Memory cards, batteries, laptops and hard drives. Because my camera's RAW image files are huge, I ne

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Mr frogoutofwater and I just got back from a wonderful, airline ticket discount tickets 50th birthday trip to Malaysian airline ticket discount tickets Borneo airline ticket discount tickets and Singapore. I don't plan to write a detailed trip report, but I thought Fodorites might be interested in a few aspects of our trip:
First, if you're interested in photos (mostly of animals) from the trip, you can find them on my Smugmug site. Scroll down on the homepage to see highlights of the trip. Click on any photo in the highlights section and you'll go to the full gallery.
1) Itinerary. We were lucky enough to secure 3 weeks (plus a day) for this vacation, as it was a special occasion (our 50th birthdays). I started planning the trip for 2013, but we postponed it to 2014 because we got kittens in 2012 and wanted them to be a little older before we went away for such a long period.
I found it very hard to contact some of the lodges (Lankayan Island, Borneo Rainforest Lodge, etc) on my own, so I ended up using Borneo Eco Tours to book Sukau Rainforest Lodge and Lankayan Island. They were great - superb service, always friendly, airline ticket discount tickets very timely in responding to queries, and excellent service on the ground in Borneo. I worked with Nasatia and she was excellent.
Flights: I used United Airlines miles and booked 1st class tickets Washington (Dulles) to Singapore, and business class tickets airline ticket discount tickets on Asiana (Singapore-Seoul-JFK) for the return trip. The connecting airline ticket discount tickets flight from NYC to Washington would have required us to get up at 4 am and there was always the risk of missing a flight in winter weather, so we took the train from NYC to Washington, DC the night before, after the end of the working day. I booked SilkAir (a Singapore Airlines sub) to fly from Singapore to Kota Kinabalu and from Kuching to Singapore. I booked business class for the SIN-KK flight because that meant we would have lounge access airline ticket discount tickets at a stage when we were staggeringly tired after the long trip from NYC but booked Economy for the short Kuching-SIN flight. Within Borneo, we flew on Malaysia Airlines.
We flew to Sandakan early on the Sunday morning, were met by the Borneo Eco Tours guide, taken to Sepilok for the morning feeding, and then took a boat to Sukau Rainforest Lodge in the afternoon after lunch. We stayed for 3 nights at Sukau and loved it.
On our return from Sukau, airline ticket discount tickets we stayed overnight at the Four Points Sheraton and then transferred to Lankayan Island for 4 nights. We also loved our stay here. The diving was good (but not spectacular). I think non-divers might be happy with a 3 night stay, but 4 nights is a good length of stay for divers.
On our return from Lankayan, we decided to spend another night in Sandakan, in part so we didn't have to rush with getting to the airport and in part because we wanted the opportunity airline ticket discount tickets to go back to certain places (e.g., Sepilok) if we felt we didn't get enough of wildlife viewing. I think there is enough in and around Sandakan to keep you busy for a few spare mornings and afternoons. We visited the War Memorial, the Rainforest Discovery Centre, Sepilok, and walked around a water village, among other activities.
The next day we flew from Sandakan to Kuching via Kota Kinabalu, arriving mid-afternoon. We stayed at the Hilton for 3 nights - as a Diamond airline ticket discount tickets member, we were upgraded to a suite on one of the executive floors. We quite enjoyed our stay there - lounge staff were very friendly and helpful with various arrangements.
Kuching is definitely worth a few days and for those who can only afford to spend 4-5 days in Borneo, I would even recommend that they base themselves in Kuching (with a night in Bako National Park), since Kuching provides relatively easy access to wilderness (e.g., airline ticket discount tickets Bako), a great orangutan reserve (Semenggoh), culture (some very interesting museums, the orchid garden), and good food.
We flew out of Kuching in mid-evening and continued to Singapore, where we spent 4 nights/4 days based at the Conrad (used points for this stay). I have friends (and a branch of my office) in Singapore, so we allocated a little more time than some might to Singapore. We're glad we had 4 days, though, because it rained fairly frequently and we ended up having to adjust planned activities to work around the downpours.
Would I change airline ticket discount tickets anything in the itinerary? Probably not. Kota Kinabalu was probably the least interesting part of our stay, but because of the risk of misconnections on the long trip to Borneo, airline ticket discount tickets it seemed prudent to stay there for at least 2 nights before the pre-paid tour (Sukau etc) part of our trip started. airline ticket discount tickets Maybe the only change I'd make would be to spend 2 nights in Kuching and one night in Bako National Park (or add one day to the trip so we could spend a night in Bako). To get the most out of the wildlife viewing opportunities there, I think it would be best to stay overnight so that you can get into the forest early in the morning and late in the afternoon, and that works best if you stay overnight.
