[Chlidonias]

Originally Posted by Birdingcraft

Sorry to hear that Sulawesi has become so expensive- have always wanted to go there. The required guide sounds pretty annoying although a suppose a valid price to pay if it helps to preserve the forest. Hopefully a solution can be found for the bush-meat situation.

the guide requirement is veryannoying when you are travelling on a budget and prefer being independent. In some cases, like Tangkoko, the money apparently goes directly to the village which is good, but in other places I suspect it goes straight into the government coffers and is of no conservation benefit. The Lesser Sundas were great because apart for Lewa (on Sumba) guides weren't obligatory. In all of Sulawesi's national parks they apparently are. On Java and Sumatra you are supposed to have guides in some parks but not others. Really you have no idea what the actual deal is anywhere and you have to rely on the officials telling you the truth about whether guides are required or not (which in Indonesia is by no means guaranteed!).

I fear the bush-meat trade will only come to a halt when there is no more bush-meat to be hunted.

[Chlidonias]

One of the more unusual animals in Sulawesi is the babirusa, which is a type of big hairless pig with four big tusks in the males. The lower pair of tusks grow out from the sides of the mouth like a regular pig but the upper pair grow straight upwards through the snout itself before curving back towards the eyes like horns, hence the name babirusa (babi pig, rusa deer). Because babirusa are quite large creatures and tasty to eat they are now critically endangered over the entire island. In fact the only place where they can still be seen with any regularity is at a place called Nantu Reserve near Gorontalo, which is where I headed after Bogani Nani Wartabone national park. The only reason the babirusa are still found in any numbers there is because of a constant police presence to protect them. There are always three guards in the reserve, ostensibly patrolling to stop poachers. The ones there during my visit all looked about eighteen years old, and seemed to spend the entire time sitting around the camp playing with their AK47s, having ping-pong matches, and listening to an interesting selection of Bryan Adams and Whitesnake songs. Nantu is a very expensive place to get to; this place is where tourist-wallet-stripping really goes into overdrive. Just as an example of the costs, the three-hour motorised canoe trip up the river to the reserve's camp was at the time 500,000 rupiah each way. I was told that because there are no fixed prices the costs go randomly up or down according to the whims of the local people involved. Apart for the cost of the boat, there are also the hefty permit fees from the forestry department and the police, the fees for the required national park guide, the additional local guide, etc etc etc. The rooms at the camp there cost 200,000 per night, the price of a homestay elsewhere, but at Nantu getting you a mattress on the floor (if you're lucky). You have to take your own food and pay the cook to prepare it, although as everyone was eating the same food at the same time I'm sure there's an unnecessary step in there somewhere! There is no toilet -- and I don't mean there was no toilet in the room, I mean there was physically no toilet. The river is the toilet, and also the bathing area. I'm not too sure that using the river as a toilet is really very environmentally-sound so during my stay I did my best to avoid polluting the local water sources!

As previously mentioned, at Tangkoko I had met a chap named Bobby who was taking a Belgian guy to Nantu to see the babirusa, and I managed to wrangle my way into the visit. It cost me the equivalent of three weeks of my budget for just four days and they were some of the more uncomfortable days I've spent in a long time but it was totally worth it (although I may have had to change my mind about that at the end of my trip when there would be the potential for running out of money and having to sell my kidneys). I could probably have done it a bit cheaper on my own but realistically I don't think I would have even made it because the whole journey there turned into a complete shambles. First stop from Gorontalo was the forestry department to get the permits there and then the police in Limboto about twenty minutes drive away to get more permits. Although Bobby had already arranged the visit for his client weeks in advance it still took two full hours to get these sorted out. If you don't speak Indonesian (or aren't travelling with an Indonesian) it would take considerably longer! Bobby warned me to say I was just a regular tourist because if they suspected me of being a professional filmographer then the fee would shoot upwards! (Fortunately I was just a regular tourist so I didn't have to lie). Then it turned out that the river was too low for the boat to even make it to the reserve; or rather it could have made it if we spent half the trip pushing it over the rocks. Bobby was not exactly happy with this as he had been in touch with the national park guide every day for the last few weeks and it had never been mentioned. There is a road to Nantu but it was so bad that the car Bobby had brought from Manado couldn't make it (he having assumed that we would only be driving as far as Mohiolo on good roads to get the boat). We did our best but eventually had to ditch the car at a little cluster of huts and try to find some motorbikes. Normally its not hard to find a motorbike in Indonesia but, as it turns out, it is when there are five of you! This was about where we were thinking we were going to be ending up back at Gorontalo with no Nantu. Eventually we did manage to round up five bikes for I have no idea how much money, and we took off for an hour's ride over what could have been an extreme motorcross track. The river was low because it hadn't rained in months but you wouldn't know it from the road we were on. Some stretches were just broken rocks but mostly it was kilometre after kilometre of quagmire. No joke, at one point we passed a truck abandoned in the road up to the top of its tyres in the mud. Then inexplicably for the last ten minutes the road turned to perfect seal, but by that stage of course we all looked like Swamp Creatures. Then there was a raft across the river, half an hour over another very bad road in what had in a former life been a Landrover, another half hour of walking through rice paddies and corn fields, a wade through another river, and finally we reached the Nantu Reserve just after dark, after ten hours of travelling.

The babirusa site is just fifteen minutes walk from the camp. Its a big clearing in the forest overlooked by two hides, one at ground level and one about tree-top height. The two essential guides proved themselves to be entirely superfluous - they walk you to the hide (one walking in front of you, one behind) and then they go back to the camp to do nothing all day, while dreaming what they will do with all the money they are getting. A little stream runs through the clearing and the babirusa come here through-out the day to drink and wallow in the mud. At some points there were fifteen or twenty babirusa in the clearing at a time. We only had two full days at Nantu, so for the first day I took the top hide and for the second the lower, alternating with the Belgian. The upper hide was, shall we say, none too comfortable. The roof was about four feet high and the viewing hole was at a perfect height if you were a squatting Indonesian. They can squat all day long because they've been doing it all their lives but for westerners it gets very painful after a short period. Worst were the tree ants though. They were living in the palm-frond thatch, and as soon as I climbed inside the hide they swarmed all over me in their thousands with stings like burning needles. For an hour they kept up the assault until either I'd killed them all or they had suffered such heavy casualties they'd decided a strategic withdrawal was the best strategy. When I returned to the hide after lunch they launched another offensive, obviously not realising I was the same formidable opponent as in the morning. I was wondering how the Belgian was getting on in the other hide, because he wasn't really a jungle type of person, but the next day when I had the lower hide I realised he'd been in comparative luxury. The roof was over six foot high, there were no ants, and there was even a seat at a perfect height to see out the window.

There were LOTS of babirusa at the site, and they were in a remarkable array of colours: dark grey, pale grey, pale grey with pinky legs and bellies, wholly pinky-brown, blotchy in pink and grey, and even some that were almost chestnut. They're hardly the most attractive of animals. From a distance they somewhat resemble hippos with their skinny legs and fat bodies. Otherwise they're rather like a cross between a tapir and a mangy dog. Very odd creatures. There were also Heck's macaques at the site. These have grey bellies and lower legs, and look very different to the black crested macaques of Tangkoko. The black cresteds reminded me of small gorillas (and the males even develop silverbacks), but the initial impression of the Heck's macaques is that they resemble chimpanzees. Very occasionally people see anoa from the hides at Nantu. Anoa are a type of dwarf buffalo endemic to Sulawesi. Like the babirusa they are very rare due to hunting and I wasn't expecting to be lucky enough to see one, so you could have knocked me down with a maleo feather when an anoa stepped out of the jungle, looked around, had a bit of a wander and then disappeared again. I got some photos to prove I saw it but frustratingly they were all shockingly out of focus. Around the camp there were also Sulawesi warty pigs which were much smaller than I had been expecting. For some reason the young ones kept reminding me of super-sized elephant shrews but I'm not sure why. I went wandering for a bit as well trying unsuccessfully to find a bear cuscus, but did see a Sulawesi red-bellied squirrel which was quite fantastic.

There are lots of birds around the place as well, but there's no point wasting your time on them when you've paid so much to get there to see babirusa! New species for me were Sunda teal and blue-eared kingfisher on the river and Sulawesi pied cuckoo-shrike in the forest. Non-new species included collared kingfisher, great-billed kingfisher (could have saved myself the cost of the boat trip in the Tangkoko mangroves!), red-knobbed and dwarf hornbills, bay coucal, ashy woodpecker, Stephan's dove, brown cuckoo-dove, Sulawesi black pigeon, black-naped fruit dove, green and silver-tipped imperial pigeons, yellow-billed malkoha, slender-billed crow, hair-crested drongo, blue-backed parrot, ornate lorikeet, black-naped oriole and cattle egret. A few of these were seen from the hide (eg, the brown cuckoo-doves and Sulawesi black pigeons, along with mangrove monitors) but most were easily spotted in the trees along the river, especially first thing in the morning.

