Celebes Sea

This morning I'm of to see the Proboscis monkeys. After a good breakfast Luiz and I have agreed to take a shared private cab. It's about a 30 minutes drive but most of it is down a dirt track so in reality takes about 40 minutes. We arrive at 9am and walk down a boardwalk for 200m and in the distance I hear a strange sound. Having never heard a Proboscis monkey before I don't know whether it's one of them but as we reach a pavilion I can see it's the guy who runs the place who is calling the monkeys to feed.Labuk Bay Proboscis Monkey Sanctuary is located within an oil palm estate. In the mid-1990s this 400 acre site was going to be cleared for the development of oil palm when the owner discovered that proboscis monkeys were living in the mangrove forest. He decided to retain this relatively small pocket of forest as a sanctuary for the monkeys. Today Labuk Bay is home to around 150 free ranging proboscis monkeys. Luiz and I are the first people her and shortly after another small group of people approach and they shout Fiona I realise it's the Malaysian group that I met at Mount Kinabalu. We wait as the feeder throws out food and then listen as the trees start to shake. Initially it's the female monkeys that approach and are followed shortly after by the Alpha male. Proboscis monkeys have 2 groups , the Alpha male and his harem of women( usually between 8-10) and the bachelor party. These are made up of all male Proboscis monkeys that are either too young to be the Alpha male but too old to stay with their mothers or Alphas that have been replaced by another Alpha stealing they're women. The males are the ones with the huge long noses and the females nose is more of a 90degree angle with its face. They have webbed feet to enable them to swim in the rivers from predators and are endemic to Borneo living mainly along the waters edges of Borneos rivers and mangroves. Size really does matter here as well as the bigger the nose the louder the noise and the more attractive they are to the female species. It's amazing to get so up close and personal with them although the Alpha male has the size and weight of an average six foot man and the size of the thighs on him I wouldn't want to outrun him. We move on to platform b a site a little further along the dirt road. The monkeys don't seem so interested here and there are a lot more people but we manage to get a glimpse of a couple of males and females and a few younger ones but within minutes they have made they're way back to the mangroves and we head back.Read more