I woke early again, after a super good sleep. I woke to the sounds of the gibbons call and also the hornbills. The spot where we stopped for the night, just outside of Camp Leakey, was really beautiful! It was amazing to see the hornbills gliding through the air. So graceful and peaceful! The early mornings were trully stunning!
I had coffee and breakfast with the sights and sounds of the rainforest. =)
After breakfast we headed back down the river to the second camp, Pondok Tangui - feeding time was 9am. On arrival at the camp, there were hundreds of butterflies fluttering around, it was amazing!
We started the walk to the feeding station, and not very far along, we spotted 'Nanang' - a huge male, he was just sitting in a tree right near the path. Although he was big and scary, he looked cute sitting in the tree because he was so big and the tree was a thin, little tree...it was a funny sight! Nanang's face was very cute...he had like a little grin on his face!
As we kept walking down the path towards the feeding station, Nanang followed us...and ahead...I could see loads of orangutan, quite a few of them with babies too, they were all hanging high in the trees. It was probably the most amount of orangutans that I had seen in one spot, since I got here!
Nanang walked down to the feeding station and took his spot sitting on the platform. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, another big, male orangutan, much bigger and apparently the dominant male, just came out of nowhere and Nanang jumped off the platform and was chased down the path by the big, dominant male (who was so fast that I hardly got a good look at him!) The two male orangutans ran off and apparently had a big fight (reported the guides and tourists that had ran off and followed them!)...I had decided that I didn't want to see two big, aggressive dominant males fighting.
Eventually the fight ended and Nanang made his way back to the feeding station, he had a visible bleeding scratch on his hand...I have no idea what happened to the other male orangutan, as he did not return. Had Nanang become the new dominant male? Nanang took his place sitting on the feeding platform. He didn't eat anymore, just sat there, like he was the boss!
Other orangutans came down for bananas, with really cute babies, they snatched a hand or two of bananas and then climbed back high up in the trees! Some bananas were left in a woven basket, rather than being placed on the feeding platform, so funny to watch the orangutans creep down one tree to steal bananas from the woven basket. One by one they came down to get bananas, and not just one hand of bananas but they would stuff two or three hands of bananas in their mouths! So funny!
We stayed for quite a while and then we headed back to the klotok. We headed up the river again, back to Camp Leakey. It was suddenly really busy with klotok and tourists...so we decided to hang around on the klotok until after feeding time, as obviously all the tourists were going to feeding time, so when they were gone then we would go into the camp. I was happy to try to avoid the other tourists, it changed the whole experience. I had been really lucky so far in that I had only seen a couple of tourists at a time.
I did washing on the back of the klotok with river water and had my first proper shower! Yay! And then another yummy lunch. In the late afternoon, we walked into the camp and watched Princess with her baby and her older child. They were all distracted with 2 tubes of toothpaste! So funny! They were putting the toothpaste on their upper wrist, rubbing it in their hair on their arm, and also rubbing their teeth/mouths on their arm. It was almost as if they were using their arm as a toothbrush. Fascinating and funny! They had so much toothpaste on them, it looked like they were wearing white lipstick! We hung around for a while, went for a walk along the boardwalk and then went back to the klotok.
We headed down the river and found a nice spot for the night, not far from Camp Leakey again. When we were parking the klotok, we realised that we had stopped right next to an orangutan's nest, we only realised this when we saw the orangutan scurrying out of his nest and moving through the trees! We had disturbed him...I felt bad...but none of us had seen him! I wish, I had of seen him so that not only could we have stopped from disturbing him...but I also could have got a great photo of him sitting in his nest!
Dinner was steamed rice, mi goreng-fried noodles and prawns. The mosquitos seemed to be extra bad tonight, so I ended up taking cover under my mosquito net and having yet again an early night.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please feel free to leave a message.