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Other entries in Sepilok

Orang (Man) Utan (Forest) - In Malay

After the walk down the mountain, I collected my gear from the storage room at the Park HQ and headed down to the road where the staff assured me that a bus would turn up to take me to Sepilock. I was told three different stories, as thats what they were. One would be there between 12 and 2, they would turn up every half an hour, or, there would be one at 3:34pm. There were lots of buses, but none stopped, they were either private tour groups, schools or going in the wrong direction. After 4hours of waiting I gave up. It was getting cold and I needed to find somewhere to stay. A man drove past saying that he was going to KK and did I want a lift, two other people joined me and we headed off. He even dopped us straight outside the guest house, where as the long distance bus would have dropped us miles from the centre of town, and we would have had to get a taxi, all for the same price. He seemed a bit more genuine than the last people I had a run in with. He was a government civil engineer. Don't know if thats anything to go by, but there we go. The next morning I got on board a bus that would take me straight to Sepilok.

When I got to Sepilok I met the guys that I had been waiting at the bus station with, who said that a bus turned up 15mins after I left, o well, thats travelling. Sepilok Orang Utan Rehabilitation center is one of the biggest in the world. It rescuse abandoned Orang Utans from the wild and those that are being kept illegally as pets.

The main threat to them is habitat destruction. All over the north of Borneo, and probably the south as well, has had huge tracks of jungle flattened and made way for Palm Oil plantations, that stretch for miles either side of the roads. When you look out over the countyside it all seems to be very green and lush. But when you look further into it, its all the same tree. Not very good for bio-diversity. They are trying to turn the oil in to bio-diesel. So for all you people with bio-diesel cars here are some of the bad points behind it. More jungle is flattened for the plantations and less food is produced for the local population, which is already lacking in food, good points, they will have a garenteed demand from the west, as we can probably use up more than they can produce, so they will all be kept employed.

When the locals first saw the Orang-Utans, they thought it looked very human, so they called it 'the man of the forest', in Malay, Orang - Utan. The centre has a lot of information areas and a short film made about the work of the Center. They nurse orphans back to health and teach them how to survuive in the wild for the first 5-10 years of their life, a long and expensive process, but they have had some very good results. They start to feed them close to the centre and then keep moving the food further and further out into the jungle, until nature and instincts take over and they don't come back again.

The Orang Utans seemed to know when it was time for the park wardens to come and feed them and started to collect on the feeding platform half an hour before they came. They seem to be very pleasant towards one another at feeding time and there wasn't any fights amongst them. They seemed to be very friendly. May be I will have to readdress my dislike of monkies. It only seem to be the small ones that have the problem. After a while a troop, I thinks the right word, of Marrqaues came in to enjoy the feast of fruit. Some of the Orang Utans held their ground for a while, but after more and more Marrques came, they were eventually chased off. There were huge fights over the food, with the bigger ones throwing the smaller and younger ones all over the place to get at the food, including off the feeding platform. When the Marrques dissappeared, some the Orang Utans came back again and chased off the remaining few Marrques, and finished off the last of the fruit. I stayed after most of the other people had gone, and watched 2 Orang Utans, that were best friends, and kept pulling funny faces at us. Eventually it was time to head back to the hostel.

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