On 24th August 2011, I went to Tawau for official duties… for the second time this year. The last one was on 10th May. As usual, we travelled by land… with our office four wheel drive the Toyota Fortuner 2.5D.

Although I can use airplane to Tawau, I prefer to travel by land coz I can enjoy the scenery along the 400km journey. Furthermore time is on our side if we use our own vehicle… we don’t have to rush… we can drive slow or fast… We can stop anywhere we like to relieve ourselves.

Not like travelling by air, have to be on time to catch the flight… I really hate it when the schedule is tight… that’s why I usually take flight in the afternoon if I have to fly… coz I hate getting ready early in the morning. Travelling for official duty and non official like travelling for Las Vegas holidays are two completely different loads… yes loads… for official, the loads like the garments must be neat and well taken care… but for holiday, I can simply chunk my cloths into the luggage without worrying if they get crumple or not… 😛

OK back to our 400KM++ journey… we use the Kalabakan road which cut through the Crocker Range and pass the Meliau Basin… the Lost World. As everyone know, 140KM of Kalabakan road is still in gravel… and it being used by logging truck. When the road is well maintained, although it is gravel, the ride will be still smooth. I’ve been using this road many times since 2008. But unfortunately the condition of the 140KM seem to be getting bad each time we use this road. And this time it was the worse experience… it is raining season… although it wasn’t raining that time. We did not know that there was notification issued early of the week that the road is not passable for small vehicles… 😛

The road was a bit muddy… but some are dried… the logging trucks left two deep tyre tracks at some areas where it is impossible for small vehicles to go through… lucky our Toyota Fortuner is tall enough. But there is one path where our 4×4 almost stuck in the mud… although the mud was not deep, it was slippery. The car can’t move forward… and the deep logging tracks made it difficult to reverse. While we tried to rave through the mud, suddenly the car… slammed… skidded… turned… by the mud almost 90 degrees… the car is no longer pointing towards where we going but pointing to the edge of the road… its no longer parallel with the road but across the road… but lucky all are OK after a few tries. It was a memorable experience… quite an adventure journey 😀

Some photos…


I thought we were in Florida beach holidaying when we saw this convertible from afar…


It turn out to be… we were LOL. This is somewhere in Kalabakan road where there are lots of palm oil plantation.


Common… passing each other with logging truck filled with fresh logs.


Don’t worry, you don’t have to go through here… this is the logging camp and not the road itself. But we were stuck in this kind of mud.


Logs felled into the drain…


Fresh water… very cool… washing my face with the water is very cooling 😀