There are certain things in life that you just don’t want to miss, and for us, a family of wildlife lovers travelling through Indonesia, seeing the orangutans of Borneo was one of them:
“Look, Mummy, there it is,” whispered Lukie as he pointed the binoculars up at a treetop some 30 metres away. “It’s huge!”
The tree shook as the giant shifted its weight, the slender trunk bending precipitously.
Matias touched my arm. “There’s a baby too. Can I please have your camera?” he begged. “I really want to take a close-up picture, and your zoom is better than mine.”
I focused the camera on the dark shape in the treetop, using the zoom to get a better view. Up close I could see the beady black eyes, the soft unkempt orange fringe lining the wrinkled dark face, the fuzzy baby clinging onto long strands of chestnut fur. They were looking straight at me, peacefully noting our presence with no apparent alarm.
“They’re wonderful!” I said before handing the camera to Matias.
The mother turned her head and stretched out one enormously long left arm to grab a branch of a nearby tree. She leisurely leaned her full body weight towards the new tree and grabbed hold of a branch with her left foot, leaving her hanging casually outstretched between two tall trees, her baby encircling her waist with its long arms.
We were on a klotok, the onomatopoeically named brightly painted local houseboats used to take nature lovers up the Kumai River to the Tanjung Puting National Park in Borneo. Aria, our guide, had spotted the orangutans from his seat at the front of the boat and signalled for the driver to stop so that we could have a good look.
Quietly we sat there watching the sizeable orange shape calmly staring back at us through the jungle foliage. She was on the northern side of the river, which is not part of the National Park.
“Can she cross the river, to get to the National Park?” Matias asked Aria.
Aria explained that orangutans don’t swim across the river and that the female and her baby were therefore stuck in the unprotected narrow band of vegetation shielding the river from the millions of hectares of ever-expanding palm oil plantations destroying the Borneo jungle of the hinterland.
We had come to Borneo on our way north from Bali. The third largest island in the world, Borneo is smaller only than Greenland and New Guinea. The southern roughly three-quarters of the island belongs to Indonesia and the rest is Malaysian apart from the tiny Sultanate of Brunei. In Indonesian, Borneo is called Kalimantan, a word rooted in the Sanskrit term for ‘burning weather island’, referring to the searing heat and dense humidity of this equatorial jungle-clad location. It is just the kind of climate that an orangutan prefers.
We had arrived in Kumai the day before, anchoring in the peat-stained dark brown river off the town of Kumai after a four-day passage from Bali that I would call nightmarish but which David merely labelled ‘stimulating’. We had good wind and an incredible amount of traffic leading to tense night watches where I sat, knuckles white, gripping the binoculars, frantically trying to make out which of the tiny, deceptively faint flashing lights were fish attracting devices (FADs) and which were fishing boats, and whether we were on a collision course with the incredibly bright lights dotting the horizon which might be squid boats, tows, cargo vessels, tankers or a healthy mixture of all four.
The passage took us through a huge fleet of a thousand or more squid boats, parked up in dense clusters on the extensive shallow sea to the far south of Borneo, their bright lights ruining my night vision as they lured unsuspecting cephalopods to the surface, their presence crowding my radar screen.
Deciphering the meaning of different lights on night passage can be hard. Squid boats are generally stationary and intensely lit, but when they move they display the typical Indonesian fishing lighting (i.e. random cheerfully coloured flashing lights). The FADs and small fishing boats are hard to make out because they do not show up on the radar, and their faint multi-coloured blinking lights were hard to make out in the luminous sea of squid boats lighting up the moonless sky like a first world city. Cargo boats and tows can be distinguished from the squid boats by the fact that they are moving and generally use standardised lighting (i.e. showing starboard and port colours) and some of them are even on AIS, an extra bonus. Combine this confuddling mass of innovative approaches to lighting with intense sleep deprivation and a fast-moving sailboat and you get one of my versions of a passage nightmare (there are others: upwind sailing, no-wind sailing, nearshore sailing….).
I don’t mind moving through a sea full of boats in the middle of the night (OK, that’s a lie – I do mind, but not as much) when using the engine. But on this passage we were sailing dead downwind in a respectable breeze with a goosewing sail configuration (mainsail on one side, genoa on the other) which leaves very little leeway for manoeuvring, as any deviation from course could lead to a crash jibe. This meant a narrow 10 degrees of downwind leniency on the course steered, and my only option for bailing in a potential collision situation was to head upwind, which given a catamaran’s tendency to drift rapidly downwind as it is sailing along, is never a great option for avoiding oncoming traffic. All this meant night watches spent nervously weaving my way through the never-ending squid fleet, dodging one vessel only to see five more ping up on the radar, the whole affair leaving me so traumatised that once my watches had finished I had trouble sleeping, and when I did fall asleep it was a broken, uncomforting rest, harrowed by vivid dreams of terrifying head-on collisions with spiky squid boats.
“It’s not so bad,” said David cheerfully after the first night. “I prefer squid boats to FADs. At least they are stationary, which means that you can easily avoid them.”
“Sure,” I sighed. “I just prefer open ocean, with no squid boats, no long and poorly lit tows, no small but lethal FADs….”
