So far in Borneo in the two weeks I've been here I've seen proboscis monkeys, langurs and bearded pigs, pitcher plants and the world's largest flower, giant squirrels and tufted ground squirrels, black naped terns, metallic pigeons and white-rumped shamas, glow in the dark moss and fireflies, more lizardy-dragony-things than you'd find in the Millennium Stadium on match day and so many species of palms that not even Mum's, Grandie's and Auntie Mary's minds combined would be able to identify them all. I've seen primary rainforest, mangroves, the remains of bush fires, weird volcanic-like plateaus and even weirder sandstone structures. I've lounged on beaches, hiked up hills and dragged my way up waterfalls. I've seen the only species of stingless bee, been spat at by a cobra and I've shaken a pot of salt over my left buttock to persuade a leech to let go. I've watched countless DVDs (non-pirated ones for once) and gorged on toast and jam. I've visited supposedly the best museum in southeast Asia and found a lovely internet cafe that's genuinely and internet cafe.All this while staying in the best hostel so far, Borneo Seahare, run by the uber friendly Wesley and Teresa. I and the other two guests even went with them to Teresa's family's homes for open houses to celebrate Hari Raya. Open house is where people open their houses to family, friends and in theory anyone passing by and they provide them with food and drink. Muslims here do it for Hari Raya (the end of Ramadan), Christians for Christmas, Hindus for Deepvali and Buddhists for Chinese New Year. We only went to two homes to eat and I was already full bus Welsey and Teresa used to go to fifteen in one day when they were younger! I get the feeling that Sarawak is a lot more racially mixed and tolerant than in Peninsular Malaysia: Welsey, for example, is half Iban (one of the native tribes), half Chinese bus it Christian and in the houses of Teresa's family we visited there were Malays married to Chinese and all sorts of combinations. Of course you find this all over Malaysia but especially so here in Sarawak.
The city the hostel was in, incidently, is Borneo's largest city but you could easily walk from one end of the city centre to the other in fifteen minutes. It's called Kuching, meaning 'cat', so named as legend would have it because when Rajah James Brooke first arrived on his yacht he asked his guide what it was called. Thinking he was pointing to a cat the guide answered 'Kuching'. However, it's more likely that it's a corruption from the Indian word for 'port' - 'cochin'. Even so, the city is full of giant sculptures of cats as well as plenty of real strays running about the place. The souvenir shops are all filled a third with T-shirts, a third with local tribal woodwork and a third with cat-related things. There's even a cat museum, the world's first. Kuching is the capital of Sarawak, one of two Malaysian states in Borneo (the other being Sabah), with Brunei and Indonesian Kalimantan making up the rest. Sarawak itself has a pretty interesting history having been colonised not by the British but by a single 
man, James Brooke, and later by his nephew then by his nephew's son. It once all belonged to Brunei but when James Brooke arrived in 1841 there were many bloody tribal disputes going on. The Sultan of Brunei told him that if he would settle these disputes in a certain area then he would give him that land as his own to govern. He set up a special legal system that proved so effective that he was basically given nearly all of Brunei and made it Sarawak. The British didn't like this and never accepted Sarawak as an official British colony (although the Brookes wanted them to). When they took it over after the Japanese Occupation during the Second World War they banned the Brooke family from returning and exiled them to Australia, one of which came back to lead an unsuccessful rebellion against the British. Nowadays though the Brookes are looked upon like royalty by the Sarawakians and are invited back for official celebrations because even though they were colonisers they were the ones that actually formed Sarawak for Sarawakians.
Seeing as I've been up to so much I couldn't possibly talk about it all so I thought I'd just choose one day: my encounter with orangutans at Semenggoh Nature Reserve. I woke up early on Monday morning and after lying in bed doing nothing for a while in a very Hedd style decided to get up, get ready, eat some toast with jam (supplied free in the hostel) and get to the tourist information centre by the waterfront in time to catch the minibus to Semenggoh at 8 a.m. There, I met Germaine, a Belgium/Italian woman in her sixties also staying at the hostel who had the spirit of a young backpacker, a Danish and a Texan woman and the driver, a jolly Malay who knew anything and everything about the nature reserve.
