Our maid, like so many Sarawakians, has a mouthful of entirely rotten teeth.  When she smiles you can look directly into a cavern of blackened stumps that even when whole must have represented significantly misshapen dentition. On our first morning here, she was terribly hung over and between that and her boss having the day off, she accomplished almost nothing.  

However, through her personal haze she was able to point us in the direction of the bus to the orang-utan conservancy.

This is not a zoo.  There is no guarantee you will see an orang-utan. But we were fortunate in seeing six.  We have seen four species of monkey now in their natural habitat living relatively undisturbed lives, and the orang-utans stand out.  

Clearly intelligent yet endowed with awesome strength and agility, they move easily through the forest below the canopy using all four hands – as their feet seem (to a casual observer at any rate) to be formed exactly as their hands.  Each limb (whether their extraordinarily long arms or their shorter legs) seems to operate with independence and strength, so they are as likely to hold a bunch of bananas in any fist while clinging easily in mid-air to a few branches or vines with two or three of the remaining appendages.  

Their intelligence and agility seem to support one other personality trait of these big beasts:  a slightly sneering hauteur that is most clearly expressed in their enjoyment of urinating on human groundlings that end up directly below them.  We kept our umbrella up.

The macaques were a problem and would steal food from your

 plate

 while you ate.

But one day of sweating in the equatorial rainforest did not satisfy us.  We booked a few days’ visit to a national park.  The park lady was helpful.

Silver Leaf monkey with her baby

“Maybe see many monkeys. Monitor lizard, I think. Maybe also bearded pig.”  

“Bearded pig,” I mused aloud.  “That sounds like a girl I dated in high school.” 

Ingrid rolled her eyes – she is growing inured to the sparkle of my wit.  The park lady was a half a beat slow getting it, then tried to suppress a smile.  Around the counter, however, three young English-speaking ladies of glacial mien had no difficulty at all repressing their laughter.  But judging by their dour expressions, they needn’t have taken offense, as they apparently belong to a bovine rather than a porcine species.

So Tuesday morning found us in the bus shelter at 0800 waiting for the Kuching Express in the company of a young German man who was so worldly he knew immediately that Terrace, B.C. was of no account and soon informed us that he would only spend a few hours in the jungle because he’d already seen one, and they were all the same.

We sneered at both of these opinions, but in the end, we tended to agree with the second.

In Bako National Park we determined we would first take the Lintang trail – whose main virtue was that in 3.5 hours it traversed 7 ecological zones.  It all seemed so reasonable.

At first we strolled along a semi-biodegraded and very slippery boardwalk and things looked fine, if steamy hot.

Soon, however, we realized we were clambering over roots and between rocks – very much like a poorly-maintained BC trail.  But hot.  Airless, humid, clinging, steamy, sauna-like hot. Then the trail began to climb steadily.  A series of rickety steps, some rotten, a few broken, none with dependable handrails confronted us, and we sweated up. Between massive boulders slippery with greenery and through cracks in the rock, over sudden skinny but deep chasms, all the time stumbling uphill between menacing mega-fauna: it seemed half the trunks sported very nasty spikes: some in clusters, others running along ridges in the stem – still others seemed paired like tiny, sharp ducks’ beaks.  Twenty-centimeter hammerhead slugs and hand-sized spiders entertained us with their exotic appearance.

Underfoot we had twisted roots: tough, dense, dry roots that resembled snakes. Up and down the path, we began dripping sweat.  It had a terribly enervating effect.  My hands ran with sweat so that handling the camera was tricky.  The lenses were slick on the barrel from my sweat and I begrudged the energy to set up the tripod and frame photos.  It was oddly fatiguing – certainly we have walked much greater distances and scaled much steeper terrain.  But the heat.  Even sitting in the shade not moving a muscle the sweat ran down my forearms and dripped from my elbows. 

But both the flora and fauna were fascinating.  The macaques were a nuisance, even taking food right from the plate of a man as he ate. The bearded pigs turned out to be nothing more than wild boars. 

The silver leaf monkeys were delicately beautiful and equally standoffish.

The proboscis monkeys, however, were wonderfully colourful and odd-shaped and kept to themselves.  

(We enjoyed their local name, Orang Bilanda: the Dutchman Monkey,

the name based on the resemblance between 

their noses and those of former colonial masters).