After Singapore we travelled overland to Johor Bahru, Malaysia. From the minute we reached Malaysia it became clear that Allison was invisible. Rich was expected to do all the talking etc, or 'Mr Richard' as they all called him. All of you who know Allison know this wasn't received well, especially when Rich seemed to be enjoying the attention and service a little too much. At dinner the waitress said to Rich, "will sir be having the steak this evening" he replied "yes sir will be". Needless to say Allison retorted "sir will also be getting a clip around the ear also this evening if he's not careful'!

We arrived late afternoon so stayed in a nice hotel for the evening before our early morning flight to Borneo. Even got some room service, a couple of smartie ice-creams (I know how old are we), but they were great!

Our first flight took us to the capital of Sabah, Kota Kinabulu, here we got a connecting flight to Sandakan. This would be our base as many jungle and wildlife areas could be reached from here.

Our first visit was to the Sepilok Orangutan Sanctuary. The Sanctuary was developed to help return orphaned apes back to the wild. Many of the Orangutans have been maltreated, abandoned, injured or ceased as it is illegal to have these animals as pets. 

The Sanctuary was about 30 minutes from the town centre via local bus, which was an experience. Like South America, Malaysia has small minivans you flag down, we took one to the town centre then transferred to a larger bus and were the only honkies on there. This was something we got used to very quickly as although Sandakan was the central place for wildlife transfers we seemed to be the only ones travelling ourselves. All the other Europeans etc we saw seemed to be on orgnaised tours, lucky gits! If only, never craved a package holiday so much in our lives!

Anyway after about 30 minutes we arrived at the sanctuary just in time for the 10am feeding. We walked down a short boardwalk to the feeding platform and within minutes of the ranger appearing with a large bucket of banana's we saw 6 Orangutans swinging in for a morning feed. It was an amazing site. That morning the big male of the group called Mr G, made an appearance, he was huge. He had the big cheek flanges that apparently males only develop when they are over 20 and if they are the dominant male.

We watched the Orangutans for about ten minutes until it started pouring down with rain. It was nothing like the rain at home, we were literally soaked through in about 2 minutes. Unfortunately we didn't bring our rain jackets or umbrella so like stuid idiots just stood there getting wet as we didn't want to miss anything. The funny thing was there was nothing to watch. The Orangutans having 96% of their genes identical to humans also don't like the rain, so were huddled together sheltering. One of them even swung to gather leaves to put over his head. Think we saw him smirking at us, as we were honestly soaked through to the grundies. We decided to go back to the main centre and wait for the 3pm feed time, maybe the weather would be better!

Just before the 2nd feeding time we again walked to the feeding area and saw about 20 macques monkeys just walking around on the boardwalk near our feet. It was a brilliant site. A few of the monkeys had babies with them which were gorgeous. They were very inquisitive and were approaching people tugging at their trousers and tapping people on the hands. It was great to see them grooming each other and playing right before us.

The ranger then made an appearance, the macque monkeys detected him first and made their way up to the platform. Then 2 Orangutans also swang in to join the group. It was amazing to observe them and see the way they moved from tree to tree.

Altogether there were 68 Orangutans at the sanctuary, we only saw 8 the day we visited but it was a brilliant experience. Hopefully most will sucessfully be re-introduced into the jungle.