Jungle Trip

This was more like it. We took a flight from Kota Kinabalu to Sandakan, spending a couple of nights there.







First, we went to Sepilok Orang Utan Sanctuary, where they re-introduce orang utans into the wild. This process can take several years, before the utans are completely rehabilitated (some of them never are.) Once the utans have been released, the sanctuary provides milk and bananas twice a day, so the utans have something to eat if they haven't learned to forage for themselves. We went to one of the feeding sessions and saw several orang utans turn up to be fed.









(The theory is, the sanctuary provides the same food every day, so the utans get bored with it, and start searching for their own, different food.)






As well as the orang utans, lots of wild macaques (long-tailed and pig-tailed) turned up to steal the food. They can be quite aggressive, so you have to be careful not to look at them in a funny way, or they'll get all their mates over to give you a seeing-to.




Next we went by speedboat to a lodge on the Kinabtangan River, where we stayed for two nights. Our room was on stilts, and was fairly basic, though it had a bed and a shower (which worked if you remembered to turn the water pump on.) We went on a couple of river cruises, searching for wildlife and managed to see:

• Great Egret
  
  
• Oriental Darter





• Rhinocerous Hornbill
  



• Black Hornbill


• Oriental Pied Hornbill
  
• Purple Heron
  
• Little Heron


• Black and red broadbill
  
  
  
• Stork- billed kingfisher



• Crested serpent eagle


• Monitor Lizard


• Reticulated Python
  
• Long tailed macaque
  
• Pig tailed macaque
  
• Silver leaf monkey


• Proboscis monkey

We also went to Gomantong Caves, which are full of swiftlets and their edible nests, and bats. It was very smelly. There was a walkway, covered in droppings and alive with cockroaches. That made it very slippery, but fortunately there was a handrail - covered in droppings and alive with cockroaches. David Attenborough went there, but I'm not sure why.

We also went on a jungle trek - just 1 km but it felt a lot longer. Very slippery and muddy. Not much wildlife apart from millipedes and leeches.