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ZEISS DTI thermal imaging cameras. For more discoveries at night, and during the day.

The Malay Archipelago, 2009 (1 Viewer)

Again. Great stuff. I like that you also mention mammals, insects, etc. I hope some day you can make it back to Danum during a dry period. I spent a week there once wearing just shorts and sandals during the day. Not even a shirt. Much better insects during the 'Wet' - but just heavenly when quite dry.
 
I really would like to go back to Danum, for a whole month to really get stuck in there. Its the kind of place where the longer you stay the better. Just as a side-note I have recently heard that the prices at the DVFC have doubled since I was there. I'm not sure if that's true or just hearsay but worth bearing in mind if anyone is preparing for a trip there.
 
SABAH, Sepilok, 26 - 29 August

En route from the Kinabatangan to Sepilok the bus passed a few oil palms by the side of the road. And by a few I mean a few million! Malaysia is infamous for replacing forest with oil palm plantations but until you actually see it first-hand you really can’t grasp the problem. And even after seeing it its still impossible, like trying to imagine the Universe. The biggest plantations seem to be owned by the Sime Darby company. I’d passed one in Sarawak that went on and on for tens of kilometres, and where-ever roads cut through it you could see that it kept going back to the far distant hills beyond. The one by Kinabatangan dwarfed that one though. We drove through it for what seemed like forever. At a petrol stop overlooking the landscape the plantation stretched to the horizon. The grotesque enormity of its scale was absolutely unbelievable. Even more unbelievable was that on the other side of the road what was presumably the same plantation carried on to the other horizon. And from that point for the next twenty kilometres towards Sepilok was a plantation owned by IOI that also reached horizon to horizon on either side of the road. Borneo is doomed I tell you.

I stayed at the Sepilok B&B because I’d heard it was right outside the orangutan rehabilitation centre. I guess a twenty minute walk along the main road could be considered to be right outside. I wasn’t actually interested in going to Sepilok to see the orangutans. The Semenggoh centre outside Kuching didn’t do much for me and I’d now seen real wild orangs at the Danum Valley and on the Kinabatangan River. At Sepilok they do night tours though which are reputed to be very good. At Bako, for instance, I met a guy who’d seen two tarsiers and a slow loris on a night tour at Sepilok. They’re not cheap at 40 Ringgits per hour but you’re not allowed into Sepilok at night by yourself. The tour started at 6pm which is well before dark but that’s when you start if you want to see the red giant flying squirrels. They come out of their tree holes at dusk and run up and down in the canopy chasing one another through the branches till it gets too dark to see them any more. They really are wonderful and bizarre creatures, very big with very long skinny tails. Their legs are also long but somewhat encumbered by their gliding membranes, so when they run up the tree trunks they use a curious leech-like looping movement which gives them an odd resemblance to a mix of monkey and miniature tree kangaroo. Much weirder animals than I would have imagined. The flying squirrels were the only mammals of the night however, probably because it had been bucketing down an hour before and everything was dripping wet, but there were naturally frogs everywhere, nothing particularly outstanding but some species I hadn’t seen before. We also found three Wagler’s pit vipers and what I think was a baby dog-toothed cat snake.

I made a couple of short trips into Sandakan during my stay because I needed to replenish my wallet and buy some odds and ends, like new shower jandals for which I had to get a pair two sizes too small because they apparently don’t make them in my size in Borneo! Sandakan’s a town about an hour by bus from Sepilok and its where most tourists base themselves for visiting Sepilok and the Kinabatangan (I think the guide-books recommend this and as we all know, most tourists only do what their guide-books tell them to). At the end of World War II the last of the Japanese forces were routed from Sandakan by the Australians who, with their usual degree of finesse, somehow managed to completely level the town. Not a single building was left standing. For the locals it must have been a blessing in disguise because they could rebuild for modern times - before the war there weren’t any mobile phone shops in Sandakan but now every second shop on every street sells phones and accessories. That’s progress for you!

The plan had been to spend just two nights at the Sepilok B&B and do two night tours and also to spend one morning birdwatching as Sepilok is reputed to be a good place to see the Bornean bristlehead. The problem with Sepilok for birding is that the gates to the forest are only open twice a day, at 9-12 and 2-4pm. I’d read of birders getting in with hired guides earlier in the morning around 6am, but when I asked they said they didn’t allow that. I guess it’s a variable thing. It turned out that I didn’t even go back to Sepilok anyway after that first night because I found a different place that I’d never even heard of before, and it was only 400 metres from where I was staying. Its called the Rainforest Discovery Centre (RDC) and it was so much what I was looking for that I rang up my next destination (the Poring Lodge) and moved my booking so I could stay an extra two nights where I was. Sepilok is 30 Ringgits entry, whether for birding or to watch the orangutans feeding, the RDC is only 10 Ringgits. Sepilok is only open at very specific hours, the RDC is open officially 8-5 but you can stay till 10pm and enter at any time in the morning and just get your ticket off the security guard. Sepilok essentially just has one trail, the RDC has many. Not only that but there is also a sturdy metal canopy walkway 10 metres off the ground with towers at either end that are 26.5 metres high. For birdwatchers its so much better than Sepilok, for mammal-watchers even more so because you can wander round at night without paying for a guide, for frog-watchers it’s a Mecca with its streams, mud-holes, ditches, puddles and artificial ponds.

There are lots of birds at the RDC, as evidenced by the many identification signboards around the trails, all the photos on which were taken on-site. Perhaps because of the dryness of the season, however, I found the birding here unbelievably hard. There was a Spanish birder there at the same time as me who was wandering around for two days without seeing anything before he gave up and moved on. Most of the birds I did see were ones I'd already seen elsewhere in Borneo. I only saw two that were completely new for me (yellow-eared spiderhunter and green iora), and the only others that were new for the trip list were yellow-bellied prinia, scarlet-backed flowerpecker, blue-crowned hanging parrot, dark-necked tailorbird, grey and buff woodpecker, white-chested babbler, blue-throated bee-eater, rufous piculet, sooty-capped babbler, black-headed bulbul and, bizarrely, a common sandpiper on the road leading between the B&B and the RDC.

There’s a red giant flying squirrel living in the really big tree at the Trogon Tower end of the walkway, who comes out at dusk to fly around. There are ear-spot, Prevost’s, variable giant and plain pigmy squirrels during the day. I even saw an orangutan from the walkway. Although I’d hesitate to call it a “wild” orangutan as the RDC forest is continuous with the Sepilok forest, it was in a natural setting, behaving in a natural manner, so it was nice to watch. On my final evening I was up on the walkway waiting for the red giant flying squirrel to appear. I’d seen all of the above-listed diurnal squirrels already that day so I thought I’d make it a squirrel day and add a fifth. There were some other people up there waiting for the squirrel as well, but when he came out he glided straight off in the opposite direction and disappeared so it wasn’t so good for them. But while I was talking to them, and pointing out the nearby branch on which the red giant had sat for twenty minutes the evening before, a completely unexpected black giant flying squirrel came gliding in, landed on the tree trunk and ran up to sit on the very branch I’d just been pointing to. It was like I was some sort of wizard pulling squirrels out of thin air. I have to say that while the red giants are very attractive with their bright reddish fur, the black giants look like pure concentrated evil, sort of a cross between a huge vampire bat and a gremlin, especially when their eyes are glowing back at you in the spotlight like balls of fire. Still a fantastic creature though. It seemed like it was even harder to find the birds at the RDC than at the Danum Valley but that black giant flying squirrel definitely made my stay there worthwhile.


photo: yellow and black broadbill, taken from the canopy walkway at the RDC
 

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We found the vast palm oil plantations one of the most depressing parts of our visit to Borneo :-C.

