April, 2001

We have just come back to the yacht after a five day “adventure tour” to Sandakan and the rain forest on the east coast of Borneo. Our adventure trip was .. an adventure. 

We took a bus from Kota Kinabalu to Sandakan, 175 miles that takes between six and seven hours with a half hour stop for lunch. Sandakan used to be the capital of Sabah until the Allies bombed it into oblivion during WW II. Although Sandakan is a launching point for many tourist attractions, it is indeed limited in what it has to offer. Fortunately, our needs are simple. We had booked a three-star hotel for our first night there, figuring that after more than 6 hours on the bus we would welcome a bit of comfort. It wasn’t bad – a decent hotel, but the food was nothing to write home about. Then again, the food everywhere in Sandakan was nothing to write home about. Not enough Chinese there, I think.

The tour was to start the following morning, and we were told that a licensed guide would pick us up at the hotel at 8 in the morning, for three full days of touring. I had worried that we and the guide would not find each other, but when we got to the lobby that morning, it was obvious that we were the only tourists there. So we sat looking for our guide, who we had been told would have a picture ID and would be wearing a tour operator’s shirt. Nobody like that appeared. Then a man in a yellow polo shirt came up to us, telling us we were to come with him. His English was rudimentary at best. I asked him who he was, where was his ID – he pointed to himself, said “Rahman”. I said, “fine, now who are we?” He looked confused and was not communicating. I finally pulled out our itinerary with our name on it (which I had almost left on the boat, just shoving it into my purse at the last minute). The fellow looked at it, pulled out a piece of paper with our name scrawled on it, and seemed to examine the note. Seeing that he had our name, I figured that we had the right person, and so off we went (oh, how trusting we foolish tourists can be!). The van also reassured me, because it had the tour company name painted on the door. The fellow then told us we were going to “Sukau”. I said that I thought that we were going to Sepilok (Orangutan Rehabilitation Center) first. He made no answer, just started the van and drove. We sat there with a man who couldn’t speak English, and wondered what we had let ourselves in for. Our reassurance when we did indeed arrive at Sepilok a half hour later, at about 9 in the morning, didn’t last very long because as we got out of the van to head for the visitor’s center the driver told us we had one hour. No, said I, we were there to see the feeding of the orangutans which only started in an hour. I was beginning to feel just a bit desperate: what had we gotten ourselves in for? All the other tourists had real guides, with picture I.D.s, and some sort of uniform. And they spoke English. Never mind, we bought our ticket, watched the half-hour movie that gave some information about the orangutans and the rehabilitation center, and attached ourselves to one of the groups as everybody marched to the feeding station. I heard a guide tell his group that they were lucky because the day before only one orangutan had come to the feeding station, and today there were three.

The interaction between the orangutans was more interesting than just watching them eat, but the incessant chattering of the tour guides and the tourists was a bit annoying, drowning out the sounds of the forest. Maybe if the tour guides had been a bit quieter, setting a properly respectful example, the tourists wouldn’t have been so loud. It was still interesting, though I think that the Semenggoh Rehabilitation Center in Sarawak that we had visited last year was a better trip.

With the young orangutans heading back to the forest with their bunches of bananas, we found our guide and got into the van for who knew where. He just drove. After half an hour of driving, a man flagged down our van, spoke with the driver, and then explained that he was our guide, that we were staying at Sipidan Lodge and he would join us at the lodge later that day. “SIPIDAN?” I asked – Sipidan is the island where the Philippine Muslim separatists had kidnapped ten tourists back in April of this year. I could not imagine we would be going there because it was a long, long way from where we were, but this was turning into a peculiar adventure indeed, so it seemed that anything was possible. But no, Sipidan was just the name of the lodge, don’t worry. 

So, off we went for almost another two hours, over a truly dreadful road. We drove through an endless series of palm oil plantations, with not a rain forest tree to be seen. This wasn’t what we had expected, but we figured we’d better make the most of it, so we sat quietly as we bumped and bounced over the road, only once gasping when we inched past an enormous hole, big enough to swallow our van and a Greyhound bus besides, smack dab in the middle of the road. 

We finally arrived at a “settlement” – two or three buildings and several men sitting around on the steps of one of the buildings. Our driver stopped, said something to the men who pointed down the river. The driver got back into the van and turned around and set off again. Five minutes later we pulled up into a small resort named “Uncle Ben’s Riverside Lodge”. I checked my intinerary, and sure enough, this was where we were supposed to be.

