll go! Through rain and through sleet and through mud and through snow. Oh, all the things we’ll see! We’ve been to a country or two. Or three! Oh, all the fun we’ve had! To have you along, would make us real glad. So give us a like, and hit subscribe to join us along our epic ride.
[This episode is dedicated to our Fuel the Dream Patrons]
[Join for as little as $1 a month! See link in the description below.]
Tim: So we got on the bike, and we took off.
Alright.
Attendant: How much?
Tim: Uh, full. I have a card, is that okay? Do I have to get off? Can I what? Park? Do you want me to get off? Okay.
Marisa: Yeah.
Tim: Alright, put the card in first. Right? Don't you have to put it in first? No? Oh, processing. Okay. What is your name? Adam? Nice to meet you, Adam.
Marisa: Adam!
Tim: We are going to uh, TW.
Marisa: Tawau.
Tim: This is my wife, but this is my girlfriend. My name is Tim. Tim? Tim, T I M.
Attendant: Tim?
Tim: Yes, yes sir.
Marisa: Nice to meet you.
Tim: Thank you, Adam.
The road was beautiful, very coastal.
Marisa: Yes.
Tim: Twisty, it kind of went in and out and up and around. It was just a beautiful road. Best part? Zero other people on it. It just, just made for us.
Marisa: Yeah, just a really nice paved road, and there was no other traffic, and beautiful views all around. We were loving it.
Tim: Yeah.
Marisa had me put into my phone a little waypoint that I was not sure what it was going to be.
Marisa: It was my little surprise.
Tim: She always has little surprises for me. That's pretty much how our days go: is we get on
the bike, I don't know where we're going, but I'm just the driver, folks. I put on the hat, and we take off.
And we pull up, and there's not even a really huge parking lot. It's just like a this fishing village on the side of the coast, built onto the coast itself, and then this pier that just shot straight into the ocean. It was just absolutely beautiful!
[Tanjung Parapat - Malaysia]
And it's just this narrow 3-foot (1 meter) wide little pier that you're walking down. So it's not this huge Jersey Shore boardwalk, right?
Marisa: No.
[Music]
Tim: How far out would you say that pier went?
Marisa: I don't know, but far enough that...
Tim: 200 yards (meters)? Two football fields, maybe a football field?
Marisa: I don't know. At least.
Oh, you can feel the dock wobbling. It's not the most solid construction I've ever seen. But it functions.
It was a long pier, and it was kind of wobbly, and you could definitely feel it move underneath you as you walked along it, which was...
Tim: Part of the experience. Yeah, you can end up swimming at any time. Anytime it's a good time to swim on that pier. It reminded me of that video game Myst, you know, where you kind of walk around?
Marisa: It did! It was like being transported to this really cool world with another culture of people that build houses over the water on stilts, and that's exactly what we were experiencing.
Tim: It was really pretty.
Marisa: It's awesome!
These villages on the water, or 'kampung air’ in Malay, are a traditional way of living for communities that subsist from fishing. The life of people living in these houses built on stilts is as intertwined with the tides and the ocean as is possible.
Tim: We walked to the end of this pier where they were building some new accommodations for hotels.
Marisa: I know! How beautiful it was! So they were building these little chalets right on this pier, and it was the farthest thing out into the ocean. How cool would that be to stay in one of those?
Tim: Absolutely. And they let us, uh... kind of trespass, if you will. We had the blessings of a maid that said, "Sure, do whatever you want." And so there was construction. You can see the pier being built board by board by some guy.
So we had a meal at the restaurant.
Definitely hot.
Marisa: Look at where we are.
Tim: We need to get out of the ocean, go back on land, and then make our way towards Tawau. I’m doing this upside down and backwards, folks.
Marisa: Tawau is really south. If we turned it...
Tim: Oh, alright.
Marisa: There we go. But it is cool that we're like... Google recognizes us to be in the ocean.
Tim: And we had absorbed this little pier for all it was worth. It was beautiful, it was fun.
We could walk way up there... But we're not going to. We already walked up 20,000 steps yesterday. So no need.
Marisa: I'm also not feeling 100% today. I think maybe I overextended myself yesterday. So I'm taking it easy. I don't think I need to do a big hill climb in the heat.
Tim: When we walked back down to the bike, we saw even more the little crabs.
Marisa: Oh my gosh! Millions of crabs! All the red ones!
Tim: KTM orange claws.
