Tuesday 7th July
It’s now Thursday afternoon, and we have just arrived back in Sandakan after our 48 hour adventure to the little river village of Bilit.
More on that in a sec.
We left Sandakan around 08:00 Tuesday morning, heading for Sepilok, an outer suburb which is home to one of the largest orang-utan sanctuaries in Borneo. Despite all the good things we’d heard about the Sepilok Rehabilitation Centre, after Semenggoh, this was an utter disappointment…
Just like the Shangri-la Rasa Ria Resort (which we visited in 2013), your view of the orang-utans is from a boardwalk platform, and the stars of the show are located a good 15 meters away on a wooden platform built around a tree. The platform is fed by a series of ropes which the orang-utans use to come in for the feeding ritual. With a 300 mm zoom lens, you can fill maybe 50% of your frame with orang-utan. You really need at least a 400 mm lens to do it justice, but at Sepilok, a 400 mm lens brands you as a “professional” and with that designation comes a hefty fee (I think it was an extra RM100 to bring in a lens of that size or greater). Compared with Semenggoh, where we were walking down the road from the car park with the orang-utans right beside us, no “camera tax”, and the ability to get close-up shots of their faces, Sepilok had nothing.
However, in its defence, we did wander back toward the feeding platform about 20 mins later (thinking that perhaps the crowds would have dissipated and there might be something different to see…. maybe the male orang-utans would come down once everyone left?). As we approached, we noticed a small group of maybe 8-10 people standing with one of the keepers. There, sitting about 2 metres away from the boardwalk was a female orang-utan, quite happy to have her photo taken. This was an opportunity to get some lovely close-up shots of her face, much better than anything we had been able to see during the feeding. I even grabbed a couple of “selfies” of Cath with the orang-utan in the background.
After that, we decided to head next door to the Borneo Sun Bear Conservation Centre. Sun bears are a small, meat-eating, tree-climbing bear. Unfortunately, on this particular day, there were only two sun bears visible. One was flat out in the dirt, half obscured by a tree, and the other one was so far UP a tree that you could barely see him (or her). I didn’t even take a photo!
We decided not to hang around, as it was quite warm and very humid. We jumped back in the car and started our journey to Bilit. Little did we know just how awesome the next 48 hours would be!
We arrived at the jetty after a few mis-adventures (it wasn’t particularly well signposted!) and met our guide, Liam.
We loaded our belongings into the little 8 seater dinghy and headed off down the river for about 1km. We pulled up at another jetty, much smaller and much more “home-made-looking” than the first. We walked up to the village, which is really just a series of houses along the riverbank. There are no streets. Just a dirt track that runs through the front yard of every house. No fences. No gates. This is really primitive stuff.
The house was more than the humpies I’ve seen the REALLY poor people of Borneo living in, but it was still quite basic. Suspended about 8 feet off the ground (presumably to avoid the flood waters in the wet season), with floors of wooden floorboards with the occasional hole in them. The floors were covered in a patchwork of various pieces of linoleum, with lots of rips and tears. To be honest, it reminded me a little of my childhood in the 70’s. The “shower” was a bucket of water with a saucepan in it, located in the same room as the toilet. To shower, you would pour a saucepan full of room temperature water over yourself, and let the water find its way to the drain hole in the corner.
I won’t go into every detail of the house. I’m sure you’re getting the picture by now.
Our hostess, Needa (or perhaps Neida… I never did find out how she spelled it) was a small Malaysian woman with a lovely disposition. She was also a great cook!
We had arrived around 14:00 and had already eaten lunch on the way.
But almost as soon as we’d dropped our bags, she presented us with lunch. We felt it would be rude not to eat, given that she had obviously been cooking in preparation for our arrival.
Presented to us was stingray in a kind of black bean sauce (none of us had ever eaten stingray before, so that was our first culture shock), a chicken dish and a vegetable dish and a huge bowl of steaming hot boiled rice.
Next culture shock… there’s no dining table. You sit on the floor for meals.
Next culture shock… there’s no cutlery. You eat with your hands (yep, even the rice!).
We fumbled our way through our second lunch, making a complete mess of it (as you do when you’ve never eaten like this before!).
As I mentioned earlier, it was a really warm humid day, and the house naturally was devoid of air conditioning. We sweated through until 16:00 at which point, we jumped in another boat for our afternoon wildlife search up the river. We actually started heading down river first, but were only about 5 mins into it when we passed another boat full of tourists heading up river. Liam exchanged words with the other driver, swung the boat around and announced that we were going to follow the other boat. No reasoning was given at the time.
Over the next 45 mins or so, we saw the odd collection of monkeys here and there swinging through the trees or playing on the river banks, one or two hornbills (a famous bird in this part of the world), and a handful of egrets. But then, we came across the jackpot. We rounded a corner of the river and could see up ahead of us, a group of perhaps 8 other tour boats all with motors cut, drifting by the bank about half a kilometer away. As we neared, Liam eased off the throttle of our boat to reduce the noise, and we slowly drifted up to see what all the other tour boats were seeing. There on the bank was a herd of Asian pigmy elephants… and not just a couple! We counted somewhere in the vicinity of 30-32 elephants! It was hard to nail down an exact number as they were all constantly on the move. Liam explained that this herd had been moving further and further up the river with each day, and that it was quite possible that this would be the last time we’d see this herd as by tomorrow, they might be too far afield for the tour boats to reach them.
Cath’s favourite animal in the world is the elephant, and to her, this was a dream come true. Not only to see the Asian elephant, but to see it in the wild as opposed to in a zoo.
Watching these magnificent creatures interacting as a family unit was truly magical. And to see 8 boats full of people all hushed in awe was equally endearing. The loudest sound you could hear (other than the elephants munching on the grass) was the beep of AF lock and shutters clicking.
We must have stayed there for about half an hour, watching, shooting, smiling, laughing quietly at how amazing it was to witness this so “up close and personal”. How close? We were perhaps 10 meters from where the water met the sand, and while the majority of the herd were a further 10-15 meters back from the water’s edge, there were a couple of elephants who came right down to the river for a drink. That kind of proximity allowed for some awesome close up shots!
Clearly, the local tour operators have made sure to maintain their distance from these wonderful creatures so as not to frighten them. This has obviously allowed the elephants to build up a trust of the tour boats. They didn’t seem in the least bit perturbed by our presence, for which we were most thankful.
Eventually, we fired up the outboard and slowly moved away, our souls genuinely touched by having been in the vicinity of these wonderful animals. I said to Cath that of all the pachyderms, these ones have probably got the best existence. Their small tusks save them from being the target of poachers, and they live in an environment where there is plenty of both water and grass all year round, and plenty of wilderness for them to roam free in.
A rare win for the wildlife.
So, we headed back down the river for Bilit, along the way spotting more monkeys including some of the proboscis variety. Unfortunately though, I have yet to get a decent photo of one of these as they almost always sit really high up in the tree. Maybe tomorrow…
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