So, excellent couple of days. Well worth the expense, especially (at the risk of sounding like a wildlife-spotting snob) as seeing babirusa isn't an everyday experience like the Komodo dragons on Rinca where every man and his dog can go. Hopefully the area remains protected but as they are currently building a bridge and fixing up the roads I fear it won't be too many years before poachers have gained easy access and come in and wiped the babirusa and anoa out here as well.

[Chlidonias]

hopefully these pictures will attach all right. Just a few relating to previous posts: olive-headed lorikeet from West Timor (this one was being kept as a village pet); Komodo dragon on Rinca; spectral tarsier at Tangkoko; maleo chick at Tambun

[Chlidonias]

and two from Nantu Reserve, the anoa and a male babirusa

[Mysticete]

wow...Babirusa has to be one of my top most wanted mammals in the world. And you managed an Anoa too! Now I am super jealous and not just jealous of your trip!

[Birdingcraft]

Pretty darn impressive mammals but holy smokes- what an awful and expensive ordeal to see them! I thought that park entrance fees in Costa Rica were kind of steep ($10 per day for non residentsn, no guide nor permits required) and I wonder where the money goes but the situation is apparently nothing compared to that of Indonesia.

Thanks for all of this info- although it puts a damper on my dreams of doing an easy trip there at least I have an idea of what to expect!

[Chlidonias]

Originally Posted by Mysticete

wow...Babirusa has to be one of my top most wanted mammals in the world. And you managed an Anoa too! Now I am super jealous and not just jealous of your trip!

the anoa was a super-duper bonus. Its one of those ones where you know people have seen them there and you think wow that would be awesome, but you know its just so unlikely that there will be one at the site on the day you're there....and then it steps out of the jungle and smacks you in the face! That's why the photos all turned out crap. I took hundreds of the babirusa because they were always there, but I was so concerned about not getting good ones of the anoa in the few minutes it was out that I completely stuffed them up. Still, I always think of the photos as being secondary to the experience anyway.

[Chlidonias]

Originally Posted by Birdingcraft

Thanks for all of this info- although it puts a damper on my dreams of doing an easy trip there at least I have an idea of what to expect!

it is a trying place to travel, but its all worth it. When you get home, you forget all the hardships and just remember the good bits, then want to go right back there and do it all over again!

[Chlidonias]

The late Douglas Adams, when journeying to Komodo, wrote something along the lines of "Everything we were told in Indonesia turned out to be not true, sometimes almost immediately." He didn't mean it literally of course, but its pretty damn close.

After returning to Gorontalo from Nantu I had time to grab a shower because I smelled like a babirusa, then it was off to catch the night-bus to Palu in central Sulawesi. It takes about 14 hours to get from Gorontalo to Palu and while there is a day-bus its basically a waste of a day. The night-bus would save me that time, and also the money for the hotel that I'd be paying otherwise, and I'd be able to get to Lore Lindu National Park a day earlier. Lore Lindu is one of the most important protected areas in Sulawesi, home to almost all the species of mammals and birds on the island, but because of my restricted time in Sulawesi I was only getting two full days there instead of the seven in my original plan, so any extra days I could get I needed to take. The bus left at 5pm. It was actually going to Makassar right down the bottom of Sulawesi, so I'd be getting off at Toboli and then taking another bus from there for two hours to Palu. I was told we would be arriving in Toboli at 7am the next morning, which seemed about right. As I soon found out, the night-buses on Sulawesi are not like the night-buses elsewhere in Indonesia where they take on their load of passengers and then travel non-stop through the night to their ultimate destination. Instead they are just like the regular day-buses except in the dark. They are like old school buses past their use-by date, and there is no sleep to be had because all the way along the route they are stopping to pick people up and fill up with cargo. The position you are in is the position you stay in for the next ten or twenty hours because you are packed in amongst sacks and boxes and other passengers. Its like a mobile Tetrus game with people. Doubly-unfortunate was that my seat was right next to the permanently-open door so I had to use my feet to wedge myself against the frame to stop myself flying out into the night on the corners. And just in case anyone does try to sneak in a few winks, there is deafening Indonesian dance music played constantly. Some stupid woman had brought her two kids onto the bus who were infected with chicken-pox or small-pox or something and they spent the entire trip scratching furiously and rubbing against everything and everybody they could. I couldn't remember if I'd had chicken-pox before or not, but I fortunately suffered no consequences.

At 7am the bus was passing through a town called Tomini and I had one of those moments where you wonder "did I somehow mis-hear Tomini as Toboli, and I'm supposed to get off here?". At 8am we pulled into a petrol station and I asked the driver how far to Toboli. Two hours he says. At 11am I had pretty much given up any hope of getting to Lore Lindu that day. At 1pm the bus finally came into Toboli, after a full twenty hours on the road!! I was in Palu by 3pm but it was too late to do anything about Lore Lindu except go to the central office and get the permits sorted out. The night bus had saved me almost no time at all. I had the address for the National Parks office - I think I'd got it from Lonely Planet or somewhere like that - the only problem being that it was wrong, so I basically drove all round town in a bemo with a random person who thought it would be fun to help until we found it (but I forgot to write down the actual address at the time so I'm still none the wiser). I sorted out the permits for visiting the park and also sight-unseen (as I had no frame of reference for who would be a good guide) arranged a guide called Idris who lived in the village of Wuasa where I would be based. From reading trip reports, it seems that most people stay in the village of Kamarora but its much further away from the Anaso track (about 2 hours apparently) than either Wuasa or Sedoa (45 and 15 minutes away respectively). In Wuasa there are several places to stay, namely the Sendy Inn, Mona Lisa, and a National Park guesthouse, all apparently about the same price. I stayed at Sendy which was 150,000 per night. At the Palu office they also told me there was a “cottage” in Sedoa where you can stay too. After sorting out all the permits and such, I went back to the Hotel Dely for the night. I hadn't been back there long however when there was a knock on my door and I found the guide Idris standing out there, which was mildly surprising! I never did find out why he was already in Palu but he organised with me that he would be back the next morning to travel to Wuasa on the bus with me. The "bus" was actually a big car (called a "public car" because they function as buses) and the trip cost 80,000 rupiah. Later I discovered that the price was 40,000 and I had paid the fare for Idris as well, which I was slightly annoyed about.

The main site at Lore Lindu for birders is the Anaso track which goes straight up a mountain. As I said in relation to Tangkoko National Park there is a stunning paucity of small passerines in Sulawesi's lowland forests, but up in the montane forests there are loads of them. Its a very striking contrast, and its the reason the Anaso track is so important for people looking for as many of the island's birds as possible. With only two days in the park I decided to spend the entire time on this track. Idris appeared at first to be a good guide for a birder but after a few bad ID calls (eg, he identified streak-headed dark-eyes as Sulawesi leaf-warblers, and a female black-naped monarch as a mangrove blue flycatcher), a lazy attitude which really wasn't on when you're paying someone good money for their presence, and some other stuff which I'll talk about a bit later (and some stuff I won't talk about!), by the end of my stay I was well and truly fed up with him and more than a couple of times came close to thumping him one. But, the birds were great. The Anaso track is really a rough dirt road that used to be a four-wheel drive track. Now its completely impassable to even motorbikes due to slips. One part in particular is now just a narrow ridge between two great chasms where the track has literally disappeared down the mountain-side. Some of the trees in the chasm still had green leaves on them they had been toppled so recently. I really wouldn't be surprised if that part of the track is gone entirely within the next year and nobody can get up to the top. It would be a very long list if I recounted all the species I saw here, but some of the best were the fantastically-beautiful purple-bearded bee-eater, the Sulawesi pigmy woodpecker, red-eared fruit dove, fiery-browed mynah, greater and lesser Sulawesi honeyeaters, mountain tailorbird, island verditer flycatcher, sombre pigeon, grey-headed imperial pigeon, rusty-breasted fantail, Sulawesi leaf-warbler, streak-headed dark-eye, golden-mantled racquet-tail, caerulean and pigmy cuckoo-shrikes, blue-fronted flycatcher, yellow-vented whistler, Sulawesi drongo, and a wierd thing called the malia which is always described as being "babbler-like" so I was surprised how large it was. Best bird of all though is the one I was most hoping to see, the fearsomely-named satanic nightjar. Its also called the diabolical nightjar and, somewhat less-dramatically, Heinrich's nightjar. It was only discovered in 1931 when one specimen was collected in north Sulawesi and then it wasn't seen again until one was spotted by a birder in Lore Lindu in 1993 and then a few more times in 1996. Now that people know where to find it every birder that comes to Lore Lindu sees them. They sleep by day on the ground and fly at night after moths. I've seen a few species of nightjars now but always in flight at night (identified by their distinctive calls) so I wasn't prepared for how awesome they are when you see them in daylight. Really nice birds, now my favourite bird of the trip (move over maleo!).

