LOWER KINABATANGAN RIVER, MALAYSIAN BORNEO
This morning the Uncle Tan's folks loaded us into the back of a pickup truck and took us to the nearby Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre, which was created in 1964 to reintroduce orphaned and captive orangutans to the wild. The Centre's staff provides medical care for the orangutans and helps the young ones learn skills like climbing and finding food, before slowly introducing them to the adjacent forest where it's hoped that they'll return to their natural "wild" state.
The Centre also provide food daily for the semi-wild orangutans at feeding stations, although they deliberately make the menu pretty boring to encourage them to forage for other stuff in the jungle--apparently even apes get tired of just bananas! These feedings are open to the public, and that's what we were there to see today. So just before 10am, we walked on a boardwalk several hundred yards into the forest and to the feeding station, which consists of a wooden platform in a tree about ten feet off the ground with ropes strung across to several other trees.
We then saw about a dozen orangutans emerge one by one out of the jungle and climb the ropes to the platform, where a staff member had left them bunches of bananas and sugar cane. It was really interesting to watch how each orangutan behaved differently: Some went for the bananas, some only wanted the sugar cane, some kept taking the others' food, and others seemed like they just wanted to hang out, socialize, and wrestle! There were young ones, old ones, and a mother with a baby in tow; all very cute of course, and extremely agile, too: It was funny to see one using his two hands to climb from tree to tree on the rope, with a stalk of sugar cane grasped in each foot and another in his mouth!
After watching the orangutans for an hour or so, we returned to the Centre and watched a pretty good video about the place before catching a ride back to Uncle Tan's "operations base," having lunch, and then being driven by minibus about an hour away to the Kinabatangan River and the tiny village of Batu Puteh, where Chris, Laura, Ashley, Becks, Helen, and I (plus three rather antisocial Belgians) boarded a boat for the final leg to Uncle Tan's Jungle Camp.
The boat ride down the Kinabatangan to the camp actually was the first of several "river safaris" where our driver/guide pointed out wildlife on the riverbanks and in the trees, and we immediately saw quite a lot of wildlife. This was our first time seeing Borneo's famous proboscis monkeys, which are the ones with the ridiculous Jimmy Durante schnozzes and big pot bellies. There were groups of them high in the trees, just staring down at us, and making weird honking sounds. Ha! We also saw long-tailed macaques, various herons and egrets, a rare Storm's stork, a couple of crocodiles, and some really cool hornbills (big birds that look kind of like a toucan, but with a weird horn sticking out of their beak). We also saw a couple of rare red leaf monkeys, chillin' on branches high in the trees. Just amazing.
After an hour or so, we came to a pier, where we docked, then slogged for quite a ways on a muddy trail to the camp, which is basically a series of wooden huts connected by boardwalks, plus a common area with dining tables and a kitchen, all raised a couple of feet above the muddy ground. The area apparently is prone to heavy flooding--they're still recovering from a massive flood in February that covered the whole place in six feet or more of water!
Anyway, we're talking primitive conditions here: Mattresses and mosquito nets in wooden huts, horrific pit toilets, and electricity from a generator for maybe six hours a day. (Worse even than Boy Scout Camp, haha.) Still, it's kind of a cool place, because of all the forest creatures that make themselves at home right near (or in) in the camp: Several wild bearded pigs hang around the place and eat kitchen scraps, as do huge monitor lizards and (at night) the occasional civet. Troups of macaques also come into the camp, and are actually kind of a pain, because they steal anything that's not locked up, and can get kind of aggressive, too. Ah well--it is the jungles of Borneo, I suppose.
After dinner (chicken with too many bones, rice, and some unidentifiable Bornean veggies) we were given an orientation by Lan, the chief guide, then slogged back to the boats for a night river safari. This time we saw lots of fish owls, a huge stork-billed kingfisher, and some very sleepy monkeys.
On returning to camp, I was playing cards ("Shithead," of course) with Ashley, Laura, Becks, and Helen, when a Malay civet walked up the stairs and right past us! I had to laugh, because we were told they come into camp after the lights are turned off at midnight and it gets really quiet, but this one just walked into a fully-lit dining area full of loud people playing cards! Anyway, civets are beautiful animals--sometimes they're called "civet cats," but they're really not cats at all. They have a body like a cat, but a longer face, like a fox or weasel. This one immediately ran off when we got up to have a look, but I wanted to get a picture of one, so when the generator went off, Ashley, Chris and I waited in the dining area in the dark until we saw some dark shapes move into the open. There were actually three of them in the camp at once(!), and one of them came upstairs again and stuck its head in a bucket of food scraps. I managed to take a couple of photos before it ran off again into the jungle. Cool....
