Orangutans of Borneo

Borneo is well known for its jungles and wildlife and Susie and I were dead set on taking Adina to see the orangutans that can be found there.

From Sulawesi it meant four days of sailing – we have been whipping up the miles over the last six weeks! Indonesia has some very shallow waters and for a few days we found ourselves sailing in depths ranging between fifteen and twenty-five metres. When on passage in Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands or Papua New Guinea you could easily take a little cat nap on a night watch as you’d never see a thing. Not so in Indonesian waters, you need to be positively alert. Big international cargo boats or tankers have AIS (Automatic Identification System) which means we can see them on our navigation system and more importantly they can see little us; we each know what the other is doing and can clearly see if we are on a collision course. Not so the Indonesians boats. Quite often you see big groups of fishing boats with bright spotlights fishing for squid or even worse smaller fishing boats with little more than flashing LED lights that look like disco lights. Then there are the tug boats which fortunately can be seen with their bright ‘restricted in ability to manoeuvre’ lights but not so the usually large item they are towing on which, at best, they simply put a tiny LED light. And in these shallow waters some boats will even anchor. It keeps you on your toes working out who’s doing what.

Susie, Glenys and Neville keep a look out

We motored eighteen miles up the muddy river which is shallow in spots but we had plenty of safe waypoints to navigate our way. The tide was against us – you can’t win them all. Anchored off the town of Kumai were Neville and Glenys on their boat Alba who we had first met in the Tuamotos last year. We’d been in email contact and arriving first they had kindly booked a three day, two night cruise for the four of us to see the orangutans.

The next day we left Adina behind with a local security guard and headed off. Funnily enough our biggest concern leaving Adina was whether the freezer would last three days in these warm equatorial waters. Inside the freezer were our last treasured Vanuatu steaks and around twenty lobster tails from Papua New Guinea!

‘Boy’ the Gibbon monkey

The Tanjung Puting National Park has three orangutan feeding stations providing food for orangutans that have been rehabilitated into the wild. Luckily for us tourists we are allowed to visit them! In addition to these stations the jungle abounds with proboscis and macau monkeys and the odd gibbon can be seen too. Birds are plentiful and in between demolishing big meals we enjoyed some wildlife spotting. We were certainly well fed, Susie and I relishing the Indonesian food after months of eating assorted sweet potatoes, fish and coconuts.

So many bananas, so little time

This stuff makes you strong?

You sit and wait for the next visitor. The first sign of an approaching orangutan is the sight of moving leaves high up in the trees. The way they move between trees had us riveted. They will often climb high up a tree and rock it until it starts to swing. Once it gets swinging they continue until they can grab the next tree and gracefully move into that. And so they move from tree to tree before descending down to earth and onto the platform to feed.

Winner of Borneo’s Got Talent show

A gibbon monkey called ‘Boy’ has locked into the Camp Leake feeding station and turns up every day to enjoy the bananas although he showed no interest in the milk. With long arms he’d sweep from tree to tree and then grab a few bananas before climbing into a tree next to the platform and sit rather nonchalantly eating his fruit before descending for a few more.

And so we spent our three days leisurely moving between feeding stations, doing a few walks, eating, catching up with Neville and Glenys and generally being content with life. On our last day we were walking up a wooden boardwalk when we spotted a young male called ‘Atlas’. It’s quite something to get close up to these orangutans and he seemed unfazed by his cousins, the humans. Sitting in the tree, Atlas decided he would pass over the top of us in the trees over our heads. Neville and Tom quickly got the cameras out as he posed. Susie and Glenys were in the background and decided to do an impromptu pose for a picture with an orangutan overhead. At this moment Atlas fell out of the tree – nearly on top of Susie and Glenys! Looking not too pleased, he gave them a disgruntled look and walked off. Sadly this blog isn’t big enough but if you head over to Facebook you can see the very funny sequence of photos on Tom’s page.

Alpha Male

The three days of living the easy life were up all too quickly and we returned to our boats, Adina and Alba. The battery gods had been kind and our steak and lobsters were still nicely frozen, averting the need for an impromptu feast.

While the forest fire smoke had been bad at dawn and dusk each day, during the daytime it had largely cleared up so hadn’t presented any real problem. The day we left it suddenly became thicker and we motored down the river wearing masks, our next destination the island of Belitung, a two day, two night passage away.

Seeing the orangutans proved to be the highlight we had hoped it would be. They enchanted us with their behaviour and expressive faces, delighted us with their play and grabbed our attention as they swung effortlessly between the trees. We were glad we had taken the chance, despite the forest fire smoke. Might even try some banana balls dipped in milk and vitamins one day.

More pictures – click here