Yellow pants are rarely a good idea. In fact, I cannot recall a single occasion in my life at which I’ve paused and thought to myself, “Dear me, if only I had some yellow pants.”
I suppose they’d come in handy were I to be possessed of a sudden urge to pee myself or if I wanted to sit on a park bench during Atlanta’s pollen season. But on all other occasions, I’ll pass on yellow pants.
Residents of Sarawak, Malaysia’s easternmost state, disagree. Yellow is the royal color, and locals apparently believe the very best way to show national pride is to cloak your bum in it. I’ve seen more yellow pants in my time here then I would have thought possible.
I’m in Kuching, capital of Sarawak, on the island of Borneo. I hopped a two-hour flight here from Kuala Lumpur for meetings with clients who are at this moment doubtless reconsidering their interest in doing business with me after reading the sartorial critique in the blog’s intro. But I hope they’ll bear with me and read a bit more because the yellow pants were the only thing about Sarawak I didn’t find utterly charming.
We began our time here by fattening up on scrumptious spicy laksa and a veggie dish made mostly of local ferns. Laksa is a traditional Malaysian noodle soup with prawns and other goodies, and Sarawak’s best comes from Sarakraf. The owner, Gerald Goh, plied us with heaping bowls, as well as several other dishes including sautéed fern (must tastier than you’d think) and we relished the splendid meal.
Overly full and burping up spicy laksa fumes, we headed off to the Semenggoh Wildlife Centre to watch the orangutan feeding. Our wonderful guide from the Inter-Continental Travel Centre promised us a thrilling adventure observing orangutans in the wild. We couldn’t wait!
Our guide was wrong.
Reaching Semenggoh from Kuching requires a 45-minute drive over bumpy roads. The thrilling adventure once you arrive involves 30-40 minutes of standing around, idly kicking the occasional pebble, waiting for the apes to appear. Once they do everyone gets excited, whispering “ooohs” and “ahhhs” as each orangutan swoops in and grabs a handful of bananas.
This excitement lasts a few minutes before it dawns on you that they’re not going to do much else. Ok, it’s true that you don’t run into orangutans every day, but eventually it occurs to you that you’ve invested an hour and half of your life just to watch a hairy biped slurp down bananas and very occasionally fart in your direction. This is the highlight of your day, and you still have a 45-minute drive back.
You begin to wonder if you could antagonize them into some sort of a fight, maybe get them to chase the park ranger. Alas, the apes are intent only on their bananas, so you stroll back to your car, clutching your camera and the hundred or so pictures you’re just breathlessly taken of orangutans feeding themselves.
Our guide, sensing our mild disappointment, and perhaps fearing the loss of the next day’s booking, immediately promised that tomorrow’s agenda, hiking the Bako Rainforest, would be “much more perfect.”
And it was.
I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the orangutans were fascinating. But it’s only a semi-natural environment, with ropes helpfully hung from dozens of trees near the feeding platform, and a group of semi-tame apes accustomed to swinging in at the appointed time for their goodies. The entire experience would be so much better if it were truly a natural environment, or if the keepers went full-on touristy and let us pet them. (I wonder if maybe the orangs feel the same. I wonder if they look at us think, “Don’t they do anything but eat? I wish we could pet them!.”)
So on to Bako, the 27-square-mile national park on the Muara Tebas peninsula at the mouth of the Bako and Kuching Rivers. The park is home to abundant wildlife, including several species of monkeys only found in this part of the world, stunning sandstone cliffs, secluded beaches and seemingly half the world’s mosquitoes, many of who paid me a visit.
The park can be reached only by a 20-minute boat ride up the Bako River from the small fishing village of Kampung Bako. The water throughout the 290-kilometer Bako River is fast-moving, muddy brown and occasionally populated by hungry crocodiles. Our guide told a story of one who had snatched a local woman the previous week, commenting that it was a “friendly croc” since it left much of her body intact to be buried.
Once in the park, we set off on the Telok Paku Trail, one of the smaller trails and well-suited to out-of-shape tourists who just really wanted to see some monkeys anyway. Our guide pronounced our monkey quest blessed when, within minutes of entering the rainforest, we happened upon a troop of proboscis monkeys leaping through the canopy above.
The proboscis is a monkey unlike any I’ve ever seen. Native to Borneo and Indonesia, they’re distinguished by their comically elongated noses and the odd honking sounds they make to communicate. I was fascinated, and managed to snap what became my favorite picture of the day when one paused, apparently to ponder life, on a nearby branch.
Our guide was busily explaining how lucky we were to have seen the proboscis, assuring us that many visitors explored for days without happening upon a group of monkeys, when we stumbled into another one. This time it was a gathering of small silver leaf monkeys, and we were able to get quite near as they fed on the leaves of low-hanging branches. Sighing deeply, our guide gave up any hope of downplaying our expectations for the day. At this point we naturally assumed we’d find more monkeys around every corner.
We spent many hours trekking through Bako and were rewarded with visits from more monkeys, including long-tailed macaques, flying squirrels, a couple of green pit vipers, a family of Bornean bearded pigs (a species of wild boar), sun lizards and jillions of birds of species, plumage and sizes too numerous to count. Every inch of this gorgeous jungle teems with life, pulsing with a cacophony of sounds both energizing and serene .
It’s a magical place, almost magnificent enough to distract me from my fatigue at hike’s end. (Advancing years have graced me with a jiggly middle, bad knees and the stamina of an aged goat. After a two-hour hike I was drenched in sweat, gasping extravagantly and terribly uninterested in returning the way we came, which was our guide’s plan.)
So we hailed a boat, and, boy, were we glad we did!
After trudging through goop above our ankles on the mud flats we clambered into our little water-taxi and set off to enjoy a splendid ride back along some of the most magnificent coastline I’ve ever seen. Millions of years of relentless waves and tides have sculpted stunningly dramatic formations in the sandstone cliffs lining the shores. And since I’d stopped panting I could lay back, relaxed, and take in the incomparable view.
At length we pulled into Teluk Assam Beach, yet another place I’d never heard of but am so grateful now to have seen. It was post-card perfect, yet another hidden treasure in a part of the world I never knew existed.
I like to consider myself rather worldly and informed, so was appropriately humbled by my ignorance. Sometimes the best adventures are the ones you never see coming.