Big Hairy Apes

Kutai National Park is a small patch of forest near the coast of Eastern Borneo. It has an interesting history: it was first set up by the Indonesian government in the 1960s, but soon their greed consumed them and they took away part of the park so it could become a logging concession. Then, as greed begets greed, they decided to give back the already denude area (how environmental of them!)in exchange for virgin forest lands, which were then raped of its trees. All of this means that the national park is in a pretty sorry state vegetation-wise, as far is national parks go. The good news is that there are still plenty of animals around the park and because there aren't many large trees these animals are relatively easy to see in the "natural" habitat. And this is what brought us to Kutai.

The main attraction of the park are some of the biggest and hairiest apes of all: the organ-utan (see bad out of focus pictures here). Some background info on organ-utan: there name translates to "people of the forest" (orang = person, hutan = forest, example: we are Orang American, the apes are Orang Hutan or orang-utan). They are only found on two large islands, both in Indonesia: Sumatera and Borneo. They are an arboreal species and spend most of their time eating the fruits and twigs of trees. They even sleep in the high boughs in a nest they make every night from fresh leaves. Through habitat loss and poaching their numbers have been greatly reduced.

We spent about a week in the park, in various locations. In the first, Sangkima the park service has set up a circular "adventure" trail right off of the busy highway. We call this trail adventure because, well, it is. There are places where its a boardwalk, which is lovely. Then the laborers got tired because the boardwalk turns into 6 in wide wood planks you must balance on about a meter or more in the air. The most adventurous of the adventure are the bridges. Borneo is a very wet place and there are many small creeks and streams. To cross these bodies of water, they park service developed many various bridge devices like the slightly slanting hanging wooden bridge and my person favorite: the tight rope with two wire handrails which all swings in the breeze. We opted to go in the river for that one. While the trail was adventurous, the wildlife viewing was not. We did see a group of macaques, who were not happy we crossed paths. They scared Lora so bad she ran away because she thought they'd attack with their nasty fangs, but they were only foolin'.

One of the best parts of being here was when a group of about 50 local high school students camp to camp in the deep dark jungle. They were very friendly and even offered us some of their dinner. They were also much more quite than 50 American students would EVER be...i was thoroughly impressed.

Then we moved to a place in the park called Prevab (I kept thinking there would be pre-fab housing there...I was wrong). To get there we had to travel to a coal company town and sit on the side of the river for a private boat to pass then convince them they should take us 20 minutes upriver. Of course no one would say no because the amount of money they get is absolutely ridiculous ("the price of gas is very expensive" blah).

Here we stayed on the floor of a once beautiful information center. The WWF helped put up this center and at one time it had electricity, furniture and even a sink, which has all been stolen so now its just a shell of a building. We brought our own food, tent and headlamps. It was like camping in the depths of the jungle only there was a large Japanese orangutan research station with a big generator right next door and every day we could hear sounds from the coal mine.

During our 3 days here we saw 6 orang-utan. The first was a large male who got very upset that we disturbed his lunch. He began grunting,shaking the boughs and throwing down branches at us. We watched him in is anger for a few minutes then decided we better jet before he comes down the tree and really does some harm. He was located a fruiting tree and I took it as a sign that this is where the orang-utan would hang out. We repeatedly went back to the same tree and were hardly ever disappointed. At one time there were three orang-utans eating its fruits. Now usually the apes like to travel in pairs, but we think that the mother was toting around her new baby and its older sibling. It was pretty amazing!

One night we decided to go on a night hike. We didn't get very far because we were exhausted from the 8 hours of trekking during the day, but in the hour hike we did run across 2 mouse deer. Mouse deer are so named because they are very, VERY tiny. Though they are larger than a mouse, they may not be larger than a giant rat. In actuality they are about the size of a house cat.

We saw a few other things such as monkeys and hornbills, but we never got a good view of any of them before they ran or flew off. We thought we'd see gibbons, but we missed them, though we did here their strange calls in the morning which we mistook for noisy morning birds...oops!