When approached from the river, one’s initial impression of Kumai township is that it is remarkably endowed with high rise apartment buildings. Rather a unique feature in Indonesia. As the weary traveller draws closer, these 4-5 storey buildings reveal some unusual features. They are all unpainted grey concrete, they have no windows or balconies, no downpipes, gutters, or lighting, and they all had defects in the walls into which fly multitudes of birds. At street level the buildings have faux facades to make them appear to be habitable but in fact they are not inhabited by people. They are “bird hotels” and are built specifically for swallows to nest in. Swallows nest could be seen in quantity under the eaves of some of the buildings and the evening air was alive with the creatures. Why? The answer is in the nest itself. The nest is somehow distilled, extracted or cooked to make the Chinese delicacy of “birds nest soup”. Apparently it is gelatinous in consistency, and our local guide informed us it is also an acquired taste. The nests may also be used to manufacture cosmetics or possibly so-called natural remedies. Yuk. Of course there was literally some fallout from this trade. The local pasar (market) had to have lots of tarpaulin awnings to reduce the contamination of produce. Double yuk. In the background lies the memory of the nearby West Kalimantan genocidal slaughter of times gone by. The indigenous Dayak population eventually took umbrage at the transmigration policy of Java that resulted in Madurese communities taking lands and so on. This dissatisfaction took the form, not of political protest but of ultra violence. The Dayaks sent out death squads to hunt down Madurese. The victims, men, women and children, were tortured, murdered and decapitated. The heads were used for show-and-tell in prominent places. In addition the hearts and livers were cut out and eaten. Bags of bloody organs were carried on belts as trophies. The corpse remnants were BBQ’ed on the roadside and cutlets sold to passers-by. All this was a long time ago, right? No. Try 1999. This did not occur here in Kumai but just a bit west. I am told that a reconciliation has been reached but the entire province is alcohol-free to stop unrest. Kumai is a dry town. The reader would be right to ask why one would come to such a place. To see our relatives naturally. Kalimantan is home to the orang-utans (lit. “people of the forest”) and it was for the jungle experience of these magnificent primates that we had voyaged here. Borneo is not only home to the orang-utans but also home to the one of the world’s biggest area of palm oil cultivation. The plantations have destroyed much of the habitat of the primates and their preservation became the life work of Professor Birute Galdikas whose picture graced National Geographic magazine back in my youth. She was inspired by Louis Leakey and is from the same mould as Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall. Her child enjoying a bath with a baby orang-utan also got a cover shot in a subsequent issue. Burn-offs of native forest have helped decimate the animal population with 20,000 dying in one fire in 1997. Many of the orang-utans that survived had no food and went into the palm oil plantations in search of nourishment, only to be shot by guards to prevent damage to the precious trees. Our guide for the odyssey was the excellent fellow Zulham (phone +62 85652420580 or email HYPERLINK "mailto:zulhamtriansyah@gmail.com"zulhamtriansyah@gmail.com). The area of the orang-utan population is more than 20 miles up a tributary of the Kumai river called the Sekonyer river and is only accessible by local boats. These have the onomatopoeic name of glotok, given as a result of the noise their diesel engines make. Trips can vary between 1 and 3 days. For land travellers there is a nearby large airport to allow access. Our craft was called the Spirit Aling and we shared it with the crew of Gypsy Rover for our jungle adventure. We were picked up from our yacht at 6am and so began our trip to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.