We got to Semenggoh about forty minutes later, walked over a sheltered bridge and to a small area with a large tree, some planted pitcher plants, some caged crocodiles, the vetenary centre and a few other buildings. We waited here until 9 at which time a warden in the jungle was leaving fruit - bananas, papayas, coconuts, all the things they'd eat in the wild - on a feeding platform. The head warden was radioed that there were some orangutans there that had come for some breakfast so we all (about 50-odd all together, most had come as one big French tour group) followed him in along a planked path into the jungle. There, we saw a large feeding platform about forty metres away and on it was an orangutan eating away. Or rather, he wasn't really 'on' it, more like leaning towards while balancing spread-eagle on the surrounding vines, gripping lightly with three of his hands (they have hands instead of feet) and using the other to shove the fruits into his mouth. In the trees imediately above were a mother and her child, only a few months old, waiting for the male who was eating to leave. And in the far distance you could see trees swaying and bending like pendulums and then suddenly spring back as orangutans moved about the rainforrest.
man, James Brooke, and later by his nephew then by his nephew's son. It once all belonged to Brunei but when James Brooke arrived in 1841 there were many bloody tribal disputes going on. The Sultan of Brunei told him that if he would settle these disputes in a certain area then he would give him that land as his own to govern. He set up a special legal system that proved so effective that he was basically given nearly all of Brunei and made it Sarawak. The British didn't like this and never accepted Sarawak as an official British colony (although the Brookes wanted them to). When they took it over after the Japanese Occupation during the Second World War they banned the Brooke family from returning and exiled them to Australia, one of which came back to lead an unsuccessful rebellion against the British. Nowadays though the Brookes are looked upon like royalty by the Sarawakians and are invited back for official celebrations because even though they were colonisers they were the ones that actually formed Sarawak for Sarawakians.
Seeing as I've been up to so much I couldn't possibly talk about it all so I thought I'd just choose one day: my encounter with orangutans at Semenggoh Nature Reserve. I woke up early on Monday morning and after lying in bed doing nothing for a while in a very Hedd style decided to get up, get ready, eat some toast with jam (supplied free in the hostel) and get to the tourist information centre by the waterfront in time to catch the minibus to Semenggoh at 8 a.m. There, I met Germaine, a Belgium/Italian woman in her sixties also staying at the hostel who had the spirit of a young backpacker, a Danish and a Texan woman and the driver, a jolly Malay who knew anything and everything about the nature reserve.We got to Semenggoh about forty minutes later, walked over a sheltered bridge and to a small area with a large tree, some planted pitcher plants, some caged crocodiles, the vetenary centre and a few other buildings. We waited here until 9 at which time a warden in the jungle was leaving fruit - bananas, papayas, coconuts, all the things they'd eat in the wild - on a feeding platform. The head warden was radioed that there were some orangutans there that had come for some breakfast so we all (about 50-odd all together, most had come as one big French tour group) followed him in along a planked path into the jungle. There, we saw a large feeding platform about forty metres away and on it was an orangutan eating away. Or rather, he wasn't really 'on' it, more like leaning towards while balancing spread-eagle on the surrounding vines, gripping lightly with three of his hands (they have hands instead of feet) and using the other to shove the fruits into his mouth. In the trees imediately above were a mother and her child, only a few months old, waiting for the male who was eating to leave. And in the far distance you could see trees swaying and bending like pendulums and then suddenly spring back as orangutans moved about the rainforrest.
After about half an hour they'd all mosty gone apart from one adolecent female who was waiting in the trees just above our heads. She obviously wanted to go down to eat but for some reason wasn't, maybe because she was shy in front of all the spectators, maybe because of something else. A warden went to the feeding platform and had a look down to see if there were any snakes around that might be scaring her off. Whatever it was she was starting to get angry and she started to tear branches off the tree she was holding on to and throw them down, then she began weeing above the observation platform, wetting some of the spectators. Then a pair of tufted ground squirrels climbed up the wooden legs and onto the feeding platform to eat, and it was these the warden said that must have been scaring her off coming down.By this time nearly all the visitors had left as their tour busses were leaving at ten. The minibus I took was leaving too but I'd arranged to stay in the centre and take the same minibus back when it returned for the afternoon feeding. It was only me and a group of four people from near Chester who were left. The husband of one couple in the group had worked for many years as a doctor around Bario, deep in the Heart of Borneo close to the Sarawakian-Kalamantan border and had been to the centre many times. The wife of the other couple had worked in the apes section in Chester zoo and so was thrilled to see some semi-wild orangutans. "Things like seeing them swinging from one tree to another," she said, "you just don't get to see that in the zoo."
We left the jungle and after chatting with them for a while I took a break by learning more about Semenggoh Wildlife Centre (sometimes it's c
alled a Wildlife Centre, sometimes a Nature Reserve). For the past few decades it has been a centre where orphaned or recovered orangutans came to be rehabilitated and taught how to survive in the wild. When they'd completed their training they were let out into the surrounding forrest, and food palced on the platforms twice a day if they wanted to come back to eat. They start by coming back regularly (then classed as semi-wild) and then less and less until they feel comfortable enough to be completely wild and never return. So in a sense the fewer orangutans that come to feed the better. Nowadays the rehabilitation training goes on in a seperate wildlife centre but Semenggoh is still the best place to go in Sarawak to see them up close.
