Before we left for our Rainforest camping experience we stopped by the nearby Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Center, one of 3 such centers in the world. The goal is to slowly rehabilitate injured or sick orangutans and reintroduce them to the wild.
The center is located at the edge of the rain forest, and a wooden boardwalk extends out to their feeding time platform. This gives visitors a chance to see orangutans up close. During the actual feeding time, a worker sits on a platform 10 m away with a bucket of bananas and hands them over to the orangutans that come. Macaques scurry around trying to snatch half eaten bananas. The better thieves make off with a whole bunch. Two orangutans showed up for the feeding, although other travelers have told us that up to 5 have shown up at a time.
We stuck around on the boardwalk after most of the tourist left and watched the macaques claiming the scraps and scampering around. As we began to leave, an orangutan appeared on the walkway and started walking towards us with a gentle, lumbering grace. It passed in front of Rashmi by about 1 ft!
Afterwards we wanted to head out to a short 2 km jungle trail. As we walked along the boardwalk, we saw an approaching band of macaques chasing 2 panicked tourist towards us. We faced off the monkeys a little bit and they quietly would pass us or sit down and have a grooming session. As I filmed a grooming couple a passing macaque jumped on my backpack and held on!
He seemed to be clinging on in curiosity and not aggression although I still did not want a monkey on my back. I swung around a few times and was able to shake him off, but after that we quickly made our way to the trail. The trail itself was muddy and overgrown. As we pushed through we saw small black worms perched on leaves reaching and extending towards us. It was our first leech encounter!
We carefully picked our way through and saw numerous butterflies and crawling insects. A group in front of us pointed out a walking stick insect on the ground! We were very excited to see it as it can be very hard to spot.
As we hiked back I realized my toe was bleeding, but I hasn't felt it get cut! It just kept bleeding and bleeding and I realized a leech must have bitten me and put in some anticoagulant. When we returned to the center, I sat down and did a leech check and found one squirming in my belt buckle! I'm glad the leech didn't bite me anywhere in that region! Overall we definitely got had a fun experience and got up close with some creatures we wouldn't have otherwise.
That sounds like a lot of fun seeing the orangutans up close, and especially the macaque gang haha.
ReplyDeleteThe leeches sound creepy though...