How would you like to be fed uncooked rice and then made to drink water so it expands in your stomach and creates excruciating and debilitating pain?

Or forced to march in chains across a humid jungle knowing that if you stop once you will be shot in the crotch and left to rot and bleed and sweat in the rainforest for the snakes and spiders to feed on?

Didn’t think so.

These are the stories we heard at Sandankan Memorial Park during our week of quarantine in Sabah before being permitted to handle the orang-utans. The Park commemorates the tragedy of the death, between January and August 1945, within sight of Allied victory in the Pacific war, of approximately 2,400 Australian and British prisoners of war held by the Japanese in the Sandankan POW camp in North Borneo.

I am not usually so touched by such museums or stories, but this atrocity was gripping by the manner of the death inflicted upon these soldiers by their captors – starvation, overwork, beatings and punishments and the forcing of over 1,000 sick and weak POWs on three marches across Borneo under brutal physical conditions.

Some of the personal stories of the soldiers were horrific, especially in light of the fact that they were suffering on the backwater of Borneo far from home and from anywhere that the world was really looking at the time. I wondered as I walked around the museum how visiting Japanese tourists might react to some of the more vividly portrayed stories. Of all those who had been alive in January 1945, by the end of August only six survived. Two of the six escaped into the jungle during one of the Japanese death marches. The other four escaped from Ranau and were fed and hidden by locals from the Japanese until the end of the war.

On a more upbeat and ecologically intense note the volunteers took a trip to Sukau where we enjoyed several river cruises on Sungai Kinabatangan, one of which was under the star-light of the peaceful Sabah night time and another which was a dawn cruise in the mist of the Malaysian morning.

Sungai Kinabatangan is Sabah’s longest river and is home to an astonishing array of species in a narrow strip. We had the pleasure of sweating below the evil looking long-tailed macaques, the bizarre looking proboscis monkeys with their long droopy noses, big bellies and permanent erections, kingfishers and hornbills galore and the wacky oriental darter, and of course, Big Frank, the crocodile. Keep your hands in the boat.

We also visited Gomantong and its limestone caves, the largest cave system in Sabah. There are 300,000 bats living in the cave. We covered ourselves up from head to toe and headed into the darkness. It was a bizarre experience. The bat sh*t which completely covers the floor is a breeding ground for cockroaches and as bats flew round our heads in the pitch blackness we trampled through their guano and the squirming larvae seething beneath our feet.

The caves are also home to 1 million swiftlets, the birds of bird’s nest soup fame, and we witnessed some crazy locals climbing precariously on a dangerous rope and pulley system to harvest the bird’s nest. Apparently it is a serious industry here with harvesting periods and teams carefully pre-planned. We learned that deaths are not uncommon and that sacrifices are made to the cave spirit before each harvest. All I would say is that if you ever do try bird’s nest soup, you should check it for cockroaches before digging in.

Three weeks here and my Malay is improving. I know now that thank-you is Terima kasih rather than Tiramisu and importantly that the Malay for ‘wee man’ is orang-kecil. Are you listening Gearoid O’Dalaigh?

The wonder of working hand-on with orang-utans comes, however, at a price. If I had to give two words to sum up my time so far in Borneo, they would be easy to select.
The first word would be sweat. I cannot explain to you how much I have been sweating here in Sabah. Sitting down doing nothing in the shade draws gallons from my body. My t-shirts appear to be now be made from liquid. I smell of dettol, orang-utan and mouldy football socks.

The second word would be ‘leeches’. Sure, the mosquitoes are way worse than in Ghana coming out not just in the evening but all day long, and the variety and volume of creepy crawlies requires me to be extra vigilant, but it is the leeches that have instilled the most fear in volunteers and which have been the subject of most conversation by far. Leeches suck you. And not in a good way. They wave their little suckers in the air looking for you, latching on from a leaf by a swamp, growing fat on your blood.

Do you like sweat or leeches? I don’t.