The Long Read: In an excerpt from her travel memoir Shape of a Boy, My Family & Other Adventures, Kate Wickers shares an edited version of her chapter on Borneo and what the Malay island taught her family about perseverance.
“You’re going where?” asked my dad.
“Borneo,” I repeated, guessing that he was hoping that he’d heard incorrectly, and I’d said Bournemouth, Bognor, or Barry.
He glanced at his precious grandsons. Josh aged seven, Ben five, and Freddie a whisper off two.
“Is that a good idea?” he wanted to know, images of head-hunting tribes no doubt marauding through his imagination.
“Can’t think of a better one,” I told him.
I didn’t admit it, but I thought that my dad might have a point. Was this such a good idea? This was the first long haul adventure trip we’d taken with three children, and in choosing Borneo we were certainly throwing ourselves in at the deep end. Five was such an awkward number in so many ways. Now we had three curious, and, at times, overly-confidant boys to keep track of in a destination that was unfamiliar and full of potential hazards. For the first time in my life, I didn’t sleep the night before our departure, sick with sudden worry.
The day after Freddie turned two, we flew to Kuala Lumpur, the gateway to our adventures in Sabah, Borneo. Our plan was to let the kids acclimatise and shake off their jet lag. We’d been there just two hours when, while paddling in the shallow end of the roof top swimming pool, Ben suddenly screamed and clutched at his foot. He’d stepped on a diamond stud earring, and it had pierced deep into the sole of his soft skin. Of all the snake-biting; kid-stealing; boat-sinking disasters I’d envisioned over the last few days, this wasn’t one of them and strangely, after pulling out the earring (a trophy, which Ben was reluctant to give up), I relaxed. We were here now, and this was most likely the worst accident we’d encounter. I was determined not to ruin the experience by anticipating danger at every turn.
Kota Kinabalu is the capital of Sabah, Borneo’s most northerly state, and it was shrouded in low brooding cloud the colour of granite when we arrived after a two-and-a-half-hour flight from Kuala Lumpur. Humidity was high and our driver warned that a storm was brewing, and that we should hurry to our transport. Ben, still milking his recent impalement, limped (on the wrong foot) from the surprisingly modern terminal to the old banger of a minibus I’d pre-booked to pick us up. Our destination, Shangri-La’s Rasa Ria Resort, lay between rainforest and sea, an hour’s journey north from here and I watched as the wooden crucifix, that hung from the rear-view mirror, swung at every bump and twist in the pot-holed roads. As our driver had predicted, the heavens opened just ten minutes into the journey.
“I can’t shut the window,” I shouted back to Neil who was at the back of the bus. In fact, none of the windows on the right side of the bus would budge so we all scooted to the left and watched as the raindrops bounced on the seats next to us.
“Nice! Refreshing!” our driver bellowed above the clatter of rain on the roof. No doubt he was hoping the fact we were getting soaked to the skin wouldn’t ruin his chance of a tip.
There were two reasons to bed down at the beach resort I’d chosen for Christmas – its stunning location and its private nature reserve, home to eight young Bornean orangutan orphans. This was to be our first orangutan encounter and the boys were both excited and a little nervous.
“Will the monkey cuddle me?” Josh wanted to know.
“Orangutan,” I corrected him.
“Yes, but will the monkey come into our bedroom?”
“Orangutan. And no, they won’t cuddle you or come into your bedroom.”
Josh looked relieved. By now the sun was out and we headed for the reserve – more a half-way house for waifs and strays, at liberty to roam during the day and play amongst the vines and vegetation, but by night housed and protected by rangers. Their next residence would be the famous Sepilok Rehabilitation Centre, before ultimately, they would be reintroduced to the wild. I held Freddie monkey-style on my hip to give him a better view, and soon the young orangutans spotted him, and hurried over to check out his mop of scruffy fair hair and cheeky grin. He entertained them with a series of impressive and well-rehearsed “oo ooos”.
“Do it again, Freddie,” instructed Josh, impressed by his baby brother’s linguistic skills. Ever the performer, Freddie obliged and then stuck out his tongue at a five-year old orangutan, named Cute, who stuck his right back out at Freddie. We all squealed with delight.
