The saying goes with age comes wisdom. Apparently it also comes with new balance issues and one of the best places not to find this out is during a hard uphill scrabble in dense equatorial jungle in 36°C, where half the exposed tree roots are footholds and the other half are trip hazards. And better not put a steadying hand down too quickly, as the local fauna includes sleeping pit vipers, invisibly waiting for the unwary. This is Bako National Park, on theh western tip of Borneo, home to probocsis monkeys (the one with the silly nose and their dicks always hanging out), silvered leaf monkeys and wild bearded pigs. Oh and pit vipers, but they can just sod off. The national bird of Borneo is the rhinoceros hornbill, but not here.
We almost needn't have bothered with the hike as Jen, our guide, spotted a pair of probicsis in the mangrove swamp from the speedboat on the way over to the park entrance. Then, hearing a commotion in a nearby tree while enjoying a coffee before the hike, we found about ten silvered leaf monkeys playing and squabbling in a tree by the path. But heigh ho: hiking, we go. Although almost impossible to count accurately, there are thought to be about 270 proboscis monkeys in the Bako park, in which case, we encountered about 2% of them. Observing the entreaties to move slowly and keep quiet, we were able to watch one for quite a while as he (or she) nonchalantly picked at mangrove shoots in the top of trees.
We are nominally in Malaysia and arrived via the capital, Kuala Lumpur. But the country only existed since 1962 when the mainland Malay peninsula hooked up with the provinces of Sarawak and Sabah on the nearby island of Borneo, which they share with tiny Brunei and a chunk of Indonesia. And Sarawak only really came about in the mid 19th century due to an English adventurer James Brooke, who vowed to set sail and plant his feet where no white man had set foot before. Up to that point, most of Borneo was home to 100+ indigenous tribes, including headhunters, under the thumb and taxation of the Brunei empire. Brooke saw an opportunity to set up his own country and mediated between the tribes and Brunei, who gave him a slice of land around Kuching. The rule of the three White Rajahs, James, his nephew Charles then Charles' son Vyner lasted 100 years and saw a land grab across half the island, followed by Japanese occupation in WW2, accession to the British Empire in 1942 then independence as part of Malaysia in 1962. As all this history has taken place in less than 200 years, all the evidence is still here in Kuching: the fairly modest houses, the toy forts, the little courthouse and first post office. But now Kuching is a big, modern Asian city straddling both sides of the Kuching river (" beware: crocodiles!") and the colour and contrast have been turned down. Kuching has two colours: grey (river, roads, concrete buildings and - most of the time - sky) and green (it rains: quite a lot). And it is constantly very hot: even a short walk in full sun to get water from a 7/11 pretty much requires a full change of clothes.
Full disclosure: this one is a fully guided tour, so hopefully will be marked by an absence of the occasional travel jeopardy, like challenging border crossings, missed connections and other failures in arrangements. That said, a 24-hour journey to get here, seven hour time difference and a cock-up by the hotel over room bookings didn't get us off to the best of starts. However a gin and tonic, a decent prawn laksa and reasonable bottle of red by the river put us in better humour.
Still no pit vipers, but we've found our first snake, in the street outside the Annah Rais tribal longhouse. But it's only about 6" long and non-venomous (according to Google). And dead, so definitely non-venomous. Still, a snake. Consequentially approached the nearby dustbin with caution to dump the empty coffee cups. A longhouse is, well, long. The traditional residence of the Bidayuh tribe, these structures are essentially a wooden village all joined together as one continuous building, raised on stilts above the river bank. Many are still occupied or at least preserved as homestays or, as here, attractions for tourists, also serving traditional lunches. Cats and kittens laze in the shade on bamboo floors as a few fans half-heartedly shuffle the sauna air around. In the head-house, named for the 100-year old trophy skulls of captured enemies, a fire smoulders to honour the spirits. A native family toils over a gas burner to produce chicken soup, pineapple and shrimp and boiled jungle fern for us, lubricated with dashes of home-brewed rice wine. The absence of air con would make for a fairly challenging homestay, but the lunch was lovely. Back through the churned up traffic and into Kuching for a last Sarawak laksa and to pack ready for moving on. The multi-provincial legacy lives on meaning that it is necessary to pass through immigration from the mainland to Sarawak and thence onward to the Northern province of Sabah.
