ABOUT THIS WEBSITE
Thankyou for visiting my website. I am Michael Lo. I was born and grown up in Kuching city, Sarawak state of Malaysia, western part of Borneo island.
Since I was young, I already developed my interest with Mother Nature. I love to study and observe all the flora and fauna of Borneo. I collected and preserved a lot of specimen of butterflies and insects when I was a junior school kid.
When I was 15, I explored almost every area of the forest in Stampin area, near Kuching. In that forest, I learnt and discovered more interesting native plants and animals in that forest.
Later, I spent 7 years in Kuala Lumpur city of West Malaysia (Peninsular Malaysia) to further my education (Accountancy study) and working as an auditor in an Accountancy firm. During that seven years, I spent most of my time in the concrete jungle.
When I came back to Borneo, I could not adapt the peaceful and quiet life of my hometown.
One day, I decided to go to look for fish in the countryside with my cousin. The first few trips, both of us found a lot of beautiful tropical fishes which we never seen before. Most of them are not available in the local fish shop! We decided to explore more places and found out that, in different habitat, different species of fish living there. We also found a lot of rare species of aquatic plants and others flora and fauna.
One year later, I bought my first digital camera, Fuji finepix S5000. From there on, I started to learn photography and trying to capture the images of every fish and aquatic plants I found in the jungle stream of western Borneo.
I found an interesting article from a fish magazine, when I was visiting a local fish shop. It was about a fish collecting trip in Kapuas river of Western Kalimantan, the other side of Borneo. (Indonesia Borneo) After reading the article, I wrote to the person who wrote that article. He is a tropical fish hobbyist from Europe. He encouraged me to construct a website and publish all the photos which I took for the past one year.
I constructed my first website "The Freshwater Fishes of Borneo". Later, I constructed two more websites; "Beautiful Borneo" and "Heaven on earth - Borneo ".
" The Freshwater Fishes of Borneo" is all about the fishes I found in western part of Borneo.
"Beautiful Borneo", is about some interesting flora and fauna of Borneo.
"Heaven on earth - Borneo" is about anything I found, explored and photographed in Borneo.
The name of the URL of this website, "ibanorum" is the scientific name (Greek) for something named after Iban people of Borneo. In north -western Borneo, there is a new species of wild fighting fish named after Iban people & it's called "Betta ibanorum".
In the future, if I have some funds & free time, I will go to explore northern (Sabah & Brunei) and eastern & southern (Kalimantan) part of Borneo.
I want to show to the world, that Borneo is truly a heaven on earth !!!
Photo below : A jetty at Sarawak river.
Website created by Michael Lo
email address: rasbora2004@yahoo.com