Visiting the cousins

We had the chance to spend a couple days up a small river in the jungle of Central Kalimantan (part of the Indonesian section of the island of Borneo).  It was an amazing chance to see some of our primate cousins.  Traveling by boat, enjoying the evening light, we made our way up the river towards the lodge where we stayed three nights.

On the way, our guide spotted some long-tailed macaque monkeys.  Our last night, we saw macaques close up, grooming each other on the roof of the lodge; we had been warned to keep our room doors securely latched!

Every day that we traveled along the river, we saw groups of proboscis monkeys.

Like the macaques, they were amazingly nimble, flinging themselves through the trees.

And of course the mature males have the most amazing noses...

We saw other wonderful creatures as well.  We were repeatedly warned that jumping into the river would make you dinner for a crocodile, and having seen two big ones we could easily believe the warnings.

On a night walk, we had a fleeting glimpse of a mouse deer (maybe eight inches high), this tarantula,

and a bird peeking out from its night time bed in a tree.

Perhaps the biggest show was the orangutans (certainly they are the biggest tourist draw in the area).  We saw a few from the boat on the river, but our closest views were at orangutan feeding stations set up by the park, particularly to sustain orangutans which had been liberated from years of captivity but were not fully capable of surviving in the wild.

Our boat pulled up alongside the other tourist boats, we made our way through the maze of decks and galleys to the dock, and from there walked inland to the feeding area.

While the enormous animals spent some time on the platform, they felt safer up in the trees, where they were amazingly adept.

Mother orangutans care for their young for seven years or more, and carry them with no apparent effort as they clamber from tree to tree in the jungle canopy.  Often, rather than swinging between trees, they get high on small trees and get the treetop to sway over to the next tree.

Many of the orangutans that seemed more intimidated (by the humans 10 yards away, or by larger orangutans) would grab mouthfuls, handfuls and feetfuls of food from the platform, and despite the load scamper easily up into the trees.

This young orangutan was practicing its independent climbing, and then screamed for its mother when it got too scared to go further.  (She came over immediately and let the young one climb back onto her.)

I was most astounded by the grace and agility of the enormous mature males.  Weighing around three hundred pounds, they stared at any tourist or orangutan that was considering getting too close, or disrespecting the male's territorial rules.  The males were truly frightening.

Of course, with great power comes great responsibility.

Part of what felt captivating, watching the macaques, proboscis monkeys and orangutans, was that their physical similarity to humans left me feeling viscerally their swinging and leaping travel through the treetops, almost as if I was moving through the canopy behind them.  Almost.  There's a lot of things I can do that these cousins can't do.  But what they do, they do very, very well.

You can see video (with family commentary in the background) of our visit to the Kalimantan jungle here:
https://youtu.be/TyOHMbbGDyw