Two weeks on this river fly by like nothing at all. It is so easy for the days to disappear when it involves the lovely boat and funny monkeys and scary crocs! I feel like this isn’t my last time on the Kinabatangan because it feels more at home to me than most places have. I’ll just have to wait and see when the next time is but I am already looking forward to it!
The last couple days I spent doing a few different things I hadn’t done before! I spent half a day going around helping check camera traps (well….i didn’t help all that much, but I watched them check the cameras!). It was interesting to see the process, which surprisingly involves a lot of raking! The nicest trails I have seen are those for camera traps – all raked and clean from debris! Apparently a nice clean trail attracts animals (especially the cats of interest….and apparently MANY macaques) so it increases the chance of animals walking in front of the cameras. The macaques are so funny to see in the photos of camera traps and I don’t think I will stop giggling every time I see a picture of just the eyes of a macaque staring into the camera, so curious about what is going on that it’s face is basically pressed up against the camera. They also seem to time their matings just right so they are right in front of the camera for it. Camera trapping also involves a lot of sitting on a boat to go in between sites and therefore resulted in some pretty bad tan lines for me! But all in a days work!
Our last day we went for a last walk through the forest in hopes to see a snake, but the closest we got was a large millipede. But it is such a nice forest and SO easy compared to the one in La bundo bundo. I had forgotten that it can actually be enjoyable walking through the forest when you don’t have to worry about falling down a limestone cliff!
The afternoon we went to Gua Gomantong – a MASSIVE bat cave just about an hour and a bit away from the field site. The first thing you notice is the smell. It’s a smell that gets right in your head and seems to push out any other senses that are trying to express themselves. There must be millions of bats in that cave and so the amount of guano and ammonium is enough of a smell to hit you right in the face over and over again. BUT it is still an amazing place. There is a board walk set up which walks the inside perimeter of the cave, which I was very happy for, because the entire floor of the cave is covered in small mountains of guano and cockroaches. I don’t know if you guys have seen the planet earth caves episode but they filmed it in this spot, and had a camera run up the guano mountain. When you look quickly at the ground it just kind of seems shiny, but not anything special. But if you keep your eyes in one spot for a few seconds even, you will see the ground starting to move from all the cockroaches. You also have to watch your step on the boardwalk since the cockroaches are everywhere! And don’t even think about using the handle on the board walk to help yourself go up or down the ramps or you’ll get guano and cockroach allll over you! After going through the cave we sat outside and waited for dusk – and it was amazing. All the bats started streaming out of the cave, and it looked as though they were actually in a stream! They would flow out in a continuous stream and break off into small groups which look just like the bait balls fish go form when they are being attacked (although the bats going into this formation weren’t necessarily being attacked). But there were a few brahminy kites soaring around the entrance of the caves trying to snatch up whatever they could get! But kites don’t seem necessarily built for quick action strikes but it was still really cool to watch!
This cave is an important cave as it is harvested 3 times a year for the edible bird nests. So there were many people living outside the caves, and up on the mountain that work for the bird nest industry. Two of the guys came over and showed us the bird nests and told us a bit about them. There are two types of nests that are collected from the caves in the area (there are many, but only one accessible to visitors) – a black type and a white type. They are made from the birds basically up-chucking (I don’t know the proper word!) and so the nests are kind of gummy and rubbery. The black ones have more feathers in them, but the white ones are basically entirely this rubbery material and the bit that attaches to the wall had a bit of blood in it still. The white nests are more expensive than the black ones, but both are used for Chinese medicines and in soup. They were saying they would get about £400/1000kg of nests, and each time they harvested nests they are collecting about 3000kg worth of nests – so in a year they are collecting about 9000kg of these nests! They do it 3 times a year because the nests take about 3-4 months to be made, and they said that they wait until the chicks have hatched and have left the nest before they harvest them, which I hope is true, otherwise this harvesting would not be able to continue for too long.
We left the field site early Friday morning and headed back to Sandakan. Following tradition of last year, we ordered pizza from pizza hut and had it delivered to the hostel. We each had our own regular sized pizza and it was amazing!! I don’t seem to have a problem completely demolishing a pizza there, and not even feel disgustingly full after! Lol! Also, I found out about a roof top patio that the hostel has, so we ate up there and were able to listen to some beautiful music being played along the water. It was a great way to end the Bornean trip!
Now it is on to Kuala Lumpur for a couple days to visit some of my lovely ladies who are doing some great work there. I can’t wait to lay by the pool!
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