We got out of the van, a fellow came out from one of the back rooms and handed us a key. I was all set to take it and settle down, but Peter asked the fellow, “is this Sipidan Lodge?” He answered that it wasn’t, and a lot of discussion ensued. He pulled out his cell phone and made a call. He then announced that the driver would be here to pick us up to bring us to the lodge. I was totally confused and showed the fellow our itinerary. He answers “oh, I guess you’re supposed to be here after all.” More discussions, with Peter insisting that we belonged at Sipidan Lodge (I think he saw what the other guests were eating for lunch and figured that anything was better than that!). The discussion was cut short by the arrival of the outboard-driven canoe that took us to “our” lodge. 

The sign over the river jetty said “Proboscis Lodge” – still no Sipidan Lodge, and by now I am beginning to think that this is an exceptionally complicated kidnapping ploy. Had it been, we would have deserved to be kidnapped after showing such incredible trust in strangers who couldn’t even speak our language. But the lady who greeted us spoke excellent English (she’s from the Philippines), greeted us by name, and reassured me that this was indeed where we were supposed to be. It was now about 2 in the afternoon, and we were starved; we were supposed to have been provided with three meals, and no food had yet been given to us. Alma, the Philippino, immediately bustled back into the kitchen and within a very short time we had an excellent lunch of Lemon Chicken, fried fish, rice and fresh vegetables. Things were looking up.

After lunch a fellow announced that we were going on a river excursion, so we clambered into the outboard canoe. The lodge is on the Kinibatangan River, and our first trip was up a narrow tributary, almost completely overhung with trees and vines. 

The contrast between this rain forest and the oil palm plantations that we had passed through to get here was dramatic; and we were now sure that we were on our adventure tour. There are about five lodges along this stretch of river, and each lodge had launched a boat full of tourists for the river trip. All the other boats had between eight and twelve people; but Peter and I were the only tourists in our boat with both a driver and guide to do our bidding. We saw a whole lot – Long-tailed Macaques; Pig-tailed Macaques; Proboscis Monkeys; Silver Langurs (another kind of monkey); Maroon Langurs; a Monitor Lizard just lazing in a tree; a Mangrove Snake when I announced I wanted to see a snake or two; and sitting in a tree just looking at all the tourists was a most adorable owl. Because nobody is feeding these animals they do not consider the tourists to be a food source and remain wild. Although well out of our reach in the trees, some of the monkeys we saw were not particularly pleased to see the boats full of tourists, and they would leap from tree branch to tree branch until they were well away from us. Peter was looking for his no-fault divorce again, and asked if there were any crocodiles in the river. Yes, they replied, and maybe we would see one. We did (of course), but too small to be the agent of Peter’s divorce, alas.

All told we took three different river excursions in a day and a half. I had really wanted to see the famous Hornbill, and we were lucky enough to see four different ones. The largest of the hornbills, the Rhinoceros Hornbill, is huge – I’d say bigger than an Osprey. The growth on its head is called a casque, and to me, at least, it seemed to serve a similar purpose to the casque on top of the Cassowary. The hornbills are loud, with a raucous cry that seems to be amplified by its huge beak and casque. They land so high in the trees that it is difficult to get a decent photo, so you are going to have to take my word for it that they are pretty spectacular.

The cook in the lodge was an exuberant naturalist, dragging us outside the lodge with a flashlight to show us a hornbill in one of the trees for the night, another time pulling us out to see an owl that had settled on a post behind the kitchen to do its night hunting. 

I wonder if the animals think we have been brought in for their entertainment. Many of the animals that we saw watched us as if we were the animals on display. The owl, a Buffy Fish Owl, simply sat on his tree limb watching us – he was beautiful (I might be a bit biased, since I think that owls are the most wonderful of birds). On the afternoon of our second day at the lodge we saw several wild orangutans, one of which was an old male, about 20 years old according to our guide. He sat in the tree, munching on his fruit and calmly looking down on us. 

Although we rarely join organized tours, this was not a trip that would have been as successful that way. The guides were absolutely necessary, both to spot the animals with their more experienced eyes and ears, and to tell us what we were looking at. To look at pictures of the macaques, the orangutans, or the hornbills, you would think that they would be easy to spot, but they are not. The rain forest is an incredibly dense jungle of trees and vines and plants living on top of plants, and the very busyness of it distracts the eye so that at first it was a real effort to see what the guide was pointing out to us. We got better as we traveled, but it was the canoe driver and the guide who knew where the monkeys were, and when we would find them. For example, late in the afternoon or very, very early in the morning were the best times to see the proboscis monkeys, because they would choose a tree near the river to sleep in. Macaques and orangutans eat fruit, and so the guide and driver look for the trees that are fruiting. 

The proboscis monkeys can only eat leaves, and are pretty particular about what kinds of leaves they eat, and so we looked for them in an entirely different place. Not only did we not know any of this, we would not have recognized a fruiting tree for what it was, and would have certainly missed a lot. Additionally, it was a most comfortable way to travel to see the animals. We could approach quite closely before they became alarmed, and thus got some really fantastic views of them eating, and playing, and jumping around from tree to tree.

