We spent last night at Uncle Tans basecamp, which had terrible food, but we didn’t really care that much because Penny is umm… a little under the weather. She’s like Lilly from How I met your mother… she doesn’t like people to imagine what she looks like unwell, so I wont elaborate…
Anyway we got up and went down to the Orangutan sanctuary at Sepilok which was about 10 minutes up the road by car. Here we went through a small jungle boardwalk to a feeding platform to watch the various orphaned Orangutans come down for a feeding. They rescue them from the wild or they are turned in by locals and the sanctuary teaches them how to fend for themselves before weaning them off of human contact and releasing them back into the wild.
Like most of the wildlife in Borneo they’re orphaned because their habitat is being destroyed to make way for Palm oil plantations, which is a huge industry in Malaysia. Google it if you’re interested.
Anyway we were let in to the viewing platform at about 9:30AM but the feeding wasn’t until 10:30AM and the viewing platform was out in the sun. As more and more people arrived the heat and the press of two hundred budding wildlife photographers started to get overbearing. It didn’t help that they didn’t allow you to take any food or water into the feeding area, and all the toilets were outside. They started the feeding and Penny was able to see about 15 minutes of it before she decided to head out and take a seat in the shade.
(Penny here…there weren’t actually any seats, so I walked down the boardwalk and squatted down to put my head between my knees….when I looked up, there was a huge group of monkeys sitting on the railing looking at me. One of them reached out to touch me….I think he was seeing if I had anything to steal, rather than checking on my welfare though.)
I stayed in and took some video footage for her, which I’ll show to anyone who’s interested… it’s too slow here to consider uploading it to youtube. The orangutans themselves were pretty amazing. Their faces are so full of humanity and they move so slowly and gently, not at all like the other monkeys we’ve seen on our various travels. We saw a mother and her baby playing together and we even saw what can only be described as a bit of Orangutan foreplay followed by a quickie, which I also caught on video. After the Orangutans lost interest with the food it was like somebody had hit a switch and huge tribe of smaller monkeys came streaming out of the jungle, over the boardwalks, through the crowd and up the platform to eat the rest of the leftover food.
It was quite an amazing opportunity to see the Orangutans in the “wild” and the obligatory visitor centre DVD presentation makes you feel pretty shitty when you realise everything you eat has Palm Oil in it and there’s no real way to avoid it… at least here and at the Proboscis sanctuary they’ve found a way to retain some of the jungle and do their best to keep the animals alive and healthy.
After this, we returned to Uncle Tan’s basecamp for lunch (which was terrible) before heading off to our 3 day Jungle camp. I’ll let Penny talk about that in the next entry…. she’s still feeling unwell so please send her your mental support.