A quickie

Good evening all,

Only a short post i’m afraid.  I’ve been in Bako national park all weekend, hence no post yesterday and Bako barely has edible food let alone internet access.  I’ve only got 5 minutes before a cab back to matang, so a few bullet points about this week.

Matang:

• We had an injured croc come in last week who had been baited and the hooks trapped in his stomach.  Unfortunately he died the day after and had to be buried out the back.
• Speaking of crocs it was feeding week last week so we watched the keepers kill the chickens halal style (slit their throats and drain the blood).  I ended up haing to push the heads through the lepoard cat cage…not easy and a bit minging!
• Another croc related story!  Visited jongs croc farm on friday and saw them bein g fed….great photos, i’ll get them up next week.
• We took a baby samba deer from its mother, as it was beginning to get malnurished.  After 2 days it still hadn’t began bottle feeding and had escaped twice…..it’s fun trying to catch deer in the pouring rain through mud! She is now back with the herd, but we are not sure what will happen.
• Doris made Alvin ( keeper/co-ordinator bloke) her prison this this week by stealing the bucket of food and refusing to let him out of her enclosure…all good fun!  Alvin got away and Doris kept the bucket….a fair trade I think!  She thgen walked with it on her head all day.
• Mamu escaped for a couple of hours but was persuaded to come down by durian.

Bako

• Spent the weekend at Bako national park with the rare probiscus (cock nose) monkeys.  Very cool, some some tough 5 mile treks through the rainforest.
• Had our room broken into by macaques who trashed the place and ate our food.
• Had breakfast stolen by 4 macaques in a dazzeling display of organisation, they had decoys and everything!
• Had lunch taken by the macaque….see a pattern here?
• Got the first solid sunshine of the last 2 weeks which was cool.

General

• My back is still messed up, just back from Mr Kaki who beat me senseless, hopefully it will do some good, otherwise it’s going to get worse.

A much more detailed update next week hopefully, but I have 30 seconds left and better go. 

Ta ra for now.

P.S Contary to comments on the previous post I do not have orangutans for sale (FOSTER!)

Good morning children, are we sitting comfortably?

Now then children I hope you are all sitting comfortably, pencils at the ready as it is time for a short lecture…..and no nodding off at the back.

I’ll start with a quick history of the Matang Wildlife Centre.  It was set up by the government about 10 years ago as a centre of excellence, somewhere that could rehabilitate orangutan, sun-bear and other endangered species before releasing them back into the wild.   

Interesting fact, very sad but interesting: There is not a single vet in the entire of Sarawak, Malaysia’s largest state with a population of over 2 million people, who is qualified to work with orangutan or sun-bear.  The centre does not have a vet, if an animal gets ill they take them to a regular cat and dog vet in Kuching.  Currently they are waiting for a training vets to graduate after which hopefully they can employ someone and then bring an experienced vet over from abroad to mentor them for a year or so.

There is currently near to zero knowledge about the rehabilitation of sun-bear.  Nobody is really working on it, currently the centre has a waiting list of about 200 sun-bear that people want them to take.  Everything that Matang is doing with the bears is to be published as a scientific paper, essentially to PHD standard.  When they are young sun-bears are very big in the pet trade industry.  Unfortunately like many animals when they grow older they turn wild, and a sun-bears bite is much worse than its bark!  One of our bears at Matang, gummy-bear, had all of his teeth pulled out with a pair of pliers when he was younger so his owner could keep him longer.  Luckily, they decided not to pull his claws out as often happens.  Gummy bear cannot now go back into the wild.

Guess which country has the highest density of orangutan, Borneo, Indonesia? Nope, it is Taiwan.  There used to be a soap opera with an orangutan in it, the pet trade went through the roof.  As they got bigger they got dumped into parks and what not, remember that orangutan do not live in Taiwan, they are nothing like indigenous to the area.  The pet trade luckily as calmed down, and all the zoos/centres are trying to send them back to Borneo to places like Matang to be rehabilitated, but the centre is not quite ready and the paperwork/bureaucracy is a nightmare.  In time it will happen.

In the UK, if you know where to look and have the inclination, you can buy a pet orangutan for $25,000 (pounds not dollars).  Over here a baby orangutan can be yours for about $1000, generally from Kalimantan in Indonesia.  If you can get to the source, and nobody can, orangutans cost $100. Most figures put it at about 1000 animals going to the market every year.  The only way to get to the babies is to kill the mothers, who aren’t worth much, if anything.  About 2 out of every 3 babies that are taken from their mothers and into captivity die quite quickly.  So for those 1000 orangutan that are on the market, the real figure of deaths could be as high as 4000-5000 orangutan.