2) Photography. Our planned trip to Borneo inspired Mr frogoutofwater and I to get decent cameras and learn how to use them. I ended up getting bitten by the photography bug and in the past year, I've become a rather avid photographer. The investment in decent cameras and a basic photography course (about 6, 2-hour lessons) was really worth it. (I ended up going beyond the basics in terms of instruction and have been taking courses or workshops almost every month for the past year.)
Cameras. We chose Pentax DSLRs because of their high degree of weather resistance, which comes in handy in a rainforest. airline ticket discount tickets Hubby has an intro-level camera (the K-30) and my dad gave me the new, top-of-the-line K-3 as a Christmas/birthday present. It was useful to have the same camera brand because that meant we could share some lenses, although we each have our own walk-around lenses. Hubby's main lens was an 18-250 zoom (Sigma, I think). airline ticket discount tickets I brought a Pentax 18-135 and a 55-300 lens. The extra 50mm of reach made quite a difference when it came to wildlife photography expeditions. The 18-135 was used a lot for city explorations. We also brought a couple of fast prime lenses for dusk and evening photography (a 50mm f/1.8 and a 77mm f/1.8) as well as a 90mm f/2.8 macro lens.
Memory cards, batteries, laptops and hard drives. Because my camera's RAW image files are huge, I needed cards with faster speeds, so I splurged on 80 MB/s cards - mostly airline ticket discount tickets 16GB cards plus a few 32GB cards. I wanted to have enough cards so that I didn't need to reformat them during the trip. I ended up with more than I needed. I brought 5 32GB cards and 12 16GB cards - I think I ended up filling 3 32GB cards and 8 16GB cards. (This is mainly because there weren't a lot of photo opportunities above the water line at Lankayan Island.) On average, I used about 3/4 of a 16GB card each day on the wildlife viewing days (e.g., at Sukau, Sepilok, Singapore Zoo etc) and about 1/3-1/2 airline ticket discount tickets a card on other days.
We each brought a laptop and uploaded our images each day and backed them up on a portable hard drive at least every other day. I bought a very small, lightweight (and fairly cheap) laptop to use for this trip and for other photography workshops that I expect to take, because airline ticket discount tickets my regular laptop weighs almost 6 pounds. I got an Asus 11" Vivobook for about $400 and it worked quite well. It's a bit slow (only an i3 processor) and the screen is a bit small for major photo editing, but it worked well for this trip. I put Lightroom on it (but not Photoshop) because I didn't want to do any major editing while we travelled.
Camera bags: I used two bags. I used a LowePro Photo Sport 200 as my "travel" pack (and airplane carry-on). It's quite lightweight (important because I have a bad back) but still was large enough to carry my camera body, 3 lenses, flash, laptop (in the hydration reservoir), airline ticket discount tickets phone, and assorted bits and bobs (including a change of shirt for the long trips). The pack was very comfortable and distributed the weight airline ticket discount tickets well. It has a lightly padded hip belt with a couple of small pockets that came in handy. It also has a rain cover (which we didn't need).
Once I got to my destination, though, I used a much smaller Tamrac Aria 3 (which also doubled as my purse). I was particularly glad to have this smaller bag because when we got to Sepilok, we were told that we couldn't bring a backpack airline ticket discount tickets or large bag into the forest (Mr frogoutofwater had to check his larger sling bag). Although airline ticket discount tickets the Aria 3 looks fairly compact, it actually was large enough to fit my camera with the 55-300 lens attached, with room to spare for the 18-135 airline ticket discount tickets lens, my wallet, my phone, a map and various bits and bobs.
Other camera accessories. Other essential camera gear included a good rocket blower and PEC-PAD lint-free wipes. I also brought a small (12") reflector with me, in case we did some portraits, but I only ended up using it a couple of times. It took up very little space, though, airline ticket discount tickets so I'm glad I had it. We didn't bring a tripod or monopod with us and there were probably only a couple of times when we wished we had one (not so much for wildlife photography but for some landscape photography). But our gear was pretty heavy to begin with, so we decided to skip tripods.
I am mosquito-phobic and so one of my biggest concerns about this trip was protecting myself against mosquito airline ticket discount tickets bites. (Borneo is in a malaria zone and they're also having quite a bad outbreak of Dengue Fever.) As it turned out, we didn't encounter a lot of mosquitoes because the weather had been unusually dry before we got there and for most of the trip, but I'm glad I was prepared for the worst.
I'm a fairly disciplined packer but we didn't feel the need to limit ourselves to carry-on, so we each brought a 24-inch, expandable airline ticket discount tickets suitcase, which was perfectly adequate. Overall, I had what I needed in terms of clo