Into the Jungle

When we came to Indonesia, there was one place we felt we had to visit...other than Bali of course. We recently made a trip to the southern part of the island of Borneo to visit Tanjung Puting National Park. The park is the largest wildlife preserve in Southeast Asia and home to some of the great biodiversity found only in Indonesia. The main reason we wanted to visit this place is because Borneo is one of two islands in the world that still has orangutans living in the wild. In Sumatra, the other island where orangutans live, there are only around 7,000 left and they are critically endangered.

The orangutan population in Borneo (the third largest island in the world) has faired better due to their relative remoteness. However, the estimated 50,000 left in the wild are endangered and represent only 14 percent of the historical population. Their homes have always been subject to destruction from forest fires and logging, but they are under an exponentially growing threat due to the growth in the palm oil business. Some estimates say they may be extinct in the wild by 2012.

The best way to see Tanjung Puting is to fly to Pangkalan Bun, Central Kalimantan. From there, you drive 20 minutes to get on a small chartered boat. We took the boat along the Kumai river to a smaller river that headed north. It took about 4-5 hours to travel all the way up into the area where there is a large population of orangutans. As you travel into the reserve, you begin to see long-tailed macaques sitting along the trees lining the river. We also saw proboscis monkeys, which only live in Borneo and are extremely endangered. Fewer than 7,000 still live in the wild. They're famous for their long protruding noses and in Indonesian are often called "Dutch Monkeys" because they think white people have big noses.

On the first night, we moored our boat along the river and the boat crew cooked dinner and made beds for us and our two friends on the upper deck of our boat. We slept under nets, afraid of every mosquito since malaria and dengue fever are prevalent in this area. The next morning, we woke up early and continued up the river to Camp Leakey, a remote orangutan observation camp built in the 1970s. More to come...