Borneo (sabah) - Kinabatangan River & Sepilok

River safari on the Kinabatangan

The Kinabatangan River was brilliant! We organized a tour through Nature lodge Kinabatangan and were staying in a really nice little hut with an en suite bathroom, quite a different experience to Kutai! There were lots of other tourists there and we were all organized into groups of about 8. We had signed up for the 3 day/2night package and it was perfect. We did two early morning and two afternoon river cruises, two night walks and a jungle trek. To start with it felt a bit like a school trip, about 60 people all piling onto boats and heading off down the river…we were skeptical as to how much wildlife we would see but we were very pleasantly surprised. 

River safari on the Kinabatangan

Basic lodges were very comfortable

Borneo's pygmy elephants - much like other
elephants only...erm a bit smaller!

Within 10 minutes of leaving the jetty we were watching the pygmy elephants eating at the side of the bank….difficult to believe that they’re actually quite rare to see when we had seen them so quickly! Over the three days we also saw a couple of orangutans, lots of macaques, the endemic proboscus monkey, gibbons, the silver leaf monkey, a mangrove snake, a green pit viper, a barred eagle owl, lots of king fishers, 6 species of hornbill, monitor lizards and salt water crocodiles!! Those of you interested in every single species of bird spotted can contact Mike directly and he can show you his bird book with each one lovingly marked offJ you can also discuss his favorite question at the moment which is why scuba diving is considered cool and bird watching isn’t?? Luckily for him we have a lot more scuba diving planned.

Monitor lizard

Barred eagle owl

This orangutan was sucking the juice out of some figs
and dribbling it down his stomach

Blue eared kingfisher with large fish

Jungle trekking is muddy!

Sunrise over the Kinabatangan river

Getting ready for the night jungle walk

Mangrove snake

Orangutan feeding time

After the Kinabatangan we headed up towards Sandakan in order to be able to visit the famous Sepilok Orangutan Santuary. We stayed in ‘Uncle Tans’ hostel which provided us with endless rounds of table tennis and pool as well as the odd game of darts for entertainment. The orangutan sanctuary has feeding times when you can go to the feeding platform and watch the orangutans eating. They are the orangutans that have been rehabilitated and released into the wild so they may or may not decide to show up. Apparently some of the orangutans once released never return and others never fully adapt to being back in the wild and come back often to feed at the centre. We saw just one Orangutan when we visited, and although reasonably close to us he had his back turned most of the time. I think we were  little disappointed not to have seen more orangutans close up at Sepilok, but at the same time just so pleased we’d had such a good prior encounter in Kutai.  

Flying squirrel at Sepilok

Malaysian taxi....bizarre

Enjoying sugar free pancakes

 As well as visiting Sepilock we also decided to go to the proboscus monkey sanctuary which was brilliant!! Again there are fixed times when the monkeys come to feeding platforms to eat and a walkway for the spectators to stand. Only this time the monkeys were everywhere, there must have been about 50 or 60 in total and ignoring all the rules they ran on the spectator walkways and banged their fists on the roof. Watching them all interact together as a big group was brilliant…the big alpha male asserting his position by taking and hoarding all the food (sugar free pancakes) and then the little baby ones timidly approaching the feeding platform before being scared away by one of his bullying brothers. They are such bizarre looking animals that almost everything they did was entertaining to watch. As well as the proboscus monkeys there were also some silver leaf monkeys that enjoyed posing for photos.

Definitely the male proboscus monkey

Silver leaf monkey

Proboscus monkeys were not fazed by tourists