At the top of the Anaso track is another small trail that leads to the top of Mount Rore Katimbo. Visiting Rore Katimbo had been a dream of mine for as far back as I could remember -- well, 20th November 2008 anyway, because that was when I found out about the existance of the pigmy tarsier which is only the size of a mouse. The first specimen found was collected on Mount Rano Rano in 1916 and the second on Mount Rantemario in the south in 1930, and then it vanished into the depths of scientific obscurity until 2000 when a third one was caught on Rore Katimbo. More were trapped accidentally by rat-researchers on Rore Katimbo in 2008 and the news made it to my ears, coincidentally just when I was preparing my trip itinerary. So onto the schedule went Rore Katimbo. I didn't know if I'd have any chance of success but it was worth a shot. There are actually three different species of tarsiers in Lore Lindu. The Lariang tarsier is found in the west of the park so was out of my reach, but the Dian's tarsier is found commonly throughout the lowlands and the pigmy tarsier up on the tops of the mountains. I had wanted to try for both the Dian's and the pigmy but with such limited time as I had I decided to just concentrate on the pigmy. I had also found out shortly before leaving New Zealand that the pigmy tarsiers were also found on the upper reaches of the Anaso track itself -- some birder was complaining on the internet that tarsier researchers had disturbed the habitat of the geomalia so he couldn't find it, boo-hoo. [I didn't see a geomalia either, due to Idris' extremely irritating habit of rushing up the path ahead of me then coming back after scaring the birds away saying, "oh I just saw a such-and-such up there"]. I had been talking non-stop about the pigmy tarsier since meeting Idris for the first time, and he said he'd actually seen them himself on Rore Katimbo, so we set a plan to go up Anaso on the first morning for birds then do the detour to Rore Katimbo in the afternoon to stay until night for tarsiers.

So, on that first afternoon when we reached the start of the Rore Katimbo trail I asked Idris how far it was from there to the top of Rore Katimbo.
"1.3km" he says. "Do you want to go there tomorrow?"
"No, today," I say
"Oh, OK," he says with a note of surprise as if this is the first he's heard of it.
So we set off up the Rore Katimbo track into thick dripping cloud forest. Great wads of moss covered every surface; it was surprisingly close in appearance to the mountain beech forests in New Zealand.
"Did you bring a torch?" I ask him
"No."
"Ah. Well I've got mine." I would have thought he would have brought one too if we were up there at night. It was a bit strange so I ask, "You do remember I said we were staying up here till after dark to look for the pigmy tarsiers?"
"On Rore Katimbo?"
"Yes, here."
"No, there are none here."
"Yes there are. You even said yourself you've seen them."
"Me? No."
"You said you've seen them before!"
Blank stare.
"Have you seen pigmy tarsier?" I pressed
"Yes."
"Here?"
"No, on Anaso." (This despite him having specifically said "some person" had seen them on the Anaso track but he himself had only seen them on Rore Katimbo).

In any event the track up Rore Katimbo was not the sort of track you'd want to be coming down at night by torchlight and Idris was adamant that he wasn't going to be leaving his motorbike down on the main road at night, so the tarsier search that night was a bust. But at least I had stood at the rubbish-strewn top of Rore Katimbo and seen the tarsier's habitat. The next day we returned to Anaso in the morning for birds and this time I had made sure we were staying put for nightfall, although I had decided in the interests of safety that we would look around the top of the Anaso track rather than the top of Rore Katimbo. According to Idris this was where he'd seen them, and also apparently people regularly saw them around the camping site there which sounded a bit suspicious but it could well be the case. You can't have cloud forest without fog, and the fog there is amazing. One minute you'll be standing looking at the view, then you turn your head for a few minutes and when you turn back all there is in front of you is a white wall of mist. You also can't have cloud forest without rain, and boy did it rain! I think I've only once in my life seen rain heavier than on the top of the Anaso track and that was at Khao Yai National Park in Thailand. With rain that heavy there's no point looking for birds so we just stood on the top of the mountain waiting for dark. Idris kept complaining that he was cold and wanted to go but I ignored that. Some people when they want to see some wildlife go to Africa and look at lions and elephants from the comfort of a safari jeep. Not me, I have to be a dumbass and go looking for obscure things like giant rats and pigmy tarsiers that really don't want to be found, in obscure places where the only comfort is that you're not dead.

"So where-abouts did you see the pigmy tarsiers?" I asked
Blank stare.
"The pigmy tarsiers -- where did you see them?"
"I don't know what you mean."
"When you've seen pigmy tarsiers, where exactly have you seen them?"
Blank stare.
"Have you seen pigmy tarsiers?" I asked in exasperation.
"Here?"
"Yes here!"
"Yes."
"Where exactly?"
"Oh, over there," he says with a vague wave of his hand towards the forest. Then, perhaps sensing my annoyance, adds "It was in 2001. We were mist-netting for the pigmy tarsiers. We did not catch any but I saw one. We put nets there, there and there. But now, I don't know if there are any here."

This didn't mesh with the dates I had found out before my trip but what do I know? On the other hand it sounded remarkably like he was making up stories. Because of the rain I decided we would head twenty minutes back down the track (now transformed into a series of mini waterfalls) to an anoa poachers' lean-to shelter and see if the rain abated. With the heaviness of it, looking for tarsiers in it would have been futile, and the shelter was near to the tracks the tarsier researchers had been cutting the previous year (although whether they had actually caught or seen any tarsiers on those tracks I did not know). In the shelter I asked if the anoa poachers got fines or jail time when caught by the rangers. Idris just laughed and said the rangers eat the anoa too. I decided it would be better for my state of mind if I refrained from asking if he ate anoa. In the shelter Idris was physically shaking with cold despite wearing four layers of clothing (but only jandals on his feet!). I felt a bit sorry for him but he knew what the deal was and this is what I was paying him for. And he still hadn't brought a torch with him!! I was only wearing a shirt and rain poncho and felt perfectly comfortable because in spite of the rain it was still about twenty degrees. After dark and with much moaning from Idris that he was cold and wanted to go, I went off the track and into the forest. Idris refused and stayed on the track. There were no pigmy tarsiers to be found. I am fail.

The night wasn't a complete loss though. All the way back to the main road the track was littered with fallen branches and trees brought down by the rain (it was that heavy!). At one point a particularly large leafy mass was blocking the way and as I approached it a big black shape suddenly lurched up from almost at my feet into my torchbeam and lumbered off into the forest while I said words to the effect of "Holy Mackerel that's big!". It was a bear cuscus which is a type of possum, but not just any possum. The bear cuscus is far bigger than a possum has any right to be. Its like a wombat with a tail! Normally they are right up in the very tops of trees and I had been looking unsuccessfully for one for the last couple of weeks. I can only assume this one was on the ground because it had fallen with the branch. So I may not have seen the world's smallest tarsier but I finally saw the world's largest possum. I think it may well eclipse the spectral tarsier as my favourite mammal ever!

The next day I had to return to Palu for a flight to Makassar at the bottom of Sulawesi, but I had the morning free and I wanted to spend it looking for Tonkean macaques. Idris said they were common in the plantations and he knew right where to find them. They weren't there. A local farmer came past and said the macaques were only in the plantations very very early in the morning and in the late afternoon (basically when there weren't any people around to shoot them); during the day they were off in the forest. So we set off for the forest. What Idris didn't tell me was that there were no trails through the forest around Wuasa village where I was staying. We headed straight up a hill, the sort of hill where when someone is standing in front of you their feet are at your eye-level, hacking through vines and bamboo and spiny palms. Once at the top we headed straight down the equally steep other side. It did cross my mind that Idris was getting back at me for keeping him on the mountain after dark the night before. There was no way we were going to see anything with the amount of noise it took cutting a path through the jungle, so the macaque hunt was a waste of time. On the downhill side we came across six snares, four set to catch macaques and two for ground birds. I destroyed them all, which Idris found immensely amusing which I suppose it was because doing away with six traps isn't going to make much of a difference but it had to be done. By the end I had a pocket-full of nylon rope and fishing line. On the way back to the Sendy Inn where I was staying we stopped off at a house where they had a pet Tonkean macaque chained to a tree so I could at least see one and get some photos. It was a poor sad creature, eating despondently from a bowl of rice, leading a miserable existance. I asked where the people had got it from, knowing full well the answer but wondering what they would say with Idris the park ranger standing there. They said they had got it as a baby from the forest after shooting the mother for food.

Back at the Sendy Inn I had to settle my bill, and that's when I found out that all the food that Idris had been eating there was going on my tab, despite him actually living in his own house in this village. Somehow he had managed to plough through a couple of hundred dollars worth of food in just two days. To say I was furious would be an understatement. I paid the total on the Sendy Inn's bill, but then deducted the amount he had eaten from what I was paying him. He was not happy. To cap it all off, I much later discovered (via Larry Wheatland's thread, post #808!!) that despite what I had been explicitly told in the Palu office, the Anaso trail is apparently not even inside the national park and you don't need permits or a guide there at all!!! Once again, this was a case of never really knowing where you stand in Indonesia, and by the time you find out the truth its just too late to do anything about it. Its a great country, but oh so frustrating!

[MKinHK]

I think I would end up in jail for GBH - the birds and mammals would have to be very good indeed to put up with anything like the nonsense you've had to deal with!

