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Published: June 30th 2009
We could see almost nothing of Kuala Lumpur until we touched down on the runway due to a thick heat haze sitting over the city! The airport is about 45 minutes from the centre and it was very strange to be traveling on such an orderly, British looking road network - driving on the left on tarmacked roads with cars actually giving way! After checking in to a little guesthouse we went in search of food to a nearby shopping centre which again seemed very Western, but as soon as we reached the food court on the top floor there was no question that we were in Asia - it was like an extension to the multistory car park with food stalls round the edge, grubby plastic patio furniture scattered throughout, and a general air of chaos! We picked a stall at random and had to do the same with the dishes as the menu was all in Malay, but it was delicious!
First thing the next morning we caught the monorail to the Petronas Towers - as skyscrapers go, this seems one of the most impressive looking, based around the Islamic star. At the bottom is an extremely swish
designer mall and hoards of queuing tourists waiting to go halfway up the towers to cross the Skybridge that links the two (we decided against going up as the queue would have taken most of the day and the view from the top wouldn't have included the most prominent landmark!) From there we jumped back on the monorail and went to the Central Market which is full of craft stalls, before walking around the Colonial District and Chinatown. The city has such a mixture of buildings - from a single spot you can see a mock Tudor pavilion, elaborate Islamic style buildings, office blocks, and jaded Chinese shop houses. We walked through the centre of Chinatown down Petaling Street, which is awash with market stalls selling fake designer sunglasses, handbags and watches.
At dusk, the streets around our guesthouse came alive with lots of Chinese food stalls spilling out into the street. As we walked through them, people all tried to entice us into their seating area, though it wasn't clear where one stall ended and the next began! Each of our dishes was brought by a different person and appeared to be cooked at a different stall! After
dinner we went to watch a film at the IMAX cinema which was in a ridiculous shopping mall that had an indoor theme park on one of the floors which had a huge rollercoaster!
The next morning we popped to the Tourist Information Centre where we booked a tour to the Elephant Conservation centre and used the free internet to book an overnight train to Singapore. Jobs done, we headed to Little India for a look around - it wasn't very appealing and, apart from its population, not very Indian at all, just big concrete buildings housing malls or offices. We went for lunch in a little cafe that looked like it hadn't been altered in any way since the 1950s and was generally shabby round the edges. There was no menu so we just went for anything the old man serving us suggested! Elly had something called Rojak Mee which turned out to be a weird dish of noodles, bread balls and tofu in a satay-ish sauce that was served on a plastic sheet! The little old man was very interested in chatting to us as we were the only non-locals in at the time (or perhaps ever!)
and he proceeded to watch us eat very intently, presumably wanting to see whether we liked the random dishes! We walked to the KL Tower - a really tall communications tower that you can see from most of the city, and to reach it you have to climb up steep paths. This wasn't an easy task in the heat and high humidity - we didn't realise just how hot it was til we saw 36 degrees on a temperature sign and it made us realise how much we'd acclimatised! At the tower, we'd intended to go up to the Observation Deck but were told that for 2RM more we could do this plus go to the rotating restaurant on the very top floor for complimentary afternoon tea. So for the sake of 35p we took went up and enjoyed our cake and ice cream with good views of the Petronas Towers and all across the city. On the way back to hostel we stopped at a Hindu temple which was really interesting, its brightly coloured roof covered in statues of elephants, cows and Gods, a fire was burning outside and men were sitting making flower garlands for the many people
taking off their shoes and going inside. In the evening we ate at another Chinese street food stall before getting an early night as we were up at 3.45am the next morning for our flight to Sandakan in Sabah (part of Malaysian Borneo).
We were greeted at Sandakan Airport by our guide, Robert, a very jolly little round man with the most infectious of laughs! We drove to the Sepilok Jungle Resort and checked in - it was in a beautiful setting in manicured gardens with boardwalks over ponds surrounded by jungle. We spent the rest of the morning in the swimming pool and then went to the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Sanctuary which was just round the corner. We watched a video about the work done at the sanctuary before heading into the jungle along boardwalks to watch the orangutans' feeding time. Initially we watched an empty platform, but then as two rangers arrived with bananas and milk in buckets, a female orangutan called Britt appeared from nowhere and climbed onto the platform, accompanied by her tiny 5 month old baby "Brittina" clinging to her front. Suddenly, another female called Eyos appeared right next to us on the boardwalk
(she's scared of Britt so wouldn't go up on the platform). Aside from the orangutans, crowds of cheeky macaque monkeys were clamouring to get up there and steal the fruit! It was amazing to be so close to the orangutans in their natural habitat.
