Malaysia: Borneo (Sabah) – Sepilok Orangutan Sanctuary

🦧 Sandakan, Sepilok and the Orangutan Who Tried on a T-Shirt

I am not sure the English language has quite the right words for how excited I was when we finally touched down at Sandakan. Sandakan sits in the north-east corner of Sabah, which is Malaysia’s slice of Borneo, and it has had a fairly eventful history for a place that most people couldn’t find on a map without a good ten minutes of squinting. It was the original capital of British North Borneo in the late 19th century, a prosperous timber and trading port, until the Japanese occupation during the Second World War left it almost entirely destroyed. The post-war rebuilding gave it a rather functional, no-nonsense look that it has largely kept ever since. It is not a glamorous city. But it is the gateway to some of the most extraordinary wildlife on earth, so we forgave it immediately.

The airport is tiny — a handful of flights a day, a modest terminal, the sort of place where you half expect someone’s auntie to be behind the check-in desk. And yet, despite its modesty, it managed to take an absolute age for our bags to appear. The reason, we suspect, was that our flight in from Kuala Lumpur had been packed with local passengers returning home laden with an impressive quantity of shopping. We are talking serious cargo here — cardboard boxes of every conceivable size, rolls of paper, what appeared to be at least one ceiling fan. Getting all of that off a plane and onto a single baggage belt is, it turns out, something of a logistical undertaking. We waited. We waited some more. Eventually, the bags arrived, and we made our way out into the thick, wet Bornean air.

From the airport we transferred to what would be our base for the next couple of days: the Sepilok Jungle Resort, which sits right next door to the orangutan sanctuary — and we mean right next door, as in the jungle that contains wild orangutans begins essentially at the edge of the garden. If you are planning time in Sepilok to see the orangutans, we would recommend this place without hesitation. More on that shortly.

We were still feeling the full effects of the journey that first morning, but jet lag, it turns out, is no match for the Bornean dawn chorus, and we were up at an unreasonable hour regardless. We had been told an orangutan had nested close by the previous night, so we headed out hopefully into the early morning half-light. Sadly, he or she had already gone about their business by the time we got there. Instead, we walked the boardwalks that wind around the resort, which turned out to be no consolation prize whatsoever. At that hour, the forest was in the middle of what you might call a changing of the guard — the nocturnal shift clocking off, the daytime crew clocking on — and the birdlife alone was staggering. Hornbills, kingfishers, things we couldn’t name but stared at for far too long. All of this within the narrow confines of the resort grounds. Not bad before breakfast.

After we ate, we were making our way back to our room when one of the staff started waving at us with some urgency, beckoning us to follow her. We were just in time to see an orangutan strolling along the boardwalk with the unhurried confidence of someone who owns the place — which, in fairness, is a reasonable position for an orangutan to take — before melting calmly into the jungle. As we walked back, Karen got chatting to another guest who had her own encounter to report. Apparently, this same orangutan had earlier turned up on the deck of her chalet and, in what we can only describe as a bold lifestyle choice, had attempted to try on her husband’s t-shirt. When the guest appeared, the orangutan bared its teeth, which is not the sort of thing you want to see on an animal that is considerably stronger than you. She was, understandably, spooked. We were, equally understandably, absolutely delighted by the story.

Our first proper visit of the day was to the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre, which is the whole reason most people make it to this corner of Borneo in the first place. The centre was founded in 1964 by a British woman named Barbara Harrisson, working under the Sabah Forest Department, at a time when habitat destruction and hunting were already taking a serious toll on orangutan populations. The site covers 43 square kilometres of protected land on the edge of the Kabili-Sepilok Forest Reserve, and today somewhere between 60 and 80 orangutans live freely within it.

Orangutans, we should say, are remarkable animals in ways that go well beyond their habit of borrowing clothing. They spend most of their lives high up in the forest canopy, rarely coming down to ground level. The name itself tells you everything — orangutan comes from the Malay words orang, meaning person, and hutan, meaning forest. Man of the forest. It is thought the name came from indigenous peoples who observed the older, larger apes moving slowly through the undergrowth below the canopy, and drew what seemed like a reasonable conclusion. Younger orangutans are almost entirely arboreal; it is only as they age and grow heavier that they begin to spend more time at ground level, which incidentally makes them more vulnerable to hunters and to the advancing edge of farmland.

Most of the orangutans that pass through Sepilok arrive as orphans. Their mothers have typically been killed — by hunters, by farmers protecting crops, or by logging operations clearing the forest. The centre has processed around 740 orangutans since it opened, and a significant number of those have been successfully returned to the wild, either within the Kabili-Sepilok reserve itself or at release sites elsewhere across Sabah. The process of rehabilitation takes years. These are highly intelligent animals that would normally spend the first seven or eight years of their lives learning survival skills from their mothers, and replicating that education in a rescue setting is painstaking work. The centre is officially administered by the Sabah Wildlife Department, which provides some funding, though the bulk of financial support comes from visitor fees and from the Orangutan Appeal UK, a British charity that has been supporting the centre for decades.

The centre is open year-round, and the peak times to visit are the twice-daily feeding sessions at the platforms — 10 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon. There are two platforms. The first is in the nursery observation area, where younger orangutans are brought out under supervision. The second is deeper into the reserve, visited by orangutans that have already been released back to semi-wild life, and sometimes by other local primates who have worked out that free food is free food — pig-tailed and long-tailed macaques being the main opportunists.

Watching the orangutans swing through the trees above the feeding platforms, moving with a fluid, effortless grace that made the whole thing look entirely too easy, was one of those experiences that is genuinely difficult to put into adequate words. We have tried, and this is what we came up with. It was, quite simply, wonderful.