Category: RTW Trip

During the three years I worked at the Louisville Zoo during high school, I found a way most days to pop in and see the orangutans. I swear that these hairy “men of the forest”* seemed to recognize me and other frequent visitors. You could tell from their eyes that they were smart. And you could tell from their behavior that they loved to play. sometimes I’d come in with the task of washing the visitor side of the window into their enclosures, removing the handprints and noseprints of all the people who couldn’t resist getting close to the orangutans. As I’d work, the orangutans would watch, and when they were feeling naughty, they’d look right at the part I’d just cleaned and then grab some banana and smoosh it right onto the window on their side, the side I couldn’t get to. It made me laugh, and I swear that this would just encourage them to do it more. What magnificent, human-like creatures I’d think.

So when I found out that we could go see orangutans in the wild on the Malaysian island of Borneo, I put it immediately on our itinerary. Plus seeing orangutans would mean that we’d see all four species of great apes in the wild on this trip: humans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans.

The exact number of orangutans left in the wild is not exactly known but estimated to be around 20,000. They are highly threatened as logging takes away more and more of their habitat. On Borneo, one of only two places they’re found naturally (Sumatra is the other), orangutans are being forced into smaller and more isolated tracts of forest. They’re also being injured, killed, or orphaned in accidents related to logging. And too often, the orangutans with nowhere else to go, find themselves on farms and plantations searching for food and risking being killed by angry farmers or taken home as pets.

Fighting to save the orangutans—rescuing them from cages, teaching orphans how to survive in the wild, and rehabilitating injured orangutans—is the Sepilok Orangutan Reserve. Here orangutans are given the care they need by trained and passionate staff, before they are weaned from human care and returned to the wild, the reserve encompassing a huge tract of forest ideal for the orangutans. Not enclosed in any way, the orangutans released here are free to stay in the area or move further and further into the remaining wild.

To help the orangutans adjust to the wild and become independent, the center has set up a set of five feeding platforms. The first platform is not far from the center where the orphaned, injured, or displaced orangutans have spent months or even years learning or relearning skills. The fifth is far from the center, in the midst of wild and unvisited forest (except by center staff). The other three fall in between. Twice a day milk and bananas are brought to the platforms to act as supplements to the orangutans diet. The idea is that newly released orangutans will begin by visiting the first platform, and then gradually they will move farther and farther away until they don’t visit the platforms at all.

For some orangutans, this is exactly how it works. Others, once released into the wild, immediately adapt and never visit a platform at all. And still others spend most of their time away from the platforms but occassionally venture back for a snack or to show off a baby. One measure of success is that many of the rehabilitated orangutans have, in the wild, given birth to babies that are completely adapted to life without any human assistance.

But what does this have to do with us seeing orangutans? Well, while we could just take our chances and hope to come across one while wandering around Borneo (possible but difficult since orangutans are actually solitary animals most of the time so you have to have a keen eye), we could also visit the center around feeding time and see if any orangutans come for a visit to platform 1 (the only platform accessible to the public).

Not wanting to miss seeing them, we made the trip to the center and headed out to the platform for the 10 am feeding. Gracing us with their presence were four orangutans, each of whoom took a long swig of milk, grabbed a banana, and then swung about on the ropes. Two went quickly back into the forest while two others hung around and performed acrobatic feats.

When the feeders left the platform, a large family of short-tailed macaques snuck out of the forest and raided the area for leftovers.

With our admission ticket to the reserve good for the entire day, we decided to stay around for the 3 pm feeding. In between we checked out the exhibition center and a film on orangutans, and also followed one of the nature trails in the hopes of catching sight of one high in the trees (didn’t happen). A bit before 3 pm, we returned to the viewing area, where we found something like 7 orangutans hanging around in the surrounding trees and venturing out to the platform. They were much more playful than the ones from the morning feeding, swinging about and wrestling.

