Advertisement
Published: November 26th 2009
Sunset over the South China Sea
Our camp over looked this beach side Pondock - what a great place to wake up in the morning.Wow what a fantastic few weeks I've had. I can't believe I've only got 4 weeks left in Borneo - Where did the time go !!! Having started the expedition meeting all the other project managers and then the Venturers, I knew I'd be in for a very special time. As soon as the expo started proper, I was out on the first Loop, visiting all the sites Raleigh are at in Sabah. This meant that I got to visit all the projects we're working on here, a trip that involved 3 of us (all girlies) in a Land Rover, 4X4'ing over the length and breadth of Sabah, Borneo. FANTASTIC!!!! We visitied Imabak Canyon, one of the remotest areas on the planet, with pristine rain Forrest and species yet to be discovered, right at the very center of Sabah - AMAZING - I feel privileged to be one of only a very few people to have made it to this remote part of the world - despite the off road drive and trek into camp taking 8 hours. WOW - as you can tell, I'm very excited to have been there and I even got to bath in the River Imbak
Alpha 4
Hot and sweaty after a hard days work behind the scenes at Sepilok. - fully clad - right in the middle of the Jungle - how cool is that......I half expected Tarzan to come swinging through the trees!!!!!!. The following few days saw us driving through rivers (and on one occasion with our wheels on fire - yikes), visiting remote Kampongs (village communities), getting lost for a few hours in a palm oil plantation (well what can you expect when every palm oil tree looks the same and every cross road looks like the last - nightmare - mind you, it does help if you hold the GPS ariel up to the sky and not horizontally and pointing at the trees!!!!). We did have to casevac a patient out of one kampong due to illness, but it just seemed to add to the fun of the experience! Eventually, we found our way over to Sepilok, at the other side of Sabah, and I met, for the first time on this trip, a couple of very gracious Orangutans, but also a few very sad Sun Bears. I'll come to these guys later. As with all the other projects we visited, we looked over the project site to see the progress being made. However, at
Digging girles
Where are the boys? ah yes looking at the site plans. Not sure I like all these equal rights. Sepilok, I was leached, not once, but 3 times by the little blood suckers - yuk!!!!! I am no longer a leach virgin 😊 Again, the day after we set off for very the top of Borneo - The Tip of Borneo to be precise, to a place called Kudat, where the 'Metre of Rainforrest' project was starting. Here we're planting trees to get the Rainforrest back into area's where its been removed. The idea is that you a buy a piece of land here and plant Rainforrest saplings taken from the existing forrest so it grows back quicker. We camped out on a fine white sandy beach and saw the big red sun set into the south China Sea and whilst I bathed in what was the warmest sea I have ever been in, I shouted at the top of my lungs " AUTODESK THANK YOU FOR MAKING ME REDUNDANT ".
The following day we made our way back to field base and some form of normality (if you can call sleeping in a room with 6 other women who make a 14 year old teanage boys room look tidy and listening to a short wave radio for
Digging holes is so much fun
Drenched from sweat and hot as hell. These bridge parapet foundations take some digging. 24 hours with wisps of Hong Kong radio and singing frogs coming through the radio speakers most of the time - normal). Change over came (that's when all project groups move onto another project to vary their experience here) and with that, I deployed with one of the groups (named Alpha 4) back to Sepilok, taking an 8 hour bus ride with all our equipment and food for 3 weeks with us. I looked and felt like a turtle with my backpack - and I thought I'd packed light!!!! I haven't mentioned taxi drivers for a while, but it seems that all drivers of public vehicles on this continent come from the same school of motoring. Is it really normal for a bus driver to hand out a small bottle of water, a piece of layer cake (yes, I said layer cake - the type that has a pink and a yellow layer with jam filling) and ..........wait for it.......................a sick bag!!!!!! I should have known it was a recipe for an interesting journey. The begining of our journey seemed quite sedate, until we got onto the one main road that crosses Sabah. This road has lots of palm oil
Meal time on the pondock
Some of Alpha 4 eating tea on the Pondock, an open air living space made from wood. trucks traveling at silly speeds and round bends you wouldn't exceed the speed limit on - well not if you're sane at any rate. As we started to drive round Mount Kinabalu, I felt like I'd suddenly been dropped into the film 'Speed', but our bomb was the sodding bus driver. It was like being driven by a stunt man on acid, all whilst watching an on board video playing pirated films that had different sound tracks from the film that was being shown. Its an interesting experience watching ' Meet the Fockers' with the sound track from 'Rambo VXIII' hurtling towards a palm oil truck at 80 MPH. The first thing you ask for is NOT a piece of layer cake😊 You'd pay a lot for a ride like that at Alton Towers!!!!! 8 Hours later and one stop in a town called Telupid - a bit like a western frontier town but with out the alcohol - we finally got to Sepilok, where our bus driver dropped us and our kit off. We loaded our back packs and kitted up to walk into the Jungle and to our camp, where I was to spend the next 10 nights
Edna or Eros with her capture,
