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Published: September 9th 2009
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I think I’m probably going to make myself unpopular amongst people who have been there and loved it, but I found the Kinabatangan River to be distinctly underwhelming. For anybody who’d just arrived in Borneo and been nowhere else it must seem magical but for me, having been lucky enough to have probably been spoiled by travel, it was a big disappointment. Partly it was my fault due to a poor choice of accommodation, partly it was because I hate organised tours and activities, and partly it was because its just really not that great. My two main reasons for going were to see the Bornean “pigmy” elephant and the rare Storm’s stork, both of which I did see so that was the objective fulfilled, but apart for those and a few other good sightings I really felt like I’d have been better off staying another three days at the Danum Valley instead. It was a shame too because I was really wanting and expecting the Kinabatangan to be one of the high-points of the Borneo leg of this trip.
My original intention had been to stay at the Sukau B&B in the riverside town of Sukau, which apparently has
good forest right nearby, and where you can just hire boats for trips up and down the river at times that suit you. Instead I ended up at a place that I wasn’t even sure of the name of, having stupidly decided that a set price with boat trips all-inclusive would be more convenient. On the pamphlet that acted as the receipt their name appeared to be the “Kinabatangan Safari” but the sign on their docks when I got there was the rather curious “Nasalis larvatus (Nature Lodge Kinabatangan)”. Their slogan was the cringe-worthy “It’s a jungle out there”. The package was the standard three day - two night deal, and included two afternoon boat trips, two morning boat trips and two night walks. Their promotional material heralded their location as “off the tourist route” which wasn’t really true and in any case is completely irrelevant because the boats from all the many tourist lodges all go to exactly the same places on the river. At times there would be twelve or more boat-loads of tourists massed at the bank where there were some elephants or proboscis monkeys. I thought the tarsier tree at Sulawesi’s Tangkoko National Park was a
circus but that’s nothing compared to the Kinabatanagan River experience. The most annoying thing from my point of view (apart for the hundreds of flies constantly crawling over everything and driving me INSANE!) was that it was literally impossible to do anything alone. Even a walk in the beaten-up forest around the lodge was completely forbidden without a guide because it was “too dangerous”, and the guides only took out groups of ten or fifteen depending on how many people there were staying there, which is useless for wildlife-spotting, especially in the middle of the day when they did it. I just found the whole place frustrating, although at least most of the guests were genuinely interested in wildlife and not the sort of idiot backpackers who don’t have two brain cells to rub together.
The wildlife on the river was reasonably good, not as good as I thought it would be and certainly not a patch on Bako for instance, but it was alright. The first afternoon boat-trip we spotted an orangutan, numerous crab-eating macaques (which the boat-driver insisted on constantly stopping for, which was another source of annoyance), proboscis monkeys, a distant soaring Storm’s stork, a pair
of rhinoceros hornbills, and a group of elephants. Calling them “pigmy elephants” is a stretch but they are definitely smaller than the usual Asian elephants. Their restricted presence in Sabah is a bit of a mystery, nobody really knowing if they’re truly native to Borneo or if they were introduced by people a few hundred years ago. The latest I heard was that they were probably introduced from Java where elephants are now extinct, which handily explains discrepancies in the Borneo history and the elephants’ distinctiveness from all other living Asian elephant populations. On that first day the elephants were at the river’s edge, as they usually are I guess, but mostly hidden from view by the towering grasses twice as high as the elephants’ backs so good photos were out of the question although I was more than happy just to watch them feeding. On the second afternoon trip there were no elephants, which is the luck of the draw, but there were lots of Oriental pied hornbills, as well as the notable spectacle of three primate species in a single tree (proboscis monkeys, crab-eating macaques and southern pig-tailed macaques).
Although there were four boat trips in total
in the package, the two morning ones went up-river from the lodge which for most people was largely a waste of time because most of the mammals were down-river. The elephants in particular could only be seen down-river from the lodge’s location, so I’d only had two chances to see them. However on the first morning boat trip there were four Storm’s storks perched in riverside trees, enabling me to get good binocular views of them (but only poor photographic ones). Also there were silvered leaf monkeys and another orangutan. The second morning just two Storm’s storks could be found but a lesser adjutant helped fill the void nicely. Also very nice was the sight of a pair of wrinkled hornbills perched right next to a pair of Oriental pied hornbills.
The one night-walk I did was alright. The groups were too large to make it likely you’d see anything really interesting but there were some sleeping birds and various smaller critters. The guide’s identification skills were a joke though. We found a fantastic little lizard called an ornate shrub lizard which has a weird rostral appendage (in English, a thing on its nose), and the guide confidently told
everyone it was a “dusky flying lizard” and then, just to make sure we all understood, added that it could fly. The fact that it didn’t resemble a flying lizard in the slightest and was quite obviously lacking even a hint of a patagium clearly did not bother him at all. A
Microhyla froglet was described as “the smallest frog in the world”!
Because the night-walks were, um, somewhat lacking in respectability, a few of us managed to arrange a special night-time boat-trip. Some of the other lodges have these as part of their packages but not our lodge. The price was a ridiculous 60 Ringgits per person, but only if we could get ten people. Surprisingly we quite easily achieved the required number. I think we were probably all a bit worried that we wouldn’t see anything and it would be wasted money, but it turned out fabulously. Saltwater crocdiles, rarely seen here by day, were fairly common; there were no fewer than five buffy fish owls and several black-crowned night herons along the banks; a big reticulated python; and cream of the crop, the animal I’d been most hoping to see that night but didn’t actually think
I would, a flat-headed cat!! Very exciting for me and definitely worth the cost.
For those keeping score, final species tally for the three days - two nights on the Kinabatanagan River was a paltry 23 birds and 7 mammals. I’m sure it would have been more with a better choice of lodge.
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