'round the world

Orangs to KK

We had an incredible experince yesterday at the Semengoh Wildlife Rehab Center outside Kuching. We took a minibus into town around 11:00 am and caught a 45 minute rickity bus to the sanctuary at around 1 pm. On arrival we walked about 20 minutes (while sweating) through a boreal preserve with all kinds of jungle trees with names like gigantea something-or-else palms and so on. Eventually we got to where the rehab center was and took a trail to try and see some orang utans. For about 5 or 10 minutes we walked under the jungle canopy, saw some flying lizards and something looked like a squirrel the size of my arm. We found some benches where I hoped I would stop sweating, sat for a while, looked some more.

[url]http://www.sarawak.com.my/travel_features/national_park/semengoh/introduction.html[/url]

We got up to leave and walked about 50m down the trail before we heard some noise. Kacey and I looked up, wayyyyy up, and saw something rusty. About 100 or more feet above us a mother orang with its baby on its back were swinging from tree to tree, well, they were crashing from tree to tree - the mother jumping, the baby hanging on. I suppose they heard us and figured it was feeding time (we were there 45 minutes before the scheduled feeding of bananas). It was quite incredible. The mother watched us from above, the baby still clinging relieved itself in our direction (directly down), and another juvenile orang approached from the other side to see if any food was available. Kacey and I were able to watch these creatures for about 15 minutes before a group of four others came through, and then with them another 10 or so minutes before a tour group came with the people who brought in the bananas. We continued to watch, although now the orangs seemed to act a little less "real" - they were more aware of the people than they were when only Kacey and I were there. I took a whole bunch of pictures with the zoom lens and, luckily enough, found some 1600 ISO (very fast) film.

With my monkey quota filled for the trip, we headed back, had a good sleep, took a flight to Kota Kinabalu on a Fokker 50 (propeller plane) through some turbulence, landed, checked in to a not-so-clean (cramped, overpriced hostel and we're moving on tomorrow) hostel, on to the internet place, checked the Canucks score, nearly choked, wrote a weblog.

Goodnight, good morning, good afternoon,
Graham.