☕️ 10 minute read
Twelve years ago, visiting Borneo Rainforest Lodge changed me. I went back to see if the magic had held. It had. And then some.
Twelve years ago, I stumbled upon a detail that would quietly redirect the course of my travels forever. Prince William and Catherine, Princess of Wales, a couple I have long admired, so much so that my eldest son carries the name William. had visited a place tucked deep into the heart of Sabah. A place called Borneo Rainforest Lodge. If it was extraordinary enough for the world icons, I thought, it was extraordinary enough for me.
I went. I brought my little children with me. And I was, quite simply, undone.
Now, twelve years later, I have returned. This time on my own. A different journey, a different season of life, and yet the same quiet hunger for that particular kind of wonder. Older, perhaps wiser, and, if I am honest, desperately hoping the magic would still be there.
It was. If anything, it had deepened.
Where the Journey Begins: A Welcome That Sets the Tone
The Borneo Rainforest Lodge begins the moment the lodge team meets you at Lahad Datu Airport, a small airport in eastern Sabah that most travellers skip right past, not knowing what lies beyond it. The Borneo Rainforest Lodge team were already there, warm smiles preceding introductions. There is something disarming about being received this way: not with the clipped efficiency of a hotel concierge, but with the genuine, easy hospitality that Sabahans seem to carry in their bones.
Sabahans are, in my experience of travelling widely and often, among the warmest people on this earth. There is a deep patriotism in them, a bone-deep love for where they come from, and it shows in every small interaction, the way they greet you like you are expected, like your arrival matters. The Borneo Rainforest Lodge team has this quality in abundance.
Just forest, and more forest, and the thrill of knowing you are heading deeper into something ancient.
And then, almost without warning, it happens. The moment the road crosses into the Danum Valley Conservation Area and the 130 million years old primary rainforest closes around you. The very atmosphere thickens with age and life and a stillness that is not silence but something richer. It feels, I said out loud before I could stop myself, exactly like entering Jurassic Park. Ancient in the most visceral, bone-deep sense of the word.
Danum Valley: 130 Million Years in the Making
To understand why Borneo Rainforest Lodge is unlike anywhere else on earth, you must first understand Danum Valley.
This is not just a forest. It is one of the oldest primary rainforests on the planet, predating even the Amazon. While much of the world’s ancient forests have been shaped and reshaped by ice ages, Danum Valley was never glaciated, allowing its extraordinary biodiversity to evolve in uninterrupted continuity across geological time. What walks these forests, what grows and calls and breathes here, has been doing so since the age of the dinosaurs.
Spanning 438 square kilometres of protected lowland dipterocarp forest in Sabah, the Danum Valley Conservation Area is home to Bornean pygmy elephants, clouded leopards, sun bears, proboscis monkeys, over 270 species of birds, and, as I would discover in the most unforgettable way, wild orangutans.
This is not a curated wildlife park. This is the real, living, breathing, ancient world.
The Lodge Itself: Sustainable Luxury in the Heart of the Wild
Borneo Rainforest Lodge sits within this sacred landscape with a thoughtfulness that immediately impresses. The architecture and construction of the lodge uses sustainable, natural materials, timber, rattan, local stone that allow the buildings to settle into the forest rather than impose upon it. There is no clash between the man-made and the wild here. The structures feel like they belong, as though the forest approved their presence.
I stayed in a Premier Deluxe Room with a private plunge pool, and I will confess: it exceeded every expectation. The room was generous and beautifully appointed – spacious in a way that felt intentional, as if the architects understood that generous interior space was the only fit companion to the panoramic rainforest stretching endlessly beyond the window. You do not feel confined. You feel expanded.
The plunge pool stole my heart completely.
Each morning, I rose before dawn and slipped into the warm water as the forest began to wake. The sounds that greeted me – the calls of hornbills, the liquid whistles of unseen birds threading through the canopy, the hum and percussion of a living jungle – were more restorative than any spa treatment I have ever had. I floated there in the still-dark hours, listening, and felt something loosen inside me that I had not known was held tight.
In the evenings, I returned to the pool as the forest transitioned into its nighttime life. Deer emerged at the forest edge, moving through the dusk, seemingly unbothered by my presence. The soundscape shifted, daytime birds fell silent and the night chorus rose, insects and frogs and creatures unseen filling the air with layered, ancient music. I sat there, pool water still, watching it all, and thought: this is what the world was before we complicated it.
