Blogs from Sepilok Orang Utan Sanctuary, Sabah, Malaysia, Asia - page 7

I've had a fear/obsession/paranoia with leeches ever since I witnessed a traveller in Laos 2 years ago with blood streaming down his legs still an hour after having hiked in a leech area. Disgusting! I'd read that we'd be in leech territory in the jungles of Borneo so I made sure to bring tennis shoes, long socks and pants and even briefly considered buying leech-proof socks. And finally the time had arrived for our jungle trip... We took a bus from the national park to Sandakan and booked a jungle trip from our hostel near the Sepilok Orangutan Rehab Center-one of 4 in the world. The bus ride was spectacular-I saw 3 movies-one of which was the new Angelina Jolie movie Wanted that's in theaters in the States right now. Luckily, dialogue wasn't key to understanding ... read more

Ok, so we wanted to book our flights out of Sandakan for the following Friday, which happened to be Good Friday. After everything we had been through we were ready to leave. The tour agents in Sandakan were generally unhelpful, one could only offer us flights at around 700-800MYR per person (6.4 = £1) for the flight to KL, while the other said that there were no flights. We needed to get to Singapore ultimately, and the only way to fly directly there was to head back to KK - not an option that we wanted. It seemed again that Borneo was not any easy place to get around. However, after an hour or so on the net we found cheap flights to KL and then an overnight train ticket to Singapore, all on a public ... read more

Four days after we climbed Mount Kinabalu our legs had just about fully recovered. We'd made the long 6 hour bus journey from Kinabalu National Park over to Sandaken the day after the climb and conveniently booked ourselves into a hostel with a tv and dvd player in each room so we were laughing! It's a bit of a cop out really, going all this way around the world only to sit in watching dvd's and sports channels all day, but we felt like we deserved it! Sepilok was the main attraction for us in Sabah, in the northeastern part of Borneo, and is where the Orang Utan Rehabilitation centre is based so we travelled there from Sandaken for the day. It was set up in 1964 with the purpose of rehabilitating young orphaned Orang Utans. ... read more

After saying goodbye to Justine in Manila, I caught a flight to the steamy jungles of Malaysian Borneo. After a brief stay in the city of Kota Kinabalu, I headed to the Orang-Utan Rehabilitation Centre at Sepilog. This is where the Orang-Utans with drinking problems and drug issues come to be weaned off their dependencies. This is the Betty Ford Clinic for apes. Of course, I am only kidding. The work done here is heartwarming. The centre takes orphaned Orang-Utan babies which are found in the wild, or apes which have been captured as pets, or those which have been injured. There are roughly 20,000 Orang-Utans left in the wild, so this centre is taking a stance and helping BEFORE they become an endangered species, not when it is almost too late. The baby orang-utans are ... read more

Day 203 (14.10.07) We arrived at the Sepilok bus station with plenty of time to spare as due to the celebrations of the past few days the ticket booth had been shut and we weren't sure we'd be able to get tickets. We bartered a little as they told us the price on the ticket was local price and we'd have to pay another 6 dollars which we luckily managed to get down to about 1.50 dollars. We set off towards Sandakan where we hoped to be able to visit the tourist information office and find out about a possible visit to Turtle Island where you can spend the night and watch turtles laying eggs - it sounded amazing. When we arrived in Sandakan (at another cunningly located bus station which required another bus trip to ... read more