I can imagine being up in the Trogon Tower right now, thanks to your last post Chlid, and not in this portacabin in a big warehouse, where there are no flying squirrel records. We couldn't believe how far those big red giant squirrels could fly. Amazing.
 
a portacabin in a big warehouse eh? Oh well, I guess its still somewhere to plan your next epic trip....


I can't remember if I've written this in the thread already, but (apparently - can't vouch for its truth) the Malaysian government includes the oil palm plantations in its official figures for the country's remaining forest cover, which is a bit underhand. There will come a day not too far from now when the whole of Borneo is just a sea of oil palms, fields, towns and (just every now and again) a tiny scrap of forest labelled a national park.
 
SABAH, Poring Hot Springs, 30 August - 2 September

Poring Hot Springs is part of the Kinabalu National Park but is much lower in elevation (around 460 metres). It is a well-loved tourist destination in Sabah, for both local and foreign tourists alike. The place is also well-known to birdwatcher types. I caught a bus from Sepilok heading towards Kota Kinabalu and got dropped off in Ranau from where you can get a mini-van to Poring. There seems to be some sort of agreement amongst the Ranau drivers to fleece tourists because they tried to charge me 50 Ringgits for the twenty minute trip from Ranau to Poring. It took a great deal of trouble before I could finally find someone to take me for 20 Ringgits which is still double what it should be. According to the drivers there’s no public transport to Poring, to which my response was something like “don’t be stupid, of course there’s public transport to Poring! How do the locals get around?” to which the answer was they hire cars at 50 Ringgits per person!! I stayed at the Poring Lodge about five minutes from the gates to the park. It wasn’t the nicest of places I’ve stayed but there isn’t a lot of choice given that the accommodation inside the gates is run by the Sutera Sanctuary Lodge company which also runs the Mt. Kinabalu park accommodation (ie, very expensive!).

The main attraction at Poring is naturally the hot springs, which are artificialised to within an inch of their lives. There’s also a butterfly garden and a canopy walkway, both with additional entry fees of course. I avoided the canopy walkway on the assumption that with the number of people around (it being a holiday) there would be no birds there....later I found out that the walkway is a choice place for Hose's broadbills consarnit!. A little further on from the Hot Springs area is the Kipungit Waterfall, and a little further on from that the Bat Cave, and a lot further on from that the Langanan waterfall. Few people venture beyond the hot springs and barely anybody at all beyond Kipungit. On my first day there I saw just four people on the Langanan trail, but when I came out there were a hundred-odd visitors milling around the hot springs (and I felt like a right wally walking through them in my jungle gear, leech socks and all!). The Bat Cave isn’t really a cave as such, more a big jumble of garage-sized boulders, under the overhang of one of which a crowd of bats roost. I’ve read that they are mostly greater sheath-tailed bats and fawn roundleaf bats but I could only identify the latter to my own satisfaction. Greater and lesser sheath-tails tend to roost in mixed groups and you need to have them in the hand to identify them accurately, and while there were several sizes of bats in there I wasn’t sure what other species there might be intermingled, so I left everything but the fawn roundleafs as “unidentified bats”.

The Langanan Waterfall is quite impressive, even if you’re not the sort of person who can be bothered walking for a few hours just to see a lot of water falling off a cliff. In the wet season it must be a pretty stupendous sight. For me the main reason (well, only reason) for doing the trail was to look for birds, in particular the beautiful blue-banded pitta which is endemic to Borneo. There were no pittas on the first day but I saw some other nice birds such as the maroon woodpecker, purple-naped sunbird and white-bellied munia as well as some others I'd seen elsewhere such as greater racquet-tailed drongo, brown fulvetta, chestnut-backed scimitar-babbler, dusky munia, little spiderhunter, yellow-rumped flowerpecker, red-throated barbet, yellow-bellied warbler, chestnut-breasted malkoha, etc. There were no pittas on the second day either, even though I searched high and low in the spot they were supposed to be found, but that really turned out to be a mammal day anyway, with Bornean common and lesser tree-shrews; plain pigmy, Prevost's and variable giant squirrels; and the most unexpected sighting in a while, a pair of small-toothed palm civets weaving their way through the branches above my head in broad daylight, presumably an in-season female being tailed by an amorous male.

Apart for the hot springs themselves, Poring is also well-known for Rafflesia flowers. Rafflesia are fascinating plants, completely parasitic upon specific types of vines, they spend almost their entire existance hidden from view inside their hosts. Only when flowering do they show themselves, and just to make sure that nobody misses them they produce the largest flowers in the world. Those of the largest species, R. arnoldi, are three feet across. The species that grows around Poring is R. keithii which is a little smaller, “only” about a foot and a half in diameter. The other thing that you should know about Rafflesia is that they may have the largest flowers in the world but those flowers are very short-lived. They come up out of the ground as a big cabbage-like bud, open up, and then within 5 to 7 days are turning black and rotting. Short-lived and unpredictable you need to be in the right place at the right time to see them. When I came out of the jungle on that first day I went to the park office to ask if, perchance, they knew of any Rafflesia blooming at the moment and such was my good fortune that there was in fact one in flower right next to the little village outside the gates. Because it was on private land the owners were charging an admission fee of 20 Ringgits, and you can’t really blame them for that. Every time a Rafflesia blooms on their property they have a short-lived gold-mine. Once I’d seen it I passed five more tourists going in as I was coming out, and as I came up to the main road there was a bus-load of 17 people coming in. That’s 460 Ringgits in about ten minutes, and it was only the second day of the plant’s flowering. In all truthfulness seeing the Rafflesia was a bit of an anti-climax. I was led along a path through some forest to the flower, and there was a little bamboo barrier to stop tourists from touching it, but once you’re there all there is to do is to look at it, take some photos and leave. You feel like you should be doing more, because its a Rafflesia and its amazing, but its just sitting there looking rather bizarre and fake. With an animal you can watch it feeding or sleeping or whatever, but the Rafflesia just sits there. I think finding one yourself while out walking in the forest would be different because there’d be a sense of discovery about it that’s lacking when you’ve just paid someone to lead you to it and point at it. Still, I’ve seen a Rafflesia now and that was one of the things up near the top of my Borneo wish-list so I was happy.


photo: Rafflesia keithii
 

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I can't remember if I've written this in the thread already, but (apparently - can't vouch for its truth) the Malaysian government includes the oil palm plantations in its official figures for the country's remaining forest cover, which is a bit underhand.

Believe you're correct there. The companies involved also run ridiculous ads here trying to imply they're protecting the environment with lots of images of butterflies and streams to imply its a wonderful ecosystem instead of the most barren 'desert' imaginable.
 
SABAH, Mt. Kinabalu: take two, 2 - 8 September

On the way back between Poring and Kota Kinabalu, I stopped off for a few more days at the Mt. Kinabalu National Park. Its good there because there are no leeches or mosquitoes. The only thing that’s of the bitey persuasion are these big horsefly type jobs with a really painful stab. Its a fly of such a size that you can actually see it preparing its proboscis as it readies itself to jab you. They usually come in ones or twos so technically shouldn’t be as much of a problem as mosquitoes but I found them much worse because of their tenacity. Once they have you in their sights then there’s no escape. I became quite proficient at snatching them out of the air on their approach and crunching the life out of them. In the jungle its kill or be killed.