Have any of you had bird’s nest soup? No? I haven’t, and couldn’t figure out what would be so great about eating sticks and twigs, or any broth made from them. Part of our trip was a visit to the Gomantong Caves, where the Cave Swift’s nests are collected to be sold to the Chinese as the ingredient in bird’s nest soup.

These birds don’t use sticks and twigs to make their nests. You’ve probably seen a Barn Swallow nest which is a cup-like affair made of mud and stuck up on the rafters of houses and barns. The Cave Swifts make a similar nest high up on the walls of the caves but rather than mud, the nests are fashioned out of their saliva. After the eggs have hatched, and the baby birds have left the nest, the locals come in with their ladders – rather rudimentary ladders – more like a long thin tree trunk, about 100 feet long, with smaller boards nailed onto it to provide footholds. There are two harvests a year following each of the swifts’ two breeding seasons. Each ladder has a man who climbs up and one or two men to hold the ladder and guide it around the cave. The caves provide the sole industry for the village that has sprung up to exploit the birds nests. The men can gather one kilogram (60 or 80 nests) in less than an hour, and they sell them for about $300 to $500 a kilogram, depending on the quality of the nests. That is wholesale, with a great deal of value added as the nests are cleaned (for example, using tweezers to remove all the little feathers), so by the time they are processed and ready for market, the birds nests are priced at about $1,000 a pound! 

At one time Birds’ Nest Soup was enjoyed only by the Chinese emperor and was forbidden to commoners. Now it is forbidden to commoners, but by the price of the nests set by the laws of capitalism, not the laws of emperors. They tell me that eating the soup is very healthful, though I’m not convinced that bird spit has anything to offer me. But it is an interesting trip. The floor of the cave is incredibly thick with guano (bird droppings) and crawling with cockroaches, which feed on the guano (if you have a problem with bugs, this is not the place to visit). And the bats and birds in the cave feed on the cockroaches and other insects and make more guano. I asked if the villagers mined the caves’ guano and was told absolutely not, that it would disrupt the delicate ecology of the cave with its birds. And that is sensible. Fertilizer would never sell for hundreds of dollars a pound, as these birds’ nests do.

Our last day in Sandakan was spent visiting the War Memorial (WW II), which was interesting but rather grim, and visiting the largest Buddhist Temple in Borneo. Like all the other temples we have visited it is brightly decorated, with dragons a dominant architectural feature.

Our trip back to Kota Kinabalu was another adventure. Although one can fly between Kota Kinabalu and Sandakan (about a 40-minute flight), we were in no hurry and enjoyed the sightseeing from a bus. When I had earlier inquired at the bus terminal when the bus left, I was told it would be at 7:30 in the morning, and that we should be there by 7:00. The man’s English was rather basic, and so I decided to drag Peter out at 6:30 to be sure that even if I had misunderstood him that we would still manage to get on a bus. When we got there the man told us to get onto a local bus, pay the equivalent of 20 cents, and we would get to the place where our bus left. Well! This wasn’t at all what I had expected, and nobody seemed to speak any English, so off we went, looking out the windows very intently to see where we were and where we were going. For all I knew we were headed for Sipidan! Before I could panic a fellow on the bus told us that we were there. …There… another bus station about five miles out of town and sure enough, a large air conditioned bus with KK as its destination. 

Almost as if we were getting onto an airplane they assigned us seats, which seemed a bit silly since there were only about five people on this huge bus. But as we motored along the bus picked up people along the road – no bus stop or anything like that – just a person standing on the side of the road with a knapsack or so next to him, putting up his hand and the bus stopped. After about two hours of this sporadic stopping to pick up people the bus was full and we barrelled along at a fine clip to KK. I would say that the top speed that the bus reached on the trip was about 30 miles an hour. The two-lane road was usually paved, though in places the macadam was washed away; in places they were in the process of building a new road and we were detoured onto a dirt track around the construction. Then there were the sections where one lane, or half the lane, had been washed out completely and there was a sheer drop down the mountainside where once had been a road. No barriers or signs or warnings were erected, there was just the word “AWAS (caution)” painted on the road - definitely not a road for an amateur to be driving on. But we made it back to KK and are again comfortably settled on the ‘Melon, planning our next trip.

Oh! One more interesting feature of our trip. We were up so early to return to KK that nothing was open until we got to the bus station, where Peter went to the local café to buy us each a cup of coffee to drink on the bus. He returned with our coffee in plastic bags with straws sticking out the top. No cups. Difficult to carry and hold, but at least no styrofoam debris floating around.

You can view all the photos at:
http://www.fototime.com/inv/11C3063750C2C86