Cheers
Mike

[Chlidonias]

After flying from Palu down to Makassar in the south of Sulawesi, I basically had just one day before leaving for Kuala Lumpur. I potentially could have gone up Gunung Lompobatang which is a mountain near Makassar and the only home of the little-known Lompobatang flycatcher which went completely unseen between 1931 and 1995, but I didn’t really know how to access the site and I knew it would have been a fool’s errand looking for the flycatcher anyway. [I have since found out how to get to the flycatcher, so it had better watch out because I'll be back to find it one day!] The other site of interest to birders near Makassar is the Karaenta forest where I could see the black-ringed white-eye, a bird restricted to the south of the island. Karaenta is about ten kilometers past a little place called Bantimurung so that’s where I headed first to see if I could get a motorbike from there. But once there I learned that visiting Karaenta is now “forbidden” without police permission because of some trouble or other that had taken place there, so that was out the window. But Bantimurung is very nice, I was told: 2km of trails through good forest, a river and waterfall, lots of birds. Were there any monkeys? I asked, because the local species is one I hadn’t yet seen, the moor macaque. Lots of monkeys, I was told. I was right there at the entrance and it wasn’t like I was going to be doing anything else, so I paid the 10,000 rupiah entrance fee (less than NZ$2) and in I went. I don’t really know how to describe Bantimurung, its not really like any place I’ve seen in Indonesia before but it is very like many places I had seen in Thailand and Malaysia where anywhere there is even the tiniest waterfall it is made into a major tourist attraction, paths are laid, cave floors paved over, sculptures set up. At Bantimurung the river is actually very nice, flowing between great high limestone cliffs pockmarked with holes and caves and laden with lush vegetation, but there are all the man-made additions to make it as little like nature as possible. There was even a stereo system blaring out Limp Bizkit and System Of A Down of all things! On the wildlife side of it I came across a foot-long giant centipede which I got quite excited about. There were butterflies everywhere, both alive in the forest and by the hundred for sale in framed boxes all the way along the entrance road. Birds were notable by their almost complete absence (full list: black-naped monarch, glossy swiftlet, hair-crested drongo, blue-eared kingfisher and an unexpected grey-streaked flycatcher), as were the macaques which was a disappointment.

There are seven species of endemic macaque in Sulawesi (or eight if you split the Togian Island macaque) and potentially I could have seen six of them in the areas I would have been visiting. I saw the black crested macaque easily at Tangkoko, as I did with the Heck’s macaques at Nantu, but I completely missed the Gorontalo macaque at Bogani, the Tonkean macaque at Lore Lindu and now also the moor macaque at Bantimurung. The fault lay entirely with my poor time-keeping skills. As I said a few posts back, I had originally been planning on spending three weeks in the Lesser Sundas and five in Sulawesi, during which time I would have spent a few days at Tangkoko, a full week at Bogani, a week at Lore Lindu, a week at Morowali, and a few days each at Nantu, Faruhumpenai, and around Makassar. However the schedule got reversed along the way and I ended up with just three weeks in Sulawesi so had to toss out Faruhumpenai (where I could have seen the booted macaque) and Morowali altogether, and cut the other places right down to just a couple of days each, meaning that there was no lee-way for finding animals that proved difficult. I did find some great animals along the way - stand-outs being the bear cuscus, spectral tarsier, babirusa, anoa, and a whole slew of endemic birds - but I also missed a lot that I could have almost certainly seen if I’d had more time up my sleeve. I think a return trip to Sulawesi is definitely in order at some stage in the future.

So that’s the first two months of my trip up already! Now its Borneo time!

[Larry Wheatland]

Wow, I didn't know a creature looking like that Babirusa existed. I'm glad we don't have to put up with facial furniture like that.

[Chlidonias]

babirusa are fantastic beasts. One of the top-most highlights of Sulawesi for me.

Here's a little prologue for the Borneo bit, just to set the scene (while I try to find the time to write the next posts):

Eastern Indonesia, despite all its trials, was a wonderful two months. I honestly was expecting Malaysian Borneo to be much the same as Indonesia in terms of general difficulties but to my great surprise I found it to instead be an absolute breeze, pretty much about as touristy as you can get. There are comfortable buses going everywhere at scheduled times, it seems that most of the locals on the regular tourist circuit speak English, nobody tries to rip the foreigners off (well, it was tried once with me, but that really stood out as unusual in this place!). On the one hand it made the Borneo part of the trip very easy, but on the other it made me feel like I should be doing something more adventurous!

In Indonesia there had been a lot of tourists in Bali (obviously), as well as in Labuanbajo and to a lesser degree Tangkoko, but outside of those three places I could have counted on the fingers of one hand the number of white people I had seen in the last two months and needless to say none of them were looking for birds. Borneo in contrast was heaving with tourists -- I could barely get away from them -- but despite it being the high-season birders seemed very thin on the ground, at least in the specific times and places I found myself. At Bako I came across a young guy from America who was on his first trip to Asia which was good as it meant I sounded like I knew what I was talking about when pointing out birds. Apparently Susan Myers was there as well but that may have been a vicious rumour. At the Rainforest Discovery Centre by Sepilok I met a Spanish birder who got so frustrated at not being able to find any birds there that he gave up and left in disgust. And in the forest at Mt. Kinabalu I met a young couple from Austria. That was the sum total. I have been told that Mr and Mrs Halftwo were in Borneo at the same time as myself but I did not meet them unless they are actually Austrian (in which case I duly apologise for eyeing up your missus when you weren't looking).

[Chlidonias]

I've been having some trouble with my home internet connection so haven't posted any entries for a bit but that's all sorted now (hopefully). The other thing I've been struggling with is that because Borneo was just so gosh-darn easy to travel around in, the entries are rather boring to write. Its sort of all "went to this place, saw these birds, went to the next place, saw some more birds, no dramas anywhere". Anyway....


When I travel I prefer not to book accommodation and things ahead of time, largely because that would mean I'd have no flexibility in my plans which especially in a long trip is very important. It usually works out all right except for the minor hiccup here and there, but sometimes not so much. Well I flew into Kuching in Borneo, and fell flat on my face with my plans. I was coming into the peak of the Bornean tourist season, which I knew, but August is also the month Malaysia celebrates its independance as a nation, which I did know but hadn't really considered as a problem. Hence I quickly discovered it to be very difficult getting into the accommodation of the national parks of Sarawak. My first stop was going to be Bako National Park to see proboscis monkeys, but it was booked almost solid. I managed to get the last bed for the 1st of August, the last bed for the 2nd and one of the last for the 3rd. In the meantime I decided to go to Kubah National Park for a few days (it being not nearly so popular for some reason). While I was trying to organise these, there was a constant stream of tourists coming through the National Park office in Kuching wanting to go to stay at Bako and being told they couldn't. I really had no idea it would be so busy in Borneo. So I would still be getting to Bako, albeit later than anticipated, but Mulu National Park which was going to be one of the major spots in Sarawak for me was completely out of the question. All the accommodation at the Park HQ (including the 21 bed hostel) was booked wall-to-wall for at least the entire month of August, and there was also no room at the Royal Mulu Lodge (not that I could afford that anyway at a starting rate of about NZ$140 per night!). Potentially after I'd been through Sarawak, Brunei and Sabah, I figured I could retrace my steps and visit Mulu if there was room available then, it being after August by that stage.

So my first day in Kuching was spent trying to arrange and rearrange my schedule. For the second day I did the usual tourist thing and went to Semenggoh, which is an orangutan sanctuary where formerly pet orangs are rehabilitated to a life in the wild. Much the same as at the more famous Sepilok in Sabah but, I would have thought, less crowded -- nope! Watching tame orangs come to a platform to be fed bananas isn't really my idea of how I want to see them, but I figured this would be my cheat back-up in case I didn't get to see them in the real wild. When I got there I kind of changed my mind about that. I had expected that, as a centre for introducing orangs back into the wild, it would be somewhere in the middle of a forest out of the way of the local populace, but no. Its about 30km from the centre of Kuching and all the way from there to the entrance is lined with buildings and houses. From the entrance its only a couple of minutes drive up a road then a couple of minutes walk to where the feeding station is. Not exactly ideal if you're trying to return human-oriented orangs to the forest I'd have thought! There were perhaps a hundred tourists there to see the show. As far as I could tell that's all there really is to Semenggoh as much as the visitors get: a short paved road to the start of the unpaved track which leads to the feeding platform 300 metres into the forest, and that's it. There is another trail off into what forest there was, but it was closed to visitors. As it happened the orangutans didn't even come to the platform, they came to see the humans at the gathering point instead. There was a young male and an adult female with a five month old baby. They swung on some ropes, ate some sweet potatoes and bananas, posed for photos for the ooh-ing and aah-ing public, then left. It was kind of disturbing to me that everybody there was gushing about how this was a fantastic encounter with a "truly wild" animal when it was nothing of the sort. In a way I suppose its no different to, and just as legitimate an experience as, watching birds coming to a feeding table but it really was pretty underwhelming. "Bornean orangutan" went on my list as a wild animal seen (largely, I decided, because the baby was obviously born in the wild), but I wasn't not completely happy with it. Fortunately I saw "real" wild ones later in the trip up in Sabah so the pretend ones at Semenggoh could be discounted.

