Baby Orangutans

Field Trip

 

Monday:

We were supposed to leave early the next morning to drive about 6 hours away to look at some forest that Dr. Galdikas wants to buy in order to preserve it. However, Dr. Galdikas has so much on her plate that she often runs very late to things. We waited around all day until 7:30 pm. A wasted day, but we seemed to fill the time mostly by playing Jenga. We’ve gotten very good at the game! We piled into two cars and started driving down some of the worst roads I’ve ever experienced. For the first time in my life I felt extremely carsick. I then got to sit in the back of the truck under the beautiful starry night sky. It was a rainy, wet, bumpy ride. We arrived at the tiny village in the mountains at around 1:30am. We rocked up to someone’s house, still not sure where exactly we slept. It was a large wooden house with two large empty rooms. We picked a corner and put our stuff down. We all fell asleep almost instantly, right there on the floor, with nothing but the clothes on my back and my backpack for a pillow.

Tuesday:

We awoke the next morning to see our surroundings for the first time (since we arrived at night). We were in one of the most picturesque little villages. We took a short walk through the village to a river that led right down from the mountains in the distance. The water was clear and cool and very refreshing. After breakfast we started out hike into the forest to check out the land that Dr. Galdikas wants to buy. At the edge of the forest was our first obstacle; we had to cross a swift-flowing river. Our guides got a little boat and two by two they guided us across.

The hike was semi-strenuous for a few kilometers but we were all doing this hike in flip-flops, so I felt pretty silly. We hiked through virtually untouched natural forest .

 One interesting thing in the forest were the rubber trees. The locals would set up taps on these trees to collect the slowly dripping rubber. One guy told us that he taps and then collects rubber from 400 trees daily, which nets about 250 liters per day of liquid rubber that he then sells. 

 The last stretch of the hike was almost straight up hill, which took us to the most beautiful view of the Heart of Borneo. There were just miles of small mountains and preserved forests. Definitely worth the hike!

On the way back a few of us booked it down the hill so we could go for a swim in the river. It was glorious and refreshing. We then piled back into our trucks for the very bumpy 6 hour drive back to Pasir Panjang.

Dr. Galdikas Comes to Visit

Dr. Birute Galdikas is one of the most renowned primatologists in the world. She is the Jane Goodall of orangutans. She runs numerous projects around the world, including the care center here and the famous Camp Leakey. She was here visiting for about 2 weeks. She is an incredible woman with lots of stories and information to share. It is such an amazing thing to spend time with her so casually, a woman I have admired since I was a child. On Sunday she invited all the volunteers to go see a patch of forest that she owns to look at a possible release site. We left early in the morning and drove for about an hour to a town on the Java Sea. We loaded into some small speedboats that would take us into the jungle. We took about a half hour speedboat ride across the open Java Sea until we reached a river going into the forest. We then cruised up this for another hour. The scenery was spectacular, exactly what you’d imagine a river cruise through the jungle would be. We reached a point on the river where we wanted to go into the forest to look at the area. This mean jumping out of the speedboats and wading waste deep through some swampy river till we reached dry land. Dr. Galdikas showed us where she wanted to set up a release site with feeding platforms. After looking around the forest for a half hour, we waded back to our boats. After lunch we set out to cruise back to the mainland. However, on the way back we got caught in a vicious rain storm and got absolutely soaked. We docked our boat to wait out the storm at this random solitary platform off the coast. We waiting out the storm there for another half an hour before heading back to the forest. Dr. Galdikas organized an impromptu stop at a resort/camp in Tanjung Puting National Park to see an orangutan feeding. A few times a day they set out food on platforms for the orangutans to come and eat so the tourists staying at the camp can see some up close. What a nice surprise for those visitors to get an appearance by Dr. G! We followed a large wild male into the forest where we then watched him and three females come and eat bananas, sugar cane, and drink milk. It was incredible.  My first sighting of wild orangutans. We waited out some more rain at the camp and then headed back down the river where we watched the most beautiful sunset. 

Indonesia Finally!

The next leg of my journey took me from Istanbul to Singapore to Jakarta, where I had to spend the night. Very early the next morning, I boarded my final plane to Pangkalan Bun, Borneo (or Kalimantan, as the Indonesian side of this island is called, Borneo being the Malaysian side). Three days after I set out from South Africa, I was finally here. It was absolutely crazy to go from the bushveld in South Africa to the bustling European city of Istanbul to middle of the tropics, small town, Southeast Asia all in three days.

