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Cruising for Wildlife
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So we used the last of our time here in Malaysian Borneo (sniff) to do a three day, two night wildlife safari on the Sungai Kinabatangan (Kinabatangan river). A six hour bus ride from Kota Kinabalu, and an hour in a 4x4 from there, to a wildlife reserve along the banks of the river. A depressing amount of logging goes on in this area, and this is one of the main reasons that the area is so good for looking for wildlife - there's so little forest left that all the animals are easily found by boat. The strip of forest is about 100m wide, and in some parts you can see the oil palm plantations encroaching in as far as the river bank. Nasty stuff, but hopefully the WWF's involvement in the area will help to preserve it (and I don't mean the wrestlers, though their help could also come in handy here).
Anyway, we stayed at a lovely place called the Nature Lodge Kinabatangan in some fairly rustic huts on the river banks. We did river cruises each evening before dusk and each morning just after sunrise, plus a night walk and a day hike. It was excellent to see the wildlife from the boat as we've pretty much had enough of sweating our way through the jungle. The day trek was nice, saw some birds and plenty of leeches and not a lot else. The night walk was excellent, lots of sleeping birds in the trees, including hornbills, a scorpion couple, some fantastic spiders and of course the experience of walking through the cacophany of insects in the darkness, with only our small torches to guide us.
The highlight of the trip, and of course our aim in coming here in the first place, was seeing wild orangutans. Our eagle-eyed guide spotted a couple, a male and a female, climbing in a tree back from the banks of the river - so it wasn't the clearest or closest view, but it was still amazing to see them. Of course we saw plenty of other wildlife as well: proboscis monkeys with their large noses (unique to Borneo), macaque monkeys (both long-tailed and pig-tailed), wild boar, silverleaf langurs, a mangrove snake coiled up in a tree above us, some massive monitor lizards lazing on tree branches, two rhinoceros hornbill birds up close (amazing birds!), pied hornbill, blue-throated bee-eater, plenty of beautiful kingfisthers and some eagles. Well worth the trip and a good end to our time in Sabah.
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