A trip to Borneo

This past week the kids had a mid-semester break. Along with some Canadian friends from the Green School, we decided to go to Borneo to see Orangutans. We did some research and found the best place in Indonesia for Orangutans is in Tanjing Puting National Park on the island of Borneo in the Indonesian province of Kalimantan. And... here's the best part - the park is located along a series of small rivers, accessible only by boat. So for three days we hired a boat (or as it's known in Kalimantan a Klotok) with a captain, an assistant captain, a cook, an assistant cook and a guide. It felt a bit like our house! Here's what the boat looks like (although this is not our boat, ours was actually a bit bigger because there was ten of us).

From A trip to Borneo

The trip worked liked this. We spent three days and nights on the river. We arrived around 6:00pm on the first night, a bit later than we hoped, as our flight was delayed. We set sail in the dark, up a large river from the port of Kumai. After about an hour, we turned onto Setonyer river, and sailed another hour or so. It was hard to see anything, but we did pass some amazing trees that were full of fireflies. They looked like Christmas trees (albeit French-Canadian trees as they were blinking). We ate a delicous dinner prepared by the crew. The mattresses and mosquito nets then came out and we slept on the deck. A little hot at first, but great to go to sleep in the middle of nowhere, with only the sounds of the jungle as the soundtrack.

The next morning we woke and sailed about 3 hours to Camp Leakey, a research station founded by a Canadian woman in the 1970's. She is the Diane Fossey/Jane Goodall of orangutans. She works here only occasionly now, but is well-regarded for her work on orangutans. There are about 5000 orangutans in the park, about 300 of those are rehabilitated from zoos and pets. They still offer daily feedings to make sure they don't starve. At the camp, we hiked about 25 minutes into the feeding station and watched in amazement as about a dozen orangutans came swinging out of the forest to eat the provided bananas. Here's a few pictures:

From A trip to Borneo

From A trip to Borneo

From A trip to Borneo

The cycle then repeated itself. We visited three camps in all, sailing about 2 hours between each of them. We spent a few hours at each camp, looking at the orangutans. We saw over 40 orangutans in total. We also saw 5 wild orangutans off the side of the boat as we sailed on the river. The rest of the time we read, played cards, swam a little (though we had to be careful as there are crocodiles in the river) and shot our latest short film... oh yes, we've shot another one. This one is called "Up the River" and will be done soon and posted here.

After three days we were sad to leave. Life on the boat was great.

Click on the photo below to go to a slide show of about 50 pictures with captions from our trip.

A trip to Borneo