Edna shortly after scarring a whole load of visitors to the feeding platform. The day before, she had visited us at our worksite. of a 2 and half week project. Now you may think that carrying a backpack that is evenly loaded is easy, and you'd be right - that is until you get on a very steep hill that is composed of orange wet clay and lots of rotting leaves that are the size of a small continent. In fact, whilst climbing up one side of this tricky little jungle path, I looked up to see what the guys in front of me were doing and turned into a not so ninja turtle and fell backwards down the hill into the swamp below, where I encountered many more leaches than I dare to count - yuk!!!! I eventually got up and got to jungle camp and set up my static basher up (hammock bed) with my mossy net and sleeping bag. It suddenly dawned on me that I would have to do that trek every morning and every night for the next 10 days - YIKES!! The team I was with were fantastic, a really great group of kids that were so enthusiastic you couldn't help go with it. Our camp needed a bit of tidying up, so the following day, we
Feeding Orangutans are amazing
Lunching Orangutans upside down are fantastic and great fun to observe got to work digging out a long drop (a very deep hole in the ground for a jungle loo), steps down to it and building showers that were fed by a gravity water feed system. Our camp became home and a pleasant place to stay. Having spent a day sorting out the camp, we set off to work on the Sun Bear conservation center, back down through the jungle and an hours walk to the work site. A word on Sun Bears, cause pictures are not allowed, so check out this web site instead as this is where I was working for 10 days - the BSBCC - the Borneo Sun Bear Conservation Center - http://sunbears.wildlifedirect.org/bornean-sun-bear-conservation-centre-bsbcc/ . These little bears are in more danger than the Orangs and I was privileged to a little bit to help their plight. The pictures of me and a team of girls in the project group say it all. It was the hottest I've ever been and I cannot recall a time when I've drunk 8 litres of water in a day and still felt incredibly thirsty, whilst feeling like I'd just got out of a shower, fully clad with clothes drenched. Hard work,
but so very rewarding when you realise that there are only a few Sun Bears left in Borneo and they need help to survive. Whilst I was working with these guys, I was also privileged to meet Edna, or Eros which is her correct name. We were on our work site one day when she chased several members of our team over to our working kitchen, she pushed us all out of the way and grabbed a bag of goodies laying on the side and took it over to the sink to investigate. Edna is an 11 year old Orangutan who was rehabilitated and let free into the local jungle - she is amazing. Where is your camera when you need it!!!!!! With a previous group, she had watched them work in the jungle then ran over to one of the PM's, took the water bottle she had taken with her, took the stopper out, drank the water and threw the bottle back at the PM before running off back into the jungle. I can't tell you how thrilling it is to see a wild animal you have only ever seen in a zoo, right there in front of you,
Spot the thieves knicking the food from the old man of the forest
A group of these Macac's came in to our jungle camp and regularly visited us at work, trying to steal our belongings. stroking it and watching it take control whilst you are dumb struck because of its presence WOW WOW WOW!!!!!! With luck in the new year, the Sun Bears too will be able to run around in an enclosure being prepared by Raleigh. During my stay I also had an opportunity to visit the Sepilok Conservation centre, where rehabilitated Orangutans live and feed from platforms you can view, which is where all the pictures you see here are taken. But we did get a special tour, as Raleigh members, to see the orphaned babies in the nursery away from the tourists too, but no pics of them as they are also forbidden. How sad that so many babies don't have mums, but at least they have lots of surrogates to care for them.
My time in jungle camp went very quickly and again I laughed lots with the venturers. We saw spiders the size of tea plates, snakes that I'd rather not have in my sleeping bag, hornbills that gracefully flew around the tree tops of our camp and a troop of long tail Macak's that started to come into camp towards the end of my stay. It was like
Kitty Cat
This is Suraya - Sunshine in English - our new office kitty. She loves filing trays for sleeping in. living in a wild life documentary.
I caught a bus back to Kota Kinabalu on my own the following morning, leaving Alpha 4 behind, but I would rather have stayed. They were a great bunch who will all go on to become a very successful group of people. Another interesting bus journey ensued after more cake, water and sick bags were offered, which was a good job as 40% of the bus needed the sick bags - and no I wasn't one of them.
By the way, at field base we have acquired a kitten. She just loves the filing trays on my desk.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.085s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 5; qc: 46; dbt: 0.0579s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Louise Pearson
non-member comment
Lucky girl!!??
Wow your exploits look amazing, loving all the orangutans bring me one home for xmas please - I'm sure you've dated worse looking men actually.....maybe just with less hair! Glad to see you're grafting whilst having fun, looks like hard work but you're all getting stuck in. You deserve a medal for all the work you're doing it's very freshing to see so many people giving so much, not to mention humbling...I'm complaining about having to do xmas shopping which seems really trivial now. Missing you lots can't wait to hear your stories, keep safe, keep smiling and keep shouting out "THANKS AUTODESK!!!" Looby xxx