Kinabatanga River
ByIt could have been the driving horizontal rain that swept in over the river or our small boat jostling against the bank but the big orang utan fairly raced up the tree. We’d seen these marvellous creatures at relatively close quarters at orang Utan sanctuaries. It is always a special thrill though to see such a big animal living in the wild.
Although we love these big orange apes the highlight of our trip on the Kinabatangan River in Sabah, Malaysia was the Borneo pigmy elephant. It’s not that they are particularly elusive it’s just that so few of them are left. Actually they are not that much smaller than Asian elephants so we were quite surprised by its size when we came eye to eye with one browsing by the bank of the river. We somehow expected to see dinky little elephants but we were inspected by a beast that would have been respectable in India. With a trumpet and swish of the trunk it launched off back into the forest, startling hornbills that swooped across the river.
Once the excitement of the elephant settled down we drifted along the wide chocolate brown river. Ridiculous looking proboscis monkeys stared at us very openly and rudely. The fawn coloured males have enormous bulbous noses and it’s difficult not to smile or even laugh uproariously as they peer at you inquisitively.
Gliding beneath overhanging tree branches sobered us up a bit when we realised there was a huge blue and yellow mangrove snake coiled on a branch only a couple of meters above us. Our sigh of relief as we left the trees was short lived as a big crocodile surfaced next to our boat. But like the snake it was not in the least bit interested in us and just wanted to be left alone. That was OK with us.
Luxuriating in a magnificent sunset we said goodnight to a troop of macaque monkeys settling down for the night in their roost in a tall tree.
