Just got back from an incredible 3 days and 2 nights in Tanjung Puting national park, Kalimantan, Indonesia. Lots and lots of orangutans, probiscus monkeys, longtail monkeys... I am on a terrible computer in an incredibly noisy internet cafe with lots of adolescent boys playing computer games and smoking while mangy kittens are crawling around my feet, so I will update this blog and add photos (I took a lot!) soon!

UPDATE:

Arrived in Kalimantan fairly painlessly in the end! After a mad last night in Phuket (do not recommend ever going there!) on a couple of hours "sleep" - 3 in a bed and one on a mattress on the floor... we arrived in Jakarta. We did a tour off all the terminals annd airline desks at the airport and found a flight the following day to Pangalan Bun.

We then checked into the most disgusting hovel I have ever seen and then went to an incredible shopping mall. Not really ever seen anything quite like it - dirty, grimy streets and then inside a shopping utopia with TopShop, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Prada, Marc Jacobs, Mui Mui all lined up next to each other with lovely bars and cafes interspersed and non-smoking and airconditioned! Plus the only "proper" toilets (with loo paper and everything) that I saw in Indonesia! At about 10.30pm I decided that there wasn't a chance that I could sleep in the hovel so walked up the road to find a more "desirable" place to sleep and convinced the bellboy to come back with me to carry our rucksacks! In the meantime Rachel had called the doctor out as her leg had bruised and swollen where she had fallen off a tightrope in a bar in PhiPhi and she was concerned that it might be a DVT... it wasn't luckily!

On arrival in Kalimantan the following day a very helpful taxi driver took us to the police station to get our registration to enter Tanjung Puting national park and then onto Mr Majid. Although we were fairly sceptical (especially after seeing the hotel that Majid had recommended that we stay in in Kumai) he organised us a fantastic klotok. Klotoks are wooden river boats that travel up the Sungai Sekonyer to the 3 orangutan feeding stations. We opted for 3 days 2 nights and arrived the following moring to be joined by 2 other English girls (Lizzie and Dani) and an English guy called Kieran. It was nice to have some company in addition to the local guide (Maori), the boat boy (Ustop), captain and cook.

River travel was wonderful and we saw tens of probiscus monkeys in the trees around the river and a whole family jumped into the river in front of the boat to cross! Apparently they will swim when there are klotoks around as the noise of the boats scares the crocodiles away (sadly we didn't spot crocs)! The orangutans themselves were absolutely incredible - we could get so close to them - from great big kings weighing in at 135kgs to the most aborable bright orange babies! There were so many of them, it was sometimes difficult to keep track on where they were in the trees around our heads! On the last day having the opportunity to feed a mother and baby was a definite highlight. There were also longtail macaques leaping about - or cheekily grabbing me on the leg! Oh an I also got bitten by a leech. Totally thought that the guide was joking when we got back to the boat after the first jungle walk, but no, when I took off my boots there was blood on my sock - luckily the leech itself had dropped off though! Kieran also got leeched - on the last day we went on a longer jungle walk, we had just set off when he slipped into a proper bog up to his knee! When he washed off his leg there were a couple of bite marks!

Sleeping on the boat was great - we were all on the top deck on mattresses with mosquito nets over the top being serenaded by the sounds of the jungle!

We were sad to go, but incredibly pleased to have seen both wild and rehabilitated/semi-rehabilitated orangutans in such an incredible setting.