Traveling to Borneo – Kitsap Documentary Photographer

I love traveling.  I love it so hard and I simply do not get to travel as much as I would like to.  Last year when I had the very rare opportunity to travel to Malaysia, last minute, with a few friends I jumped at the chance.  My mom was able to fly into town to stay with my little one and I was off.

I really hated the idea of bringing my DSLR because, well, it’s huge and it’s heavy and it’s more than a little conspicuous.  Not to mention my DSLR is a little like the book “If You Give a Moose Muffin”.  For me, it’s a little like if a girl takes her D700 on a trip, she’s going to need a lens to go with it.  And if she chooses a 24mm lens, she knows she’s going to want something a little longer so she’ll pack her 50mm lens too……you can see where this is going. With that in mind, I decided to bite the bullet and purchase a mirrorless camera (Fuji x100t) which had been on my wish list for a while.

So with my new little camera and it’s manual safely stowed in my carry on I boarded a plane for my first, ever trans-pacific flight.  We flew into and stayed in Kota Kinabalu which is in the state of Sabah on the island or Borneo.  We were only there for a few days so we wandered the streets and soaked in as much of the city as possible and ate as much food as we could.

For some reason I can never manage to go on a trip without something going a bit haywire.  This trip included me getting some sort of stomach bug, but I rallied as hard as I possibly could and kept eating.  We tired durian – it was terrible.  We also learned that if you ask how something is made you may just get pulled back into the kitchen to actually watch them make it.  But mostly, we just walked.  We walked through the malls, we walked through the markets and through the streets because every space was just jam packed with someone or something.  There wasn’t a square foot of space that wasn’t visually interesting.

Here’s a few of my favorite images from the trip, shot through illness and jet lag and not yet entirely mastering the mirrorless camera.