It's 9 o'clock at night and utterly dark, in a resort lodge in the middle of very dense jungle, all wooden chalets and boardwalks by a green lake. The crickets or cicadas or whatever are cooking up a storm and the bar and restaurant are closed for the night. Although alcohol is sold here, I'm not sure the attraction is understood. Decent restaurants serving local food don't sell it, if you want a drink it tends to be with burgers and pizzas. We have a birthday amongst our party and enquired as to wine options: there is a bottle available for dinner tonight, but if we want fizz tomorrow, one of the staff will need to call in at his local shop on the way to work. He reckons he can sort something for 200 ringits, about £35. A laminated card in the chalet warns us that orang utans may pass through, watch out for ants but especially for snakes in the undergrowth. Sat here at 9pm with the crickets, there's a lot of undergrowth. In the bus here from the airport, our new guide warned us sternly against eye contact with or showing teeth to macaques: they think it's an invitation to fight, and they will come mob handed. So much to remember sitting here with a beer on the terrace in the dark.Wulan and Addsie lounge elegantly in the shadows under their feeding platform, seemingly enjoying a respite from the sun while their small babies explore in the grass near their mothers. Two more females turn up with their young on their backs as a couple of larger males swing down from the treetops. Their timing is pretty good and soon about seven or eight of them are gathered as one of the rangers comes along and dumps a large bucket of fruit and veg on the platform. The females and babies get stuck in first then the males swing across: they all grab a couple of handfuls of goodies and climb back up. One large female remains with her baby on the platform as a massive commotion and flurry of movement kicks off in the trees. We are meeting our first orang urans. Twenty seven macaques, large males, smaller females and a few babies attempt to sneak onto the platform for a feed. A few get through and quickly run away with their treasure, as the mother orang utan casually bats others off with a swing of her long arm.
After the macaque attack, Wulan has another party trick up her sleeve. Although there are no barriers, the action moves from the nursery area to the wild part of the reserve. A crowd (of homo sapiens) gathers at 10:00 to watch another dump of fruit and veg to summon the grown ups in from the jungle to eat. We had been warned to keep a watchful eye in all directions - up, down and around - to watch out for orangutans and to slowly back off if one approaches. A ranger is now calmly ordering everyone back off the viewing platform and to the back of the path. Wulan, baby on her back, is approaching along the boardwalk as if she owns it, and frankly she does. We are warned that, if she climbs above, keep out of the way to avoid a golden shower or worse. She climbs onto the shelter over the viewing platform, settles herself down and peers over the edge, fixing each human in turn with a not unfriendly stare. The ranger insists she is so used to human company that she is smiling but that may be pushing anthropomorphis a bit far. Having outstared us for 20 minutes, she shuffles off back into the jungle. In the meantime, a second macaque attack has snaffled all the food.
Back at the nursery, the big daddy stomps onto the scene. 25-year old Malim is the size of a small car and is the current alpha male. But there is no display of aggression or arrogance, presumably because he doesn't need to. He just finds a spot in the shade and calmly watches goings on. According to the ranger, this is a relatively rare occurrence maybe ten or fifteen appearances a year. Given there are no fences around any part of this reserve, orangutans occasionally turn up in the adjacent hotel grounds: he may be calm today but you wouldn't want to fight Malim for a sun lounger. Fun fact: all three sub-species of orangutan belong to the species pongo.
Across the road from the orangutans and definitely fenced in is the sun bear reserve, home to 42 rescued animals from all over south east Asia (we last saw some in Laos) but not Borneo, where paradoxically they are not native. The smallest species of bear are still pretty powerful and best observed behind a fence and from a viewing platform.
The following day and we have travelled about 100kms east through seemingly endless forests of palm oil trees to the Kinabatangan river, jungle central with the biggest concentration of wildlife in Borneo. Tha palm trees date back to the 1960s and since have gained something of a bad rep as associated with deforestation. The penny apears to have dropped with the authorities, who have realised that eco-tourism is now big business and the wildlife which the tourists come to see requires forest. Palm trees are therefore limited to within a few kilometres of main roads and no new plantations are allowed. More chillingly, this is where the Sandakan - Julau death marches took place near the end of the second world war. Over 2,400 allied prisoners of war were forced to march until they dropped by their Japanese captors. Just six Australians escaped to survive and the marches are commemorated as part of ANZAC memorials every year.