Despite the stimulating sailing conditions we got there and as we approached Borneo the weather became hot and humid and the seas stilled, until on the fourth morning we arrived at the flat, brown expanse of the Kumai river mouth. I was expecting a mountainous interior but southern Borneo is flat as a pancake, a large low-lying semi-inundated peatland covered in dark short jungle.
To see the orangutans we organised a three-day trip up the Kumai River to the Tanjung Puting National Park on a slightly dilapidated bright green klotok complete with a captain, a cook, a boatboy and a wildlife guide. The river is full of these picturesque houseboats, travelling slowly up the still waters, brightly coloured dots against the vivid green walls of nearshore vegetation. Our klotok was at the cheaper end of the spectrum, and after a few hours of travelling up the river we realised why.
“Ours is a klo-bang-tok,” said David, commenting on the unhealthy sounding engine which had a tendency to stall whenever we slowed down, causing no end of hassle for the captain and the boatboy who then had to work furiously to restart the thing. During the lengthy restarting procedure we would drift perilously down the river, our cook and boatboy shouting loudly to alert oncoming klotoks to our compromised engine so that they could take appropriate evasive action.
“We’re the slowest boat on the river!” exclaimed Matias jubilantly as yet another klotok overtook us, and he was right, but it didn’t matter – the toilet was tolerable, the beds comfortably enshrouded in dense mosquito nets, the food wonderful, and our slow progress meant that we got to see everything in slow motion, sometimes netting a view twice when engine failure forced us backwards.
The klotok trips up the river Kumai take visitors to the Tanjung Puting National Park. Orangutans are everywhere in the south Kalimantang jungle but are more concentrated in the 400,000 hectares of forest of the national park, which was first protected in the 1930s by the Dutch colonial government to protect the resident orangutan and proboscis monkey populations of the area. It became a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 1977 and a national park in 1982.
In Tanjung Puting’s Camp Leakey is an orangutan rehabilitation centre. The centre was established in 1971 by the world’s first orangutan researcher, Dr Galdikas, to provide a site where orangutans rescued from captivity (e.g. casualties of the palm oil plantation expansion entering the commercial pet trade) could be re-established successfully in the wild. Orangutans enter captivity mainly as babies when their mothers are killed for bush meat, as agricultural pests, or in the palm oil plantations that are rapidly expanding and overtaking the jungle. The locally run Orangutan Foundation International organisation rescues the captive orangutans and brings them to the rehabilitation centre for care, and to date more than 300 ex-captive orangutans have been released into the wild of the park.
The rehabilitation involves health care as well as teaching juvenile orangutans how to get on in the wild. Orangutan babies live with their mother for 5-6 years in the wild, during which time she teaches them social interaction as well as how to forage and which plants and insects are safe to eat. At the rehabilitation centre, human carers replace the mother and attempt to teach the juvenile orangutans self-sufficiency.
To ensure that the released animals do not impact adversely on the wild population of the area, three feeding stations have been established in the national park to supplement the food that the ex-captive animals find in the wild. Here, the park rangers provide food like bananas, sweet potatoes and sweetcorn once a day, and if any of the rehabilitated animals are struggling for food, they can come and avail themselves of a free lunch. The feeding stations provide an excellent opportunity for tourists to view the orangutans up close, and the wildlife tours from Kumai bring scores of visitors up the river every day, wildlife lovers who stand sweating with us in the humid jungle, absently swatting away mosquitoes as they gawp at these fascinating animals.
Orangutans look amazing. They are like huge, furry humans with incredibly long arms and thick, heavyset chests crowned with massive shoulders atop a short, spindly, bowlegged bottom culminating in large, hand-like feet. They are incredibly hairy, rippling muscles showing under a thick, fuzzy, orange fur. On the ground they walk either upright with a knees-out-bowlegged gait or on all four resting their heavy upper body weight on their knuckles, but really they are very rarely on the forest floor, preferring instead to spend their life in the treetops. Here they are incredible to watch, a blur of orange fur moving swiftly through the foliage, swinging from branch to branch like Tarzan (although I guess strictly speaking he got it from them), moving fluidly from tree to tree using their weight to pivot the treetops as they swing backwards and forwards, increasing momentum until sufficiently close to the next treetop to grab hold and swing over. They comfortably spend hours just hanging from branches, their long furry limbs sharply outlined against the bright sky beyond the canopy.
Unlike other apes, orangutans are solitary, and natural interactions between individuals are limited to brief mating events, the lengthy dependency of young on their mother, and loose gangs of youths who hang together before they start reproducing.
