After six days of dry weather we finally made use of our waterproofs. We headed off this morning and met up with our friends from the Sarawak orchid Society and the lab girls from MRSM School to explore Kubah National Park just west of Kuching.

It had been raining over night and it rained very hard for all three hours of our walk. (The picture above was taken at 10am)

The forest was great for nepenthes species and we found four different ones including a dwarf growing species shown below (names to follow when we have done our research)

We did find orchids (about 15 species in total) such as this bulbophyllum…

but the forests was disappointingly low on diversity especially in epiphytes. This appeared to be due to a combination of the area we explored being secondary forest with mostly young trees, and probable collection.

Nevertheless we had a very enjoyable walk and the MRSM students are now officially ‘Jungle girls’

We celebrated surviving the rain with a feast of Malaysian food with our partners.

I have been really impressed with the way our team have embraced the local food, which for those coming in October, is almost exclusively sea food in mystery sauces. The feast included, prawns, squid, fish, jellyfish, vegetables (with squid and prawns), rice (with squid, fish and prawns) and noodles (with squid), tofu and chicken. It was delicious. For those who have not eaten Jellyfish it is surprisingly crunchy! Our two vegetarians have done a great job of making do, and our hosts have done their best to find alternatives.

Tomorrow we spend our last morning at MRSM School, and then head for the airport while our partners set up their displays for APOC.