I think I’ll leave it there for now.

x

Matang Wildlife Centre – Week 1

Howdy all,

I suppose this is the first post in about a week or so, sorry about that but I don’t have the net at the orangutan centre.  Just to foreworn you, this is going to be a long post, so unless you have a bit of time on your hands then you might want to leave it until later!

So myself and the other 9 volunteers transferred down to Matang on Monday morning.  Everyone is pretty cool, I’m in a wooden chalet thing with an ex copper, nice bloke, plenty of interesting stories to tell!  It is quite a mixed group actually, 4 guys and 5 girls ranging in age from 18-50, not what I was expecting really but definately better for it.  Matang is about 30k away from Kuching, on the boundary of Kubah national park.  Mostly kerangas secondary rainforest everything is very thick and green (except the numerous leeches who mill about who are brown!), once you trek off for a minute or two unless you know where you are it would be incredibly easy to lose yourself in there.  The centre is a rehabilitation project for numerous animals (infact they are oblidged to take in any endangered/totally protected species within reson).  Currently there are 6 Orangutan, 2 female babies, 3 girls about 6-8 years old and one big 17 year old male.  There are 8 sun bears (the smallest of the bears) a bunch of crocs and samba deer, macaques and a few other species.

I guess the easiest thing to do is to go through the last week chronologically and intersperse it with general bits of trivia!  So we started gently on Tuesday, had a guided tour around the centre and through the rainforest nearby that we are working in.  Facts galore about bears, plants, insects, the centres work, orangutan (obviously!) and the crocs.  The centre itself is in about the stage of repair that I thought it would be.  A couple of the enclosures are not great, particularly the crocs but they are much better than they could be thanks to all the volunteers.  The big sunbear enclosure is great, plenty of space for them to roam around and climb (once they are ‘taught’ to, interestingly sun bears in the wild generally occupy the top of the canopy as that is where most of their food is, however none of these bears have been in  the wild and are not able to climb more than a 2 metre at the moment if at all), the orang enclosures are also plenty big enough with frames for them to climb etc. 

Wednesday was the first day we started properly.  The group was split up into 3 who in the morning to do husbandry (cleaning, feeding etc) for the quarentine area, orangs or the sun bears on a rotational basis.  First day I got put with the orangs, not a bad way to start.  Spent about half hour cleaning out Amans enclosure (the dominant male), every step of the way he was watching us from the night den, sitting near to him you realise just how big and powerful orangs really are.  Amans hands are massive, he weighs 150 kilos and is able to do ONE fingered pull ups, Arnie eat your heart out.  Unfortunately he got into a fight with another male at Semengogh (another rehab centre) and lost one of his fingers as well as half of his tongue.  Because tourists persist in throwing lit cigarettes to some of the animals he also has around 15 burn marks on his lips, not that you can see them very well.  We were then introduced to Doris.  Doris is 7 years old and loves humans, she has been humanised to the extent that rehabilitation and release is looking less and less likely.  Going into her night den with Leo we sat down next to her and began to feed her by hand, it was unbelievably cool.  She is a real girls girl and loves guys, so she came straight up to me and offered me a banana, so I took a bite and gave it back to her, she won’t eat unless she sees you swallow what she gives you, it means you eat some seriously dodgy crap!  It was an amazing experiance.  Later that day I went up to the training area where mamu was having her first ever day in the forest!  She had climbed so high that she was scared to come down, quite common in young orangs apparently.  Because she had never been in trees before she didn’t know whether they would support her or not, meaning that it took a long time for her to move about.  Ting San was also with us, they really are like little kids, wanting attention, to play or sulking because they did’t get what they wanted.  She kept grabbing me from behind and trying to pull me over, wanting a cuddle or just to wrestle around a bit.   Eventually we got Mamu down from the trees and had to prise her off the rope and into a portable cage as she is too scared to be walked or carried through the forest.  It really is silly just how cute baby orangs are! The pictures below are of Ting San, I didn’t get a chance to get any of Mamu, but I have got some video I will try to get up at some point.