It does rain a lot there though. On my first visit it had rained on me every day at one point or another, in varying amounts of intensity and duration. On my return visit, the very first day it thundered down with such ferocity that water got inside my binoculars and one lens completely misted up which, needless to say, was a trifle devastating. Going birdwatching without a decent pair of binoculars is as useless as going to play soccer without a ball, or going to watch an Adam Sandler movie. To use the binoculars I had hold them upside-down, close one eye and squint through the one clear spot. To show there were no hard feelings, for the whole rest of my visit it only rained briefly once and fortunately the binoculars unfogged themselves so all was right in the world again.

The reason I went back to Mt. Kinabalu was (surprise, surprise) to try and find some of the birds I missed last time. Two of them, the indigo flycatcher and the grey-chinned minivet, proved to be so common that I wondered if I’d been walking round with my eyes shut before. Last time when I’d been up the vertically-inclined Summit Trail to Layang Layang, I vowed I wouldn’t do that again, but once back at the park I decided I wouldn’t be much of a birder if I didn’t give the Kinabalu friendly warbler a second try, so up I went. I found another bird on my list of wants, the white-browed shrike-babbler, and saw the black-breasted fruit-hunters again. Both fruit-hunters were where I'd seen the male the first time (at km 3). They may have been nesting in the area, or they may be holding a territory there. The friendly warbler however was again a no-show. To compensate I achieved another of the reasons for the Layang Layang climb, to get some photos of the mountain ground squirrels which unlike the warbler are actually friendly, especially if you’ve got some biscuits for them. Lower down the mountain on the forest trails I found three Bornean stubtails which are little tiny birds that live on the ground like mice and have soft calls that sound like crickets. They’re really nice wee things, especially with the stripe above their eyes which glows gold as if they have little lights shining inside their heads. After days of wandering up and down the Bukit Ular Trail I finally found a covey of the red-breasted partridges; and I was practically knee-deep in Whitehead’s trogons (thirteen sightings in all) but the other two-thirds of the Whitehead’s bird trio - the spiderhunter and the broadbill - still couldn’t be found no matter how hard I searched.

Another item on my Kinabalu wanted list were the pit-vipers. The Kinabalu pit-viper is a ground-dweller endemic to this one mountain and the Sabah pit-viper is a montane tree-dweller found over a wider area. I actually found a Sabah pit-viper on the first afternoon as I was trudging back to the Bayu Homestay in the downpour, but it was dead in a roadside ditch. It may have drowned but I think it more likely someone had killed it and thrown it in there. I went out at night a few times in the park because its supposed to be common to find the pit-vipers along the roads in there but I found none. I did find some other nice herptiles though, including the Kinabalu flying gecko which is endemic to the mountain, the poorly-known Schmidt’s reed snake which is likewise an endemic, and also the montane large-eyed litter frog which is preposterously cute.

The final animal I found that was on my list was one of my most-wanted, and it wasn’t a bird or even a vertebrate, it was the trilobite larva. Now I know what you’re thinking -- trilobites are extinct -- but the trilobite larva is actually a female beetle that sort of resembles a trilobite. The male is more standard and just looks like a beetle. There are several species found throughout southern and southeast Asia, all in the genus Duliticola I believe, and they’re actually much smaller than I’d imagined. They turned out to be not that uncommon either - I found three of them. They really are the most bizarre-looking insects with their body plates and spines and sharp prickly legs. At the rear of the body is a round sucking disk they use when walking, sort of like a caterpillar. Most surprising to me was the miniscule head! I’d imagined that under the large frontal body-plate there’d be a big munchy set of jaws but instead right at the tip is a little tube from which appears a head about the size of a biro nib, which retracts when danger threatens. The beetles can be found just wandering on the trails and don’t seem overly concerned about being handled, but if you turn them upside-down they curl the two ends of the body together for protection, and when you set them down again they remain in a looped position until they think they have the all-clear. Very very cool insects. I was very pleased.

One thing I wasn't so pleased about was head-lice! First time ever that I've had them I believe. I was wondering why my head was all itchy when staying at the Bayu Homestay at Mt. Kinabalu, and then one morning when I looked in the mirror there was a louse in my beard! I thought it must surely be an isolated louse of no consequence, but no, when I washed my hair that night the towel was absolutely crawling with lice. It was extremely disconcerting! I read up on the internet about them and all the sites said they're small like sesame seeds, but the Malaysian ones must be super mutant head-lice because they're the size of rats. Its so nasty because you can feel them crawling all through your scalp, like there's a litter of kittens living on your head. Apparently it takes a couple of weeks before you notice their presence but I'm sure I would have noticed them on the towel before then because they're so big and numerous. So I believe I must have got them at Bayu; one of the hazards of travelling. They seem way worse than other parasites like bed-bugs or leeches or whatever because they're actually living on you and you can see and feel them but can't get them out. I don't keep a "parasite list" but if I did, and if it was arranged by order of how distressing to one's psyche the species are, then head-lice would be number one. Anyway once back in KK I got some head-lice shampoo (of which one of the side-effects listed on the bottle was “coma”!!!!) and killed them all with it. Because I didn’t trust putting the insecticide shampoo near my mouth (!) and thought it better safe than sorry, I shaved off my travel beard. First time I'd been completely clean-shaven in many years (normally I have an evil goatee). It was a bit annoying because I had a nice three-month's worth of shrubbery going on there, and was looking forward to finding a Rafflesia arnoldi in Sumatra and getting my photo taken with it wearing a five-month beard, thereby recreating the moment when Sir Stamford Raffles first discovered the flower. Now I would only have a loser two-month beard when that happens.


photos: trilobite larva, and montane large-eyed litter frog
 

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SABAH, Tambunan and Crocker Range, 12 - 16 September

There are several species of Rafflesia scattered around southeast Asia. I’d seen R. keithii already at Poring Hot Springs of course, but at another site just near to Kota Kinabalu grows another species, R. pricei. The site is called the Tambunan Rafflesia Reserve and its also reputed to be good for birds like the blue-banded pitta and Bulwer’s pheasant. I could have (in retrospect, should have) done it as a day-trip out of KK but the first bus out didn’t go till 10am and its an hour-and-a-half trip so I decided it would make more sense to stay in Tambunan itself (only half an hour from the reserve) and then I could get their earlier. As it happened the first buses didn’t leave Tambunan till about nine so I didn’t really save much time anyway. There are only two places to stay in Tambunan, both expensive. I chose the Tambunan Village Resort Centre because it was the less expensive of the two. I’m not sure the people of Tambunan know what the word “resort” should imply but this isn’t it. Maybe once it was nice, now not so much. There’s only one eating house at the resort and the day I’d arrived it had closed early. The next closest place was 1.5km up the road in the village. That’s not far but the route is plagued by dogs. I was cautioned to carry a stick if I was walking anywhere. On the way I passed twenty dogs, and had to use my bamboo cane twice to ward dogs off. So I wasn’t exactly enamoured of the dogs in the area and I also didn’t care much for the rats that raided my room at night and ransacked my belongings in their search for food. And I really didn’t like the rat that decided to sample my elbow that night to test it for edibility.

