Travelling Hopefully - And Now the One You've All Been Waiting For

Sea turtles and tropical islands are all very well but one doesn't travel to Borneo for that.  Nor is it for the Malay culture and friendly locals that one risks malaria, dengue fever and exsanguination by leech.  After eleven blog entries at least notionally about Borneo my readership (both of them) rises in it's wrath and screams,
"Where are the sodding orangutans?"
Well fear not gentle reader for this blog entry has more orangutans than a Terry Pratchett convention. There are so many orangutans that by the end you won't believe they're endangered in fact you'll probably support a cull.

We travel deep into the jungle (it's on the right in between the oil palm plantations) a little later but first we visited Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre where a bunch of orangutans have been collected together for our viewing pleasure.  That's not the intention of course, the centre, which has its own bit of jungle attached (about ten thousand hectares) was set up in the 1960s to rehabilitate baby orangutans which have been orphaned by hunting, logging or road accidents (orangutans are terrible drivers) so they can be released into the wild.  I can't help thinking they would do better to train the orangutans to survive in palm oil plantations but their hearts are in the right place.

Amanda, Dan (remember them?) and I turned up, not coincidentally, in time to see the orangutans being fed on platforms in the forest.  Feeding the orangutans consists of dumping a bunch of fruit on a platform and waiting for the orangutans to turn up.  An orangutans method of eating by the way is to pick up a piece of fruit, rub it on it's chin and then drop it before repeating the process.  I'm not surprised they're endangered, I'm amazed they haven't all starved to death.

There was also an area set up as a children's playground/learning centre where incredibly photogenic orangutans learned important life skills such as a dislike of other orangutans.  Orangutans are completely solitary (they even reproduce by text message) and the five or six years the mother spends teaching it's child (and there will only be one) about all things orangutan is the most interaction either of them will have with their own species.

It has to be admitted that orangutans are awesome and the babies are the very definition of cute and cuddly.  I wish them well on their journey back to the wild and I hope there's still some wild left when they turn up.  There was also a sun bear sanctuary next door to the rehab centre but this is an entry about orangutans so who cares.  Dan and Amanda claim to have seen a pygmy elephant, well you can believe that if you're so inclined.

After whetting our orangutan appetites with some easy kills (figuratively speaking) we headed up the Kinabatang River where a fair chunk of jungle can be found wedged between the palm oil plantations.  From our base at Kinabatang Nature Lodge we cruised the river in the hopes of catching a glimpse of this rare and shy great ape in the wild.

The damn things were everywhere!  We couldn't get near the river without tripping over orangutans.  It got to the point where we expected them to be at the airport to wish us goodbye.  In the course of three days we saw thirteen separate orangutans.

We were, in fact, unbelievably lucky.  Some people come and see none.  I can't help thinking we must have used up our nature lodge's orangutan allotment for the next eighteen months.