It would have been a great feeding. But just as the men with the milk and the bananas came out, the sky opened, and orangutans apparently don’t like getting drenched anymore than we do. While us viewers stood and just endured it, many of the orangutans scattered off. A few did hang out to get the goodies. If we’d been able to get the camera out without dooming it forever, we could have got a few good shots: an orangutan putting his banana peels on his head as if they’d protect his head from rain, another opening his mouth and lifting his head like he was trying to drink the rain, another picking up the entire bucket of milk and pouring it into his mouth.

They were as smart and funny as I remembered, and the entire time we watched them, even as the rain soaked us right through to our underwear and left our shoes full of puddles, I had a great big smile on my face. And while I was thrilled to be able to have this encounter, I couldn’t help feeling a little bit sad that such a place as Sepilok has to exist, that we’re not good enough and smart enough to protect such a magnificent species on our own. For being the more evolved species, we sure do a lot of stupid things.

*The word Orangutan means “man of the forest” in Malay.

Its become clear throughout this trip, both to ourselves and probably you all, that we have a different idea of fun than most people. Take, for example, our latest foray into the jungle.

It started, as usual, with our transportation. Most people are perfectly happy taking the ubiquitous tourist minibuses from destination to destination, as was offered to us direct from the Perhentian Island jetty. We, with our strange sense of adventure, rejected this option to take the “Jungle Railway.” Which, you must admit, is a very enticing name for a train, especially with its reputation for beautiful scenery. To see it in the daytime, however, the trains only leave at 4 AM and 6 AM. so we got up at the buttcrack of dawn, headed to the station and hopped on the train. It turned out this particular train wasn’t scheduled to go all the way to our destination, Jerantut, which was a downer, but it never even got as far as it was scheduled to go. We broke down after six hours in Gua Musang, which we should’ve hit after three hours. And we weren’t even impressed with the scenery. After running around Gua Musang trying to find a bus out of town and always being a step behind all our fellow train passengers who knew what they were doing, we gave up and waited out the ten hours at the local KFC (complete with free wifi!) until the next train. This train, scheduled to leave at 10:15 PM, finally arrived at 1 AM. So we finally got to Jerantut at 4 AM, nearly 24 hours after we left. And I think we definitely ended up paying more for our transportation after all was said and done than we would have just taking the minibus. The jungle railway plan certainly backfired on us.

But the next afternoon, after sleeping in until 11, we hopped on the bus up to Taman Negara, the most well preserved virgin jungle rainforest in Peninsular Malaysia, home to all sorts of jungle animals. We started by heading to the canopy walkway, 280 meters of high-walking goodness, complete with – well, no animals, bird or otherwise. But the stroll was pretty exciting, especially when you looked down.

We followed that little warm-up with something quite a bit more intense, and in retrospect, a little crazy. We hiked 11 kilometers to a hide, spent the night hopefully observing nocturnal jungle animals, and returned the next day. Sounds ok? Yeah, we thought so too. Here are the things we underestimated:

—steepness of the trail – the trail wound along the river, but went almost vertically down and back up at every ravine that poured into it. Though we didn’t gain any altitude overall, we sure went up and down a lot.

—jungle heat – we started with eleven liters of water, and I had started to cramp by midday. I simply could not drink water fast enough to balance out what I was sweating out. It was dripping off my clothes all day.

—amount of leeches – although the final tally was 2 successfully bloodthirsty leeches for Theresa, 0 for Jeff, we both spent plenty of time flicking them off our shoes and clothes.

—comfort of hide – we knew it would be spartan, but wooden planks sounds easier to sleep on in theory than when you’re actually trying to do it. But the “toilet” was completely backed up and unusable. On the plus side, no rats.

And here’s what we overestimated:

—amount of interesting animals – we sat in the hide late into the night and early in the morning and never saw a thing. For that matter, on the entire hike including our time at the hide, we saw a few monkeys, a squirrel, and a lizard in addition to a mere handful of birds. On the plus side, we heard a lot of birds (and cicadas!)

—availability of boats to take us back downriver on day two – one day of hiking in the jungle wiped us out, so we used our backup plan and headed to a nearby “town” where we were told we could hire a boat to take us back to the park headquarters. We walked up to find a completely deserted town and an empty jetty. Fortunately, other people who had stayed at the hide with us had arranged a boat and a hour or so later we were able to hitch a ride with them.