This means that the interactions we witness at the feeding stations are those between animals who don’t naturally have much to do with one another. Only a few of the released animals come back for food, but each of the three feeding stations is dominated by a huge alpha male who monopolises the supplies, stoically chewing his way through immense piles of bananas, yams and sweetcorn, and only leaving the feeding platform once he is absolutely stuffed. The alpha males are recognisable from their huge size – they are about twice as big as the biggest females – as well as by the large cheek pads which makes their face imposingly wide compared to females and subordinate males. The alpha male is the first to eat, and whilst he is stuffing his cheek-pad-enhanced face the rest of the orangutans sit hiding in treetops, hungrily waiting for an opportunity to sneak down and steal some food. Occasionally the alpha male will let females with babies come down to get some food, but he never tolerates the approach of another male, and when one approaches he gets up slowly and starts to knuckle-walk towards them, showing off the scarily full breadth of his shoulders. The dominant male hogging the food clearly upsets some of the rival males, who sit screeching in the treetops, tearing off branches and throwing them down in an attempt to provoke a reaction, but to no avail – the big guy sits calmly ignoring them, secure in his power, safe in his dominance, stoically eating through another kilo of fruit even though his rather solid shape would suggest that he ought to start limiting his carbs.
Once the alpha male has had his fill and has left the feeding station, the subordinate males and low-ranking females come down to eat. Only the largest females dare eat on the platform, the rest steal food, nervously looking right and left and keeping a hold of a branch so they can retreat rapidly. On the platform they stuff their faces and gather as much as they can hold in their mouths, hands and feet, like bulimics stocking up for a late-night binge, before fleeing rapidly, their escape slowed down by their full hands and feet. The near-naked babies cling to their mothers’ long fur and older juveniles keep one hand on the mother always, a lifeline to instant protection and effusive motherly love.
It is not only orangutans enjoying the feast – a fast-moving ex-rescue gibbon also comes down to steal some food, running along the platform bananas in hand before quickly climbing to the safety of the spindly branches of a nearby treetop, and a troop of longnosed wild boar gallop in and start excitedly sniffing the undergrowth, excitedly hoovering up the leftovers.
Occasionally the alpha male will return to the platform for another snack after seeing how popular the food is, slowly moving this way and that to chase off anyone else enjoying the event, making sure that his is an absolute monopoly. It is incredibly funny to watch, an ape soap opera featuring characters with different personalities – the bullying chief, the mocking subordinate, the nervous young mothers tightly grasping their fragile-looking babies, the seasoned mothers of two moving with more confidence – so human-like that we all recognise them: after half an hour of witnessing the overt display of stubborn patriarchal dominance the lady next to me quips that she’s pretty sure she’s worked with that guy in the past, and the female colleague with whom she is travelling laughs in agreement.
The jungle is full of interesting creatures. From the klotok we saw macaques and one afternoon, Aria spotted a troop of proboscis monkeys lounging in a tall tree. Named after their prominent facial protuberances, the proboscis monkeys are hilariously discontent-looking, a group of sour-faced, potbellied semi-humans sitting quietly, little fur hats and scarves framing their hairless faces dominated by noses that would put Pinocchio to shame. The males’ Yassir Arafat noses are long, bulbous and overhanging, and the females’ sharply pointed beaks would make Cleopatra pale. They look cheated, glum and resigned to their fate as they sit there in the top of a tree, their skinny arms and legs casually holding onto fragile branches, their long furry tails trailing below them.
At night we went trekking in the jungle, the kids excitedly following Aria our guide as he showed us huge bird-eating spiders and small spider-eating birds, using a long twig to lure hairy tarantulas the size of a grown man’s hand out of underground caves and a torch to illuminate furry caterpillars dripping from vegetation and birds curled up into balls hiding in tree holes, as well as the ominous tracks of wild boars.
The Borneo rainforests are magic and teeming with life, but sadly they are diminishing at an alarming rate. The critically endangered orangutans only live here and on the island of Sumatra and the populations are declining fast: 60% of Borneo’s orangutans have perished over the past 60 years. Around 45,000-69,000 orangutans remain in Borneo and these populations are projected to continue their drastic decline. The main threat to the Borneo population is logging and forest fires, at the root of which is the rapid conversion of tropical rainforest to lucrative palm oil plantations. Palm oil is used for cooking, cosmetics, mechanics and biodiesel, and Indonesia is the world’s biggest producer and consumer of the commodity, providing roughly half the world’s supply. A major economic earner for the country, palm oil contributed 11% of Indonesia’s export earnings in 2018 and production is projected to increase dramatically over the coming years as more rainforest is cleared. The oil is everywhere in Indonesia – it is the only cooking oil that you can buy in all but the large cities in Indonesia and the biodiesel is sold at all petrol stations.
Palm oil is unavoidable in Indonesia and we sharply feel the irony when, after visiting a national park museum which documents the wildlife destruction caused by the insidious spread of palm oil plantations, we head back to the palm-oil fuelled klotok and eat our delicious lunch of fish deep-fried in large vats of palm oil.
It’s a sad state of affairs and when the guide suggests that the kids each plant a tree in the reserve to help maintain the forest they jump at the opportunity. In fifteen years the trees they planted will be more than 2 metres tall and we hope that the habitat left will be enough to sustain the orangutan populations.
The town of Kumai is not particularly charming, and after stocking up with diesel and vegetables we left Kalimantan behind. As we sailed away from the island we mentally readied ourselves for another run in with massive squid fleets as we headed west. We were super happy to have seen the orangutans but, like so many times before here, once again feeling like we got there just in time. Oh Indonesia, land of ever-diminishing rainforests, orangutan populations and squid stocks, what will become of you?
SV Bob The Cat 