On Thursday I did the quarantine area.  Again the mornings are all about husbandry, cleaning and what not.  A pretty easy job all told, except when you are trying to remove a banana plant from Amans cage!  There are 2 baby macaque between 1 and 2 years old who are brilliant.  They love grooming the hair on your arm and generally playing with you, this is why they are very big in the pet trade, until they turn older and generally get a bit nasty, a fully frown macaque has quite a set of teeth on him!  The afternoon consisted of digging holes in the forest about 3 foot deep for a fence to surround the new deer enclosure.  I tell you what it was bloody hard work, stupidly hot and not to mention thick tree roots everywhere you looked that you had to hack through.  Generally we start work at about 8am and finish around 5 with a 2 hour break for lunch (the locals are a bit like the Spanish!), hard work but enjoyable. 

Today I moved onto the Sun Bear.  We spent an hour painting marks on the trees so that we can monitor how high they are climbing now that we can begin to ‘teach’ them, about 3 metres up each tree.  So far the highest one of the bears has gone is about a metre and a bit, so considering they are meant to be 60 feet in the air there is a lot of room for improvement!  The food delivery people had not arrived that morning, so we didn’t actually have any food for the bears save some seeds and the odd bit of fruit, this isn’t so bad.  It teaches them to go without food for a while, exactly as they will when they are released into the wild, although that is a few years away yet.  Sun bears may look cute (again big in the pet trade when they are young), but they are viscious, their bite and large claws are definately something you don’t want anywhere near you.  When we let them out they started fighting….because there was no food.  Gummy bear (so called because when someone owned him as a pet, they removed all his teeth with a pair of pliers so that he couldn’t bite anyone) kicked off at the dominant female.  The sound of those bears going at it is seriously scary, they are the one animal you can hear no matter where you are in the centre.

So this weekend we are back in Kuching (we get the weekends off) and just kicking back relaxing.  Sorry about the rambling nature of the post, trying to remember everything that has happened in the last week is impossible, not to mention explaining it in a way that doesn’t just use the words ‘fantastic’, ‘unbelievable’ and ‘amazing’ over and over again!  I think I will only be posting once a week until I leave but i’ll try and make it a bit more interesting to read next time!  A regards to the photos, the internet is really really slow over here so I have had to reduce the quality A LOT to upload a couple of them just so you can get an idea.  There are many more and much better to look at than these (especially the bears!) that will be up just as soon as I can.  

I may write something a bit more constuctive before I go back on Sunday, but for now that is it, after 1500 words! Hope everyone is well.

Sampai jumpa lagi xx

 

Singapore > Sarawak

Hey kids,

I went to Singapore zoo on the last day I was there.  Absolutely stunning, makes Twycross look as though it is third world.  Set in 28 hectares of secondary rainforest, everything is open plan, so now cages etc.  The Ethiopian Plains exhibit had an entire eco system recreated.  70 Baboons running around along with a few deer and other smaller creatures, it was about the size of a football pitch, with mini cliffs, waterfalls etc.  The orangutans were free to swing up in the canopys and make their nests at night as they liked.  Maybe about 20 of them swinging around or climbing around on an island.  Ended up sitting and watching them for about an hour, it was great!

Anyway, this is only a short post, I got into Kuching yesterday and am transferring to the orangutan centre tomorrow morning, have met a couple of the other people who seem cool enough, so I’m getting pretty excited now!

The net connection here is very slow, so i’ll get the last of the photos from singapore up soon as I can.  I’m not sure whether or not the centre has internet access, but i’ll try and get something up on here soon as I can.

X

Singapore – The Lion City

Afternoon all,

Been in Singapore about two days now, got the bus down from Melaka on Tuesday morning. All went without a hitch apart from the guy who wasn’t allowed out of Malaysia (he is Singaporean) because he had overstayed on his visa by 1 day. Apart from that everything went smoothly, in fact I was the only person on the bus after that!

You get the general idea about Singapore within minutes of being in the city-state. Walked off the bus, across the road and into the MRT, in that time I saw absolutely no litter, cigarette butts or graffiti and about 20 bins. Everything is so clean! Not surprising seeing as how they have a $500 fine for littering, not sure how the enforce that though as I have yet to see a policeman on the street. I guess the potential size of the fine stops everyone in their tracks. While I think about it, I must point out that Singapore’s public transport must be the best in the world. It’s all integrated, buses, MRT and 19000 metered cabs. Swipe your little electronic top up card thing when you get on/in and again when you get off and the amount is taken off the card; cheap as well, especially considering the buses have TVs in them! Anyway enough trainspotting type behavior….

