Chapter 28: Borneo's high mountains and cute orangutans

Hello people, after long delay, the latest installment of the amazing spriritual and physical adventures of Max and Peter...

Borneo's orangutans came in from the east, cartwheeling upside-down along a rope strung between the trees: hand, hand, foot, foot, hand, pause in some weird contorted yogic position, hanging on the rope, to make sure the green pail of milk and the pile of bananas is still on the
feeding platform and check what pals are also coming down the line, then again it starts: hand, hand, foot, foot, hand, etc . There were perhaps 7-8 of young orangutans, with 96.4% of our DNA, and totally human eyes. These orangutans roam in the jungle, but they come in to feed every day at 10am and 3pm, a steady diet of bananas and milk. The diet is kept deliberately monotonous, in order to encourage them to roam and forage more widely. The young orangutans are part of a rehabilitation program at Sandakan wildlife sanctuary, after being rescued as orphans in the wild, or as pets.

The rehabilitation process takes years; they need to be taught everything. (At another center
I visited, for even less advanced students, Ms Pippy, an utterly winsome youngster about 3 years old, with a halo of flame red hair around her head, doesn't know how to climb. She looks shocked and hurt when her beloved keeper puts her up on a post near the feeding platform and she reaches out for him, to be taken back into his arms.) A mother orangutan typically keeps her youngster with her some 5-6 years; that's how long it takes to teach them how to survive in the jungle. Since their life span is only some 50 years, and they don't reach sexual maturity until their late teens, a mother can have 3-4 children maximum in her life. And since orangutans in the wild are solitary, now that wild populations have reached a certain critical low of only some 13,000 in the whole world, it's very hard for suitable breeding individuals to find each other,
so populations are crashing even further.

But Malaysian Borneo seems very organized, and trying hard. We felt encouraged, rather than discouraged. For example, despite good roads, the jungle seems largely intact, whereas in any other country it would have been logged down to just mud and weeds. On a subsequent boat tour of the mangroves, we had to report to the police in the mangroves, and we saw loads of wildlife including the bizarre proboscis monkey. It has a nose like a semi-erect penis, and a
huge pot-belly, to contain its two stomach chambers, one with specialized bacteria to handle the toxins in the mangrove leaves. Nifty!

Climbing Mount Kinabalu. After some 5 hours of steep climbing I am utterly whacked. My lungs are burning, and my 40-year old legs are in utter revolt. Climbing through jungle first, we
then emerged into a strange zone of twisted ancient grey trees, gnarly bushes, giant carniverous pitcher plants, and odd sudden mists. It was like a forest that one would expect to see in Lord of the Rings. Just minutes before the heavens opened, I made it to the lodge called Guntung Lagadan, where I will spend the night with my 3 Japanese bunk mates, before rising at 2am to climb the rest of the distance to the summit, to watch dawn over Borneo. I am hiking Mt Kinabalu, at 4095 m the highest peak in SE Asia, and probably the highest mountain I have ever climbed. It is cold up here, at Gunting Labadan, some 3km above sea level, especially compared to the hypertropic jungle of the coast, and I am woefully unprepared with
a thin sweat soaked t-shirt, and a Gap windbreaker. Even my pen has altitude sickness, exploding blue ink over my hands, book, and bed, when I opened it. The Japanese hikers have everything: toques, leg warmers, crampons, acres of Gortex, bells on their very expensive hiking boots (to follow each other in the dark presumably) and more.

Hiking Mt Kinabalu is 8.8 km distance from the starting point to the granite massif of Low's peak, and some 3km of elevation, so we are going up STEEEEEP! I rise at 2:30 - yes that's AM - have a quick cup of sweet coffee and head off. It's quiet, just the quiet murmuring of the Malay guides, the trickling of running water everywhere on the rocky slopes, and the bells of the Japanese. With all 150 or so the hikers threading their way up the granite rock face, in the dark with flashlights, it is in fact a strange spiritual pilgrimage of sorts. I'm so cold and sweaty that my arms are cramping as I haul myself up the ropes, but dawn at Low's peak is wonderful. One
shade of blue giving way to another, as the mountains roll off into the distance, with mist filling the valleys in between. At the horizon, by the sea, lemon curd clouds erupt with fire. I am exhilarated to be here at the top, despite the chill. I can see for miles and miles over Borneo and it's very, very, very cool to be here.