Borneo

We arrived at the port of Kumai and chartered a small boat and a guide to take us 5 hours up the river into the jungle. The boat, which was about the length of Toboggan, had 4 staff: the guide, the cook, the assistant, and the captain (who also brought his 10 year old son since it was a holiday). The staff usually stuck to the lower deck which had only about 4 feet of head room (just enough to sit down). I felt bad for the cook because his galley was in the same room as the engine so it must have been over 40 degrees Celsius down there. He cooked us 3 meals a day of delicious traditional Indonesian food.

Even though it was the dry season, it rained a lot. The deck hand was constantly putting up the rain tarp and taking it down. Our clothes were soaked and we eventually stopped putting on dry clothes because they kept getting wet. The bathroom was at the stern of the boat which didn’t have a roof over it so we had to take an umbrella when we went to the bathroom.

At night, we tied up to some palms at the edge of the river and ate our dinner by candlelight on the top deck while the staff ate on the lower level. We had heard that the fireflies put on quite a show at night but we just couldn’t believe it. Thousands of them blinked at the edge of the water all night while we slept on the top deck under a mosquito net. .

The next day, we hiked into the jungle to get to the camp. It was only about half a kilometre but it was slow going because it was very muddy and slippery from the rain. At one point, the guide had stopped to show us a certain plant along the edge of the trail and when he turned back to step onto the path again, Steve grabbed him by the shoulder and stopped him just in time to avoid stepping on a snake. The guide was extremely shaken. We were less that a metre from the snake as it continued slowly across the path and disappeared. The guide told us it was a Yellow Python and that he is particularly afraid of snakes since his Aunt was killed by a cobra and died a terrible death.

We reached camp Leakey which is used to reintroduce Orangutans into the wild. Over the years, many Orangutans have been captured and kept in small cages at zoos and hotels and private homes (as a symbol of wealth) and for the last 20 years there has been public pressure to release them. These captured orangutans have lost their skills to survive in the jungle so they need to be rehabilitated. The camp provides one feeding a day of bananas and milk so that the Orangutans can come if they are not getting enough food in the jungle. The camp rangers made a loud call, like Tarzan, then Orangutans started to appear swinging through the trees at the top of the jungle canopy. They dropped down to the platform where the rangers had dumped hundreds of bananas and poured a gallon of milk into a bucket. We could not approach the Orangutans or the platform (believe me, you don’t want to get between an Orangutan and a banana) but many of the Orangutans came quite close to us on their way to or from the platform.

The Orangutans were very interesting to watch. They displayed many human characteristics and distinct personalities. One behavior I found interesting was that they always had a hand on their escape vine even when they stood on the ground so that they could make a quick get-a-way when a more dominant Orangutan approached. The adult female Orangutans were quite intimidating but the males were downright scary. The babies, of course, were precious.