Sandakan/Sepilok

8 a.m. - I got some Roti egg for breakfast and got ready for our day trip to Sepilok Orangutan rehabilitation center. Orangutans are a endangered species and you can only find them living wild in the jungle of Borneo (Malaysia) and Sumatra (Indonesia). They are endangered because of the deforesting of the jungle for palm oil plantations. As well as other animals. On our bus drive the day before I just saw palm oil plantations as far as I could see. Did you know that almost 90% of the world oil palm trees are grown on a few islands in Malaysia and Indonesia? The big problem with orangutans is that the baby’s stay with their mother unit they are six. After that they learned everything to survive by their own. If something happens to the mother in that six years the baby would die. The goal of this organization is to rescue the baby orangutans and the nurse them until they are ready to be released again in the wild.

9 a.m. - We took the local bus to Sepilok and it was horrible. The seats, the load annoying music etc. At least it was cheap and he brought us to the entrance.

10 a.m. - When we arrived we saw at first a mother orangutan with her small baby sitting on the roof of the building just chilling and watching all the people. Another thing the organization does is the provide two times a day a “feeding” where they provide a lot of fruits with nutritions and vitamins for the orangutans. So if they feel like it they know where they can find some healthy food. Basically it’s a good sign when there are less orangutans but the ranger also told us that there are some lazy ones how just take advantage of the situation. So we went to the “feeding” in the morning and we saw there another two orangutans. Just chilling there and eating. I was so fascinated how the behave and act. Really calm and chill. I can watch them for hours and hours. It was very impressive how he cracked the coconut to get the meat out of it. We also wanted to visit the nursery but unfortunately it was closed because of construction work.

1:30 p.m. - We had no service there so we just started to walke and found a restaurant for lunch after 30 min. While we had lunch it started to rain but we didn’t mind because when we finished the weather was good again.

2:30 p.m. - We went to the second “feeding” in the afternoon a bit earlier. When we arrived there, there was already a mother orangutan and her older baby up in the trees and waited for the food. Once the ranger came with the food they made their way down to the platform. Unfortunately a group of macaque monkeys wanted the food as well and the distributed the orangutans. This there were a bit more than in the morning. In total five. But most of the just grabbed as much food as possible. They had food in both there feet’s and in one hand. The last hand they used to get back up in the trees where they ate their food without any distribution. After they had enough the all disappeared in the jungle. It was very hard to take good pictures with the phone because of the colors, the light and the zoom. Luckily I met Niccolo a Italien guy how life’s in Australia and he is a nature/animal photographer with a proper camera in his free time. He was so kind to send me some of his photos.

4 p.m. - After we finished we saw a hornbill couple in a tree where we waited for the bus. Unfortunately the bus didn’t came so we wanted to order a grab but somehow every driver cancelled. So ended up asking some locals and we shared two cars back to the hostel.

5 p.m. - Later we went for a small snack in Mci and checked out the shopping mall there.

7 p.m. - In the evening there was a event in our hostel because of the seventh day of CNY. They provided a free big buffet and drinks. The brought up so much food it was insane. Furthermore we got some small fireworks and all in all it was a really cozy and familiar evening.

P.S.: Did you know that we share round about 97% DNA with orangutans.Read more