I didn’t get to the hostel and sort myself out till gone 3 clock, so jumped back on the train and headed into the colonial/quays area. Spotted Raffles across the road and ambled through the arcade of predictably extravagant shops but refrained from going into the Long Bar just yet, probably do that tonight as Chinese New Year as shut almost everything down as I shall explain.

The whole of Singapore seems to be surrounded by a kind of ‘warm glow’, I don’t really know how to explain it. A kind of security blanket seems to cover everything, the result I’m sure of having an extremely parental government, that has fostered a society with the worlds highest rate of home ownership and has health and education systems that are consistently ranked amongst the worlds highest. It is no surprise that the people of Singapore are willing to sacrifice a few personal freedoms (a free media for one) and put up with what is essentially a one-party state (the same party has been in power for over 30 years) in return for what seems to be a high level of disposable income (all the malls!), a lawful, efficient and extremely clean city.

The first night, as I was nearby and hadn’t eaten…..plus was gasping for a beer, I walked down to Boat Quay. Lots of (for me) quite expensive places to eat and a couple of bars/jazz places. Sat outside of Harry’s Bar (made infamous by Nick Leeson, the guy that caused the collapse of Britains oldest investment bank, Bearings) and had an extraordinarily expensive pint before walking back up the quay eying up all the fresh seafood in tanks along the side. I got hooked by the big Sri Lankan crabs, sat down and had easily the best meal so far, a big plate of chili crab.

During the day yesterday I walked to another botanical gardens and the National Orchid Gardens. Was actually pretty good, orchids really are very strange and beautiful creatures. There was also a VIP orchid area, an area of cross bred orchids that had been named after visiting dignitaries. Nelson Mandela’s orchid was definitely the best (if it matters), whilst Maggie Thatchers was kind of spiky, spindly, not very friendly, much like the lady herself I suppose!

Last night was the eve of Chinese New Year, not satisfied by just having one night, Chinese New Year lasts for about 15 days. Piled into Chinatown with thousands and thousands of other people. Grabbed some noodles from a street vendor and walked around the various streets they had set up. The barriers along the side of the road seemed to be set up for some kind of parade but everyone was congregating in one or two areas. After a bit of observation I took a guess that there was no such parade and that it was just access for cars/ambulances and the like, later I was proved right, a bunch of other people and been told about the mythical parade. Found a spot nearish the stage and for an hour and half proceeded to watch increasingly bizarre chinese games, ballet, instrumentalists and the ubiquitous lion dancers. I didn’t understand a word of it. The big moment finally came with the loudest firecrackers I have ever heard and a pretty good fireworks display, not as crazy as I thought it was going to get though.

  

Woke up this morning to find out that the first two days over new year are public holidays, so everything ran or owned by Chinese people is shut and in Singapore that is just about everything! Very quiet and a bit odd to tell the truth, probably not the best time to be here. No matter, I’m going to go down to Little India for dinner, that should all be open.

Tomorrow I’m going to go up to the zoo, apparently considered one of the best in the world, everything is open plan with moats to protect the public, so no cages or enclosures. There is a night safari thing as well so will probably combine the two alongside a trip to a big monastery that isn’t far away.

Think that is long enough for now. There are plenty of pictures of flowers (far too many just wade through them)  and what not up on flickr from the gardens and a fair from from CNY, not great quality though as 1. There was a huge spotlight pointed straight at me and 2. I was quite far away from the action.

Ciao xx

A couple of days in Melacca

Afternoon all,

 I’ve come to the last of my 4 days in Melacca, just about in time to.  Whilst the city is a nice place to spend a few days, after you have done the major bits and bobs and spent a couple of evenings in chinatown and the newer parts of the city there isn’t very much else to do.  ButI suppose when you are spending 8 hours a day wondering around then you are going to cover most places quite quickly.

 Surprisingly there are absolutely loads of small art galleries around.  Many of them quite contemporary and for Malaysia, quite ‘subversive’.  Went into one gallery called ‘the orangutan house’, in fact there are 3 around the city all for the same artist, and it turned out the artist was there www.charlescham.com .  Spent 15 minutes talking to him, interesting bloke, but like many artists, very slightly (or a lot) kookey.  Quite a cool guy to chat to though.

Wandered around the ruins of a couple of churches and forts today, not much in the way of photo opportunities but it gave a good sense of how the city has been under the rule of many different countries, all of whom burnt to the ground many of the buildings that the previous reigime had built.   I also stumbled upon a Nandos yesterday, that’ll be the portugese influence I suppose.  I really want to go!  It does feel as though I am cheating a bit though, however in the name of comparison then I may just go there for dinner tonight.