Unfortunately, only two days later I had to fly back to Jakarta. Since I came directly from working with other primates, I had to get some blood tests done before I could start work with the orangutans, since primates are very susceptible to diseases. I spent about three days there getting this done at a very nice international clinic. Jakarta was a nice little vacation with some first world amenities, namely Starbucks. There was a Starbucks right next to the clinic and I got like two vanilla lattes a day. I walked around a very western mall, and resisted the urge to buy clothes I don’t need. I spent most of my free time just chilling in my hotel room, watching TV (hey again, Law and Order: SVU!) and using the first-world fast internet. My tests all came back clean and I flew back to Pangkalan Bun to finish out my 10 day quarantine period.

Some notes about Indonesian life

I live in a small town called Pasir Panjang, which is basically a couple of roads with houses lining them. The Orangutan Care Center is about a 10 minute walk down the road. It’s very hot here, high 80s and above, but with like 90% humidity. The good news is that is seems that the rainy season is now so it rains and breaks up the humidity every afternoon. It looks very tropical here, with lots of big green trees around. The bathrooms are different; they are squat toilets, basically a porcelain hole in the ground. They don’t use toilet paper, they don’t flush. There is a tiled tub-like structure in the bathroom that is always filled with water. To flush you just pour some water from there with a pail down into the toilet. To shower you also just pour water over yourself from the tub with the pail, standing right there in the middle of the bathroom. It’s actually quite refreshing, but not quite as cleansing as a running shower. I’ve gotten quite used to it though after a few weeks. Indonesians take their shoes off before entering any building, a custom that I enjoy. The food here is actually really good. It’s a lot of rice. A lot. Rice basically comes with every meal. It’s rice or noodles with vegetables or chicken. Perfect for me! Although she uses a lot of salt and garlic. I live in a house with a woman and her two sons, one’s 12 the other 7. I live with another volunteer here, who has coincidentally also been to CARE. She cooks 3 meals a day for us and does our laundry. I have a room to myself, with a double bed mattress on the floor, a closet, and a fan. Simple but nice.

Orangutans and Work

My job title here is Enrichment Intern. Enrichment is a widely used practice of creating interesting and different food items to help stimulate camptive primates’ minds. In the wild they would use more of their brain power to forage for food almost constantly, whereas in a captive setting they don’t have to do this because food is provided to them. I create popsicles filled with fruit or juice, bundles of leaves and popcorn, puzzle boxes, etc. Here it also involves a lot of building fun and playful structures for their enclosures, like tire swings and wooden ladders. I’ve only been at work for a couple of weeks now and am still finding my feet here.

The orangutans are absolutely incredible. Very different from baboons. Orangutans are more solitary and much more mellow than baboons. You can interact here with orangutans that are 8 years old which you absolutely can’t with a an 8 year old baboon. By around 3 years old, baboons are too strong and too aggressive and can cause you serious damage. Don’t get me wrong, large orangutans are very powerful and could probably rip you apart if they really wanted to, but they are generally have a better disposition than that. I’ve only had a few really hands-on interactions with them so far. I took out a few babies one morning with a friend of mine. They just climb into your arms and give you great big hugs around your neck and then run off and play in the forest, often coming back to hang in your lap or just to say hey. I also spent a couple of hours out in the forest with some larger males and one female so another volunteer here could get some photos and an adoption update. This one female took a liking to me and kept coming back to climb into my arms and just hang out there, maybe to get away from all the males around her. I was sitting on a log and she would just come sit next to me and put her arm around my shoulder, like we were old friends. It was incredible. I also spent an hour out in the forest with an older orangutan female who had had a stroke and lost most of the use of her limbs. We just hung around the ground shuffling about eating grass and bark. It was a nice experience to get her out of her cage and into some natural sunshine and trees. They are absolutely incredible, intelligent, creatures and I am looking forward to more time with them as I get more settled in here.

Twenty Hours in Turkey

I left CARE, ready to start my next adventure in Indonesia, one I had been waiting to do for almost two years now. But it was a long process first to get there. My first leg took me from Phalaborwa to Jo’burg, then Jo’burg to Istanbul, Turkey. My dad and I had found this flight and thought it would just be nice and random and fun to have a long layover in Istanbul, about 20 hours. Why not, right? A couple months before this, my brother Adam and is girlfriend Lindsay were deciding where to go for a European vacation and thought “why not meet Amanda in Istanbul?” So quite randomly, everything worked out perfectly and we met up in Istanbul for the day. I landed about an hour before them at around 6am. We made our way to the quaint little hotel they were staying in. It was about mid-50s-60s there, which meant I was freezing, having just come from 100 degree weather, and they were warm, having just come from snowy New York. We spent the rest of the morning just walking around, taking in the neighborhood. It had been a while since we had all been proper tourists and we sure looked the part, with cameras around our necks and guide books in hand. We toured the Topkapi Palace and the Hagia Sophia. We ran a couple errands for things I needed and figured out how to send a package of stuff home for me. We spent most of the afternoon wandering around the Grand Bizarre, a crazy maze of shops and stalls that sold everything from Turkish trinkets to scarves to carpets. We spent some down time at the hotel, went out to a nice Turkish dinner, had a couple beers, and before we knew it, it was time for me to head back to the airport. I cannot express how great that day was. It was great to see Adam and Lindsay after almost 8 months and it was great to spend my layover doing all that fun stuff with them.  

