I am 3 and a half months into my trip, 111 days to be exact. In this time I have managed to lose socks, shirt, nail clippers, flashlight, battery charger, an iPod and a cellphone, among other things. Yeah, I'm hopeless. But now I find myself commiting what many would consider travelling heresy: I am travelling sans-camera. Why you ask? Well I was careless and left it on a boat.

It has been nearly two months since I last uploaded photos to Facebook. Since that time I have taken many pictures that I'm sure would inspire envy amongst facebook browsers. Pictures of myself with arms around the many Malaysian friends I've made,  pictures of heart-wrenchingly gorgeous sunsets over the ocean, over the jungle, taken from boats and buildings, and rivers....lots of goddamn pretty sunsets, pictures of animals in the wild (oran utans, civits, crocodiles, many kinds of monkeys, monitor lizards.....) and so on. These pictures will never make it to facebook, you won't see them. Further, I do not plan on replacing my camera, so you will not see the places I will go in the coming months.

Travelling without a camera may sound like going fishing without a rod or net, why go out to sea and come back without anything tangible? Because some people like the waves, the quiet. Travelling is in and of itself an intangible act. It goes against my utilitarian minded culture and trying to capture the reality of an environment within 8 megapixels is really a laughable waste of time. I could be using that time talking to people, eating food or just properly appreciating a sunset instead of fiddeling with the shutter settings. Even if I went out and bought the most expensive SLR that sunset, that moment will always be incommunicable. You do not smell the fish market a few metres away, you do not feel the humid evening air you are not here and no camera can bring you.

So I am wrapping up my time in Malaysian Borneo and will be crossing down into the Indonesian state of Kalimantan in a week or two. From there I am, as always, completely unsure of where I will go although I do wish to eventually get to the recently seperated nation of East Timor. I have started this Blog as a means to compensate for no longer having pictures. I hope to update here with the odd entry, nothing too regular and certainly not any award winning writing. Just trying to capture a little bit of the essence of my chosen environment.

For now I am going to go investigate the prospects of getting a night bus to the town of Kuching. Which in Malay directly translates to Cat. Yup, a town called cat.