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Published: August 10th 2007
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Hello! Again, this is really delayed, and you are getting daily reports, because the stupid website crashed. Anyway, We arrived in Singapore for 3 days of having showers every day (running water - yay!), sleeping (Mongolia was exhausting!), drinking (we met up with Simon and other BarCappers out in Singapore at the mo), and, predictably, eating. Going from a desert and sleeping in felt tents, to a terribly smart hotel (we got upgraded to a posh penthouse room for no apparent reason - our bedraggled state clearly pulled at the hotel manager's heart strings), was a bit of a culture shock, but we managed it well, I think! Singapore was great - but having lived there and visited several times, there was not a lot of sightseeing to be done. So we did all the things I mentioned above, to quite disgusting excess, and throughly enjoyed ourselves, whilst simultaenously psyching ourselves up for the next trip into the jungles of Borneo.
Then, we headed to Borneo - Sarawak to be precise. Borneo conjures up dark images of headhunters, tribespeople with blowpipes, snakes, and lots of other supremely exciting and dangerous things. To a wide extent, it is still like that
- apart from the headhunters, of course. We were staying on the edge of the jungle - so far to the edge, that we were in fact, by the sea, living in a treehouse, in a place called Santubong. This was a lot of fun, the thrill heightened by the fact that everytime you walked across the floor, it shook like it was going to collapse. Anyway, Borneo is a real melting pot of tribes and cultures, from nomads, called the Penan, who still kill their food using blowpipes, to the Iban, the largest tribal group, who are famous not only for their longhouses (communal living huts) but the fact that they are the said headhunters. The practice of headhunting has now ended, but until as recently as the 1960's, the Iban were scalping their enemies (at that time, invading Japanese). Collecting scalps was like collecting badges of honour - proof of manhood and prowess at fighting and protection. Lots of Iban longhouses still have bags of skulls hanging up - a creepy reminder of their bloodthirsty past....Anyway, meeting tribespeople was extremely interesting - it's quite sad to see how the government are trying to institutionalise the nomads and destroy
Our hotel lobby from above
(We were on the top floor and it was VERY high!) Singapore their way of life, and how tourism is affecting them in a negative way. If you ever go to Borneo - pick a good eco-conservation company - that way you know that your tourist dollars are contributing in a more postive way.
Anyway, enough sermonising and onto the animals! (Well, monkeys really!). We went in search of the rare proboscis monkey. This is a weird looking simian with a huge nose, (looks like a really big boozers conk) that only lives in Borneo. We set off on a jungle trek, with a guide, to try and get a sighting of one. Eventually, after lots of false starts (we kept seeing other types of less rare monekys and getting very excited), we saw 3. They were really high up in the trees, and we needed binoculars to see them, but it was very cool, to say the least, so see rare monkeys that you won't find anywhere else in the world. We also saw several kinds of pitcher plant - these are carnivorous plants - like venus flytraps, only shaped like...you guessed it...pitchers. Although I enjoyed the trek, it was very hard going - it is about 98% humidity in
Borneo, so we were contsantly wet and hot and slimy and gross. I also spent a lot of time worrying about snakes. There are around 66 species of poinsonous snake in Borneo (including cobras, and kraits). But only six that could kill you, really, and only one that has long enough fangs to defeat trekking trousers and hiking boots - Wraglers pit viper. I worried a lot that whenever I grabbed onto a vine to get my balance, I would accidentally grab a snake.... (First rule of the jungle - look before you touch!). Needless to say, this is just another in a long list of things that I pointlessly worry about, and we didn't even see a snake. Though, our guide showed us photos from 3 days before, of a monkey being consumed by a ginormous python....!
Anyway, onto more wildlife - and the most exciting of all - the orangutans! I adopted Anton an orangutan for his Christmas present last year, and we really wanted to see them in the wild - we aren't sure if we saw Anton's - it is highly unlikely! Because of illegal poaching and logging, it is very hard to see the
few orangutans that are left, in the wild. So to this end, the best places to see them (and also from a conservation viewpoint) are at rehabilitation centres. The one we went to rehabilitates orangutans that have been orphaned, or illegally caught and caged, then releases them back into the wild, where they belong. But they frequently come back to the centre - this was home for several years - and this is the best way to see them - when they come back for a visit (they know when feeding time for the ones currently being renhabilitated is!). We trekked inot the jungle, to a shelter, hidden by trees. From there, we could see a wooden platform, where the rangers leave fruit. We waited for around an hour, and we had to be absolutely silent, turn our camera flashes off, and suddenly we saw hairy orange bundles of fur swinging their way towards the platform. One organgutan, an older male, was absolutely huge. There were about 5 younger, smaller males and females, and 3 females with babies. The babies were tiny, clinging on to their mothers. They had spiky sticking up hair and big, round watchful eyes. They were
so so adorable. And their human traits were so clear - small mannerisms were joltingly familiar.There's not much more I can say about it - the fabulous photos, whilst brill, don't do them any justice (David-Gnome-Bailey spent a long time fiddling with monopods and tripods and shutter speeds, but the humidity was bad for the cameras, though he did amazingly well given the fact that his lenses kept fogging). They were just amazing, and why more is not being done to save them, we don't know. Anton and I both agreed afterwards, that watching them was the most capitvating few hours of our lives.
Anyway, that's an account of the monkeying around searching for the monkeys. We are headed to Bali next for some r and r - yay!
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Bad Monkeys
Bad Monkeys