Semenggoh is only open for two short periods during the day, for the feedings, so after returning to Kuching in the late morning I went to the museum. There's a whole cluster of free museums in a park in the centre of the city. The Natural History Museum was closed for renovations but the "Old Wing" (the Ethnological Museum) has a quite large natural history section devoted to displays of native Sarawak wildlife. They all have a very very Victorian air to them, with big ornately designed cases filled with dozens of birds in contrived positions and with little scorpions and snakes and butterflies hidden amongst the branches the birds are perched on. The mammal section had a sign saying that the specimens were all prepared in London in 1900 and shipped along with their cases to Sarawak in 1911 when the museum opened. They were certainly showing both their age and the attitudes of the time. It was a bit odd seeing a glass case for a family of badly-prepared orangutans just hours after seeing live ones walking around. Unfortunately for the regular tourists none of the species were labelled beyond general signs on the cases ("wild cats", "leaf monkeys", etc), not even the bay cat. There was an Australian couple standing in front of one display and the husband was helpfully identifying all the animals for his wife: porcupine as echidna, colugo as flying squirrel, and pangolin as armadillo.

Not far from the museums is a place called Reservoir Park, a small garden area around a couple of small lakes. There were various common urban birds found here, although only three -- spectacled spiderhunter, ashy tailorbird, crimson sunbird -- were new for the trip list.

While waiting for the accommodation at Bako to free up I went to stay for a couple of nights at Kubah National Park, a forested hill/small mountain about half an hour outside of Kuching. There used to be regular buses right past the entrance but just that year many of the important bus routes ("important" in visitor terms that is) had been canned. There used to be two bus companies that did routes from airport to city, now you have to take a taxi; there is sometimes a bus that runs past Semenggoh but it is regularly cancelled so you have to take a taxi; there used to be buses every hour to Kubah, now you have to take a taxi. The Kubah run is quite a bit cheaper than some of the other routes because all the locals use the mini-van taxis so you can get there for just five Ringgits (about NZ$2.50) if the van is full. I had originally been planning on doing Kubah just as a day-trip but I'm glad I stayed. The accommodation there is very nice, cheap, and almost completely empty because most of the tourists just go to Bako and even the ones that do head to Kubah only go there on day-trips. For the regular tourist there's not much there apart for forest trails for some walking -- the birds are hard to find and even the macaques stay back in the forest and can't be seen by casual visitors -- but if you stay you can take the pace a bit easier.

Its very hot in Kuching -- very very hot! -- and its not any cooler at Kubah. There's a paved road that runs directly up to the summit, and also lots of trails through the forest and pretty much all of them go straight upwards (even the ones going downhill!), so a short walk anywhere leaves one so soaked in sweat it looks like you've fallen in a river. I took the long-adhered-to advice of the tropics and went out looking for birds in the early morning, slept through the hottest part of the day back at the hostel, and then went out again in the late afternoon for search for nocturnal beasties after nightfall. The forest at Kubah is amazingly noisy at night. I don't think I've ever been in a noisier forest. There were owls and frogmouths whooping and screaming and ponking, frogs weetling and hollering, tarsiers chittering, crickets whining and wheezing. There was even some insect doing the Jaws theme tune which was a bit disconcerting. As usual I didn't have much success with the nocturnal birds but I found a giant scorpion amongst other invertebrates, as well as a nice array of frogs (the best of which were the spotted stream frog and white-lipped frog) -- and let's face it, frog-hunting is way more fun than owl-hunting!

During the day, right around the hostel as well as out in the forest, there were numerous fancy Bornean birds such as purple-throated and red-throated sunbirds, long-billed spiderhunter, dusky munia, scarlet-rumped trogon, black and yellow broadbill, spotted fantail, and lots of others. Almost all the birds were new for the trip list, and about half were completely new for my life list. There weren't just birds out there either: variable giant squirrels, horse-tailed squirrels and the awesomely-cute black-eared pigmy squirrel helped fill in the birdless spots.

Photos: spotted stream frog at Kubah, and how the orangutan experience at Semenggoh presents itself

[Chlidonias]

Bako is one of the best-known, most-visited and oldest of Sarawak's National Parks, and it is tiny. Its pretty much right outside Kuching, on a little peninsula, and it is simplicity itself to get there. You could even do it easily as a day-trip should you feel so inclined. You just take one of the regular buses for 45 minutes from Kuching to Kampung Bako where there's a jetty, and from there take a boat for 20-30 minutes and you're there. The bus only costs 2 Ringgits, the boat 47 Ringgits (but that's split between however many people are one it), entry fee for the park 10 Ringgits, and a dorm bed about 16 Ringgits per night (my three nights came to 47.25 Ringgits if you can work that out). So how do I sum up Bako National Park? It was stinking hot and there was no water. On the last night there was no power either. It hadn't rained at Bako in quite a long time and their dam was almost empty. Sometimes the toilets flushed, mostly they didn't. Sometimes there was a trickle of water from the taps, mostly there wasn't. The streams in the forest were reduced to small puddles filled with dead leaves and little shoals of rasboras. I had a bit of a poke around to see if I could find any catfish or bettas but there appeared to just be rasboras in the pools. However on one of my nocturnal ramblings I did see a catfish of some sort in one.

The meals at Bako are served buffet-style at 7.30, 11.30 and 6.30. The food is always cold so you don't need to worry about getting there too early, but if you're too late you miss out altogether. At lunch there was often the same food as at breakfast -- not the same type of food, the exact same food leftover from earlier in the day. I had stomach pains the entire time I was there and I'm sure it was the food.

The park was very very busy, both with people staying overnight and with day-trippers, the latter often in tour groups of ten or fifteen at a time. Readers may remember that I had to book a week ago to get a bed at Bako because it was so much in demand, and I got the last bed on the 1st, the last on the 2nd and one of the last on the 3rd. Well as it turned out, while the park was undeniably top-heavy with tourists, a lot of the people that were booked in never showed up. My four-bed dorm was empty for the entire three nights I was there. And yet oddly the reception staff wouldn't let anybody stay who wasn't officially booked through the Kuching office. They just kept saying to day-trippers or people who wanted a longer stay that they were full, even though they quite plainly knew they wouldn't be full any night. On the whole I found the guides there to be very friendly, and the reception staff to be very unfriendly and unhelpful. When I first arrived the guy at reception said everybody had to sign in when they went on walks and you had to be back by 6.30. I asked why and he said "because its getting dark then. No-one's allowed out after dark."
"But I want to be out after dark, that's why I'm here," I replied.
"No, no-one is allowed on the trails after dark, its too dangerous."
We had a long discussion about this and eventually he lost his temper a bit and told me I could go out at night if I wanted but it was own responsibility if anything happened, which is what I'd been trying to get through to him all along. As it turned out I didn't find anything of interest in the forest at night, and neither did the participants of the official night walks. There are certainly interesting night animals there, including pangolins, lorises, tarsiers and mouse deer, but I think the dry weather has forced most things away back into the forest. It was very quiet in there at night, especially in contrast to the noise at Kubah. There was just the occasional owl, a frog or two and a lot of insects.

The trails at Bako are even steeper than the ones at Kubah, often just being jumbles of boulders and tree roots up the sides of hills. I walked some short trails when I first arrived but it was too hot and everything too steep and frankly I was sick of walking up and down hills, so I gave up and just sat around the headquarters like a chump watching the abundant wildlife there. The park doesn't seem overly great for birds but I must admit I wasn't trying very hard. Around the dorms there were mangrove blue flycatchers, rufous-tailed and ashy tailorbirds, common iora, fairy bluebird, pied triller, hill mynah, white-breasted woodswallow, magpie-robin, common goldenback, collared and stork-billed kingfishers, black-winged flycatcher-shrike, ruby-cheeked and crimson sunbirds, red-crowned barbet, greater coucal, chestnut-rumped babbler and others. Really Bako's speciality isn't birds though, its mammals. The first animal I saw at Bako was actually a proboscis monkey sitting in a mangrove tree as the boat came up to the jetty. The Paku trail is supposed to be the best trail for seeing proboscis monkeys but really they can be seen just as readily or even more so, and without any strenuous activity, in the trees right around the rooms where you sleep. In fact its easier to see all sorts of mammals around the headquarters than it is out on the trails, including silvered leaf monkeys with their adorable bright orange babies, massive bearded pigs, plantain squirrels, and even colugos. Most obvious are the pesky crab-eating macaques who are an absolute menace. At meal-times they often mobbed the restaurant, snatching food from people's plates right in front of them, and if they can access a room through an unlocked window or open door they will ransack the place and carry off anything small enough. The park's promotional material also claims you can sometimes observe small-clawed and hairy-nosed otters in the mangroves, which I was looking forward to (well the small-clawed otters anyway, I didn't have any faith in the claim of hairy-nosed otters!), but apparently it is rare to see them and I had no luck.

I was really trying to get some good photos of proboscis monkeys but while they were easy enough to see they proved frustratingly difficult to photograph. They liked to hide behind clusters of leaves or branches, or when in the open to position themselves against the sky so they were in silhouette. Only in the middle of the day when the sun was too strong for good photos did they sometimes come out to pose. I found a big male along the mangrove boardwalk which would have made for some nice habitat shots. He sat in a tree and ate leaves, then walked across the mud to another tree and ate leaves. I sat in one of the shelters for four hours, watching the mudskippers race the tide, waiting for the monkey to come within a good range for the camera but he never did.