The Restaurant: Where Flavour Meets the Forest
After such mornings and evenings, one works up an appetite.
The restaurant at Borneo Rainforest Lodge is excellent. It opens out to the rainforest on all sides, overlooking the pool, and the views that will blow your mind. Blue sky days are beautiful, all that green blazing under sun, the pool glittering below. Rainy days are another kind entirely. The jungle closes in, mist rises off the canopy, and you sit there with a bowl of something hot while the rain plays percussion on the leaves.
Honestly? The rainy days might be my favourite.
The sound never leaves you. Eating here with the jungle as your backdrop, birdsong threading through the meal, the river somewhere below, insects doing what insects do, it does something to the experience that no amount of interior design could manufacture.
And some evenings, the staff perform. Not hired entertainers, the same people who brought your laksa, who greeted you at the door. You see the Sabahan pride that was always there, just underneath the surface, now given its full expression. Colour, movement, music.
During the day, there are music performances too – the team comes from the local village. It is people sharing something that belongs to them, and being generous enough to let you sit with it for a while.
The menu draws on local Sabahan flavours with real skill and care. Take only one piece of advice from this entire article: order the BRL Laksa. It is one of the finest bowls I have encountered anywhere – rich, fragrant, the kind of deeply satisfying that only comes from food made with actual knowledge and actual pride. It is the dish that makes you close your eyes on the first sip without choosing to.
I would show you a photo. I genuinely would. But by the time I remembered I had a camera, the bowl was empty!
A thoughtful detail: the salads, fresh fruits, and desserts are kept in a dedicated air-conditioned section to preserve their freshness in the jungle humidity. Cold, crisp, vibrant – a perfect counterpoint to the bold warmth of the main dishes. The service moves at the right pace. Attentive without hovering, which in the tropics is an art.
My only complaint? I ate far too much. Every single day. I regret nothing.
The Guides: Where the Real Magic Lives
If there is one element of Borneo Rainforest Lodge that I would call truly extraordinary, above the rooms, the food, even the forest itself, it is the guides.
They are, without question, the beating heart of the Borneo Rainforest Lodge experience.
My guide, Jean, was among the most remarkable individuals I have encountered in a lifetime of travel. Her knowledge of the Danum Valley ecosystem is not academic – it is embodied, intuitive, and profound. She can identify wildlife not only by sight, but by sound and, remarkably, by smell! Her senses have been so sharpened by years in this forest that the jungle speaks to her in a language the rest of us are only beginning to learn to hear. She will stop mid-stride, head tilted, and name a bird you cannot even see. She reads the forest the way the rest of us read a room.
On the night walk, conducted in near-total darkness, torches our only light, Jean spotted a perfectly camouflaged nocturnal creature pressed motionless against a branch, invisible to every eye except hers. Pitch black, dense jungle, and she found it anyway. I have read books about Borneo’s rainforests for decades. In just a few days with Jean, I learned more than all of those books combined.
This is what Borneo Rainforest Lodge guides offer: not just a tour, but a translation. They open a door between your world and the forests, and what happens on the Coffin Trail proves it.
The Coffin Trail: Yes, That Is Really What It’s Called
On Day 2, we set out on what Borneo Rainforest Lodge cheerfully refers to as the Coffin Trail.
Let me be very clear: I survived. You are reading this. All is well.
The trail takes its rather dramatic name from ancient Kadazan burial coffins found along the route, a reminder that this forest holds human history as well as natural history, that people have lived and loved and died within these trees for centuries beyond counting. It is, in its strange way, a humbling thing to walk a path named for the departed through a forest 130 million years old. It puts your own brief existence into a rather magnificent perspective.
And then she stopped.
Raised her hand. Turned to us with an expression that needed no translation.
“Stop,” she said quietly. “I can smell pee.”
I looked around. I saw nothing but trees and shadows and more trees. My nose reported nothing unusual. I was, frankly, sceptical.
Five metres ahead of us, two orangutans moved through the canopy, a mother and, clinging close, her infant. Jean had smelled them before any of us could see them. I stood there, heart hammering, eyes stinging, not just from the beauty of the moment but from the sheer, humbling realisation that I was sharing a trail with someone who had learned to read a world I had never even known existed.
We watched until they disappeared into the canopy. Nobody spoke for a while after.
The trail eventually rewarded every aching muscle with a viewpoint that I was wholly unprepared for. The forest stretched as far as the eye could reach in every direction, an endless, heaving, breathing green ocean rolling to the horizon. And there below, cradled at the valley floor like something from a dream: Borneo Rainforest Lodge, held gently in the embrace of two rivers – the Danum River and the Segama River – their dark water glinting through the canopy.
