The untold stories of Borneo: love, loss, and the lives of orangutans
The stars of a Netflix doc aren’t the only animals you’ll fall for in Borneo’s wildlife paradise.
Ed Grenby - 13 August 2024
I look deep into Hope’s eyes, and she looks back into mine. She smiles and I smile, too. She reaches out for my hand and I reach for hers. But just as we are about to touch, a uniformed gentleman with a truncheon reminds me of the no-contact rule, and Hope is led away, her big brown eyes brimming with sadness, and her knuckles scraping the floor.
It’s a tragic story of a love that couldn’t be, of a couple who shared so much but were divided by that age-old barrier: I was from one species; she, another (orangutan, since you ask).
With drama like that, it’s no wonder that Netflix was interested. And, sure enough, the streamer premieres Secret Lives of Orangutans this week. But Netflix’s cameras aren’t the only ones here: on the viewing platform around me, at Malaysia’s Sepilok Rehabilitation Centre (wildlife.sabah.gov.my/50-sepilok-orangutan-rehabilitation-centre), dozens of lenses are trained on the stars of the show.
That’s largely because orangs are so irrepressibly photogenic. They’ll stare right into your camera, as curious about it as you are about them; they’ll hang upside-down by their toes to make their hair stick up like mad professors; they’ll cuddle each other for comfort. And they’ll make hats out of anything because, despite living in the rainforest, they don’t actually like rain, and will sit there balefully with a leaf or bag on their heads until the shower passes.
And then, free to roam the rainforest, they disappear back into the trees (as tall as tower blocks, their tops cotton-wooled in milky cloud), leaving no trace of themselves except the day-long soppy smile on my face.
Sepilok sits inside a forest reserve in Sabah, in Malaysian Borneo, near the city of Sandakan. My day at the rescue centre goes by in a flash. Then, after a quick spin round Sandakan and one of its temples – a colour riot of firehouse reds, golden dragons, jewel-bright birds and stars – I, too, vanish into the jungle. In fact, I feel like I’m in Apocalypse Now, on a slow boat dragging upriver through mangroves and palm plantations and thick, inexplicably threatening rainforest into what feels like the absolute magnetic centre of nothing, the official Middle of Nowhere. Which makes the sight of Sukau Lodge (sukau.com) especially welcoming: sitting on stilts over river and boggy bank, its warm lights turning furry in the evening mist, it’s a tiny speck of civilisation in the vast, ranging rainforest that covers more than half of Borneo, the world’s third largest island.
In the morning, I’m woken early by a tree frog chorus as loud as an alarm clock, and I watch day rise through the window. The forest canopy means I can’t see the sky lightening, but the greenness outside gets more and more luminous as the minutes pass. The mists dissolve, but my eye still can’t pierce more than a few metres: the layers of jungle – creeper upon vine upon shrub upon tree – form a solid wall, like the Hampton Court maze, but 500km thick, stretching from here to the Celebes Sea.
Heading further upriver by boat, I see the set: orangutans, truly wild this time; proboscis monkeys, unfailingly funny with their pot bellies and absurd noses; tiny yellow-bellied puddle frogs; bright scarlet Diard’s trogon birds; flying fish; and, just when I was convinced this Lost World landscape must yield a dinosaur, something just as primordial-looking – a crocodile, one malevolent yellow eye raised above the waterline, its skin so tough and warty it looked as if it personally had been around with the T-rexes.
I’m afraid I also yelped excitedly at my fair share of “logodiles”, the croc’s floating wooden cousin (crocodilus touristicus ignoramus falsus), but in a jungle that’s home to leopards, rhinos and a walking contradiction-in-terms called a pygmy elephant, anything seems possible. I didn’t see any of the latter, sadly, but I did have a back-up plan – next stop on my itinerary (put together by Audley Travel; audleytravel.com) was the elephant sanctuary at Kuala Gandah (https:// tinyurl.com/4prjwn37), which is a couple of hours outside the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur.
These giant creatures have been rescued from around Malaysia (when they’re not being shot at, elephants have a tendency to sit on roads because the tarmac is nice and warm). After a bit of training, they’re re-released into one of the country’s national parks – an operation that apparently involves not just a very big truck, but also a man whose job it is to flap the beast’s ears to aid circulation, and another chap who’s in charge of touching its trunk every few seconds to “make the elephant more cooperative and relaxed”.
