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Published: October 21st 2008
It was really good to be waking up late on our last morning at Uncle Tan's Wildlife reserve. The big group that arrived the morning after us (we were small in comparison, only 7 of us), were already off on their morning boat safari, so everything was particularly peaceful. We didn't have any 'programs' on this day and it was nice to be able to chill in our hammocks, and watch the monitor lizard and wild pigs doing their thing. There was a giant squirrel (Darrell thinks it might have been a lemur) just above me, and the Macaques are busy destroying the kitchen. One of the other girls and I tried to scare them away, but the alpha male ended up being the one doing the chasing and we were the ones being scared away... Just wait until the guides get back! So there!
But just listening to the sounds of the rain forest - sporadically intermixed with the blaring of a passing radio attached to one of our guides ear's, or with the full hearted, soulful wailing of a love song by the guides in the kitchen - and reflecting on the last day and a half's activities
Proboscis Monkey
High above the riverwas a perfect way to end off the stay...
We had started our adventure with the hour long boat trip to the campsite. On the left bank, well, for the first half of the way, was row after row of palm oil trees, and on the right bank, I think, impenetrable rainforest. We did 5 of these boat rides in total. 1 on the way in and 1 on the way out, then 1 as a night safari, 1 first thing in the morning, and a sun set one - which was intensely peaceful and awesomely beautiful.
Our guides with their razor sharp eyes managed to spot everything from monitor lizards lying up in tree branches to crocodiles resting on the clay banks or peeping out from under the orange water. (And boy, when they spotted a croc, they steered the boat at full speed toward it so that we could get a close up look before it swam away.) One crocodile swam right by our shallow boat! Aaaah! 😱
We saw proboscus monkeys with their big noses enjoying the sun at the tops of trees, and long- and pig tailed macaques (a long-tailed macaque threw a ball
Jungle Centipede
Rub his back and he smells like Marzipan - Seriously! of poo at the boat and hit me on the toes!! Thanks for that!). We saw hornbills, cranes and kingfishers - Mum you would have loved it!
And then, probably the most exciting thing that happened on one of the boat trips, one of the guides spotted a python - 1,5m long, it's only a baby python, but that's more than enough snake for me! Anyway, he convinced his co-guide that they should try to pick it up! So, out they hopped, barefooted and with their pants rolled up over their thighs, and immediately sank up to their knees in the clay river bank. But onward they persevered, as the snake lazily started sliding into the undergrowth of the forest. The one guide managed to grab the end of the snake's tail just as it was about to get out of reach, and the 2 wrestled it back onto the muddy bank. They wanted to grab it's head, but let go of it smartly when it started to strike at them. With the rainforest blocked by the guides, it angrily wound it's way passed the boat and into the river -leaving the rest of us giggling nervously... and then
suddenly remembering to take photographs!
Our other 2 'programs' were jungle treks, one later in the morning, and one at night. Both times we went out in search of the little things, frogs, and spiders and plants and things and neither time were we disappointed - although some people have reported seeing rang-utans and pygmy elephant. I really loved the night hike. Trudging through the mud in our hired rubber boots while looking for spiders with our torches. - The trick is to hold the torch at the level of your eyes and look for the small luminescent shine of their eyes. Man oh man, there's a lot that looks back at you from out of the rain forest!
On the night hike, our guide dug out a scorpion for us. He picked me (
why??) to hold his torch while he lent in to get it out of the fold of a tree. I knew what he was going to do, but when a creature the size of my hand (I have big hands!) crawled onto his arm, I shrieked, jumped up and down like a little girl and nearly wet myself! 😞 oh dear!
I did get
it together - I was just grossly unprepared for the size of the thing. I even held it for a while 😊
We also saw a tarantula high up on a tree (thank goodness, I don't think my nerves could take it after that ruddy scorpion!) And then, my favourite, we saw a sleeping kingfisher 😊. Apparently they are almost completely blind at night, so you can get really close to them and they won't fly away.
On our free afternoon, Darrell and I decided to walk the jungle trek we did that morning. Just as a spur of the moment decision, we decided to take our GPS (Thanks Dave!!), just for interest. Darrell plotted the co-ordinates for the campsite, and then we were off, following the red paint on the trees, as our guide had done before. And then we were following blue paint, and then... some.... and then we were lost! There was no way to tell the direction we'd come or the direction that we should go. All the trees look the same and we must have done a bunch of circles looking for more paint, although it wasn't dark yet, it was getting a
bit late... We were lost in the jungle - only briefly though... cos... dum dum dumdum... Darrell remembered the GPS. Yay!! (and another Yay for Dave!) It turns out, we were only 150m away from the campsite, and it was a 5min walk back to familiarity 😊 Just in time for our night walk 😊
-Our guide told us that once, when he was first there, he'd gotten lost with 2 tourists, and it had taken them a full day to find their way to the river where they had managed to hitch a lift back! 😊 - things could have been worse 😊
All in all the whole experience was unlike anything I have ever done, or seen before. We stayed in wire cages with corrugated iron rooves. We had to secure our food and medicine in big plastic bins so that the jungle rats wouldn't get at it (We called ours the Happy Box). We bathed from a bucket using river water, and we slept on dirty mattresses with no pillows or sheets. We ate like kings, and we shared the campsite with the jungle rats, the mammoth sized squirrels, wild pigs, monitor lizards, and a troop
of long-tailed macaques. And we got lost 150m away from home base.
What an adventure!
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David
non-member comment
GPS
Yay 4 ME = )