That evening, we set out to Sepilok for our Jungle Night Trek, wearing our newly acquired leech socks! We met our guide and the three of us headed into the rainforest along the boardwalk. As we walked it was dusk and the forest looked really different, but the most striking change was the sound - the jungle seemed to have come alive, some of the sounds were deafening, the guide said they were made by cicadas, but this wasn't the little cricket chirup but a very eery wailing sound that sounded like a "haunted house" soundtrack! We stopped in a clearing and watched the treetops where flying squirels began soaring between the trees! We turned on our torches and followed the guide who lead us off the boardwalk and into the dense jungle and after 20 minutes trekking through the undergrowth we came across an enclosure with a young orangutan in it. Our guide worked
with his age group (age 6-10) and so we were able to meet "Angkung". He had to be kept in an enclosure at night because he's very adventurous and would otherwise be off exploing the forest and he's not yet ready to be fully wild and would get lost. Angkung loves human interaction and so the guide let us hold his hands and he licked our thumbs! It was incredible to be in such close contact with him, his eyes had such human expression. We continued the walk to another feeding platform, where our guide feeds Angkung and co in the daytime, and we were shocked to find a group of 4 young orangutans asleep on the platform. The guide said that they were being very lazy as they should have built themselves a nest! They were cuddled up in pairs for warmth. We were so lucky to come across orangutans in the forest at night as it is not part of the jungle nightwalk, in fact Robert had told us earlier that we would see lots of forest animals, but no orangutans.
We sat down on a bench and the guide explained to us the various stages that
the orangutans go through at Sepilok: The rescued orphans go into quarantine, then nursery where they are cared for one on one, then they start to get trained in climbing ropes and trees, then they go on 'day trips' into the forest, they then sleep in the forest at night, but still have human interaction, food and training in the day time, then they are fully released into the forest, though 2 meals a day are still provided for them at the feeding platform we watched earlier. Some eat there to top up their forraging, but others are never seen again and are fully wild. As we were sitting listening, Elly found that she had a leech on her lower back, and the guide pulled it off! They are horrible, persistent little creatures, as we had boots on, leech socks, trousers tucked into socks, and a long sleeved collared shirt, but they still found a way in!
We carried on trekking through the jungle and the paths became smaller and less trodden - we had to climb in the dark over slippery logs to cross rivers and mud filled creeks! The guide even lost his way a couple of
times, and he'd worked in this forest for 20 years! We came across a huge spider on the path, a mouse deer, what the guide called a badger (but looked like a skunk) and a pit viper in a tree whose venom the guide said could kill you within an hour of a bite! We walked back to the hotel and before going into the room, we brushed off as many leeches as we could find off our clothes. However, when we got inside and took off our clothes we found that some had managed to get in: Phil had a giant ones on his chest and wrist and another on his back, and Elly had another under her arm and one under her arm! We followed the guide's example and pulled them off (we know you're supposed to leave them to drop off but they're just so horrible that you desperately want them off you straight away!). We flushed them down the toilet, only for them to start climbing back up the drain and into the bowl like something from a horror film! The bites were painless but all bled very heavily, but we were starving so we put
on plasters (which were instantly saturated) and went bleeding off to the restaurant!
We got up early the next morning to go to the jetty at Sandakan and catch a speedboat to Turtle Island. We buzzed along the coast in the bright sunshine, passing the homes of "Sea Gypsies", and then out on the open water we passed lots of wooden stilted constructions that were dotted as far as the eye could see. They looked like little houses on wooden platforms but turned out to be fishing platforms with nets that lowered into the sea. On the island, the turtle activities didn't start until the evening so we spent the daytime on the beach, swimming and snorkeling, then at around 6pm we went down to the hatchery where all the turtle eggs are buried and we saw lots of tiny baby turtles had hatched and emerged from the sand. They were in little plastic pens within which the eggs had been buried and they had to wait there, scrabbling around on top of each other until all of their clutch had surfaced and then they could be taken down to the sea and released. We went to the Visitor
Centre and watched a video about Sea Turtles and Robert took us through the tiny museum to explain the night's "turtle program" - nothing would happen until the first turtle landed on the island at around 7-10pm, til that point according to Robert "We play a game, it's called the waiting game!". The rangers were out walking around the island in the dark looking for turtles - they record all the landings and also when a female is laying they collect the eggs, count them, bury the clutch in the hatchery where they will hatch and be released about 60days later.
