So we set off from Uncle Tan HQ (!) for a one and a half hour journey which actually took over two hours to the Kinabatangan River. When our bags were loaded onto the 4x4 mine was put onto obviously leaking petrol containers, why oh why didn’t I say something then? So after about an hour on the road we turned into a private farming area and travelled the next hour through palm oil plantations. During my journey from KK to Sepilok around 3 hours of it was through palm oil plantations as far as the eye could see and obviously that’s not the whole of it. So after an hour travelling through some rich guys plantation we arrived at a very low level river, it hasn’t rained here for almost two months apparently and the temperature is higher than normal so the river is understandably very low.
I then grabbed my bag to find it was wet and stunk of fuel :-( Knew I should have said something. Oh well not a lot I can do about it now.
There are thirteen of us and we all piled into two long narrow low boats, I can see this being a problem for me over the next couple of days not being a huge fan of the water and certainly not a huge fan of muddy (therefore can’t see the bottom) crocodile infested water, 6 meter crocodiles I might add.
Anyway we headed off on the first of our river cruises in search of wildlife, it was clear from the offset that the area we were in was not primary rainforest or actually even really rainforest at all which was a shame. Even from the very low level of the boat in the water you could see that the trees literally were only about 5 deep and then it opened up onto who knows what but probably more plantations. The only thing we saw were a few birds and a few common monkeys nothing out of the ordinary though which was a shame.
On arrival in camp we were shown down plankways to our hut, I’m sharing with a couple of French guys, Frederick and Cedric on one side and Owen (a guy I was at a hostel with in KK) on the other. We just have a mattress on the floor with a mosquito net over the top. There are three young English girls on the trip as well and one of them later said to me, ‘I know we were going to have a mattress but I kinda thought we might get the bed frame with it!’
ow that made me giggle! I’m afraid not Katie, in addition to which there was no door and my bed was opposite the doorway, to me this actually seemed like a good thing as my first view in the morning would be straight out on to the forest, nice. :-)
Our house!
This is a plan of what the next three days have in store for us.
This evening straight after dinner we went out on our evening river trip. As I said the river is really low and there are numerous obstacles in the water like trees and crocodiles but these guys were steaming through the river just slowing for the odd tree they could see and the millions of fishing lines. We saw half a crocodile (not a 6 metre one) and an owl and a few birds and kingfishers and of course more macack monkeys. I think the monkeys are going to become a bit of a regular on our trip.
Once the daylight had gone and we began to head back it became quickly very clear to me that I was really not liking the boat journeys, a couple of times we hit something in the water which made me literally jump out of my skin, eventually we managed to make it back unscathed. It wasn’t the actual boat I didn’t like it was the thought of hitting something big and capsizing in the pitch black with crocodiles as lifeguards.
We made it back though and very quickly made our way to bed in preparation of our 6.30am river cruise in search of orang-utans.
Life on the river
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