Kalimantan

Kumai River Cruise

The sail to the mouth of the Kumai River was lovely. We managed to put the ballooner up for the first time in a long time to take advantage of the downwind sailing conditions.

From there, however, it’s a bit of a slog upriver to get to Kumai, and the anchorage isn’t without its dangers. Huge floating islands of vegetation and detritus flow up and down the river with the fast-flowing tide, and these can latch onto anchored boats. The effect is to drag the boats downriver with them. In an attempt to minimise the chances of that happening to us, we anchored close to the mangroves at 2°44.553’S 111°43.950’E.

The reason we were here was to go on a river cruise for three days and two nights to see the orangutans and any other of our close relatives hanging around in the rainforest. It is not possible to get to the orangutan feeding stations on your own boat, so we hired a tour company, Jenie Subaru, who picked up from Jamala at 9 am, leaving a man onboard to keep an eye on things, just in case a floating island came our way.

There are mining operations upriver from here, but the brown colour is caused by the tannins leaching into the water from the trees. Apparently, before mining started, this stretch of the river used to be clear,

Our first stop was at Tanjung Puting National Park, where we visited a feeding station and spotted a few more things on the way.

There’s a pecking order at the feeding station. The King of the buffoonery (I love that term) always eats first, and the others have to wait until he has had enough of his solo dining experience.

After a short break, we headed out on a night walk. Before going, our guide issued a warning about snake bites. It can happen, so they have a speedboat standing by just in case to rush people to the hospital for an anti-venom injection. And after reassuring us that this is rare, off we went.

Female amblychia angeronaria (if you must know)

We left the next morning for Pondok Tanggui.

All the meals on the boat were fabulous. We didn’t expect anything like this.

Camp Leakey is the oldest established orangutan research and rehabilitation centre in the national park. Many of the orangutans here are rescued from captivity. To save me from banging on about it, you can read about it on Wikipedia. But if one of the measures of success is the orangutans not turning up at the feeding station (which I believe is the case), then this place has been very successful.

The only orangutans that came to the feeding station decided not to look at the crowd. They spent the whole time with their backs to us, so there are no photos here.

What I can’t show is our nighttime stop, where we parked against the forest next to a display of fireflies. It was a beautiful place to end the tour.

On the way back to Jamala, we spotted this truck full of palm fruit bunches on its way to a processing plant. Around 5.5 million hectares of forest have been lost to palm oil plantations over the last 18 years.

Birds nest productionThe buildings in the photograph above are nesting houses for swiftlets who make the nests that form the basis of Bird’s nest soup. Much of this, I understand, is exported to China.

Next, we are off to Belitung, and then our final stop in Indonesia, Batam.