Monkeys, Monkeys, Monkeys!*

Have I mentioned that Nike takes really good care of us here?  After 6 months, we qualified for our first R&R trip and they help pay for us to get away from it all here... we thought it would be restful and relaxing to go to the jungles of Malaysian Borneo to trek and mountain bike... and it was.  It was also eye opening, as travel often is.  

I knew about the jungle deforestation going on around the world and I imagine you do too.  But in the last few days  there have been reports of  Beijing level pollution hitting Singapore, from.... wait for it... slash and burn jungle deforestation in neighboring Indonesia.  We didn’t get any of that as we were a long way away, but what we did get was a rather heartbreaking view of nearly 200kms through an uninterrupted swath of former jungle that has been turned into plantation after plantation of palm trees for the production of palm oil 

 It’s obviously providing jobs and money there, which is no small thing, but as is often the case, the real money goes elsewhere it appears.  And while the locals get jobs, they also get to be totally deforested, and the plant and animal habitat vanishes.   Palm oil is a major ingredient in snack foods, cosmetics and increasingly, bio fuels, which is all frustrating to no end when you see the results of these plantations.

I know I’m simplifying a complex situation here,  but it does seem like it should, in the early stages of the 21st century, be possible to develop an industry like this without cutting down everything in sight - we’ve seen this movie and we know how it ends - how about leaving some habitat and corridors for wildlife?.... I just don’t buy the bogus binary construct about about jobs vs ‘the environment’  (as though ‘the environment’ is something other than the planet upon which we all live and depend), or that there aren’t jobs to be had by more responsible farming/extraction etc...but who can stand in the way when there’s a dollar (or Ringgit) to be made?  To the Malaysians credit, they are trying to protect some areas, but it sounds as though it’s an uphill battle every step of the way.  We visited one protected preserve, and sure enough, there’s a semi recently built planation that abuts the preserve,  30 miles from the nearest main road, across a treacherous dirt road for access.

So in the interest of all of the cool animals below... and the rest of the planet, here’s another thing I would ask you to watch for on ingredient labels and avoid.  Palm Oil, Palm Olein, Palm anything basically...

Ok, I’ll descend for the soapbox now...

Julia found a new tour company based in Lahad Datu called Bike and Tours www.bikeandtours.com.  They were highly rated online and they worked with us to create a cool itinerary that included time cycling as well as trekking in the jungle.  You can see where we were on this map: 

  We flew into Kota Kinabalu on the NW side of the island, changed planes and immediately headed for Sandakan for the start of our journey. After a night in Sandakan, we headed by boat, east from Sandakan up the Kinabatangan River,  (not named, but shown on map heading south towards Sukau).  From there we headed to Imbak Canyon for two nights (also not shown, but I think it is somewhere generally around the ‘H’ of Sabah on the map.) From there we combined riding and driving to work our way towards Lahad Datu, and then on to Danum Valley Conservation area for a few nights    We travelled by mountain bike and truck to get between locations. All of the riding and much of the driving were on dirt logging/plantation roads. We did several trips on the river to see wildlife, including at night with the aid of a powerful searchlight.  In both Imbak and Danum Valley we hiked in the jungle - though in Danum Valley, we saw more wildlife right at the rest house where we were staying.  The folks who run the tour company are great and we had a wonderful time with them.  Accommodations ranged from very rustic to slightly less rustic to really nice in the guest rooms that they also rent in their home in Lahad Datu.

Hiking in an equatorial jungle was good fun, if incredibly hot - the ambient temperature and humidity were both quite high - this was compounded by wearing long pants and long sleeve shirts much of the time - to try to keep down the amount of blood loss/malaria risk from mosquitoes... and microscopic black flies, and best of all.... leeches!... When I first heard mention of them from our guide, I thought he said Lychees, which are now in season and for sale on the side of the road all over Taiwan right now, and I thought “Great!  I love fruit...”  Imagine my disappointment to learn that he said leeches....you can’t even eat those... or you probably shouldn’t.  Seriously, they were fascinating, tenacious, clearly quite hungry, and everywhere.  It wasn’t too big of a deal, but it was  novel.   Sing along with me won’t you, to the tune of The Steve Miller Band’s ‘Jungle Love’... “Jungle Bugs are driving me mad, making me crazy, crazy, etc etc”...

Like any good jungle, in addition to small bite-y things, 
there were bigger chompy things like crocodiles,

cats of varying sizes and bears, along with gore-y, trample-y and stomp-y things like boars,

elephants and  small rhinos... sadly,  it sounds like there are only a very few of the native rhinoceroses left (rhinocerii?) - it appears they are heading for extinction, 30-40 known alive and we were told that breeding efforts in protection/preservation effort are not going well.  See plantation deforestation/habitat loss rant above for what appears to be a large reason for their demise.

We saw a wide range of different primates, silver and red leaf monkeys, long tailed and pig tailed macaques, proboscis monkeys (astonishingly unusual creatures when it comes to appearance... beside the nose, they are also naturally pot bellied)  I’m thinking one of the other primate species could make a killing with nose jobs and liposuction for the  proboscises (proboscii?).  My favorite of them all were the orangutans, which we learned literally means People (orang) of the Forest (utan).  I think I feel a measure of kinship with them as a result of having freakishly long arms myself.  It is so cool to watch all the different types of primates moving through the trees.  Video doesn’t really do it justice.

Besides the animals, the trees of the rainforest were amazing, several different types of trees with buttresses of roots for stabilization, others with literal supports that appeared to be rooted as well that were located away from the trunk  and supporting branches, vines and all nature of other really cool plants.  We didn’t really see any, but the area also hosts a variety of different meat eating plants.

The sounds of the jungle, particularly in the morning, but really anytime was pretty amazing to hear.

For animal geeks following along and scoring this trip at home, here’s a comprehensive list of animals we saw:

Crocodile

Pygmy Squirrel

Proboscis Monkey

Orangutan

Long Tailed Macaque

Pig Tailed Macaque

Red Leaf Eater Monkey

Grey Leaf Eater Monkey

Several types of Kingfishers

White Hornbill

Wild Boar

4 types of Owls

Eagle

Monitor LIzard

This lizard was probably 6 feet long 

Many different Egrets

Civets - (small cat)

Mouse Head Deer - which is aptly named, sort of looks like a sci-fi movie experiment gone awry

Some other more traditionally sized and appearing deer, pretty similar to white tails in the US, but actually darker/greyer coat color

Giant Cicada

Tree Frogs

Leeches - Tiger and Leaf

Supersized Centipede type thingy, supersized Pill bug/potato bug, supersized earthworms of several types

Amazing big butterflies, and spiders

And a horde of very grateful (at least I hope they appreciated the meals), black flies and mosquitos

This is probably about 2 inches long!

Here it is all rolled up

* Thanks to Ewan McGregor, from ‘Long Way Down’  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_gf3vM9CQQ for this post title...