Out of all the fantastic wildlife at Bako, the best one of all for me was the colugo. The vulgar masses call it a flying lemur, although it doesn't fly and it isn't a lemur. I've always wanted to see a colugo. If you don't know what one is, imagine some sort of mashed-up mix between a bat and a lemur and a flying squirrel, and that's about right. They're nocturnal, spending the day clinging to tree trunks, and because the fur is exactly like lichen-covered tree bark (except for the startlingly orange ears!) they are extremely hard to spot. There happened to be one suspended in a tree almost right outside my dorm, looking exactly like a lump of tree trunk. At dusk I returned to its tree to watch it as it became active. By day you can't really see much, just a lump of speckly fur, the forelimbs stretched out in front, the head either laid down on the trunk or raised to see what the people below are doing. Their eyes always seem to be open and they don't really seem to ever sleep while clinging to the tree. They are most odd little creatures. As night came along, the colugo started moving its head around, peering down at me, its huge bulbous eyes like glowing orbs, licking its fangy lips. Then it shuffled round to the other side of the tree, moving very much in the manner of a sloth, clambered up a branch and hung upside down, tucking its head down inside its gliding membrane, looking suspiciously like it was licking a baby. And sure enough out from the side of the wing popped a tiny grey head to have a look down at me. It was a most amazing experience. The reign of the bear cuscus as top mammal didn't last long. Best mammal I had ever seen was now the mighty wierd colugo.


Photos: Wagler's pit viper; silvered leaf monkey with baby; colugo (photo taken by torchlight at dusk with no flash so very blurry); proboscis monkey X2

[Chlidonias]

Because Mulu National Park was fully-booked up for the whole of August, I decided to go to Niah National Park for a while instead and then hopefully visit Mulu later in the trip. To get to Niah National Park from Kuching there is first a five hour boat trip to the town of Sibu. For pretty much the entire voyage up-river there were stacks of logs lining the river banks. From Sibu there is then a four hour bus ride to the town of Bintulu, through 200km of almost entirely denuded countryside and massive oil palm plantations. Outside of the national parks the end of Sarawak's wilderness areas is fast approaching. There is no longer a bus directly to Niah National Park so you need to get off at the turn-off halfway between Bintulu and Miri and take one of the private taxis that hang around there waiting for passengers. There's probably no cars there at night though so I decided to stay overnight in the mining town of Bintulu. On the boat from Kuching there was an older couple from Queensland with the same plan so we teamed up to split the cost of taxis and so on. Bintulu is a dodgy eerie sort of town that felt decidedly unsafe. Strangely we had arrived right in the middle of the annual Kite Festival which runs from the 2nd to 9th of August and every hotel was almost full, entirely unexpected in a town that nobody has heard of. The first hotel we tried, the Lai Lai Hotel where the two reception staff had the combined intellectual ability of a plantain squirrel, did have two rooms available but they were 60 Ringgits each so we thought we'd see if we could do cheaper. While Mr. Queensland waited on the sidewalk with the bags, Mrs. Queensland and I did a tour of the night-time streets looking for hotels. All were full, and they just kept getting worse and worse. At the last place we tried before settling on the Lai Lai, a fat troll of indeterminate sex and with only one working eye languidly pushed a registration form at us while an old man with a mass of sores for a face stared from the corner. The room rates were suspiciously cheap, the premises less than lowly, and when we asked to see the rooms first the troll just angrily tapped at the form with a pen. I don't think it was the sort of hotel where the customers normally stay for the whole night, if you get my drift.

The next day we headed onwards a further two hours north to the lovely little town of Batu Niah, next to the national park. We didn't stay at the Niah Cave Inn (say it out loud) because their rooms were 74 Ringgits, so went round the corner to the Niah Cave Air Cond Hotel which was cleaner and cheaper at 30 Ringgits. I spent one night in town but for the next two nights I moved to the accommodation at the park headquarters which is slightly more convenient being right at the park itself but more restricted in choice of eateries.

Niah National Park is a real place of contradictions. There are four-bed dorms but you can't just pay for one bed, you need to pay 42 Ringgits for the entire room, even if you're all alone like me. The hostel buildings have large kitchen areas with fridges and acres of cupboard space for crockery and food storage, yet cooking is forbidden and you are required to eat all your food at the park's restaurant. There is loads of accommodation at the headquarters -- seven chalets and five hostels (each hostel with four rooms of four beds), all quite flash really -- but almost nobody stays at Niah because the only attraction for most people is the cave system and its an easy day-trip from Batu Niah or even from Miri just two hours away. The HQ used to be on the same side of the river as the park, which would have been mightily convenient for the guests as they could access the park at any time they wanted, but now its on the other side so you need to rely on the hours of the boat service which means no early mornings, and no night-time trips unless you don't care about cost. I wasted the best birding hours because of the boat service. The river is only about twenty feet across but too deep to wade (and there are crocodiles in there). The boat fare is just one Ringgit, but after 7.30pm its supposed to be negotiable. On my first evening I was going to go into the forest to look for nocturnal animals, and the boatman says the fare will be 30 Ringgits! In isolation thats not a lot of money (about NZ$15) but in relation to other costs its ridiculous and its also a fair chunk of my daily budget so night-time forays were out apart for the first half-hour of dark up till 7.30pm when you're not likely to see anything except spiders anyway. In the mornings the boat was supposed to start running at 7am. I only had one free morning for birding so I was there at 7. The boat arrived at 8.15. The whole time I was waiting the forest on the other side was positively heaving with sound as the birds did their morning exercises but by the time I got over there, even though it was still only 8.30, all the activity had died down and apart for the occasional call here and there the forest was a silent as a non-haunted morgue. I was very annoyed.

The caves at Niah are really fantastic and really big (although nothing compared to Mulu of course). There is a boardwalk running right through them so its all nice and easy. The main attraction at the caves for the last several centuries have been the swiftlets that nest inside. They can fly in total darkness because they echo-locate like bats. There are three species, identified by their nests as physically the birds look almost identical to one another (although I think only two of the species are in the Niah caves). The mossy-nest swiftlet builds its nest of moss, the black-nest swiftlet of its own saliva mixed with feathers, and the edible-nest swiftlet of pure saliva. It is this last species that is the main supplier of birds-nest soup. The nests of the black-nest swiftlet are also collected but are less valuable because of the work involved in getting rid of the mixed-in feathers. The nests are really just like tasteless gelatin, their only worth coming from the difficulty of collection. The birds breed deep in the caves, cementing the nests on the walls and roofs, so to get them the nest-collectors clamber up ridiculous bamboo ladders that look like wisps of straw and swing about in the upper reccesses of the chambers a hundred feet above the floor. Its one of the more stupid food collection techniques around, for one of the more stupid food items.

Once I'd seen the caves I just spent my time wandering around on the rotting raised boardwalks through the forest looking for wildlife. Not all the wildlife was in the forest. There was a big huntsman-type spider in my room. Not as big as some of the ones I saw out at night but still big and scary enough to make most people want to vomit in terror. I don't know if they're venomous or not but they certainly look like they could be, so I trapped him under a cup from the kitchen, under which he stayed till I checked out. I probably could have taken him outside and released him the next morning but I expect spiders have the same revenge fantasies as the rest of us so I decided it was best for all concerned if he stayed under the cup during my tenancy. And speaking of big spiders I found a tarantula burrow out in the forest which had an entrance as wide as my thumb is long. I was hoping to see the inhabitant by night but the spider stayed hidden. There were naturally lots of birds around (um, during the day that is) such as various babblers (short-tailed, chestnut-rumped, chestnut-winged, scaly-crowned), sunbirds (ruby-cheeked, brown-throated, little spiderhunter), yellow-rumped flowerpeckers, chestnut-breasted malkohas and all the other usual suspects. The best of the birds were the teensy little rufous-backed kingfisher and the absolutely ginormous great slaty woodpecker (50 cm long according to the field guide). Best of the mammals was the plain pigmy squirrel which is so small it looks like a bushy-tailed mouse, and so fast they look like they're flying between the branches. Once you get your eye in, the pigmy squirrels are everywhere in the forest. (Truthfully, the plain pigmy squirrels were one of only three mammal species I saw at Niah, the other two being the variable giant squirrel and the lesser tree shrew).

