This morning’s activity is a visit to the Proboscis Monkey sanctuary. The Proboscis is apparently more of a rare event than the orang-utans seeing as orang-utans are also in Sumatra, the Proboscis are endemic to Borneo, found only on the island. Anton’s wife dropped me off at the Orang-utan centre to pick up a shuttle to the monkeys, now the LP (two years out of date) says the visit is a half day event and is pretty pricey. In actual fact it’s an all day event and although more expensive than a lot of other things (orang-utans included) they are endemic to here and so a visit was in order.
The monkeys are wild and in a small patch of sanctuary surrounded by palm oil plantations, it was the owner of the plantations who has realised the money making potential of wildlife and tourists and has set aside this small patch on his land and at set times at two different locations they feed the monkeys sugar free snacks and because of conditioning as opposed to a desire to have their photos taken they arrive dead on the dot for food!
They are funny looking monkeys with very large noses and pot bellies, the males are the ones with the very very large noses and a huge pot belly and ..........(you’ll see in the pics, over 18s only) while the females have smaller pointier noses and not so big tummies, are a lot smaller and of course without the additional appendage!
There are three of four different family groups at each feeding and it’s interesting to see the way they interact with each other and how the male really does rule the roost.
I managed to get 600 pics of these little fellows which I’m sure you’ll all be pleased to know wont all be going on the blog, instead you’ll just have to wait till I get home and sit through them all then!
At lunch time, in between monkey feedings, we stopped off at the Lodge at Labuk Bay within the plantation area. It looked like a very nice lodge area but we were the only ones there, all 6 of us! Oh and a very large monitor lizard, he must have been over a metre just in body! And a relatively small mud skipper :-)
In the afternoon just before the start attraction arrived some very cute and very very tame Silverleaf monkeys came along, the staff we feeding them and here were just moving freely in between us and in some cases all over us!
Back at the retreat and I was chatting to a Dutch couple who climbed the mountain a few days previously, now I know there are no mountains in Holland but these guys looked seriously fit yet three days later they were still suffering. By this time, as I said, I had convinced myself I wanted to do it and was telling them how apparently there weren’t any more permits left for when I wanted to go. They told me how a similar thing was told to them but they managed to find a tour operator in KK with permits who offered it to them for RM900 including transfers from KK to the park, they even managed to find me a flyer with a phone number on it.
Ok first thing tomorrow I’m gonna get on the phone and try and get a permit climbing the mountain as well as a permit for diving Sipadan, I’m on a three day trip to the jungle leaving at lunch time so it just gives me the morning to sort it all out, thank goodness this time I bought a local sim card, I have no idea what I would have done without it.
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