So it turned out to be a lot more work and and a lot less reward than we were expecting. Is it weird, then, that thinking back to it now I still think it was fun?

I remember as a child watching programs filmed underwater and being overwhelmed with awe. How amazing it seemed to be meters under the oceans surface hovering over coral reefs and watching marine life dart around you. But growing up in Kentucky, I didn’t have much of an opportunity to do things like snorkel or SCUBA. Sure the YMCA offered courses, but learning to SCUBA in a pool and then doing my open water dives in a lake with about 1 foot of visibility did not have quite the same appeal as learning to dive in the tropics. So mainly I just watched TV programs and thought about how cool it would be.

Later in life I’d visit a fair few tropical destinations with happening underwater scenes. I snorkeled off the beaches of Hawaii, in Egypt’s Red Sea, off the coast of Belize, in the amazing waters of the Galapagos Islands, and in a number of other places. But I never found an opportunity to get certified as a SCUBA diver, and I have to admit that as I got older, I became a bit more timid. I don’t really like confined spaces, and though the ocean is certainly not confined, being tied to an oxygen tank seemed like it might be the ultimate claustrophobic situation. I’m also a worrier, and movies like “Open Water” and episodes of “I Shouldn’t Be Alive” about SCUBA diving give my mind plenty of fodder for worry.

When we started this trip, however, we said that once we got to Asia we’d give SCUBA a try, and now with less than two months left in our trip (really, can that be right?), we found the time and place. From August 15-18, we passed our days squirming into wetsuits, donning weight belts and BCDs, and slipping regulators in our mouth as we worked to become certified PADI Open Water Divers. Our choice of location: The warm, turquoise waters of Pulau Perhentian Kecil in northeast Malaysia. Our choice of dive shop: The excellent (and highly affordable) Turtle Bay Divers.

Becoming a PADI Open Water diver combines theory with practice. Our class, which ran from 9 am until nearly 7 pm each day, involved sessions of reading, watching video, and taking quizzes; multiple confined water dives to learn and practice skills; and four to five open water dives to apply our skills. The theory was, at least for me and Jeff, cake. It all makes sense. (In fact, I aced the final exam and thus got a free t-shirt. Jeff. unfortunately, missed one and is thus shirtless.)

The skills were a mixed bag, though I have to admit Jeff was pretty aces with all of them. For me, removing and replacing the regulator underwater, using an alternate air source, gaining neutral buoyancy, skin diving, and the like were no problem. What I didn’t like was having to fill the mask with water and then clear it or remove it completely and replace it. Though you could still keep breathing just fine through your mouth (the way you breathe when diving), when my nose wasn’t secured in my mask, I felt like I wanted to breathe through it too. Also, because I wear contacts, I had to keep my eyes closed when doing these skills and that was pretty disorienting.

What I disliked the most, however, was the CESA (Controlled Emergency Surface Ascent) in which, at a depth of 6 meters, you pretend you have run out of air, and after taking one final breath you must ascend to the surface at the safe pace of 18 meters/minute while making a continuous “ahhhh” sound. Since you’re at 6 meters, that means the ascent has to take 20 seconds. Doesn’t sound long but feels like an eternity.

In the end, we managed to check off all the skills, accomplishing them with sufficient agility to know that we could, if ever faced with a situation, do them again. Hopefully–and most likely–we won’t have to. I did take one dive longer to accomplish it all then Jeff did, as he breezed through all his requirements in a quick 3 days. But really, let’s be honest. If I wanted to, I could have done it in three days too. But why would I pass up the opportunity for a free bonus dive? On the fourth morning, while Jeff just sat on the beach, I hopped back in the water, checked off two quick skills, and then got to spend an amazing half hour swimming lazily 15 meters below the surface, peeking at black-spotted puffer fish, watching Nemo play in the anemones, avoiding eye contact with the colorful trigger fish, marveling at the size of the grouper, and feeling absolutely free and at peace under the sea. It’s as awesome as I thought it would be back when all I could do was watch on TV and wonder.