The Wilds of Borneo - part 1

I have returned from the deep, dark jungles of Borneo in one piece and now feel the need to let you all know about my experiences there. My friend Jayne came over to Bangkok for a few days before the two of us departed for Malaysian Borneo together.

Now, I like to think that part of my role is to educate as well as rant, so in the interest of knowledge expansion, here is some information on Borneo for those who may be (until now at least) a little ignorant about it. Borneo is the third largest island on the planet (fourth largest if you count Australia, which doesn’t seem to make it on the official lists for islands, presumably because it’s also a continent) and is partly owned by the Indonesia (the larger southern part) and Malaysia (the smaller northern part). The Malaysian part is further split into two semi-autonomous regions: Sarawak (the western part) and Sabah (the eastern part). We only visited Sabah during this holiday.

We flew into Kota Kinabalu (KK), the capital of Sabah, on our very cheap Air Asia flights (about A$200 return) and were struck by how modern the city looked. We were expecting something a bit more basic.

The sunset on our first night in Kota Kinabalu

We only spent a day in KK (where we met up with Amy, one of the other teachers from school) before we headed up to Mt Kinabalu, which is the highest mountain in South-East Asia at over 4000 metres. Jayne and I had toyed with the idea of climbing it (it’s a very popular climb), but decided we couldn’t be bothered. It was nice to see it and do a bit of walking around the area. Unfortunately, I was feeling rather unwell on this day so I didn’t get to do much walking. We spent the next day at a place called Poring, where there are some hot springs in the National Park. Why so many people felt that the 35 degree air temperature was too mild and what they really wanted was to soak in some 50 degree water was a bit lost on me, I confess. Instead, I enjoyed a refreshing dip in a nearby waterfall and also had a swim in the cold pool, rather than sit in one of the hot spring baths.

Mt Kinabalu at sunrise

From Poring, we got a bus to Sandakan, luckily managing to avoid getting rorted by a very sneaky local woman who tried to tell the bus driver she was our tour guide and then overcharge us for our bus tickets. There we met up with Marianne, another teacher from school (we bumped into several teachers from school during the 2 weeks, but Amy and Marianne we actually planned to meet up with). It’s fair to say that Sandakan (and indeed every town we subsequently visited in Sabah) was rather uninspiring: small, dull, basic places that transformed into deserted streets lined with closed metal shutters at night.

Not far from Sandakan is a place called Sepilok, which has an orang-utan sanctuary. One of the big issues in Borneo at the moment is that a lot of the natural rainforests are being decimated in order to make space for palm plantations. Palm oil is one of the most profitable industries in that part of the world, so in true human style, companies are tearing down the rainforests and planting thousands of palm trees instead. Of course, this means that a lot of the local wildlife is losing its natural habitat, including the orang-utan. Hence, this sanctuary was set up to care for and rehabilitate orphaned or sick orang-utans. I quite enjoyed seeing the orang-utans. By the way, orang-utan is a Malay word which means “jungle person”, which is kind of appropriate because they are almost human-like (I think our second-closest relatives species-wise after the chimpanzee) and they do live in the jungle. They are very cute and quite fun. Here are a few photos out of the many that I took.

There is a special feeding platform where they come for a mid-morning snack

And there are special ropes to provide easy access to the feeding platform

Apparently this is quite comfortable if you're an orang-utan

After the orang-utans had finished feeding, as soon as the last one had left the platform, about a dozen macaque monkeys immediately raced onto the platform to scavenge the left-overs. They were also very playful and rather amusing. The baby one was particularly cute.

From Sepilok, we headed into the jungle proper and stayed at a jungle camp for a couple of nights. We did several excursions out and about to look for wildlife, mostly by boat along the river. We saw quite a lot of stuff, mainly monkeys and birds. We did see a mother and baby orang-utan in the wild, which was very nice. We also saw many proboscis monkeys, named because of their big and rather hideous noses (by the way, the Malay name for proboscis monkey actually translates as “dutch man”). Here are some more photos.

A white heron

A kingfisher

A hornbill

A proboscis monkey with baby

A typical house in the jungle

Marianne, Amy, myself and Jayne

After leaving the jungle camp we went to Gomantong Cave, which was very interesting. It’s a place where they collect the bird nests used in bird-nest soup. While the bird nest harvesting season had just finished, it was amazing to see the rudimentary equipment and extreme conditions that the people work in to collect these little nests – dangerous in the extreme. The cave itself was massive and therefore very impressive, but also incredibly smelly, as the entire ground was covered in inches of bat and bird droppings, which of course attracted thousands of cockroaches. It was far more pleasant looking up rather than down (so long as you remember to keep your mouth shut when doing so).

We then headed further down the coast to a place called Semporna, but I think this would be a good place to end part one. To be continued...