Borneo Rainforest Lodge looked small from up there. Beautiful and small, and completely at home.
I took a video. The video does not do it justice. Nothing does. You have to stand there yourself.
The Canopy Walk: Walking Into the Clouds
If the Coffin Trail belongs to the deep forest, the canopy walk belongs to the sky.
Go first thing in the morning. This is not merely a suggestion. It is the difference between an experience and a memory you will carry for the rest of your life.
In the early hours, before the sun has burned through, Danum Valley breathes mist. It rises from the rivers and pools in the canopy, soft and slow and ancient-looking, as though the forest is exhaling after a long night. When you step onto the canopy walkway in that light, suspended high above the forest floor, the treetops level with your chest, mist threading through the branches around you, you feel briefly, beautifully, like you are walking through a world that has not yet decided to wake up.
The canopy is its own ecosystem entirely. The birds up here are different. Hornbills cutting through the grey air, sunbirds hovering at flowers you would never see from the ground. The light shifts constantly as the mist moves. The walkway sways, gently, with each step, and the forest floor far below is barely visible through the layers of green.
I stood at the midpoint of the walkway, where Prince William and Catherine, Princess of Wales stood together, with mist on my face and birdsong all around and thought: this is what it feels like to be inside a living thing.
Go early. Go when it is misty. Go before the day has a chance to become ordinary.
The Tree Climb (And My Honest Confession)
Among Borneo Rainforest Lodge signature activities is the tree climbing experience – a 30-metre ascent into the upper canopy of a towering rainforest giant, the kind of climb that puts you eye-level with hornbills and offers a perspective on the forest that most humans will never experience. It is, by all accounts, extraordinary.
I did not climb it.
Before you judge me – after the Coffin Trail’s four-hour forest hike, my legs had already negotiated root systems, river crossings, and undergrowth that politely ignored the concept of a cleared path. When I looked up at thirty metres of rope and ambition, I made a very deliberate decision.
I took the pulley.
And I have absolutely no regrets.
Being pulled up through the canopy in the pulley harness turned out to be its own particular delight, an effortless ascent, the forest opening above me layer by layer until suddenly I was up there, suspended between earth and sky, the canopy stretching in every direction like a second landscape. The sounds up high are different, lighter, more exposed, the wind moving through leaves at a frequency you simply cannot hear from the ground.
Do the climb if you can. Take the pulley if you need to. Either way, get up into that canopy. It is worth every metre.
Why You Should Go
There are places you visit and places that visit you, that stay inside you, that change the way you see things, that make you quieter and more grateful and more alive to the extraordinary privilege of being a creature on this planet.
Borneo Rainforest Lodge at Danum Valley is the latter.
It is a place that earns its reputation honestly, through the quality of its people, the integrity of its commitment to conservation, and the sheer, staggering, humbling power of the ancient world it sits within. Prince William and Catherine, Princess of Wales were right to go. Twelve years ago, I was right to follow. And I am right, I know now, to return.
Go before you think you are ready. Go and let the 130-million-year-old forest remind you of your proper size in the universe. Go and walk the Coffin Trail, yes, the actual Coffin Trail, and let Jean stop you in your tracks with words you will never forget. Go and sit in your plunge pool at dusk and watch the deer emerge and listen to the night arrive. Go and stand on that canopy walkway in the early morning mist and feel the forest breathe around you.
Go. And like me, you will spend the next twelve years thinking about when you can go back.
Traveller’s Tips
- Most travellers fly into Kota Kinabalu first before connecting to Lahad Datu, onwards to Borneo Rainforest Lodge. If you’re stopping over, make a night of it.
- Leeches. Yes, they exist. Tuck your clothes in and grab the leech socks at the lodge. But honestly? They’re not as bad as you think, and if one gets you, Borneo Rainforest Lodge gives you a certificate. I am not making this up.
- Go early on the canopy walk. Mist or no mist, just go early.
- Do the Coffin Trail. All of it. Yes, your legs will hate you.
- Take the pulley if you need to. No shame. The view is the totally worthwhile.
- Order the BRL laksa. This is non-negotiable.
Borneo Rainforest Lodge is located within the Danum Valley Conservation Area, Lahad Datu, Sabah, Malaysia. For bookings and enquiries, visit www.borneonaturetours.com.