Adam and Lindsay in front of the Blue Mosque

inside the Hagia Sophia

Leaving South Africa

I know I’ve been bad at updating this blog, but I guess I just got caught up in everything at CARE. After about 5 months at CARE, raising my two boys, Orion and Awesome, all day and all night, I finally weaned them to not sleep with me. This process was not an easy one. You basically have to shove them screaming into a cage where they will sleep for the night. But for the first time in months I slept alone, without any baby baboons. It was a very strange and lonely feeling, but also liberating. I no longer had to worry all night about my boys running everywhere, knocking things over, changing nappies, making bottles, etc. That said, I did miss them very much at night.

 

Our last night sleeping together

Lajuma mountains

Since I was no longer solely responsible for those two kids, I decided to take a few weeks off from CARE and see some other friends. I spent a few weeks with my best friend, Joselyn at Lajuma Research Center. She was doing field work studying behaviors of wild baboons up in the mountains. It was great to get away and spend time with new people and in a new environment. We went hiking and swimming and just hung around doing mostly nothing. It was super relaxing. I then spent a week in Pretoria, South Africa’s capital with Joselyn and our other friends Zurika and Dylan, all of whom I’d met at CARE. We had a nice little braai and party for my birthday. I spent a weekend with Dylan at his friends’ farm, which was amazing and relaxing. A final night was spent in Pretoria where I had to say goodbye to two of my closest friends from CARE, Adam and Dylan. Dylan had left working at CARE to pursue other things and Adam was leaving on a vacation and wouldn’t get back until after I would leave CARE. These two guys had become two of my closest friends ever and I miss hanging out with them very much. I then drove back to CARE with my other good friend Matt, who sadly departed the next day back to Holland. 

 

Me, Dylan, and Joselyn with some birthday tequila

Perseus, the porcupine skull and quills I found at Lajuma

Me and Orion

Me and Awesome

My final two weeks at CARE were a whirlwind. I felt much better being there again after my brief vacation away. It was amazing to see my boys again, who had gotten so big. In my absence, they had integrated an older female baboon into the young baby troop. She took quite a liking to Orion. So much so that he began to sleep outside with her at night, and soon more and more of the Awesome Hok kids were sleeping outside with them, including Awesome. But not to worry, they still remembered who their mom was. We spent a lot of quality time together playing and taking naps. Orion loved to sleep inside my shirt while Awesome preferred to sleep as close to my face as possible. I also spent a lot of time taking photos and hanging out with some of the older baboons as well, including my other two boys Hillablue and Toughie. At the end of it all, I felt okay about leaving CARE, which has still a lot of work to do, but incredibly sad to leave my little boys. After spending almost every day all day with them, it’s very strange not to have them following me around.  But I know they are good kids and will grow up to be good baboons. 

Me and Toughie

My last night at CARE, I went out to dinner with Mary and her mom and sister who were visiting. As we were driving out of Grietjie, the nature reserve, we came across two lions, one male and one female, just sauntering down the road in front of us. We followed them for about half an hour before they finally turned into the bushes. It was very cool. We spent time at dinner talking about how awesome it was to see them one last time. But then on our way back to CARE a couple of hours later, we saw them again! There they were, closer to CARE this time, the male and female were lying right in the road again. We ended up following them for over an hour until we had to make the difficult decision to turn home due to our lack of gas in the car. But this time as the male was following the female down the road, he said down right in front of our car, right in the headlights, and roared. He was probably 15 feet from me and he roared. It was the coolest thing I’d ever heard. I could feel it in my bones. I legitimately almost had tears in my eyes. The couple got up and walked some more down the road, and by this time another car had joined us. For a few minutes the lions seemed a bit confused and kept walking in circles around our cars. Man, they are big up close! The female then ran down the road to greet another, younger female who had just come out of the bush! These two females started playing and rolling around on the road bathed in the light from our headlights, just like housecats do. We had to turn around at this point because we didn’t know if we’d have enough gas to get back to CARE and then back to town in the morning. If we did have enough gas I would have made us follow them until morning! It was an incredible last night in Africa, so see lions up close right in our backyard.

Awesome

 

Orion