It'd gone past 9.30pm and despite an apparently perfect tide level, we were losing hope of witnessing a successful nesting as though it was a lovely clear balmy night on the island, there was a lot of lightening around out to sea which deters the turtles as they don't want predators to see where ther eggs are burried. At about 10pm there was a shout of "Turtle Call" so we all dashed after the guide who lead the long line of tourists through the dark to a beach. Somehow we'd ended up at the front of the line
so were the first to see the turtle - she had lumbered her way up the steep beach and had dug a really deep hole at the top. The huge exertion puts her into a trance-like state so we didn't disturd her by watching as she laid 108 perfectly round soft eggs that look like ping pong balls. As she was laying, one of the rangers was steeling her eggs to bury in the hatchery. He then identified her by a little tag, measured her shell (she was a really big Green Turtle, at least a metre long) and then he left her to rest. After covering the eggs, she would then dig a dummy hole to confuse predators before heading back to the sea. It was amazing to be able to get so close to a turtle laying, but inevitabley as they quite rightly only allow tourists to potentially disturb one turtle per night, we had to share the experience with about 30 people, all jostling for a good view!
We next followed the ranger to the hatchery where he carefully buried all of the eggs, putting the plastic mesh around the hole to protect from predators. They
have to be very particuler about the conditions of the hatchery, in that half is in the sun and half shaded, as it is the temperature of the sand that determines the sex of the baby turtles! Finally, we trooped down to another beach where a bucket full of hatched baby turtles were ready to be released. We watched as they were emptied onto the sand right by the lapping waves. Some scurried straight towards the sea while a few needed a helping hand and persisted in running back up the beach. They were so so tiny that it's difficult to imagine any of them surviving! Though it was exiting to witness these acts of nature, and though conservation of an endangered species is clearly the goal, it did leave us questioning the long term merits of this human intervention - by increasing the rate of turtles hatching and reaching the water to a wopping 85%, are humans tampering with natural selection? Unfortunately, we're so responsible for their dwindling numbers that conservation projects like these have to happen.
We woke at about 5:45am for a walk along the islands beaches in the hope of seeing some mother turtles making
their way back to the water. We weren't in luck but it was still a lovely walk and were able to see all of the turtle tracks in the sand. On the way to breakfast, walking past the hatchery we were disturbed by some loud music only to look over and find Robbie singing and dancing away in his grey Y-fronts! After breakfast we jumped on the boat back to Sandakan and made our way back to Sepilok. We went for a quick dip in the pool before walking to the sanctuary for the morning feed of the orangutans. Our 'tour' had finished, but we were eager to see more of the apes! The afternoon was pretty much the same, after luch a dip in the pool before going to the afternoon feeding session. This turned out to be much more eventful than the morning session. Brit + Brittina, Miskam, Miko a very young male, Mimi and her son Ronnie were all eating bananas on the platform. The rangers were trying to give Brittina a drink that had worming solution in it, but they weren't succesful, so they had to sedate Britt so they could help the baby. Soon after
the injection she became woosey and then suddendly Miskam jumped and sprinted away from the platform and CID appeared through the trees - he is the dominant adult male and is absaloutelty enormous with a flanged face. He was apparently an amazingly rare sight - the rangers have only seen him twice in the last two years. He had come to this area of the forest looking for a mate, but was got really angry when he saw the rangers injecting Britt. He started throwing his weight around banging trees and shaking ropes, asserting his authority and threatening the rangers. The other orangutans had done a runner, but the sedated Britt was still on the platform with the rangers. They decided to make a run for it to get Britt and the baby to safety, prizing Brittina from her mother giving her to one of the volunteers and one of the rangers carried Britt's dead weight on his back, running all the way back to the centre! CID climbed onto the platform, still making angry roars and loud kissing sounds and we suddenly felt very close to this very angry wild animal! He soon settled down and started eating the
leftover fruit on the platform where he was joined by a small young orangutan (probably Miko). As we walked back to the centre along the boardwalk we came across two orangutans sitting on the boardwalk handrail, one large, one small. They were peeling some some long stalks and eating the centre. To get past we had to walk only a couple of feet away and they stared straight at us. The small one climbed the tree and started to make a nest to avoid the imminent rain storm. Further along the boardwalk a whole family group of macaques trooped past us. We were really impressed by Sepilok Rehabilitation Centre - it does an amazing job of not just saving the lives of baby orangutans that would die in the wild without their mothers, but teaching them to behave as they would in the wild so successfully that new babies are being born in the sanctuary all the time! Meeting the apes may not be everyone's cup of tea but for us it was definately the experience that we'd hoped it would be!
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Hevtington
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Monkeymonkeymonkeymonkey
Having had to watch that damn orangutan screensaver for nigh on two years, I know how much you two must have been spazzing out about this! Looks pretty amazing even for someone who isn't particularly a friend of the apes, and the turtle thing sounds wicked! Phenomenal photo of the towers too Phillis....Missing you both! x