Meanwhile, at the sanctuary, visitors can watch and even help with feeding the endlessly charismatic residents. Most beautiful of a beautiful bunch was Suria – sweet 16 years old and a svelte 2,000kg – and as I gazed, I felt a familiar little skip in my heartbeat. I’d told myself, after what happened with Hope, that I would never love again. And yet…
It’s a tragic story of a love that couldn’t be, of a couple who shared so much but were divided by that age-old barrier: I was from one species; she, another (orangutan, since you ask).
With drama like that, it’s no wonder that Netflix was interested. And, sure enough, the streamer premieres Secret Lives of Orangutans this week. But Netflix’s cameras aren’t the only ones here: on the viewing platform around me, at Malaysia’s Sepilok Rehabilitation Centre (wildlife.sabah.gov.my/50-sepilok-orangutan-rehabilitation-centre), dozens of lenses are trained on the stars of the show.
That’s largely because orangs are so irrepressibly photogenic. They’ll stare right into your camera, as curious about it as you are about them; they’ll hang upside-down by their toes to make their hair stick up like mad professors; they’ll cuddle each other for comfort. And they’ll make hats out of anything because, despite living in the rainforest, they don’t actually like rain, and will sit there balefully with a leaf or bag on their heads until the shower passes.
And then, free to roam the rainforest, they disappear back into the trees (as tall as tower blocks, their tops cotton-wooled in milky cloud), leaving no trace of themselves except the day-long soppy smile on my face.
Sepilok sits inside a forest reserve in Sabah, in Malaysian Borneo, near the city of Sandakan. My day at the rescue centre goes by in a flash. Then, after a quick spin round Sandakan and one of its temples – a colour riot of firehouse reds, golden dragons, jewel-bright birds and stars – I, too, vanish into the jungle. In fact, I feel like I’m in Apocalypse Now, on a slow boat dragging upriver through mangroves and palm plantations and thick, inexplicably threatening rainforest into what feels like the absolute magnetic centre of nothing, the official Middle of Nowhere. Which makes the sight of Sukau Lodge (sukau.com) especially welcoming: sitting on stilts over river and boggy bank, its warm lights turning furry in the evening mist, it’s a tiny speck of civilisation in the vast, ranging rainforest that covers more than half of Borneo, the world’s third largest island.
In the morning, I’m woken early by a tree frog chorus as loud as an alarm clock, and I watch day rise through the window. The forest canopy means I can’t see the sky lightening, but the greenness outside gets more and more luminous as the minutes pass. The mists dissolve, but my eye still can’t pierce more than a few metres: the layers of jungle – creeper upon vine upon shrub upon tree – form a solid wall, like the Hampton Court maze, but 500km thick, stretching from here to the Celebes Sea.
Heading further upriver by boat, I see the set: orangutans, truly wild this time; proboscis monkeys, unfailingly funny with their pot bellies and absurd noses; tiny yellow-bellied puddle frogs; bright scarlet Diard’s trogon birds; flying fish; and, just when I was convinced this Lost World landscape must yield a dinosaur, something just as primordial-looking – a crocodile, one malevolent yellow eye raised above the waterline, its skin so tough and warty it looked as if it personally had been around with the T-rexes.
I’m afraid I also yelped excitedly at my fair share of “logodiles”, the croc’s floating wooden cousin (crocodilus touristicus ignoramus falsus), but in a jungle that’s home to leopards, rhinos and a walking contradiction-in-terms called a pygmy elephant, anything seems possible. I didn’t see any of the latter, sadly, but I did have a back-up plan – next stop on my itinerary (put together by Audley Travel; audleytravel.com) was the elephant sanctuary at Kuala Gandah (https:// tinyurl.com/4prjwn37), which is a couple of hours outside the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur.
These giant creatures have been rescued from around Malaysia (when they’re not being shot at, elephants have a tendency to sit on roads because the tarmac is nice and warm). After a bit of training, they’re re-released into one of the country’s national parks – an operation that apparently involves not just a very big truck, but also a man whose job it is to flap the beast’s ears to aid circulation, and another chap who’s in charge of touching its trunk every few seconds to “make the elephant more cooperative and relaxed”.
Meanwhile, at the sanctuary, visitors can watch and even help with feeding the endlessly charismatic residents. Most beautiful of a beautiful bunch was Suria – sweet 16 years old and a svelte 2,000kg – and as I gazed, I felt a familiar little skip in my heartbeat. I’d told myself, after what happened with Hope, that I would never love again. And yet…