When I left Niah I took the secret direct taxi that the locals use when travelling to Miri which only costs 20 Ringgits, cheaper than the combination of car to junction and then bus to Miri, and also faster. It left Niah at 8.15am so I was anticipating getting all the way to my destination in Brunei on the same day but when I arrived in the Miri bus terminal at 9.30am I discovered that rather than buses all day long to the border as I had thought there would be (translation: as there used to be), there are just two, at 9am and 3.30pm. Another taxi driver at the terminal kindly offered to take me to the border town for just 100 Ringgits. When I baulked at this ridiculous price and said it was too expensive he responds with, "no, very cheap"!! The 3.30pm bus wasn't really worth catching so I stayed for the night in Miri at the surprisingly nice and professional Cosy Inn. Miri is a very nice town, the kind of place where you could stay for a week or more just to relax. Something that wasn't to my taste though were the numerous seafood restaurants everywhere with rows and rows of tanks of live fish, crabs, river shrimps and even big mangrove frogs, all fresh for the table. One of them was even called the Seaworld Seafood Restaurant which conjured up some interesting mental images!! It was mainly the frogs that made me sad because I really like frogs (to look at, not to eat). I went looking for a post office and instead I found a pet shop just a few doors down from the Cosy Inn, filled with baby turtles and tortoises, hamsters, mice, kittens, puppies and fish. Strangely enough, the staff didn't seem to think it at all wierd that I was wandering round taking photos of their fish tanks. I guess nothing tourists do is odd any more.


Photos: rufous-sided sticky frog (great name for a great frog); assassin bug; giant cave cricket in its natural habitat

[Chlidonias]

You’ve got to feel a bit sorry for the tourism department of Brunei. The country has a reputation for being very expensive and most tourists only use it for a logistically-required stop-over of a day or two when travelling overland between Sarawak and Sabah. I wasn’t any different with three days, the first and last being days for arriving and departing, so just one proper day in the country. Brunei has masses of forest left, because its so rich from oil it doesn’t need to chop it all down and convert to plantations, but a lot of the reserves are quite difficult and/or expensive to access. I did like Brunei though and it really didn't seem overly expensive after all, so I decided that I would return there for a few more days on my way back down from Sabah to Sarawak (which didn't happen in the end but never mind).

Its very easy to get from Miri in Sarawak to Brunei’s capital Bandar Seri Begawan (known ubiquitously by the ugly abbreviation BSB), but you have to like bus travel - it takes four of them over the course of the day! When coming from BSB to Miri there is apparently one combined ticket all the way, but Sarawak doesn’t like its own buses going into Brunei so when travelling in the reverse direction you need to do a few change-overs. The first bus goes from Miri to the border immigration point at Sungai Tujoh. For almost the entire way the landscape on either side of the road was just black ash, all the land burned off presumably to make way for oil palms. They didn’t even appear to have cleared the trees first, just set the whole damn place on fire. There was the charred corpse of a monkey by the roadside at one point. White plumes of smoke were still rising from the scorched earth all along the way. It was incredibly depressing.

Things are taken very seriously at the Brunei border point. Everybody was required to stop individually in front of a thermal-imaging screen to make sure nobody had swine flu which at that time was in full-swing around the world. I’d picked up a cough in the last week or so and I was always worried I was going to get detained and quarantined at checkpoints. Once safely past the health check everybody had their bags searched. Not the casual flick-through for suspicious-looking hobo types but a thorough and complete emptying of every single bag for every single person. After that the second bus takes you across the border into Brunei to Kuala Berait, then a third to Serai, and finally the last one to BSB. And then I jumped on a speedboat for a 45 minute trip up-river to the little town of Bangar, which confusingly for me was also called Temburong! There was palm forest (wild nipa palm forest, not oil palm plantation) all the way along the river, and then the town itself appeared to be surrounded by rainforest. Certainly a big change from Sarawak. I stayed at the Pusat Belia (the Youth Centre), even though my youth days are well and truly gone. It’s a very flash sort of youth centre with air-conditioning in the main room, hot showers, everything like that, and its only B$10 for a dorm bed (and I think I was the only person in the whole building).

The next morning I went to the Peradayan Forest Reserve, about 15km out of town. The bit of the reserve that visitors can go to is called the Bukit Patoi Forest Recreation Park. There’s just one trail there, basically going straight up the side of a hill, although mostly boardwalked and stepped so quite easy, then it hits a big stone cliff-face covered in mosses and herbs, curves up the side onto the top of the plateau and stops at a look-out. There used to be more of the trail but its been abandoned and is now overgrown. I found another old trail up there as well which followed the line of the plateau edge, where I spent part of the day. There’s no public transport in Bangar so you have to go to Peradayan by taxi, which costs B$30 return, but you can pick your own hours at least. Because I only had the one day I set off at 6.30am and arranged a pick-up time of 8pm. I didn’t really see a whole lot during the day as it happened. In the morning the air was filled with the sound of calling gibbons and hornbills but the forest was so thick that there was no way I would be seeing them unless they were sitting in the trees right above my head. So I saw no gibbons and only brief non-identifiable glimpses of flying hornbills through gaps in the canopy. It wasn’t until near the end of the day that I finally got a good look at one of the reserve’s six species of hornbill when I spotted a rhinoceros hornbill perched on an open branch. Among the few other new birds I saw were a fabulous pair of striped wren-babblers, surely one of the most outstandingly-attractive birds of the trip (much nicer than their pictures in field guides), yellow-vented flowerpecker and grey-chested (white-throated) jungle-flycatcher. The plain pigmy squirrels were ubiquitous here as well. So it was one of those bad birding days and my Brunei list remained pitifully small.

The next morning I took the speedboat back to BSB and went to the bus station to get the bus to the ferry terminal for Sabah (yes, its another one of those travel days everybody loves). It was a bit like when I arrived in Miri to get the bus to Brunei - rather than ferries to Pulau Labuhan throughout the day as my pre-trip-gathering information had claimed there were only two in the early morning which I’d missed, and four in the late afternoon, two of which had already been cancelled. So I had to sit around in the terminal’s waiting room for four hours (hence the term “waiting room” I guess). The boat goes first to the island of Pulau Labuhan where Malaysian Immigration is, and then there’s another ferry from there to Kota Kinabalu, state capital of Sabah. Of course I’d missed the connection; I really don’t know why travel companies don’t tie their schedules together for the benefit of their customers. However for those people like me who are morons and don’t catch boats on time, there are also speedboats that go from Pulau Labuhan to a town called Menumbok on the adjoining mainland, from where (again, if you are in time) there are buses to KK. So that’s what I did, and I ended up halfway through the night in KK at a charming establishment called the Gaya Hotel where the only thing missing from my 15 Ringgit room was the chalk outline of the previous tenant. After one night there I moved to Lucy’s Homestay where I had to have a dorm bed but at least I didn't need to be worried about my stuff being stolen from the room.

[Larry Wheatland]

Striped Wren-Babbler gets a big thumbs up from me too Chlid. Only seen them once, at Taman Negara, and thought "Wow!"

[Chris D]

Great stuff. My favorite part of the world.

[MKinHK]

An excellent guide to the buses taxis and bureaucracy of Sarawak (plus the odd mammal and bird). I think I know now why everyone I know goes to Sabah!

Great Slaty Woodpecker is a monster, and your sticky frog looks like it could be related to our Spotted Narrow-mouthed Frog.

Cheers
Mike

[Chlidonias]

Originally Posted by Larry Wheatland

Striped Wren-Babbler gets a big thumbs up from me too Chlid. Only seen them once, at Taman Negara, and thought "Wow!"

they are a tasty little dish of babblery goodness. I saw some at the Danum Valley as well, a little bit later.

Originally Posted by MKinHK

An excellent guide to the buses taxis and bureaucracy of Sarawak (plus the odd mammal and bird). I think I know now why everyone I know goes to Sabah!
Great Slaty Woodpecker is a monster, and your sticky frog looks like it could be related to our Spotted Narrow-mouthed Frog.

well Mulu National Park in northern Sarawak is well-patronised by visiting birders but it seems like a lot of them just add it on to a Sabah trip, simply flying in from KK and back. It is true that not many seem to visit Sarawak much but maybe that's more a consequence of it being less well-known?

You're right, the rufous-sided sticky frog is closely related to your spotted narrow-mouthed frog - both are in the same genus, Kalophrynus

[Chlidonias]

Because Borneo was so full of tourists it seemed best to do the thing that I don’t like doing, and arrange all my accommodations in Sabah in advance. So on my first day in Kota Kinabalu I booked myself stupid to make sure of getting to the places I wanted to get to, arranging stays of four nights at Mt. Kinabalu National Park, then five nights at the Danum Valley Field Centre, followed by two nights at the Kinabatangan River, two nights at Sepilok and two nights at Poring Hot Springs. There really were a lot of tourists on this island, and all the tourists themselves seem surprised at this. Think “Borneo” and you think untrammelled rainforest, not tourist crowds, but its just one big intermeshed web of tourist routes. The two Dutch lingerie models that were in my dorm at Kubah National Park turned up at Bako National Park, half the people from Bako passed through Niah National Park while I was there, a couple of them were then on my bus to Brunei, I ran into a guy I’d met in Kuching when I got to Kota Kinabalu, and a girl from my hotel in KK then turned up at Mt. Kinabalu.