“Again, Freddie,” begged Ben, jumping up and down. If you were ever looking for a wonderful example of the gift children have in simple communication, then this was it. What fun these two were having without the need of a language, and what a pity we seem to lose this ability as adults. Freddie and Cute had bonded that was clear, and sharing 97 percent of the same DNA why wouldn’t they? They stuck their tongues out at each other a few more times before a piece of sugarcane caught Cute’s eye and he ambled off.
Once Christmas was over, we travelled on to Sandakan on the East coast. The attraction here was the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre, founded in 1964 and home to around eighty orangutans, which sprawls over 43 sq. km of protected land in the Kabili Sepilok Forest Reserve. Our home for the next few days was a basic wooden chalet at the Sepilok Nature Resort, built amongst a rainforest foliage of palms, pitcher plants, giant ferns, and near enough to the rehabilitation centre that we could hear the orang-utan’s soft hooting night-time calls. With their new Christmas binoculars glued to their eyes, Josh and Ben went off to explore gardens alive with croaking toads, over-excited grasshoppers, and rowdy indigo flycatchers, but soon came running back when a frog leapt on to Josh’s shoulder. We were excited to find out if Freddie, the orangutan whisperer, still had the gift and spent the next two days visiting the rehabilitation centre to watch him at work. He chatted away enthusiastically to any orangutan that would listen and of the five of us, it was always Freddie who caught their eye, but he never did find another quite as obligingly responsive as Cute. These were happy hours spent observing the energetic apes as they somersaulted and swung along the jungle vines, and we agonised over which orangutan to adopt, finally agreeing on a young adult male called Sen. 25 pounds would keep him in food and shelter for another year and we were promised a letter every three months from our surrogate primate. “He’s cleverer than you, Freddie,” I heard Ben whisper. “You can’t even write.”
In the evening we left the boys squashed into one bed after they’d clapped eyes on a spider with a body the size of a jammy dodger biscuit (Ben’s rather unique analogy, not mine), while Neil and I sat on the veranda to make plans for the remainder of our stay. To have come all this way and not to have seen an orangutan in the wild seemed ridiculous. And yet, we knew the chances were heartbreakingly slim. Illegal logging; mothers with babies caught for the meat and pet trade; and the slash and burn technique often used to make way for palm oil plantations had rendered the Bornean orangutans as endangered. Perhaps it was already too late. Plus, we’d been told that travelling on from here with young children wasn’t advisable. I’d heard that orangutans were sometimes spotted near to the Kinabatangan River, Malaysia’s longest and rich with wildlife, which was a mere 25 kilometres away, but the road to get there would be rough. Fleetingly, I thought of my dad’s concern over this trip, and then voiced what I knew Neil was already thinking. “Let’s give it a go,” I said. We arranged a car and driver to pick us up a day later.
Our Malay driver and guide, Adam, raised his eyes at the sight of our young sons, then quickly rearranged his face to a broad smile, high fiving each of them as they climbed into his 4WD truck.
“Woo hoo!” whooped the boys. I watched them happily bouncing about; their bums rarely making contact with the seats as we bumped over potholes and through ditches along the dirt-track roads. Oh, the joy of being able to stay that relaxed while being flung about like rag dolls. When we reached the jetty, we transferred to a small motorboat and Adam told us to keep a keen eye out for shy pygmy elephants and also for the proboscis monkey, which with their enormous great hooters, protruding potbellies, and permanently erect penises, was soon providing fodder for school-boy humour.
“And orangutans?” I asked.
“Unlikely,” came his reply.
“But perhaps, if we’re lucky?”
Adam shrugged, reluctant to make promises, pointing to a brilliant blue stork-billed kingfisher that was flitting along on the bank. Pig-tailed macaques gave aerial displays, leaping from tree to tree; and pied hornbills bellowed for attention above the constant shout of, “look at his willy” from the boys, each time a proboscis monkey came into view.
At every rustle in the trees my heart missed a beat as I scoured the treetops for a flash of that distinctive ginger coat, but the orang-utan was either elusive or never actually there. Either way, I resigned myself to the probability that we’d never see one in the wild.