According to the owner of the place I was staying there was a Rafflesia in bloom only five minutes walk from the Reserve’s gates, which he had heard from the manager of the reserve, and which he confirmed by phone as I stood there, so that was good. The next morning I set off on the earliest bus. I had read in an internet report that the staff at the Tambunan Rafflesia Reserve have a habit of trying to rip off the visiting tourists which is unusual in Borneo in my experience, but I was fore-warned. The entry fee to the reserve is 5 Ringgits; the girl on the desk tried to make me pay 55 -- the extra 50 was “for the government” apparently. I refused, because as I pointed out (repeatedly, until she gave up trying) there was a price-list on the counter which said the entry fee was 5 Ringgits. Just because its written in Malaysian so the tourists can't understand it doesn't make it a different price! Then it turned out that the Rafflesia wasn’t five minutes from the gate, it was three kilometres down the road and then a twenty minute walk. I went for a walk in the forest first to look for birds, of which there were almost none because it was too far into the day and they were all at siesta, and when I came out asked directions of the different person who was then on the desk. No no, he says, the Rafflesia is actually one and a half hours down the road, its just died today, and I wouldn’t be able to find it anyway because its not on a marked trail. So I had three different versions of the locality of the same flower, had found no new birds, and had been attacked by both dogs and rats. I think its fair to say I was quite glad to leave Tambunan.

After my trip had ended I discovered (via Larry's thread) that there is actually a much better place to stay right near the Tambunan Rafflesia Reserve, namely the Gunung Alab Resort, and the birding is good just by walking along the main road.....good to know for future reference.

The next place I headed after Tambunan was the Crocker Range National Park headquarters just out of Keningau (not far from Tambunan) and this was a much better couple of days. Nobody seems to know of this place - even in Keningau, just 10km away, the locals thought I was talking about Mt. Kinabalu when I said I was trying to catch a bus to the national park headquarters. I myself in fact had only fortuitously found out about the place the week before. Because it is so little-known the accommodation was entirely empty. As the rooms are way up on top of a very steep hill well away from the headquarters it was a little creepy being the only person in these big deserted buildings at night. There’s only one trail here, about 2km long. It runs through very degraded forest from the top of the hill down to the bottom where the HQ is, but its alive with birds, especially the top 1km. I found all sorts of nice feathery beasts in there -- it was almost like being back at Mt. Kinabalu the birds were so numerous. Flocks of pigmy white-eyes were very common, flitting noisily through the mid-story acting like other white-eyes but certainly not looking like them! Brown and gold-whiskered barbets were common, as were montane blue-winged leafbirds (aka Bornean or Kinabalu leafbird C.kinabaluensis, split from the regular blue-winged leafbird). At one point a flock of thirty wreathed hornbills flew over my head. The barn swallow migration must have been in full swing at this point too because there were great flocks of them all over the powerlines along the road up to the rooms. Apart for the birds I also found Prevost's, Brooke's and four-striped ground squirrels (the latter two being endemic to Borneo), and also a whole clutch of Rafflesia keithii buds, like glossy brown bowling-balls on the forest floor. In six months time that patch would have looked awesome with five Rafflesia flowers all blooming at once.
 
SABAH, last days in Kota Kinabalu

In my final days in Borneo, I made (return) visits to the Kota Kinabalu Wetland Centre (formerly known as the KK City Bird Sanctuary) where I saw a lot of common Bornean wildlife; to the Lok Kawi Wildlife Park (also known as the Lok Kawi Zoo) where I saw a lot of uncommon Bornean wildlife; and to Pulau Manukan (also known as Isle of the Damned) where I saw very little of anything.

The Wetland Centre was only about 15 minutes walk from my accommodation at Lucy's Homestay. There's a 10 Ringgit entry fee. Although it is a nice little place with boardwalks through mangrove forest, the mosquitoes are in ferocious numbers and the birds are all very common species. Unless it was your first time in southeast Asia you're not likely to see any birds here that you haven't already seen elsewhere. Mangrove skinks and water monitors are always a bonus though. About 15 to 20 minutes walk further on from the Wetland Centre are some roadside ponds near a big mosque, where again there are a variety of common wetland birds (and sometimes Chinese egrets I hear). The only species I saw in either place that I hadn't already seen somewhere on this trip was eastern reef heron.

Pulau Manukan is an island about twenty minutes off the coast of KK. It is easily visible from the KK waterfront, and just as easily accessed by the boats that regularly shuttle tourists back and forth. The reason birders go there is to see the Tabon scrubfowl (imagine a big brown chicken and you've got it). Most normal people go there for snorkelling. Around the jetty there are just masses of tropical reef fish -- monos, parrotfish, damselfish, garfish and all sorts of other piscine denizens of the shallows. It almost made me wish I liked the ocean. The girl at the desk (the island is part of a national park) said there was only one trail on the island, the Jogging Track. Or, as the sign at the trail called it, "jogging trek" which conjured up some interesting images. The trail was paved all the way but cluttered by fallen trees, vines and even at one point a slipped hillside, none of which the island's operators had any apparent intention of clearing. Maybe "jogging trek" was right after all. At the end of the track I found a rough path heading up the hill through the bush, so followed it and discovered that it was a Summit Trail (I found a directional sign halfway along). It went right across the spine of the island back to the headquarters, but again no attempt had been made to keep it clear. There were several very large water monitors along the route and right at the end, where else but right behind one of the headquarter buildings where I'd started from, a Tabon scrubfowl. All in all there weren't too many birds of any kind around that day. Mangrove blue flycatchers were common, and I also saw red-eyed and yellow-vented bulbuls, glossy starling, pied fantail, magpie-robin, tree sparrow and purple-throated and brown-throated sunbirds, but nothing was new (even the scrubfowl I'd already seen in Sulawesi). New animals for the day were restricted to lizards with black-banded skink, common striped tree skink and Mabuya indeprensa which apparently lacks a common name.

The next day I left Borneo after staying just shy of two months on this wonderful island.
 
SINGAPORE, 19 - 20 September

Goyter said:
Really enjoying reading this account Where to next?
Singapore |=)|

In between Borneo and Java I thought I'd stop over for a couple of days in Sunny Singapore, partly because the airfares worked out a bit cheaper that way. I stayed at the Cozy Corners Backpackers where I usually stay because its about the cheapest place in town. I've been going there for five years now and it hasn't changed one jot in that whole time, from the broken tap to the soccer flags on the wall. Because its Singapore there are also lots of warning signs posted everywhere about what you're not allowed to do: everything from spending too long on the internet, to downloading illegal material, to washing your clothes(!). There's even a sign in the kitchen area saying no food or drinks allowed!!

For my first day I was going to go to the zoo for two or three hours and then go to Sungei Buloh which is a bird-filled mangrove reserve I'm quite partial to, but I ended up spending seven hours at the zoo instead so never got anywhere else that day. I won't bother writing anything about the zoo because some members on here wouldn't appreciate it, but in the grounds I did incidentally see spot-necked doves and purple-throated sunbird so its birdily justified (even if I'd already seen plenty of them elsewhere).