I had a good four hours or so to burn so I thought I'd wonder around the centre and enjoy its other attractions that most people never bother visiting. As well as being an orangutan centre it's also a botanical centre with many gardens and a seed bank. This is the part of my travels when I wish someone like mum was here to explain all the different plants; I've seen enough David Attenborough programmes to recognise most of the animals's calls and to understand their behaviour but plants are still pretty alien! I got to the first garden, an exotic fruit garden, and meandered up and down its slopes reading the wooden labels by the trunks of the trees thinking I might have a better chance to know what type of tree I was looking at if I could understand Malay or Latin... having a couple of fruits hanging down would have helped too but every tree in the garden, although covered in leaves and very much alive, was fruitless.
alled a Wildlife Centre, sometimes a Nature Reserve). For the past few decades it has been a centre where orphaned or recovered orangutans came to be rehabilitated and taught how to survive in the wild. When they'd completed their training they were let out into the surrounding forrest, and food palced on the platforms twice a day if they wanted to come back to eat. They start by coming back regularly (then classed as semi-wild) and then less and less until they feel comfortable enough to be completely wild and never return. So in a sense the fewer orangutans that come to feed the better. Nowadays the rehabilitation training goes on in a seperate wildlife centre but Semenggoh is still the best place to go in Sarawak to see them up close.I had a good four hours or so to burn so I thought I'd wonder around the centre and enjoy its other attractions that most people never bother visiting. As well as being an orangutan centre it's also a botanical centre with many gardens and a seed bank. This is the part of my travels when I wish someone like mum was here to explain all the different plants; I've seen enough David Attenborough programmes to recognise most of the animals's calls and to understand their behaviour but plants are still pretty alien! I got to the first garden, an exotic fruit garden, and meandered up and down its slopes reading the wooden labels by the trunks of the trees thinking I might have a better chance to know what type of tree I was looking at if I could understand Malay or Latin... having a couple of fruits hanging down would have helped too but every tree in the garden, although covered in leaves and very much alive, was fruitless.
So I continued onto the next garden - a bamboo garden. This was much more fun as it meant I could pretent to be super strong by effortlessly shaking a structure metres and metres tall and seeing its leaves russle high above me as I did. I walked deep into this garden, testing each different species of bamboo to see which had the best shake-factor, until I saw something on the dirt track that I knew would keep me occupied for a long time: a trail of ants. It's become something of a favourite pasttime while trecking through jungles out here to take a break by a trail of ants. I try to see where they're coming from and where they're going to, watch them eat whatever they're eating or fight whatever they're fighting, put little leaves in their paths to see how they overcome the obstacle or collect them on a stick and put them down somewhere else and see how long it takes for them to get back on track... I'm sure I could play with them for hours but the trail usually ends and they've all moved on within about half an hour.I left the bamboo garden and found a third garden along the road, this time a Chinese herb garden. This one was much more landscaped than the rest with a small lake in its centre and some benches all around. When I entered I saw one plant that must have been a type of cactus, tall and completely covered in a deep green waxy coat with needles
sticking out of its fleshy branches. I wondered if it might be an aloe plant or something (again, a lack of Chinese and Latin didn't help) so I snapped a tiny bit off and smelled the white goo oozing from the flesh. It didn't smell of anything so I squeezed some of the goo onto the back of my hands and rubbed it in to see if it could be used as some sort of moisturiser. It turned out to be very sticky though and wouldn't come off when I poured water all over it. In fact the water seemed to make it even more sticky. By this time the sun was shining very brightly so I found a bench in the shade and got out my 'A Short History of Malaysia' book. I read about half a page about the Johor Sultanate after the Portuguese had driven them from Melaka and, as always happens when I start reading the book, felt sleepy, lied down on the bench and had a nap.
