Rafflesia Hunting !!!

Before we can talk about the beach, however, we did do a little side-trip while we were in Kinabalu National Park. A registration office driver tipped us off that there were Rafflesia's growing near an area called the Poring Hot Springs. Now you might wonder what a rafflesia is and this is where Wikipedia comes in handy:

"Rafflesia is a genus of parasitic flowering plants. It was discovered in the Indonesian rain forest by an Indonesian guide working for Dr. Joseph Arnold in 1818, and named after Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, the leader of the expedition. It contains 15-19 species (including four incompletely characterized species as recognized by Meijer 1997), all found in southeastern Asia, on the Malay Peninsula, Borneo, Sumatra and Kalimantan, West Malaysia, and the Philippines. The plant has no stems, leaves or true roots. It is an endoparasite of vines in the genus Tetrastigma (Vitaceae), spreading its root-like haustoria inside the tissue of the vine. The only part of the plant that can be seen outside the host vine is the five-petaled flower. In some species, such as Rafflesia arnoldii, the flower may be over 100 cm in diameter, and weigh up to 10 kg. Even the smallest species, R. manillana, has 20 cm diameter flowers. The flowers look and smell like rotting meat, hence its local names which translate to "corpse flower" or "meat flower". The vile smell that the flower gives off attracts insects such as carrion flies, which transport pollen from male to female flowers. Little is known about seed dispersal, however, tree shrews and other forest mammals apparently eat the fruits and disperse the seeds. Rafflesia is an official state flower of Sabah in Malaysia, as well as for the Surat Thani Province, Thailand [...]"

And there you have it. These flowers are extremely rare. They take anywhere between 9-18 months to fully develop and flower only for 4-7 days before they rot away again (as a big slimy bulb). All in all, a very rare occurrence which we were fortunate enough to see in the wild (or, more precise, somebody's very big backyard for 15 ringgit p.p.). Stay tuned for more info soon. Many greetings from Chickie Rendang & The White Ringgit.