On my second day I was going to go to the offshore island of Pulau Ubin and then to Sungei Buloh, but of course I spent far too long on the island and once again had to miss out the wetland reserve! Pulau Ubin is great. Its like the opposite of Singapore, all dirty and unkempt instead of clean and tidy. Unfortunately it was a Sunday so it was full of other visitors meaning most of the animals were hiding away from the paths full of bicyclists. Around Changi Village, from whence the boats leave for Pulau Ubin, I found scaly-breasted munias, black-naped orioles, collared kingfishers, glossy starlings, pied fantails, rufous and Sunda pigmy woodpeckers and moustached parakeets although the Goffin's cockatoos eluded me this time. On Pulau Ubin the only birds I added to the day list were yellow-vented bulbul, ashy tailorbird and dollarbird. There were just too many people around. After Pulau Ubin I did manage to squeeze in a couple of hours at the Botanic Gardens in the late afternoon, which being Sunday was a miscalculation. Half the town seemed to be there walking their dogs (or in one case a bunny rabbit!) and it was also some sort of special date for getting married because there were wedding pavilions all over the gardens and too many brides for even me to keep track of! Of animal note: slender squirrel was new for the trip list; I managed surprisingly to get a totally new bird when a natty little red-legged crake wandered past as evening was falling; and as I was leaving I saw in one of the lakes something quite large rolling at the surface in exactly the way an otter does. There were some other people there too watching it, trying to figure it out, asking if it was an otter. It sure looked like it but I couldn't see any way that there would be an otter in the Botanic Gardens. Fortunately I had my trusty binoculars and through them saw that it was actually a pair of spawning catfish, each one about four feet long! Nice way to end the Singapore section I reckon.
 
Thanks for taking the time to write this excellent thread - as a lover of obscure mammals, reptiles and creepy crawlies, it's much appreciated.
 
JAVA, Gunung Gede-Pangrango National Park, 21 - 25 September

In New Zealand in the 1980s there was a newspaper cartoon strip called Bogor about a marijuana-smoking hedgehog. I don’t know why the hedgehog was named Bogor, but now I’ve been in a town called Bogor in Java. I don’t know why the town is named Bogor either.

I flew into Jakarta on an almost empty plane from Singapore. The check-in queue for the Yogyakarta flight was full to bursting and I think the Air Asia crew were feeling sorry for those of us going to Jakarta because they gave everyone on board free food and water! Perhaps I should mention that there had been a terrorist bombing in Jakarta just a couple of months prior, while I was still in Sulawesi. In Java the attempted scams started before I’d even left the airport. Good old Indonesia! I was going to stay in Bogor figuring that it would be quieter than Jakarta (wrongly as I discovered), and I knew there was a bus that goes straight from the airport to Bogor which is rather handy. There were taxi drivers waiting at the terminal exit like vultures.
“Where are you going?” I was asked.
“To Bogor”
“I will take you there, only 500,000”
“No, I’m going on the bus”
“There is no bus”
“Of course there’s a bus”
“No, the bus isn’t running because of the Muslim holiday”
“In that case I’ll take a bus into Jakarta and catch a train to Bogor”
“No, there are no buses at all”
“Well I’ll just go ask about that at the information centre”
“Its closed…everywhere is closed!”
The all-encompassing sweep of the hand that accompanied this last statement was supposed to prove to me that all the surrounding airport shops were closed when they were quite patently open for business. It was a weak ploy.

The information centre was, of course, open and there was a bus going to Bogor which I caught. Bogor was insanely hectic. The Muslim holiday of which the taxi drivers spoke is the Idul Fitri which goes for an entire week. Everyone it seemed had left Jakarta and ended up in Bogor. The traffic around town was the worst I’d ever seen in an Asian city, and that's saying a lot! It was not a pleasant place.

The only things of any possible interest in Bogor are the Kebun Raya (botanical gardens) and the zoological museum within the garden’s grounds. The gardens are amongst the oldest in Asia. The Dutch Governor-General von Imhoff built a summer house here in 1744 and named it Buitenzorg meaning “free of care”. It was the British though who constructed the gardens around Buitenzorg. The idea was first mooted by Stamford Raffles who had his fingers in every pie in southeast Asia, from founding Singapore to discovering the world’s largest flower. The gardens were eventually set out in 1817 by Professor Reinwardt, another well-known name in Asian zoology. Then the Dutch returned to Java and expanded the gardens even further and even more magnificently to cover an area of over 200 acres. Sadly the gardens, once one of the greatest tropical gardens in the world, are no longer at their best. It seems the Javans have taken the name “free of care” a bit too literally. The amount of rubbish could be excused due to the hundreds of visitors pouring in with the holiday, but the maintenance of the grounds themselves seems to have been almost abandoned. Some parts like the Mexican Garden and the famous avenue of giant trees are still nice, but when walking through most of it it just feels like a regular city park that’s been left to run a bit wild. It was quite sad and disappointing. There are apparently a lot of nice birds to be seen in the gardens, but the number of people there made it difficult to find any of them. Amongst the (literally) garden-variety birds such as black-naped oriole, ashy tailorbird, spot-necked dove, brown-throated sunbird and sooty-headed bulbul I also found some black-naped fruit doves and a new species for me, the scarlet-headed flowerpecker. I could not find the grey-cheeked green pigeons that frequent the gardens however.

The Bogor Zoological Museum was alright for a wander around in but the two reasons I wanted to visit were both missing. One of the two Indonesian coelacanths in museums is at Bogor and I was hoping it might be on display but it was not; and there was supposed to be a Flores giant rat on display as well but that wasn’t there either. Lonely Planet had steered me wrong once again.

I only stayed in Bogor for one night and then set off by bus for the mountains of Gede-Pangrango National Park by Cibodas. The trip there should be a breeze but the entire highway was in gridlock. It took five hours to make the two hour trip to Cipanas, and then it took two hours to travel just seven kilometers to Cibodas. I literally could have walked that last stretch faster! What was worse was that because everyone was off work for Idul Fitri, the national park was full of people. Normally its busy there on the weekends when as a birder you’d want to avoid the place, and very quiet during the week, but now there were thousands of walkers and climbers. And the thing with Indonesians is that they always travel in big groups, carry radios turned to maximum volume, and they are always yelling. Not yelling to each other, just yelling and screaming at the forest apparently, for no discernible reason. Not surprisingly there were no birds along the main trail. The guards at the entrance had said I could only go to the waterfall (which was where everybody else was heading to dump their rubbish, that being the Asian way) but the hot springs and summit were off-limits; so I said I was only going to the waterfall but then just went up to the hot springs anyway because that trail was almost empty. The hot springs were really amazing, not just pools of hot water like I was expecting but actual waterfalls of boiling water spilling down the hillside enveloped in great clouds of steam. I’ve never seen boiling waterfalls before and it was quite a remarkable sight.

I was staying at Freddy’s Homestay where all the birders stay, as do most other tourists because it’s the only place listed in Lonely Planet even though there are a number of other accommodations in town. I had hooked up on the trip from Bogor with a Lithuanian girl and we ended up sharing a room to halve the cost. This caused Freddy a great deal of consternation and confusion, especially when she left a couple of days before me -- he wanted to know why I wasn't leaving at the same time as my "girlfriend". Freddy, as I quickly discovered, was a grand purveyor of balderdashery. Half the time I didn’t know what he was talking about and wondered if he ever knew what I was talking about. His stories changed constantly, even in the middle of conversations. His sons were both bird guides and he said that guides were a requirement in the national park. This is standard in Indonesia and I was fretting a bit about having to pay the asking price of 500,000 per day for their services but then it turned out that in actual fact guides aren’t necessary in Gede-Pangrango which was a huge relief.