This morning the Uncle Tan's folks loaded us into the back of a pickup truck and took us to the nearby Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre, which was created in 1964 to reintroduce orphaned and captive orangutans to the wild. The Centre's staff provides medical care for the orangutans and helps the young ones learn skills like climbing and finding food, before slowly introducing them to the adjacent forest where it's hoped that they'll return to their natural "wild" state.
The Centre also provide food daily for the semi-wild orangutans at feeding stations, although they deliberately make the menu pretty boring to encourage them to forage for other stuff in the jungle--apparently even apes get tired of just bananas! These feedings are open to the public, and that's what we were there to see today. So just before 10am, we walked on a boardwalk several hundred yards into the forest and to the feeding station, which consists of a wooden platform in a tree about ten feet off the ground with ropes strung across to several other trees.
We then saw about a dozen orangutans emerge one by one out of the jungle and climb the ropes to the platform, where a staff member had left them bunches of bananas and sugar cane. It was really interesting to watch how each orangutan behaved differently: Some went for the bananas, some only wanted the sugar cane, some kept taking the others' food, and others seemed like they just wanted to hang out, socialize, and wrestle! There were young ones, old ones, and a mother with a baby in tow; all very cute of course, and extremely agile, too: It was funny to see one using his two hands to climb from tree to tree on the rope, with a stalk of sugar cane grasped in each foot and another in his mouth!
After watching the orangutans for an hour or so, we returned to the Centre and watched a pretty good video about the place before catching a ride back to Uncle Tan's "operations base," having lunch, and then being driven by minibus about an hour away to the Kinabatangan River and the tiny village of Batu Puteh, where Chris, Laura, Ashley, Becks, Helen, and I (plus three rather antisocial Belgians) boarded a boat for the final leg to Uncle Tan's Jungle Camp.
The boat ride down the Kinabatangan to the camp actually was the first of several "river safaris" where our driver/guide pointed out wildlife on the riverbanks and in the trees, and we immediately saw quite a lot of wildlife. This was our first time seeing Borneo's famous proboscis monkeys, which are the ones with the ridiculous Jimmy Durante schnozzes and big pot bellies. There were groups of them high in the trees, just staring down at us, and making weird honking sounds. Ha! We also saw long-tailed macaques, various herons and egrets, a rare Storm's stork, a couple of crocodiles, and some really cool hornbills (big birds that look kind of like a toucan, but with a weird horn sticking out of their beak). We also saw a couple of rare red leaf monkeys, chillin' on branches high in the trees. Just amazing.
After an hour or so, we came to a pier, where we docked, then slogged for quite a ways on a muddy trail to the camp, which is basically a series of wooden huts connected by boardwalks, plus a common area with dining tables and a kitchen, all raised a couple of feet above the muddy ground. The area apparently is prone to heavy flooding--they're still recovering from a massive flood in February that covered the whole place in six feet or more of water!
Anyway, we're talking primitive conditions here: Mattresses and mosquito nets in wooden huts, horrific pit toilets, and electricity from a generator for maybe six hours a day. (Worse even than Boy Scout Camp, haha.) Still, it's kind of a cool place, because of all the forest creatures that make themselves at home right near (or in) in the camp: Several wild bearded pigs hang around the place and eat kitchen scraps, as do huge monitor lizards and (at night) the occasional civet. Troups of macaques also come into the camp, and are actually kind of a pain, because they steal anything that's not locked up, and can get kind of aggressive, too. Ah well--it is the jungles of Borneo, I suppose.
After dinner (chicken with too many bones, rice, and some unidentifiable Bornean veggies) we were given an orientation by Lan, the chief guide, then slogged back to the boats for a night river safari. This time we saw lots of fish owls, a huge stork-billed kingfisher, and some very sleepy monkeys.
On returning to camp, I was playing cards ("Shithead," of course) with Ashley, Laura, Becks, and Helen, when a Malay civet walked up the stairs and right past us! I had to laugh, because we were told they come into camp after the lights are turned off at midnight and it gets really quiet, but this one just walked into a fully-lit dining area full of loud people playing cards! Anyway, civets are beautiful animals--sometimes they're called "civet cats," but they're really not cats at all. They have a body like a cat, but a longer face, like a fox or weasel. This one immediately ran off when we got up to have a look, but I wanted to get a picture of one, so when the generator went off, Ashley, Chris and I waited in the dining area in the dark until we saw some dark shapes move into the open. There were actually three of them in the camp at once(!), and one of them came upstairs again and stuck its head in a bucket of food scraps. I managed to take a couple of photos before it ran off again into the jungle. Cool....
posted by John Kuge at 11:26 PM
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