The Kinabatangan is the second longest river in Malaysia, 560kms from mountains to sea and about 100m wide and very fast flowing at the point we join it for a couple of days spent mainly on boats looking for stuff in the wild. As the afternoon sun on day one started to cool, we headed upstream in search of Borneo's Big 5: proboscis monkey, orangutan, pygmy elephant, rhinoceros hornbill and estuarine crocodile. However, after just 30 minutes we are cowering under whatever little shelter there is at the water's edge as a colossal and terrifying thunderstorm breaks over us. Lightning and thunder are practically simultaneous and the pounding of the rain is almost painful. After a few minutes and with no end in sight, our guide suggests we head back, although he can hardly see the shore to navigate. 12 hours later, at 6am, it is as though it never happened, although it takes a further 48 hours to get all the clothes dry. Day dawns clear and bright with a blue sky in all directions as we set off the downstream voyage. There is plenty of traffic about at this time of day, not just the tourist boats but also tired rusty old tugs blasting clouds of black smoke into the sky as they manoeuvre giant barges along the river. And the wildlife is also up and about. Within a few minutes of setting off, we encounter our first tree full of proboscis monkeys and then macaques a-plenty. A lone juvenile orangutan swings through the vegetation close to the water and a pair of rhinoceros hornbill, with their massive orange horns above their yellow beaks, land obligingly close and low in a tree for photos.
The clouds are gathering in a lowering sky again in the afternoon, but in a change of tactics to try and beat the rain, our guide takes us full tilt 20km upstream to where he has been told our next quarry might be found. Sure enough, a few other boats are on the same trail and are found clustered a few metres offshore from some very dense forest, which appears to be moving. Then the branches part and a small group (herd? memory?) of pygmy elephants is feeding at the water's edge. About half the size of their African and Indian cousins, these elephants are itinerant and thus often hard to find. We stay in their quiet company for a few minutes until with a loud trumpet from one of them, they back off from the shore. Time to leave and the guide guns the engine and....nothing. A few dozen times, the starter fires but no ignition. A couple of other boats come to help but to no avail. Management is summoned from the lodge half an hour away as we drift among reeds and bamboo on the bank. Some wag at the front of the boat helpfully suggests that this is where the python could come aboard. Then it starts to rain: not the cataclysm of yesterday, but still. Still struggling to get yesterday's rain-soaked clothes dry after 24 hours in 100% humidity, I have gone for the full on Rambo look today: just swim shorts and life jacket, so let it rain. This story does not however have the jeopardy of our Amazon boat breakdown a few years ago: this time, man turns up, clears a blocked fuel line and we're off. Dusk is now closing in but this starts to bring out the night creatures, including a civet, and sees all the other animals and birds, including more rhinoceros hornbill, settling down for the night.
I'm not sure if Lahad Daru airport is actually the smallest we've ever been through, but it's certainly up there with Luang Prabang in Laos (the one where they make you pour away your drinks at security, but then let you back out into the town to buy some more, which are not scanned) and Lake Inle in Myanmar (where I was frankly too ill to consider the infrastructure other than the toilets). There are seats for just 49, slightly fewer than the capacity of the three-hourly flight to Kota Kinabalu, our final Borneo destination. This is the territory of the French workhorse of the skies, the ATR72 turboprop. Cramped, noisy but very efficient,, these planes take off and land using about a quarter of the runway and climb to just 14,000 feet. We do the old joke about having been on trains that go higher and the part of the safety announcement about "in the event of loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks..." isn't required. Strictly speaking, on this short hop, the bit about "in the event of landing on water..." isn't really needed either, unless the pilot has to ditch in the Kinabatangan River, in which case the advice ought to be to stay on the plane and find a big stick to ward off the crocodiles.
Safely arrived and a short speedboat transfer delivers us to a few more traditional holiday days on the coast and the wildlife is a bit less intense, if still there. A three foot monitor lizard slowly paces the undergrowth around our beachside lunch table, but despite greedy eyes, does not venture too close. On the other hand, a late afternoon beer by the pool is violently disturbed as 10 kilos of aggressive macaque crashes onto the table, scattering bottles, glasses and phones to devour a bowl of peanuts in a single gulp. The bar staff are apologetic but, to be frank, the macaques were here first. A guided trek up through jungle from the water's edge shows up the same issues of balance and drenching humidity and heat as at Kuching, but leads to just a couple of lizards and a glow-in-the-dark scorpion. There are apparently thirty species of snake here, several of them dangerous, but they don't like the heat either. A two metre King Cobra was found by the pool and "rehabilitated", but that was five years ago. On the advice of the resort naturalist, a sunset vigil by one of two treetop nesting boxes is rewarded by a brief glimpse of a giant red flying squirrel, but sadly not in flight and that's about it.
A last day or two of leisure, including a modestly successful first stab at stand-up paddleboarding, so perhaps the balance isn't quite as shot as I thought. It will be nice to not be constantly sweating and always on the alert for a rustle in the undergrowth or a loud screech from a nearby bush. Today is the first day when there is no rain or thunder forecast and the clouds are clearing from the summit of Mount Kinabalu across the bay. Lovely food, lovely people, impressive wildlife and scenery but time for the long trek home.
Comments
Post a Comment