Cibodas isn’t so much a town as a string of stalls, all selling the same items - some have avocados, some T-shirts, some little cages of rabbits, guinea-pigs and hamsters. Everywhere there are potted plants lining the roads, but I could never figure out if they were for sale or just town beautification. There is a proper botanic gardens at Cibodas as well, which was established by the Dutch in 1889 for experimenting with plants in a cooler climate than that offered by the Bogor site (Cibodas being at 2000 metres altitude and Bogor at 260 metres). One of the plants famously grown there are strawberries, the ones here being very small and very sweet like they’re covered in sugar. In contrast to the Bogor gardens, the Cibodas gardens are very well-cared for and a pleasure to explore (or at least they would be when its quiet, but I was constantly being mobbed by Indonesians which made my bird-watching efforts rather difficult). Apart for various commoner southeast Asian birds, I quickly started finding more local species in the gardens here, pride of place definitely going to the Javan hanging parrot, although the grey-throated white-eye, Javan fulvetta, olive-backed tailorbird and Kuhl's sunbird certainly weren't to be sneezed at either. One particular species that had me very confused was the Oriental white-eye. Some looked like Orientals and some looked (to me) like mountain white-eyes, but as far as I can ascertain the ones in the gardens here actually are all Orientals, its just that they look wierd because they are sneaky intergrades between two subspecies (the lowland buxtoni and the montane melanurus) -- or something like that! In a section of forest between the gardens and the park itself I found crescent-chested babblers and lesser forktails along a sort of culvert, and came across a fantastic bird-wave that was apparently in the same tree daily as I saw it several times, consisting of Sunda minivet, blue nuthatch, black-winged flycatcher-shrike, chestnut-fronted shrike-babbler and Sunda warbler (as well as some of the birds mentioned earlier like the sunbird and white-eyes). Sunda black-banded squirrels, bicoloured giant squirrels and small Asian mongooses were also more than welcome additions to the trip lists.

Once I could get more or less clear of the people on the smaller side trails on the mountain I started finding lots of nice birds, many of which were endemic Javan mountain birds. Javan whistling thrush, rufous-tailed fantail, rufous-fronted laughing thrush, orange-spotted bulbul, pale blue flycatcher, orange-fronted barbet and the adorable little pigmy tit were all excellent lifers. A flock of the beautiful mountain serins in some seeding bushes right next to the path was much-revelled-in once I managed to actually see them through the foliage because all the other finches on my life list are introduced species in New Zealand! A fire-tufted barbet was a massive surprise, given that the field-guide told me that they don't even occur in Java -- but the log-book back at Freddy's revealed that in fact they are seen regularly in the park. My favourite bird of all was going to be the Javan tesia which like the stubtails on Timor and Mt. Kinabalu is a tiny ground-dwelling mouse-like bird, but then the tesia was well and truly eclipsed by the mind-blowing pink-headed fruit dove which really does have an outrageously bright pink head. On the non-bird side there were more small Asian mongooses as well as Horsfield’s tree shrews, three-striped ground squirrels, and two species of leaf monkeys (langurs), the grizzled leaf monkey and black leaf monkey, both of which are also called the Javan leaf monkey, which isn't helpful! Sadly I didn’t see any Javan gibbons here, probably because of all the people around. One particularly cool thing I saw was on one wandering when I found a tiny little tree frog about half the size of my little fingernail, sitting on top of a dead leaf on the ground, on the underside of which was a spider three times the size of the frog. It would have made a fantastic photo but just as I was going to take it the batteries in the camera died. I quickly changed them for the spare ones, but discovered they were dead as well! Then the frog jumped and the spider rushed up onto the top of the leaf but luckily just missed his prey.

Gunung Gede-Pangrango was somewhere I could have stayed for a week longer because its just the sort of place I like (once Idul Fitri was over at least). All there is to do is get up, go the forest and wander round looking for animals all day, then go to sleep and repeat the next day. Also this was the only montane site I would be visiting in Java so anything I didn’t see here I wouldn’t see elsewhere (like the Javan hawk-eagle, which I missed out on!). But the other side of that is if I’d spent longer there I wouldn’t have enough time to visit the lowland sites, so I had to move on before Idul Fitri was over. Not the best time to be on the mountain but you make the best of things.
 
JAVA, Jakarta, Muara Angke Nature Reserve, 28 September

I had originally planned on staying in Bogor and commuting by train each morning to Jakarta for the couple of days I needed to see the essentials in the big city - the essentials of course being the zoo, the oceanarium, the bird park, the bird market and the bird reserve. However when staying there for the one night before going to Cibodas I had discovered that I did not like Bogor one little bit, so decided Jakarta couldn’t be any worse. I ended up in the backpacker haunt of Jalan Jaksa staying at a place called Borneo Hostel 31. Coming from Cibodas, in complete contrast to the trip there, the bus ride only took an hour which was a bit irregular seeing it was meant to take two, and then the train was so quick that I got into Jakarta by 10 o’clock, which should have meant that I had ample time to start the agenda. First I got the bus information for all the destinations from a tourist office (every single bit of which turned out to be wrong!) and then I proceeded to hit one stumbling block after another. Suffice to say that over the next couple of days I never got to the oceanarium, the bird park or the bird market. I did get to the zoo, but the place that is of real relevance to this forum is of course the Muara Angke Nature Reserve.

The Transjakarta bus system is very easy to use to get around the city; you only need one trip to work out all its intricacies and then everything is easy as pie. The only thing with it is that you often need several transfers between stations and so every trip takes time. Although I had been wanting an early start to the nature reserve, it took me two hours to get there! First I travelled all the way to the Ancol bus station because the bus station people had told me that’s where I needed to go, and then I had to catch a little mini-van from Ancol to the Kota station which is where I should have gone instead. Then there was a little bus from there to the little fishing village/suburb of Muara Angke, although that one dropped me at a random corner somewhere in the city and I had to get yet another mini-van to Muara Angke from there. None of these trips cost much at all, just a matter of about twenty cents each, but I was starting to wonder if I’d ever get there. Once I was in Muara Angke I then had no idea where I was meant to go. I only knew the reserve was near the fish market, which it turned out it wasn’t really, and it did not help at all that my poor idiot brain went completely blank on the Indonesian term for “nature reserve”! I wandered down several streets the wrong way, getting various unhelpful directions from locals, and then ended up taking a motorbike for what a traffic cop told me was an hour’s walk but turned out to be about five minutes. Still, I got there in the end. I think you're supposed to have an entry permit for the reserve but there was no-one there so I'm not sure. Its a nice reserve with a well-constructed (new) boardwalk stretching through the mangroves. The watch-tower looks good too but the ladder was completely rusted away so there was no access to it. I wouldn't want to be up in it in any case if a troupe of the local crab-eating macaques came by -- the ones here are honestly the most aggressive macaques I've ever come across! There were lots of birds about in the mangroves so that was good, although most of them were common things I'd seen lots of places elsewhere. Watery-types included cinnamon bittern, grey heron, little heron, Javan pond heron, Oriental darter, white-breasted waterhen and white-browed crake. Non-watery-types included bar-winged prinia, great tit, fulvous-breasted woodpecker, ashy tailorbird, white-breasted woodswallow, small minivet, pied fantail, Javan munia, etc. Indian cuckoo was the only bird seen that was new for my life list. The main reason I had wanted to go there was to see a bird called the Sunda coucal which is a big swamp-dwelling cuckoo that is very very rare. The Muara Angke Nature Reserve is pretty much the only place that is easily accessible to try and see it. Try I did, succeed I did not. I didn’t really want to see it anyway. Birds are stupid.
 
