Rather than talking to myself for another blog, I decided to have someone else do the talking for me. My fellow monkey lover, CIM, and her partner came to visit me... here is their story.
According to the rain gauge, there has been more than a meter and a half of rain in the last 12 hours. It rained off and on all night. When the deafening sounds of the rainstorm on the tile roof quieted they were replaced by frogs bleating like sheep in surround sound. It sounded like they were tucked away in every corner of the house. We were supposed to be on the boat by 5:30 this morning but the rain has kept us indoors. It’s been raining off and on for the past four days and this is supposed to be the dry season!
Jake and I are visiting my friend Katie in Indonesian Borneo (or Kalimantan Barat) for a few weeks. Katie has been here since last October and has learned the local language, Bahasa Indonesian, quite quickly, which is necessary because not many people speak English. (We made sure to bring gifts of cheese and chocolate to pay for her translator fees…) She’s here studying the proboscis monkeys – orange pot-bellied monkeys with protruding noses that are endemic to Borneo’s riverine systems. Not much is known about the species in general, much less about the population here in Kalimantan Barat. Katie lives with a local family in the small coastal town of Tolak. It’s not the easiest of places to reach from the Southwestern US. We took four flights spread out over a day and a half to reach Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital located on the island of Java. From there we flew to the island of Borneo, spent the night Pontianak (Kalimantan Barat’s largest city), took an hour long flight to Ketapang, and finally jumped on a bus for an hour before arriving at the house three days after we left our own back in Tucson. From here camp is still another 18 km up the Sungai Tolak (Sungai means river in Bahasa) by long boat.
“Camp Katie” is not much more than a small cleared area on the river that Katie and her two local assistants claimed for themselves. There are no permanent structures other than a wooden table, bench and a swing. There is a lot of logging traffic on the river and multiple small encampments perched along its banks. It has been disheartening and hard to escape the constant sounds of chainsaws creating destruction in the surrounding forest. We spent our first four days up at “Camp Katie” and were treated to some of Borneo’s many treasures as well as hot and dry weather. We had some great views of many of the river’s primate species, including an acrobatic water show starring a rather large group of proboscis monkeys. We stopped to watch a group along the river and quickly realized there were monkeys on both sides of the water. Not before long a few daring monkeys started diving out of trees into the river below and swimming to the other side. The most timid of the group slunk in at the shore and soon there was a steady stream of monkeys with their long noses above the water, swimming in a line to the other side. It was amazing!
We’ve been looking forward to a glimpse of Asia’s only great ape, the orangutan. Appropriately enough, orangutan means man of the forest in Bahasa. Katie doesn’t see them on a regular basis but she has, and they are here so we have been continuously scanning the trees for a large orange man of the forest. Our third day on the river we parked the boat and went for a walk on a logging trail in the forest. We lost track of Jake early on because he was busily snapping photos of every bird he came across. Katie and I decided to stop and wait for him to catch up. Not far from where we were standing something fell from the tree tops. Then something else fell in the same place. It wasn’t a group of monkeys; they make more noise and shake the foliage when they jump around. This thing wasn’t moving much but there was definitely something up there. We looked at each other without saying anything, I’m sure we were both thinking the same thing, and scrambled around the undergrowth for a better vantage point. And there he was, a giant flanged male orangutan high in a tree feeding on stinky durian fruit. Jake caught up with us and we all watched the orangutan feed for quite some time. Orangutans have no natural predators so it wasn’t surprising that he didn’t seem bothered by our presence in the least.
Jake has been hard at work identifying and recording every species of bird he can and has come up with a sizeable list for Katie’s site. I’ve been busy pointing out and counting monkeys as we cruise down the river in the long boat. We are hoping Katie hires us in the future as assistants…
Katie took a break from work and we went north to Gunung Palung National Park for a three day expedition. We saw three more orangutans from our camp, a bunch of singing gibbons, radiant red-leaf monkeys, huge hornbills, glowing mushrooms, pygmy squirrels you could put in a coin purse, blood loving leaches, and monstrous insects. Camp was not what we were lead to believe it would be, Jake ended up sleeping on the floor by the French tourists, Katie and I shared a plywood platform, and the hike in and out was a little crazy with our packs. We are still kicking ourselves for not bringing the sleeping pads but really glad we had mosquito nets. Regardless, for what we saw, it was worth it. We spent our last night of Katie’s vacation down in Ketapang running errands, most importantly finding some cash as we nearly ran out of money and couldn’t find a working ATM near the park. Plus we wanted to eat extravagant foods like ice cream and burgers washed down with beer, a welcome break from the rice, veggies, and tempe we’ve been eating three times a day for the past couple weeks.
We are going to spend four more days in the field with Katie…if it ever stops raining. Then we are headed to Lombok and Bali to experience a very different side of Indonesia.
All the best from Borneo,
Corey and Jake
