Proboscis Monkey Day Trip

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Another day trip I took from Sandakan was to the Proboscis Monkey Sanctuary. The Proboscis are only found in Borneo and it is believed that there are only about 1,000 left living. Their habitat is the low land mangrove swamps that is also being destroyed because of palm oil plantation expansion. They travel in groups, either a bachelor group or a herem with one dominant male and several wives and babies.

They are not very attractive due to their long noses (up to 7"), and big fat bellies; their diet is mostly mangrove leaves and their bellies are similar to a cow, it has chambers since mangrove leaves are hard to digest.

I went to two feedings in two different locations and I have to say it was a day I will never forget. Everything started very normal. Take the bus to the sanctuary, see some cute silver langur monkeys and two different pods of proboscis that came down from the top of the mangrove trees to feed. It was all very enjoyable and interesting.

I was then taken to the Nipah Lodge for lunch (I was the ONLY one on my bus, glad a brought a book). The Nipah Lodge was like a ghost town, very odd. Thankfully, there were two girls from London that were also brought there for lunch so I had someone to eat with and talk to. After we ate we were taken into the tv room to watch the video and that is when things got interesting. The video was 51 minutes long, much much too long, and I would consider parts of it to be monkey soft porn. We were dying laughing and so grossed out my several "scenes" in this video, and during this their taxi driver was taking a nap on the next couch, so strange.

I understand the need to educate people on mating habits, but I think they went a little over the top. We knew that the sex scenes were coming when the soft jazz started playing on the video, the voiceover would make a comment like "the bigger the nose the bigger the...", and then we would see lots of monkey sex and females in a line waiting their turn. AND the icing on the cake was when they explained that if the male doesnt have a mating partner then they have to pleasure themselves and in case we didn't understand what that meant they showed us. We were lucky enough to see a male monkey masturbating with everything showing for our viewing pleasure. Needless to say, we were shocked by the end of this movie and agreed that monkey masturbation is an image that is permentaly tatooed into our minds.

Afterwards, we went to another feeding that was much better than the first. It was out in the middle of the mangroves and we were a lot closer to the Proboscis.

All in all a very eventful and disturbing day.

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Photos

Silver Monkey
They are really friendly and are willing to get very close to people

Mother and Baby Proboscis
The babies are very cute, too bad they grow up to be not so cute