JAVA, Ujung Kulon National Park, 29 September - 5 October

Ujung Kulon National Park sits on a tiny triangular peninsula at the extreme western end of Java. It is famous as being the last home of the Javan rhino (although actually there are two last homes of the Javan rhino, the other one being in Vietnam, but that's just nit-picking because there's only about five or ten there). Despite their common name Javan rhinos were historically found throughout southeast Asia, from India in the west, China in the north, and eastwards through the Greater Sundas to Java. They were so common in Java in the 18th century and caused such damage to plantations that in 1747 the government placed a bounty of 10 crowns on each animal killed. The bounty lasted for two years and 500 rhinos were shot. Despite this the species remained relatively common for the next 150 years. They became officially protected in 1908 but with no implementation numbers dropped rapidly due to poaching. By 1967 there were an estimated 28 left. That's twenty-eight. Total. Today there's about 50 or 60, all in Ujung Kulon (plus the few in Vietnam which were only discovered in the 1980s). They are one of the world's most critically endangered mammals. There wasn’t really much hope that I’d see a rhino if I went to Ujung Kulon but to not try is to have no hope of success, so that was where I was heading.

From Jakarta I headed first to the village of Carita, where I stayed at the Paniisan Hotel (aka The Black Rhino). There's a small forest reserve (the Taman Wisata Alam Carita) just nearby where I had a bit of a wander looking for some of the lowland endemics but there wasn't much of interest to be found at the time, although scarlet minivet was new for the trip list. Carita is most tourists' start-point for the two local attractions, Ujung Kulon National Park and Krakatoa. The latter is of course a very famous volcano sitting between Sumatra and Java. I had been fully intending to pay it a visit but it had been erupting constantly -- hundreds of times in fact -- since June and it was consequently on a Level Three Alert meaning that (at least officially) no fishermen or boats of any kind were allowed near.

Although most of the few tourists who visit Ujung Kulon get there by boat from Carita, it is in fact cheaper to start from further south. From the small village of Carita you first head down the road to the small town of Labuan and from there to the very tiny village of Tamanjaya. I got to Labuan at 8.30am and was told the bus would be there at 9. In fact it arrived at 8.20 which I thought was all right, but we just went to another bus station where we sat until 10 before heading back to the first station where I’d been picked up where we waited for another hour. Then we were really off, at least as far as the next village where we sat for yet another half an hour. So instead of getting to Tamanjaya around noon like I’d been expecting I didn’t get there till 4pm and it was too late to get to the national park that day.

There are basically just three ways into Ujung Kulon and all of them are costly. The first option is to stay on Handeuleum Island off the northern part of the peninsula, and take boats across to the adjoining mainland where you can do canoe trips on the Cigenter River for wildlife-spotting. The most expensive part should be the boat to there from Tamanjaya which is one million rupiah return, but it turned out that the ranger post on Handeuleum doesn’t have a boat of its own so I’d have to charter the Tamanjaya boat for the whole stay to get back and forth to the river which would run to 3.5 million which put the kibosh on that idea. A better notion I thought was to camp on the mainland there because the river’s right there and there’s also a grazing ground for banteng, but I was told that I would need a park ranger the whole time as well as a local guide -- but the ranger couldn’t be off Handeuleum at night, and in any case camping isn’t allowed in that part of the park. [I'll note that all this information is just what I was told at the time, and some or all of it may in fact be completely false!]

The second idea was to stay on Peucang Island off the west coast, to which the boat costs two million (these are ridiculous sums for a boat ride but there’s no other way except to pay it). There’s a grazing ground there as well called Cidaon, and the ranger post has boats to get back and forth.

The third and cheapest option is trekking round the south coast for which technically you’re only paying the cost of the local guide, food and park fees, but unless you turn around at the end and walk back again for another three days you still need to pay for the boat back to Tamanjaya from Cidaon, which is 1.5 million. Also it seemed to me that most of the trek was along the beaches which wasn’t much good for wildlife, and trekking’s not really my thing anyway because you just can’t keep stopping all the time to look for birds because you have to reach a certain point before each nightfall.

Considering the options I came up with a cunning plan that meant I’d stay on Peucang and pay the two million return boat fee, but stop off at the Cigenter River on the way to and from. It wasn’t ideal because it meant I wouldn’t be doing the Cigenter at dawn and dusk which was the whole point of staying on Handeuleum but you work with what you’ve got. The boat from Tamanjaya wasn’t quite what I was expecting, just a little beaten-up fishing boat with no life-boat, no life-jackets, no radio, no hope of survival. The boat ride from Tamanjaya to Handeuleum took an hour and from Handeuleum to Peucang three hours. It was very odd being on the ocean in a little fishing boat and for there to not be albatrosses and petrels swirling in its wake. Apart for a few great crested terns and some flying fish (“flish”) the sea was empty.

The trips on the Cigenter River are in an actual dug-out canoe with rough-hewn wooden paddles. No mod-cons in this national park! Its a nice experience, sliding gently up-river with only the quiet sweep of the paddles through the water to break the silence of your passage. There wasn’t much wildlife to speak of because it was already 9am, well past the prime activity hour, the only birds I saw being lesser adjutant, purple heron, little heron, common kingfisher and blue-eared kingfisher. Water monitors and crab-eating macaques were common, and there were no fewer than three juvenile reticulated pythons coiled in branches over the water. At several points there were great stomp-holes in the river banks where a rhino had come down to drink or had climbed out after swimming across. It made me feel like just round the next bend we’d surprise a rhino at the water’s edge, but of course we didn’t. Its definitely a place where you’ve got better odds than elsewhere though.

The headquarters where you stay on Peucang are much like those anywhere else in southeast Asia with crab-eating macaques, wild pigs, rusa deer and water monitors roaming all over the place picking up scraps, but I wasn’t there for such common fare and headed straight over to the grazing ground at Cidaon. I was looking forward to seeing wild banteng for the first time. I thought it would be exciting, but it wasn’t. It quite literally felt no different to looking at cows in a field. The area in front of the watch-tower is mown right to the ground by the banteng, which are just sitting around in the shade under trees chewing their cud -- and it didn’t help that the cows you see in Asian fields actually are domesticated banteng and don’t really look any different to the wild ones. On the third day though there was a bull banteng at Cidaon which completely shattered the farmyard illusion. In no way did he resemble a common barn cow unless you put it on steroids and stuck a couple of giant Viking horns on its head. A most impressive animal. Apart for the banteng there were always several green peafowl sauntering around on the lawn with their chicks, a few fly-bys of Oriental pied and wreathed hornbills, and a colony of blue-throated bee-eaters nesting in holes in the ground right in front of the tower. When a black cobra slid by the whole colony turned out to attack it and drive it away, and when evening approached all the adults and juveniles took to the air together in a great swirling flock which was fun to watch. And that was pretty much it for Cidaon, a bit of a let-down after the build-up my brain had given Ujung Kulon.

The birding in general was just as uneventful. For two days I wandered along the one forest trail seeing almost nothing. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a forest as difficult to find birds in as this one. Black-banded barbet and grey-cheeked tit-babbler were the sole endemics found, and almost everything else were common species I’d seen in dozens of other places -- although seeing fifty pied hornbills taking off from one tree was a definitely a sight worth seeing!

On one of my days at Peucang a group of four tourists turned up from Carita which initially sort of annoyed me because in Carita I’d been specifically told there were no other tourists around who were going to Ujung Kulon; so I sat down and did the sums and worked out that even though I was paying twice what they each were, I was paying for four nights and they only three (one on Peucang and two on Handeuleum) and because I came through Tamanjaya I was still only paying half of what I would have been as a single traveller from Carita (because there all the tours are based on groups with a minimum of two people) so I’m sort of on the winning side.

