Had a great time in Kumai with Phil, Ae, Nora and Jean.

Took a cruise up the Sekonyer River visiting the Pondok Tanggui and the Tanjung Harapan orang utan camps. Visited these camps at ‘feeding time’ where they are given enough food to ensure survival while encouraging them to forage for their own food as well. They are in the Tanjung Puting National Park and we toured up the river in a local wooden boat called a ‘kelotok’ which we travelled, ate and slept on.

Our tour was organised by Nina from www.sistertour.com. I can highly recommend them to anybody who might be in the area and want to see some orang utans! They also organised for us to plant a tree and so help with the revegetation of the national park; the tree may not help much but hopefully the donations and awareness will! I have kept the gps coordinates and will come back one day and check ...

Most of these orang utans have been rescued as babies. In the wild they spend 8 years with their mothers learning how to survive and without this knowledge they die. So the camps are required to teach them how to survive in the wild. Almost all of them eventually leave the camps and look after themselves but in the meantime we get a great opportunity to view them at feed time!

We also went to Camp Leakey, established in 1971 by Dr. Biruté Galdikas, which was where the ‘save the orang utan’ movement started. Here we saw orang utans in the wild as we wandered around the National Park in the area. Quite amazing as they passed within touching distance of us just going about their thing.

There are some depressing issues here of course – the mining, logging and burning continue although the Indonesian Government have acted to try and limit the illegal activities. The river is a dirty, muddy brown from the mining upstream and contains high levels of mercury yet the local children still swim and bath in it. Where the tributaries (with no mining) join the main river you can see the original ‘black’ colour of the water, not dissimilar to the tannin stained waters of the Tasmanian west coast. The other problem is the lack of alcohol – even beer has to be purchased on the black market with associated bribes and such forcing the price up a long way.

I have posted some photos in the ‘Kumai’ folder. Not many but gives some idea of what we did. Fantastic and informative time.