Orang Utans at Sepilok

Orang Utans at Sepilok

Sandakan, Malaysia, Asia

I’m getting a little tired of these ridiculously early wake up calls, but today it was well worth it. I woke up at 4:30am and got in a cab at 5am to head over to Terminal 1 at KKIA. I had checked the website and unfortunately my AirAsia flight wasn’t flying out of T2 which was only a five minute walk away. It was leaving from T1 which was a 30RM ($10) taxi ride away. Luckily I mentioned the flight I was on to the taxi driver and he informed me that all AirAsia flights leave from T2. Since it was literally a one minute drive from the hostel, we stopped at T2 and I found out that my flight did indeed leave from there. The cab driver was “nice” enough to only charge me 20RM ($6) for the one minute drive, and I checked in.

I got on the flight with more white people than I’ve seen in a long while. Of course we were all heading to the same place once we landed in Sandukan, so it shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise. It was a quick 35 minute flight, but the scenery was pretty awesome. We were up in the air for such a short amount of time, that I was only able to listen to two songs on my ipod before we were told to turn off the electronics again.

I landed at 7:50am and I had no checked luggage, so I went straight outside to grab a taxi. We made it to Sepilok Orang Utan Sanctuary by 8:15am, which didn’t open till 9am. It gave me time to check out the map of the area and read up on what’s been going on at the sanctuary. I headed into the park at 9am and went straight to the feeding platform. There were two orang utans waiting to be fed, it was a mother and baby and there were a couple of macaque monkeys hanging around too. The baby orang utan was having fun chasing the macaque away from the platform making sure he wasn’t going to steal any of his bananas when feeding time came.

The feeding lasted about 25 minutes and then I decided to escape the staggering heat and humidity by going into the theatre to watch a 30 minute video about the sanctuary. I fell asleep. It’s not my fault, I woke up at 4:30am, and it was nice and cool in there. I got out of there at 11am and tried to go for a walk down the trail, but it turns out they close the park from 11am to 2pm, so I had to sit in the cafe for three hours waiting for the park to reopen. The cafe wasn’t air conditioned and I seriously thought about taking off and going to my hostel, but I wasn’t going to do much there, so I decided to stay. Best decision ever!

When the park opened up at 2pm, EVERYONE else headed straight to the feeding platform for the 3pm feed. I went the other direction to go on a walk down the trail, but never made it that far. Instead, I encountered a group of four orang utans hanging out on the boardwalk, and I was the only one around. I was there for about 15 minutes and got to take some pretty awesome pictures. I hung around there until the orang utans left for feeding time and then I went over to the feeding platform.

They took a lot longer to get to the feeding platform in the afternoon than they did in the morning, but it probably didn’t help that there were about twice as many people. Also, these people were a lot louder than the ones in the morning, so I think it probably scared the orang utans a bit and put them off a bit. I ended up leaving the platform a bit early because the people were annoying me so much. On my way back through the ticket office, I ran into a few more orang utans climbing all over the building. It looked like a couple of them were trying to get into some mischief.

I hopped in a taxi and got a ride to Sandukan Backpackers where I’ll be staying for tonight. This is one of the worst hostels I’ve stayed in so far. It cost 50RM ($17) for a single room, which is a bit expensive, but wouldn’t be too bad if the place was at least clean. The entire place looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in about 15 years. It was nasty. There was only a fitted sheet on the bed, no flat sheet or blanket. The curtains in the room were shower curtains, and the bathrooms were horrendous.

I grabbed a quick bite to eat at a local restaurant and now I’m going to try and sleep. It’s not where I was hoping to be spending the night, but at this point I am so exhausted I think I will fall asleep anywhere!

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