On the last day, heading from Peucang back towards Handeuleum, our little fishing boat rounded the top of the peninsula and began battling its way valiantly into the wind, bucking and diving over the crests and troughs of the waves like a rodeo bronco. It was just like that movie A Perfect Storm, except all the crew were Indonesian and the swell was only half a metre. There were still no sightings of rhino on the Cigenter River but they’d certainly been active with even more signs along the banks than last visit (and I also added Javan scarlet sunbird to my list). Apparently there are three or four rhinos in the immediate area. I reckon that if you had a lot of money and the time to spare, then spending a month at Handeuleum with canoe trips on the river every dawn and dusk would give you a reasonable chance of seeing a rhino. I did some rough calculations and worked out a cost of 40 million rupiah for thirty days including boat hire, guide fees, accommodation, etc. Put that into a currency conversion website and see what it is in your local money. I guess its an idea to store in the back of my head for a distant date.

The Ujung Kulon trip cost me an arm and a leg (figuratively!) and I couldn’t really afford it at this late stage of my journey, but really if I’d decided not to go or to only go for a day-trip then for the rest of my life I would have been berating myself, wondering “what if?”, so it was something that simply had to be done. And when it came down to it I spent less in four full days than I had in two full days to visit Sulawesi’s Nantu Reserve to see babirusa, so once again I suppose you could say I’m on the up.


photos: banteng and a juvenile reticulated python
 

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Cool pythons and the Banteng dont look all that bad either.
On another note, it is so mindblowing and tragic that the Javan Rhino is nearly extinct when it used to range over such a large area.
 
it really is both mindblowing and tragic. Its quite difficult to grasp, writing that 500 were shot for bounty in Java alone in just two years - and this is a solitary forest-dwelling rhino, not an open-country one like white rhino. Deeply saddening.
 
SUMATRA, Way Kambas National Park, 8 - 12 October

After the Ujung Kulon trip in Java, my first destination in neighbouring Sumatra was to be the Way Kambas National Park down in the very south of that island. In Carita on Java I had run into a local chap by the side of the road who told me that I should hire him to take me to Way Kambas in his car because it would be easier and cheaper than using local transport. Only 1.7 million he says. When I said that was very expensive he said no it was cheap because it was in rupiah not dollars. (Everybody in Indonesia thinks that any amount of rupiah is a negligible amount to a foreigner, even if its in the millions). "Why, the ferry alone is 500,000 rupiah," he says, which I had a hard job not scoffing at. If the ferry was 500,000 then none of the locals would be able to afford it and it would never run! Anyway, I went from Carita to the Way Kambas National Park by a combination of public transports (mini-vans, ferry, big bus and motorcycle) and it cost a total of only 180,000 rupiah in travel (about NZ$32). The ferry, incidentally, was 10,000 rupiah.

Once there I discovered that the Way Kanan part of the park where the birders go is a very expensive place to be, especially as a single traveller with no-one to share the costs. Way Kambas is another one of those parks that requires every visitor to be accompanied everywhere by a guide, although in this case it may be justified given that the park still retains a full complement of large mammals including tiger, clouded leopard, sun bear, rhino and elephant. The guide fee is 150,000 but its not for the whole day, just for two hours, and because they would only do two hours in the morning and two in the evening for night birds and because you’re completely forbidden to go anywhere outside the ranger post alone - even along the access road you came in on -- that means that you’re basically stuck almost bird-less from about 8am to 6pm every day. It was very very frustrating! The accommodation and two lots of guided walks per day added up quickly, and then there was the 350,000 fee for a boat trip to a nearby swamp called Rawa Gajah where you need to go to try and see the endangered white-winged wood duck. I had brought along what I thought was a plentiful supply of rupiah but doing the sums once finding out the costs it was obvious that I didn’t have enough, even with only one trip to Rawa Gajah with one chance at the duck, so I had to cut a whole day out of my intended stay and even then it cost me over two million rupiah.

For such a well-known birder spot Way Kanan seems to be very little visited. From the visitor registry book it was apparent that they only get two or three visitors or groups per month on average, although ironically on the Sunday I was there three separate groups turned up (none of which were composed of birders!).

Once I’d got over the annoyance of not being able to go out into the forest except for those couple of hours morning and evening, I quite enjoyed my time at Way Kanan. I spent the days trying to find birds in the trees directly around camp, accidentally straying along some paths until I got caught and ordered back, but unfortunately almost all the birds there were fairly common Asian species I could have seen elsewhere for cheaper, such as greater racquet-tailed and crow-billed drongos, paradise flycatcher, scarlet-rumped trogon, ashy tailorbird, green imperial pigeon, red-crowned barbet, and various malkohas, sunbirds, flowerpeckers, things like that. (Maybe its the excessive heat and dryness, but it was sort of a repeat of the time at Ujung Kulon; total bird list for three days at Way Kanan was just 47 species). One of the few exceptions to the “ordinary bird” theme was when one of my most-wanted birds, a great hornbill, flapped right overhead and landed in a nearby tree. The guided morning walks into the forest were mostly pretty quiet as well, with only a few other birds worth noting such as crested fireback pheasant and black-thighed falconet (how can you not like a falcon the size of a sparrow?!!). The one trip I could afford to the Rawa Gajah swamp was better, with grey-headed fish eagle, white-bellied sea eagle and blue-eared, white-throated and stork-billed kingfishers seen along the river from the boat. The swamp itself wasn’t so much a swamp anymore as a small pool, it being very much the dry season here, but on that pool were three white-winged wood ducks, which was good as it would have sucked to have paid all the money going there and not to find any! These ducks used to be found all over southeast Asia but swamp drainage and hunting have decimated their numbers and now the populations are very fragmented, being practically extinct in several of the countries they once inhabited. The ducks were much bigger than I had been expecting, and also much shyer - I only got to watch them for a couple of minutes before they got spooked and took off (my fault for not being inconspicuous enough). The other special bird sought after in Rawa Gajah is the Storm’s stork, an even rarer bird. There were no storks on my visit here, but fortunately I’d already seen that particular species on the Kinabatangan River in Borneo.

The night forays after nocturnal birds went as per usual, sometimes well and sometimes not so well. I don't use tapes when looking for birds (because its cheating!!) and one of the park guides really started ticking me off by constantly complaining that "real" birdwatchers use tapes to find the owls blah blah blah. Honestly, he's getting paid a lot of money just to walk along the track behind me -- what does it matter to him how I look for birds!? I took great delight in pointing out to him an absolutely fabulous large frogmouth perched on a branch directly over the track. Also seen that night were a colugo (“flying lemur”) way up in top of a tree and a lesser mouse deer right next to the track about two feet away. On the next night I spotted a small-toothed palm civet, but in general the mammal-watching at Way Kanan was very poor despite there being loads of species present in the forests. The usual camp-goers were there (crab-eating macaques and wild pig) but apart for those and plantain and Prevost's squirrels the only other mammals I saw were the short-nosed fruit bats the size of small rats that had a colony under the roof of the entrance archway. There were plentiful signs of elephants (dung, and also the smashed bird hide at Rawa Gajah that apparently the local elephants had taken exception to!), signs of sambar deer (dung and the roaring of stags) and even signs of Sumatran rhino near Rawa Gajah (footprints and wallows), but see them I did not. Siamang were so common that every morning the forest reverberated to their calls, sometimes so close that your eardrums would just about be shaken from your skull, but always they were in trees just beyond sight and I never saw any. I'd seen siamang before (at Bukit Fraser in Peninsula Malaysia, in 2006) but I was hoping to see the Sumatran subspecies as well. Never mind, that's the way it goes when animal-watching.
 
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