“Do you want to go here on the way back?” Adam asked us, pointing to a crease in a well-worn map when we were back at the jetty.
I gestured at the boys. “Perhaps it’s too much for them.”
He was suggesting a stop at the Gomantong Forest Reserve, famous for its caves where swift’s nests are harvested for the Chinese delicacy of bird’s nest soup.
“Amazing at sunset when the swifts return,” he promised me.
Again, Neil and I reminded each other that we wouldn’t be passing by here any time soon and so we agreed. The caves weren’t much to look at from the outside, and even before we’d set foot in, we could smell the toxic stench from the accumulated excrement of swifts and bats, known as guano. We ventured to the mouth of the cavern, and I looked at Neil. “What do you think?” I asked.
“I don’t like it,” Ben said. “Please can we go back?”
“It stinks,” sated Josh, who wasn’t known for mincing words.
Neil shrugged and picked up Freddie to carry. “We’re here now,” he said, taking his first step in on to slippery guano splattered floor. “Come on, boys! We can do this!”
Adam assured us that we would be through the cave and out the other side in just ten minutes. Fetid and gloomy, but unfortunately not quite dark enough so we couldn’t see cockroaches and giant millipedes scurrying around, I had to stop myself shrieking.
“You’re doing great,” I told them, just as Ben slipped and put his hand down to save himself.
“My hand’s got poo on it,” he wailed. “I want to go back to the car.”
“Oh God, this was a terrible idea,” I conceded, trying to wipe the odious substance off Ben’s hand with a tissue. Neil handed Freddie to me and scooped Ben up. Josh, as the oldest, had to fend for himself and we soldiered on.
“Peg your noses,” I barked, breathing through my mouth.
After ten minutes of picking our way through the cave, a large shaft of light came into view and we hurried towards it. “Sorry, boys. Never again. We’ll take you to the Isle of Wight next year,” I promised.
Adam had gone ahead to clear the path by kicking as much debris out of our way as he could. “Nearly there,” he called back to us. Up ahead I could see daylight (our exit from, what I was secretly calling in my head, ‘this God forsaken shithole’). As we stumbled out of the cave, into a clearing in the forest, I couldn’t have felt guiltier at having put my young sons through such an unpleasant ordeal.
“Oh, boys. I’m so sorry. That was awful,” I said. “We made a bad decision, but I’ll make it up to you…”
Adam gripped my arm. “There, look there,” he whispered.
I gazed up to where he pointed, a sudden movement catching my eye. My breath caught and my heart seemed to thud to a stop as I realised what was before us. “Look boys. Oh, my goodness, just look.”
Up in the bamboo, right before us, was the world’s largest tree climbing mammal - a female orang-utan reaching up for newest, sweetest bamboo leaves with her long grasping fingers. No one said a word. Even Freddie was silent, lost for his usual “oo ooos”. Her shaggy reddish fur was aflame in the setting sun. Intent on feeding, she wasn’t disturbed by our arrival and so we crept a little closer. Close enough to smell her musky odour, and to see how her feet gripped the bamboo stem, while she stretched her seemingly elastic arms up through the canopy. Then with a sudden movement she disappeared into the forest, leaving the trees quaking in her wake.
“Did you know she would be here?” Josh asked me.
I shook my head. “No idea. Aren’t we lucky?”
Adam agreed. “I’ve only ever seen one other so near to the cave.”
I was close to tears as what we’d witnessed sank in. “We almost gave up,” I reminded the boys. “See how it was worth it? We would have missed seeing her if we’d turned back.”
Ben sniffed suspiciously at his hands, and yet even he nodded.
To have seen the original wild man of Borneo not on a feeding platform but in a tree, feral and free, remains one of the rarest privileges I’ve had while travelling, made even more special by experiencing it with our young sons.
Kate Wickers’ travel memoir Shape of a Boy, My Family & Other Adventures (Aurum, £9.99) is available at Amazon and all good books shops in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, & New Zealand. Order a copy here.
Follow Kate @wickers.kate