Day 5: Where the @%#^ is the river?!?

We bid farewell to Syamsuddin and his family, and Sukau, today and we made our way back to the West Coast. Since our trip was supposed to end on Wednesday, we tried to locate some of the upper reaches of the tributaries we were working on the past few days.

This part of the job is honestly so much worst than the boat rides due to several reasons:

• unlike the confluence of the tributaries, not all upstream areas are easily accessible...better yet, not that easy to locate either, and not known
• generally, most of them are located in some oil palm plantation and I really dislike driving around in there
• if we do (finally) find them, doing measurements here is a hell of difficult, for instance, I couldn't use the depth sounder to measure the river's depth as sonar does not travel through air (we improvised by measuring a bamboo and tying a rock to its bottom and dropping it vertically into the river).

We left the Lower Kinabatangan area around 6pm so to avoid driving the whole crazy way in the dark, we put up another night in Telupid and luckily for us, we got the last three rooms in the same Rest House. In a way, it was grand that we ended the trip with a night in 'luxury' :)