Marisa: Yeah, oh my goodness. My zodiac sign is a crab. These are my fellow brethren.
Tim: My zodiac sign is an evil twin, or a good twin. I am the evil twin.
Marisa: You're the evil twin.
Tim: Yeah, we all know that.
Little did we know, we had little guards watching our bike the whole time.
Marisa: We did. A bunch of little children.
Tim: Yeah, they were very, very cute.
Marisa: They were. They really wanted to ride the motorcycle. They liked the KTM 250 Adventure.
Tim: This is true, who doesn’t?
[Tim makes revving sounds]
Bye buddy.
Marisa: But it was time to head back on the road, and so we got on the motorcycle and headed
off to the city of Tawau.
Tim: Bye-bye.
Children: Bye bye!
Marisa: Bye bye!
Tim: There goes their mom. They all ran. Have a good day!
[Music]
[Tawau - Malaysia]
Marisa: And then once we got to the town of Tawau, the road started to widen out, and it
was gorgeous. What a beautiful city it is.
Tim: But I found a hotel. I pulled up on the sidewalk, as I always like to do. Marisa had zero to little faith in my ability to do so, but I nailed it.
Marisa: There was a big step thing that I was like, "Ah, I don't think he's got enough momentum."
Tim: I did a wheelie, I started 100 yards away, did a wheelie.
Marisa: Are you going to try?
Tim: I'm going to do.
Marisa: Whoa, whoa! Wow!
Tim: I was like, "Mlluuh, I did it!"
Marisa: You did, you got it.
Tim: I did. Nailed it!
Marisa: I'm impressed. Yeah!
Tim: We walked up to our room.
Marisa: All right, this is nice. There is a window.
Tim: Oh, look at that, folks. Paid an extra $2 for that 2 feet of light.
Marisa: There's an air conditioning that we haven't put on yet, I don't know why. And here's the bathroom.
We had our own private bathroom again, which...
Tim: Yes, it's always nice.
Marisa: Always nice.
Tim: We have private bathrooms 99.9% of the time.
Marisa: We do, but in Semporna...
Tim: The day before we didn't, and we're really thankful for our own bathroom.
Marisa: Yes, especially because I started to feel like I was getting sick.
I am feeling sick. I've got some congestion in my nose, and I uh, can feel it starting in my head, got the headaches and the body aches. And so I'm not happy about that. Tomorrow we have a really, really big, awesome, important day that I have been looking forward to for a long time. So I'm not excited to do that while sick, but don't think I have much of a choice.
Next time, it's our big day of going across Sabah through the jungle - a super, super, super long ride. And I am sick.
But that will all be in the next episode. So thank you so much for watching this video. I hope you liked it. If you did, please give us a big thumbs up and hit the subscribe button below.
Tim: Ding ding!
Marisa: And if you've been enjoying our videos and our journey through Malaysia here on the KTM 250 Adventure, please check out our Patreon link in the description below. For as little as a dollar a month, you can get early access to our videos, all ad-free, plus a postcard sent to you from wherever we are in the world.
Tim: And if you have a few more dollars, we would love to have you actually physically ride along with us on our little ride through Borneo. We have started doing tours that we are
leading. You can get your own KTM 250, you can get a BMW 310, a Royal Enfield. But we would love to show you all the beautiful, magical places that we've seen.
Marisa: And you can check that out at www.2upAndOverloaded.com/BorneoTour.
We'll be seeing you next time.
Tim: Stay safe, everybody.
Marisa: Bye!
Tim: Peace.
No hand rails, guard rails, you know. So I'm walking around taking pictures, and I just had to make sure to check my equilibrium, lick my finger, make sure there's not a lot of wind.
Marisa: Or you might drown in that one foot of water.
Tim: That's true. But the scary thing is there's like a thousand million crabs down there. There is. And I do not coexist amongst crabs. They will eat me in a moment. They know what I've done to them, and how much butter I've used against their kind with the tiniest of all forks.
Marisa: And by the way, I want to clear something up. Tim does not like fish, but the only type of fish that he will eat is tuna fish out of a can, maybe… And crab.
Tim: This is true, but not soft shell because that's gross. I don't eat the eyeballs, I don't eat the brain parts, but I like the... The legs. They're not tentacles.
Marisa: They're not tentacles.
Tim: And I don't like the ones that have a small hand and a big hand. They need to be proportionate.
Marisa: Symmetrical crabs.
Tim: Symmetrical crabs.
Marisa: Okay.
