Up the River (Kalimantan Part III)

Previous Related Posts:
Heading for Kalimantan, 12/05/05
The Klotok (Kalimantan, Part II) 12/11/05


The Rimba Lodge was rather like those rustic lodges you often find in the mountains of the United States, but instead of snowcapped peaks, the windows opened close up and personal to the tropical rain forest right outside. There were few guests. To get to my room from reception, I crossed a narrow, wooden bridge over rushing water. As I unpacked with the door open, small monkeys edged near my door, and I actually had to shoo them away so they didn't become my roomates. I made the mistake of taking a shower, only to find the water brown and suspect - water from the river. I was probably cleaner before the shower.

As agreed, I met Said back at the klotok at 4:00 p.m. We went further down the tributary and passed more tributaries. We turned down one of them and soon found ourselves staring back at crocodiles watching us through slitted eyes from the shore and macaques screaming at us from the trees. Troops of proboscis monkeys swung from branches; it was hard to believe they were endangered, they seemed so numerous. But I knew they were numererous only in this small slice of Asia, calling to each other, their huge noses giving each a distinctive visage.

And then... and then, I wouldn't have seen it but for Said. There, in the late afternoon, a wild orangutan building a nest high in the trees near the river. I was mesmerized. This was not one of the once-captive orangutans from a santuary. This was a wild orangutan who had so far escaped the scourges of man, and I was seeing it as it was meant to live.

We were extremely lucky; we saw one or two more organgutans that afternoon. More often you can go down this same river and not see any at all, even after several trips. But their land is dwindling, with the farming and the gold mining and the logging. Few humans here respect the orangutans, the "people of the forest", killing them mercilessly when they are driven into the open to the farms due to famine and fires started by humans. The babies are cute, and many people want them for pets. This often dooms the babies to witnessing their mothers slaughtered before the babies are taken into captivity. Of course, as they grow up, they are no longer so cute and risk suffering the same fate as their mothers, or, at best, living their lives in tiny cage prisons, rather than ranging extensively in the trees.

I had seen huge trucks hauling timber in Kumai, proof that greed was stripping the jungle (and the orangutans' habitat). Although I had not yet seen the gold mines that had turned some of the world's lushest forests into wasteland, I would before I left Kalimantan. As I watched the orangutans build nests and the probosiscis monkeys play in the trees, I knew I was seeing a world that likely would not exist in 15 years... almost certainly not in 20.

Sunset approached. Said pulled out his prayer mat, kneeled facing east on the klotok's deck and praised Allah.