Jungle Creatures
I had always wanted to visit Borneo, but I never knew why. I guess I had always imagined it as being this wild place filled with dark jungle, strange animals, and inhabited entirely by cannibal head-hunter tribespeople, with whatever mainland Asian population existed barely hanging onto the fringes of existence on the tropical coasts.
So I don’t want to say that I was disappointed with Borneo, as we made some memories here that will be with us for the rest of our lives, but the vision I had of Borneo being this primeval tropical jungle was confronted by reality the moment we drove past Mount Kinabalu. The reality is that Borneo is thoroughly inhabited, at least from the Malaysian side that we were on, and whatever ancient forests still remain have been pushed off to the depths of the middle of nowhere and the few national parks that the Malaysian government have set up. This is mostly due to something that wouldn’t even occur to us in the Western world as being important: palm trees.
Miles, and miles, and miles of palm trees. That’s what we saw as we drove our rental car out of Kota Kinabalu the morning after coming back from our big hike. These massive, island spanning monoculture plantations exist for the sole reason of providing ‘palm oil,’ a vegetable oil that’s used abundantly worldwide for cooking and additives in food products. You may not have known it, but apparently humans consume about 17 lbs of the stuff per person worldwide every year.
So, that’s where Borneo’s lush jungles have gone – they’ve been razed to feed human appetites for a product we didn’t even know that we wanted. The palms used in palm oil production have a much higher yield per acre of oil than comparable methods, but they only grow in certain latitudes. So, the once beautiful, primeval jungles in Malaysia, Indonesia, Africa, and Latin America are being torn down for these shitty palm trees. This is especially concerning in Malaysia and Indonesia, as they are the only habitats for the wild orangutan, which is now on the verge of extinction in some areas due to habitat loss.
Extinct!? ME!? But I'm so FLUFFY!
And the orangutans are beautiful creatures, truly. Our first stop on our road trip through Borneo was to Sandarkan, a tiny boom town on the Northeast coast of the island. Sandarkan itself didn’t have much to win over our hearts and minds, despite a great seafood dinner at the Filipino Agricultural Society that our Uber driver recommended, but just outside of town lies Sepilok and their world-famous orangutan sanctuary.
The Sepilok Orangutan sanctuary is a large tract of primeval forest that has been used by the wonderful team here to rehabilitate baby orangutans that have been orphaned from activities at logging camps, plantations, illegal hunting, or kept as pets. They spend years with these orangutans, giving them love and the skills to survive, all while gradually weaning them off human help so they can enjoy productive lives as wild animals in Borneo’s rainforests. This sanctuary currently has around 60-80 of the endangered orangutans living in the virgin jungle surrounding it, as well as a myriad of other indigenous Bornean life including pygmy elephants, sun bears, monkeys, and hundreds of species of birds.
We can’t say enough good things about what the folks here are doing. I’m usually one to look pretty critically at most charitable organizations, especially ones that get their donations from entrance fees to see ‘wild’ animals, but even I was having a difficult time poking holes in their setup. They treat these little furry grandpas (Orangutan is Malay for ‘Old Man of the Forest’) with the utmost respect for their wild nature, helping to establish the skills that they need in the jungle and then letting them be, not treating them as zoo animals or tourist attractions – they don’t even guarantee that you see any orangutans when you get there, so we were lucky that we did see some. The programs that they have at Sepilok are rock-solid, and we were happy to help support them and our little furry buddies.
Our ride for a couple of days.
With visions of little wrinkly ginger apes dancing in our heads, we hopped back into our shitty rental car and made for the Kinabatangan river, our next stop in our self-guided Bornean wilderness safari, hoping to see more of the little guys. The Kinabatangan river is one of the few protected areas in Borneo, and thus is home to all sorts of endangered and at-risk native plant and animal life that you can’t find anywhere else in the world. Knowing this, and after driving through what seemed like a million more kilometers of the ecological desolation of the palm oil plantations, we were happy to arrive in the little village of Sukau, our jumping-off point for the wilderness surrounding Kinabatangan river.
This little cutie is a red-lipped langur.
Hornbills looked like someone made a reject on the assembly line and sent it out anyway.
Crikey!
The ancient rainforest in the Kinabatangan river basin is home to the majority of Borneo’s incredible biodiversity, and you can see thousands of different species of birds, fish, monkeys, big mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. We were able to check off quite a few of those boxes, but unfortunately the Sumatran Rhino that I was hoping for never materialized as it became extinct in this area a few years ago – a sad fact but one that is becoming all too real these days as many species get pushed or poached out of existence. We also didn’t get to see any leopards or orangutans, but that’s just a matter of bad luck, more than anything else. That said, during the two river cruises we did take, we managed to see a ton of wildlife including pygmy elephants, hornbills, crocodiles, and all sorts of monkeys (including my distant cousins, the proboscis monkeys), as well as some fantastic river landscapes. We also spent a lot of the time just hanging out in the lodge and watching the world go by, a fun thing to do when your world includes all sorts of fantastic beasts just outside your door (and some even inside our door! We shared a box of crackers with some geckos who helped themselves without asking -- see here).
However, after a couple of days we were starting to get pretty burnt out on Malaysian food (fried rice, fried noodles, fried vegetables, fried everything) so we packed up the Perodua and headed for Tuwau, where we’d be dropping off our car. On the way out of Sukau, however, we did manage to stop at the world-famous Gomintang Caves, where we’d get to see a) the places where they harvest the swiftlet nests that they use for bird’s nest soup, b) a massive exodus of 250,000 bats, flying in vortexes at sundown, and c) literally millions of cockroaches. It was one of the most disgusting and interesting things that we have both ever seen, and not one that either of us will forget soon.
After braving all that bat poop and seeing all those roaches, we were pretty pumped to get to Semporna and head to Mabul Island – at least we could get in the ocean and wash off – and the world-famous dive sites at Sipadan, Mabul, and Kapalai were waiting for us.