Mt. Kinabalu is about three hours by bus from KK, and its a fabulous place. It was definitely nice to get to somewhere cooler. It hadn’t rained in Borneo for quite some time and every day seemed hotter than the last, the heat just continually building up with no rain to stave it off. I stayed at a pleasant little place called the Bayu Homestay (aka Bayu Lodge), where a dorm bed costs 20 Ringgits (about NZ$10). Its situated on the main road about five minutes walk from the entrance to the park. The accommodation inside the park itself is operated by a company called Sutera Lodges. Their prices used to be high, now they’re insane! 120 Ringgits for a dorm bed (NZ$60), up to 3500 Ringgits (NZ$1750) for a six-bed room; and if you’re climbing the mountain the cost of a dorm bed at the rest point of Laban Rata starts at 320 Ringgits (NZ$160)! If you want to get a minivan to KK the park charges 150 Ringgits (NZ$75), but if you walk two minutes from the HQ out onto the main road you can get a public one for 15 Ringgits (NZ$7.50). Its an expensive exercise climbing Mt. Kinabalu, but its very popular. In the peak (no pun intended) tourist season the park’s accommodation is fully-booked and so are the climbing permits. I fully suspect that very few tourists visiting the area even realise that there's other cheaper accommodation available so nearby. You can climb the mountain in one day if you’re very fit or very crazy. In fact there’s a race held every year where very fit and crazy people do exactly that. The fastest time in 2008, up to the summit and back down again to the start point at the Timpohon Gate, was 2 hours 44 minutes and 47 seconds. But most people take about six hours just to reach Laban Rata at the 6km point, where they then get a few hours sleep before climbing the last 4km to the summit in the dark so they can be up there when the sun comes up and they get a fabulous view of mist - or, I hear, sometimes a sunrise over a spectacular view. You pays your moneys and you takes your chances. I could never have climbed the whole mountain even if I'd tried: it took me five hours just to reach Layang Layang at the 4km point because I was stopping every 100 metres to look at things and take photos. There was a couple staying at the Bayu Homestay though who did the whole climb from Timpohon Gate to the summit and back in ten hours. They looked a bit tired when they came down.

If you are doing the full climb to the summit you need to pay for a guide, but you can go up to the Layang Layang point by yourself as I did on my third day there. There are certain birds that are only found at higher altitudes on the mountain for which as a birder you need to do at least this part of the climb to have a chance of seeing, like the Kinabalu friendly warbler - which wasn’t so friendly towards me and remained hidden. There are also lots of regular day-tripper tourists to the park who do the climb to Layang Layang, and I don’t really understand why. I can understand climbing to the summit because that’s an achievement, something to be proud of; and if you’re a birder or a botanist or an entomologist or something like that then going only as far as Layang-Layang is understandable because you’re looking for specific things at that level; but the regular folk who just struggle up the steps without ever really looking at anything except their feet, reach Layang Layang, and then turn around and come down again I don’t understand at all. I mean, its not like you can go home and boast about having climbed a third of the way up a mountain!!

Although I didn’t find the un-friendly warbler, I did see some of the other mountain birds like the Kinabalu bush-warbler. The spot-throated form (oreophila) is found up here, but there is also the "typical" form which is found from the HQ all the way up as high as Laban Rata -- I have no idea what the score is with these: they are treated as subspecies but by definition two subspecies cannot live in the same place. I am confused. About 700 metres up from Timpohon Gate is a set of near-vertical steps, and the trees either side were always full of birds. Here you can almost be guaranteed of seeing the mountain black-eye. At about km 3 there are bamboo stands in which I have read you may see tawny-breasted parrotfinch but I didn't. The most excellent sighting for me above Timpohon Gate was a pair of black-breasted fruithunters, absolutely stunning birds and probably my absolute favourite of all Bornean birds. They were exactly at km 3 where there is open forest on the right side of the path with an understory of bamboo and tree ferns (to the left of path is scrubby bank where there were bush-warblers also). The male was here on a bare branch about mid-level (I even got photos, which is not something I normally manage with the forest birds). A bit further along the trail (c.km 3.2) was a pair right above the path, the male of which was probably the one I'd seen previously.

There was also a nice variety of small mammals along the Summit Trail, from the weeny Jentinck’s squirrel, like a super-charged arboreal rat, to the snackiverous mountain ground squirrel, as well as mountain tree-shrews. On the way back down the Summit Trail it started to really pour down which put an end to the birding, but did bring out the 70cm Kinabalu giant earthworms, found only on this mountain. What the rain didn’t bring out was the earthworms’ main predator, the 30cm Kinabalu giant leech, again found only on Mt. Kinabalu and something I’d been hoping to see. However the next day, once more in the wet embrace of another thunderous downpour, I did come across what I can only assume was the Kinabalu giant leech. It was a leech, it was certainly giant, but was it the Kinabalu giant leech? Without any real working knowledge of the Mt. Kinabalu leech fauna I don’t know for sure.

Most of my time at Kinabalu was spent not on the Summit Trail but in the forest lower down. Pretty much everybody goes to the mountain just to climb to the top and then they leave straight afterwards, so you don’t see many other visitors on the forest trails and those you do see are usually birders. There are absolutely tonnes of birds here, and many of them come in waves. Sometimes it seemed as if every 100 metres I was meeting another bird-wave. They’re kind of a blessing and a curse. On the one hand you get several species all at once, but on the other hand most of them are new to you so you’re trying to identify unfamiliar birds from a flock of several different unfamiliar birds, and then a fog bank rolls in so you can’t see anything anyway! After the first day or two though you’ve got the commoner core birds sorted out and can flick through them to concentrate on the less common wavers. There are actually two types of bird-waves, small birds and larger birds. Small bird bird-waves consist mostly of grey-throated babbler, Bornean whistler, yellow-breasted warbler and white-throated fantail, with random additions of indigo flycatcher, eye-browed jungle-flycatcher, black-fronted white-eye, mountain leaf-warbler, etc. (Two-species waves of just the grey-throated babbler and eye-browed jungle-flycatcher were also common). The larger bird bird-waves were made up of chestnut-capped and Sunda laughing-thrushes, ochraceous bulbuls and short-tailed green magpie, with random additions of eg Bornean tree-pie, ashy drongo and various woodpeckers.

One of the more sought-after birds of Mt. Kinabalu is the endemic Whitehead’s trogon. I’ve never had much luck with finding trogons so I wasn’t going to be too surprised if I couldn’t find this one, but I’d barely arrived at the park (well, fourth day, but who’s counting?) before I saw my first pair on the Liwagu Trail, and then just twenty minutes further up the same trail I came across no fewer than four of them all moving as a group, sort of a “trogon wave” you might say. I also managed to spy the cute little Whitehead’s pigmy squirrel, which is only a bit bigger than the tiny plain pigmy squirrel of the lowlands and has long white ear-tufts, so long in fact that they look like horns giving it the appearance of some sort of devil-mouse. I couldn’t for the life of me find the Whitehead’s spiderhunter or Whitehead’s broadbill though. If you’re wondering, and I know you are, John Whitehead was an English zoologist who spent a lot of time in southeast Asia collecting museum specimens. He was the first non-local person to climb to the summit of Mt. Kinabalu, in 1877. He named the highest point Low’s Peak after Sir Hugh Low who was the first to attempt the climb some years earlier.

The best trail without question was the Liwagu Trail, most profitably done I feel from the bottom, going from HQ up to Timpohon Gate; this trail skirts a river valley so has good vantage points. I saw most of my trogons along this trail; they do seem very easy to find -- eleven here on various days but only one pair elsewhere (at the lower entrance to the Bukit Ular Trail). I also saw pigmy blue flycatchers here several times. There was a Bornean whistling thrush holding a territory near the top of the trail and in the area round the Timpohon Gate where he was always easy to find, and the Austrian couple and I managed to spot an Everett's thrush near the top of the trail as well. Bornean montane forktails (split from the white-crowned forktail of the lowlands) were common along the streams. Mammals in the forest by day included black-banded squirrel, variable giant squirrel and smooth-tailed tree-shrew.

Its not all birds at Mt. Kinabalu. The place is an entomologist’s dream. Even just the Bayu Homestay would be heaven for a lepidopterologist. The variety of moths there was extraordinary, from tiny ones the size of ants to ones the size of small family cars, and all the colours of the rainbow from brown to another shade of brown (also white, green, multi-hued, etc etc). On one of my daily treks through the bush I took some time out from birding to have a dabble in one of the mountain streams, where in just one small side-pool I found freshwater crabs and limpets, the nymphs of dragonflies and damselflies, the tadpoles of what were probably large-eyed litter frogs, and three different species of hillstream loaches.

But too soon my allotted time at Mt. Kinabalu was up and I had to leave for the hotter climes of the Danum Valley….


Photos: the black-breasted fruithunter, in full "habitat" shot and a blown-up section

[MKinHK]

OK now I'm freaked out - no personal pain, no rip-off (for you at least), easy travel, no leprous hunchbacks, but instead nice accommodation, multiple lingerie models, and masses of good birds . . . am I in the right thread?

[Chlidonias]

and that's why everyone goes to Sabah!

[Steve G]

Congratulations on a superb read!!!

I've spluttered a mug of coffee across my laptop laughing at some of your antics and the bizarre predicaments you frequently found yourself in. But the truth is -I wish I had the courage and the youth to embark upon such a journey.

I take my hat off to you sir!

I believe the appropriate lowland Scots term is "Nae Feart"