Mans of the Jungle!

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Hi peeps - you’re probably all very bored of us going on so we will keep this one short.

After coming down the mountain we caught a bus to Sandakan where we stayed in and equally nice hotel as the suite - just not a big. But we did have a view out onto the sea which was nice, and ESPN again which matt really enjoyed (Marissa not so much). We had 2 nights there to rest our aching legs. We had planned to be moving on after that but due to the fact that Monday was diwali all the tour operators were closed, so that put us back a day.

We had to move hotel because this one was a bit out of our price range. We followed lonely planets advice (thank you Caprice) and ended up in the first place on our trip that Marissa doesn’t like! She can’t get on with the blue walls or something like that. It’s fine though so none of you need worry.

After spending the first night in Marissa’s new favourite hotel we got up early to go to the Sepolik Orangutan Rehabilitation Sanctuary which was the main reason we ventured over to this side of Borneo. The sanctuary is on the edge of a protected bit of forest which is home to rescued orangutans which have been made homeless by the palm oil industry which is currently the major industry apart from tourism in Sabah. If you are interested have a look HERE.

Anyway, food is put out for the orangutans twice a day at 10am and 3pm and there is a platform where visitors can stand and watch them. We arrived at 9am and got to the platform nice and early to get a good space!

It was amazing watching them coming to the platform, swinging along on the ropes! They are magnificent! There were probably about 7 who came all in all. There were two younger ones who were play fighting and they were so funny! As always, the pictures don’t do it justice! They stuck around for about half an hour then once they had had enough bananas and milk (not a bad feed!) and a bit of a play they slowly left one by one. You will see from the pics that a few macaques came too and nabbed the leftovers - cheeky monkeys!

After the feeding we went to get permission to do a walk of one of the trails in the jungle. The only trail we were allowed to go on was the bird trail and this would take us about 45 minutes which was more than long enough as we’ve had our fill of walking for a while! The trail was muddy but we decided to trek on, with the hope of seeing some orangutans for ourselves! After about 10 minutes matt started to get a pain in his right armpit. Scratching it didn’t work so Marissa had a look.

There it was - a LEECH!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Marissa had to flick it off with her fan but by that point we were both pretty freaked. We both ran back the way we came to get out of the jungle as quickly as possible - not before finding another 4 leeches on matt’s clothes and 1 on Marissa’s shoes. A quick trip to the toilet to make properly sure we were leech free (they like hot places so we were both a bit worried about ‘you know where’) and we finally calmed down.

We then headed back to Sandakan to book ourselves a river safari tour down the Kinabatangan River which is apparently older than the Amazon and home to Marissa’s new favourite animal the proboscis monkey.

Anyway more about that on the next one. Bye for now.

Lots of love x

*By the way the date on the last one about the climb should be 26th Oct*

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Photos

posing for the camera
nice pout