Heading down to Singapore tomorrow, going to get up and out early as it is a 5 hour journey.  In fact will probably head to the station after this and see if I can grab a ticket rather than just turning up.  I’l be in Singapore until Saturday when I fly over to Kuching in Sarawak.  Looking forward to getting to a new place, be interesting to see what Singapore is like, definately going to get out of the main city as well and wander around the rest of the island.  Chinese New Year is on Thursday so i’m sure there will be plenty of things going on around the city, so i’ll be getting involved there.  Suppose I will have to smarten myself up a bit as well and do the typical tourist run into Raffles for a Singapore Sling, the thought of the cost makes me shiver however!

Got bit by something the other night, at least that is what I assume must have happened.  But it blew up into an orange Malteser sized pus filled ball.  Not very nice!  It eventually burst this morning when I took off the plaster that was protecting it.  Have never seen anything that colour come out of a ‘blister’ before!

I think I stumbled upon a Chinese graduation ceremony the night before last, at least that is what I assume was going on.  All very strange, but I did just about manage to get a photo when they all let off there confetti ‘cannons’. Like quite a few photos it needs a bit of processing to clean it up, but seeing as how I was quite far away from them, I’m quite happy with it. 

Photos of Malacca are now up on flickr.  I’l be back in a couple of days with news from Singapore!

xx

Penang>Malacca

Hello all, I actually have a few things to say this time! Haven’t got my camera with me though so pictures will have to wait until tomorrow probably.

The last couple of days in Penang were alright. Met up with a few people so we wandered round and what not. Penang is a nice enough place, but after a couple of days I was certainly feeling the need for something to do. On the last day I went up to Kek Lok Si, the biggest buddist temple in Malaysia. That was cool, some nice deities, pagodas and general prayer rooms. The bronze statue of Kuan Yin (mercy) they have on the hill at the top (about 35 metres tall) was great, but it is currently surrounded by scaffolding as they are building 5 180 foot bronze pillers around her and will be constructing a gazebo type roof over the top. Surrounding her will be 1000 6ft tall bronze statues. Be amazing to see when it is finished. Being the charity giving type that I am (I give to amnesty don’t you know), I donated 30 ringgits to the fund and got to write my name on the bottom of a tile that will form part of the roof.

Made my way back into Georgetown in the early evening and wandered into a bar, purely because it had draft Guinness. Ended up talking to a supposedly minted english bloke who was so full of bullshit that it was hard to keep up/keep a straight face! Best mates with richard branson apparently, talking a load of crap. Caught him out a few times with things I knew to be true/rubbish which kept me entertained. His mate who turned up later spilled the beans………he was a joiner from scarborough! Ha ha. Met with a 50 year old chinese bloke as well, he used to be an oil trader in New York, so had some interesting conversations with him regarding the current state of the world/markets etc. Turned out he had never married but had a 22 year old english girlfriend in Sheffield, along with a string of others! Think I only bought one drink the whole time I was there (about 5 hours), and left a little worse for wear thanks to those two kind gentlement, all good aside from the 8 hour bus journey I had the next day leaving at 9am………..

Have been in Malacca for 2 days now.  Seems like a very chilled out place, lots of influences.  At one time or another it has been under the control of Portugal, Japan, Britain, China, Malaysia and surprisingly (well not really I guess), the Dutch, there is even a bloody windmill in the town square!  Some beautiful buildings from that time, and plenty of exquisitely crafted Chinese temples, one of them being the oldest in Malaysia.  Did the obligatory museum visit and it was actually quite interesting, lots of old artifacts and different rooms talking about each of the different countries that have influenced Malacca and controlled it.  Some good life size displays of various settings, but also there were some of the worst dioramas I think I have seen, pointless and incredibly dull, but you cannot have everything.  Quite a few old churches and ruins about which I will go to tomorrow I think, and then I am off to Singapore in a few days.

It is the beginning of Chinese new year, and Malacca has a large and very active Chinese community.  Saw a couple of dances with those big puppet monster things last night, didn’t have my camera with me though.  I think there is some form of singer/dancer later on (at least there is a big stage set up for something), so will head along to that I suppose.

Time is running out, so I’ll be off.  Photos will be added ether later on or tomorrow at some point.

xx