We said a sad goodbye to Sipadan and the turtles and boarded a Fokker 50 for the hour flight north, over endless miles of Palm Oil plantations, to Sandakan. This was to be our base for a jungle adventure with Uncle Tan's. First though we paid a visit to the Sepilok Orang-Utan Sanctuary and Rehabilitation Centre. This is a reserve of 43 sq km of primary rainforest and mangrove which was established in the 1960s to protect orang-utan from extinction. The main draw is feeding time where you get to watch the orang-utan on the feeding platform from reasonably close quarters. It is pretty addictive watching their amazingly agile acrobatics dangling from their feet and hands and swinging wildly between the trees. As you are reasonably close, it is also a good opportunity to take photos and I certainly took hundreds, a small selection of which are shown here. The heat and humidity was however pretty overwhelming and after just half an hour the sweat is pouring off you.
After a glimpse of Bornean wildlife we were ready for the real thing and pilled into the Uncle Tan's mini van along with 10 or so other backpackers to head into the jungle in a remote area of Kinabatangan. Around an hour and half later, and as the rain really started to become torrential, we transferred into small uncovered motor boats. Surprisingly, this being a rainforest and all, rain was a bit of a theme to this trip.
We arrived at the camp, after about an hour, very wet and hoping the black plastic bin liners we had used to cover our rucksacks had been effective. The camp is about 500m from the river through the jungle. Our guide recommended that we borrowed some wellies for the walk as it can get very muddy. Unfortunately for Richard there were none he could actually get his feet into – this was soon to lead to some very muddy shoes.
The accommodation at Uncle Tan's is pretty basic – wooden huts with mattresses on the floor and the essential mosquito nets. It is all set on raised wooden walk ways to protect it from the mud and frequent flooding. After a cup of tea and a briefing describing the various types of primates, birds, crocodiles and deadly inspects that can be found in the area, we set off on our first night time river safari. Unfortunately we didn't have much luck and only saw a brief glimpse of a very small croc, a couple of owls and some macaques, which a pretty ubiquitous around here.
We had much better luck the next day when our 6:30am start was rewarded with finding an Orang-utan. Whilst it was high up in the trees so we didn't get as good a view as at the sanctuary, you still feel very privileged to be seeing one in the wild. We also saw several proboscis monkeys – they are the ones with the ridiculously long noses and fat bellies.
We managed to fit in a second boat safari and two jungle treks in during the rest of the day so I won't bore you with exactly what we saw on each but the highlight was probably the night trek. In this we focused on the small stuff, my particular favourite being the frogs and a sleeping kingfisher. I was less enamoured by the tarantula which was larger than a hand. Luckily it was high up in a tree, but still you couldn't help jumping sightly every time a twig brushed you unexpectedly. Given the lack of wellies in Richard's size he had to resort to fashioning some shoe coverings out of black bin liners. As we were knee deep in the muddy swamp, he commented that it felt like we had come full circle from the start of our trip, as the experience was very much like Glastonbury, but without the live music. The frogs, however, did provide all variety of strange noises.
The journey home was accompanied by some of the loudest thunder and heaviest rain I have every experienced. We were soaked to the bone, extremely muddy and feeling pretty sick - Richard had developed the cold that I had in Sipidan, but it had turned into a deadly case of man-flu. However, this was still a great experience and we would still highly recommend this trip to anyone who doesn't mind a bit of mud and and the odd poisonous spider.
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