When I woke up it was time to go back to the orangutans for the afternoon feeding so I made my way there trying not to scratch the back of my hands which had by now come out in a bright red rash! My jaw and the back of my elbows were also tingling, places I must have touched with my hands in my sleep. When I got to the small area with the tree and the pitcher plants there were three orangutans there: the same mother and baby that was in the morning session and another adolescent who's the older sibling of the baby. They were only a few metres away from us so I could see their actions much more closely than in the morning. Orangutans are generally a little smaller than humans but they're about 6-7 times stronger than us, something you can find hard to believe until you see them effortlessly bite a coconut in half and pour the water into their mouths! The older sister was enjoying herself too, for example when she dropped a sweet potato she was eating the head warden picked it up and streched his arm offering it back. The orangutan took it from him but it 'slipped' out of her hand, so the head warden offered it again and again it 'slipped' out of her hand. The third time it was offered she took it and threw it away as far as she could!There weren't any orangutans who had come to eat in the main eating area in the jungle so we stayed around these three until suddenly everyone started running over the sheltered bridge to the entrance to the jungle. There stood Delima, a veteran of the centre who usually always turns up for food, and she started walking towards the croud and then onto the sheltered bridge, where she climbed up onto the bench running along one side of the bridge. I was lucky enough to be on the bridge at the time and sat on the bench on the other side of the bridge sitting virtually opposite her only a few m
etres away. As if this wasn't amazing enough we then saw something tiny clinging onto her hairy chest that you couldn't see at all when she was walking on all fours - it was her new baby born only that morning! This was the first time anyone had seen it and given that they have a newborn at an average of only one a year the wardens were all excited and overjoyed while us spectators just looked on in awe. This was Delima's fourth and probably her last child, and the fact that she'd just given birth to a healthy baby boy on her own in the jungle is proof that Semenggoh works.
etres away. As if this wasn't amazing enough we then saw something tiny clinging onto her hairy chest that you couldn't see at all when she was walking on all fours - it was her new baby born only that morning! This was the first time anyone had seen it and given that they have a newborn at an average of only one a year the wardens were all excited and overjoyed while us spectators just looked on in awe. This was Delima's fourth and probably her last child, and the fact that she'd just given birth to a healthy baby boy on her own in the jungle is proof that Semenggoh works.Delima carried on sitting on the bench for a while tucking into fruit from a bucket placed down beside her. She was obviously very hungry after the birth and it was fascinating to watch 
her just sitting there peeling bananas and papayas and showing off her suckling baby to everyone. Then she got up and slowly walked back over the bridge and up the road, posing for pictures (unfortunately by camera ran out of batteries in the morning! gutted.) along the way and shoving fruits into her mouth to keep for later. Suddenly it started to drizzle so Delima with her baby boy climbed up a bank and into the thick jungle to find shelter and to rest in her nest. Like always out here, within a minute the drizzle had become a heavy thunderstorm and our minds went from running after orangutans to running back to the busses. I was able to buy a set of photos and postcards along the way and then we (this time me, a couple from Twickenham and the same driver) were on our way back to Kuching, soaked but feeling very privelaged.
Right now I've just tucked into a delicious laksa Sarawak and a laici kang after taking a 12-hour bus journey from Kuching to a town called Batu Niah in northern Sarawak who's economy is dependent on birds nests and bat poo from the million or so swiftlets and bats living in the caves close by. The caves are also the most important archeological discovery in SE Asia as they contain the remains of the earliest known homo sapien inhabitants in the region as well as cave paintings depicting their 'death boats'. Then it's off to Brunei for the weekend to see the palace of the man who earns £5,000,000 a day then back into Sarawak to visit Lambir Hills National Park, the most bio-diverse place on the planet where I'll see some wild orchids and maybe even a hornbill. All this before being out of contact for a fortnight while living like a local in the jungles of Sabah. Wish me luck!
her just sitting there peeling bananas and papayas and showing off her suckling baby to everyone. Then she got up and slowly walked back over the bridge and up the road, posing for pictures (unfortunately by camera ran out of batteries in the morning! gutted.) along the way and shoving fruits into her mouth to keep for later. Suddenly it started to drizzle so Delima with her baby boy climbed up a bank and into the thick jungle to find shelter and to rest in her nest. Like always out here, within a minute the drizzle had become a heavy thunderstorm and our minds went from running after orangutans to running back to the busses. I was able to buy a set of photos and postcards along the way and then we (this time me, a couple from Twickenham and the same driver) were on our way back to Kuching, soaked but feeling very privelaged.Right now I've just tucked into a delicious laksa Sarawak and a laici kang after taking a 12-hour bus journey from Kuching to a town called Batu Niah in northern Sarawak who's economy is dependent on birds nests and bat poo from the million or so swiftlets and bats living in the caves close by. The caves are also the most important archeological discovery in SE Asia as they contain the remains of the earliest known homo sapien inhabitants in the region as well as cave paintings depicting their 'death boats'. Then it's off to Brunei for the weekend to see the palace of the man who earns £5,000,000 a day then back into Sarawak to visit Lambir Hills National Park, the most bio-diverse place on the planet where I'll see some wild orchids and maybe even a hornbill. All this before being out of contact for a fortnight while living like a local in the jungles of Sabah. Wish me luck!
