Our month in Borneo is over too soon and we’re flying to Singapore tomorrow to stay with Pete and Sharms for a few days. It really is the beginning of the end - up to now we were always heading out, and now it seems like we’re turning and heading for home (admittedly via a fairly tortuous route). We’ve been in and around Kuching, the capital of Sarawak province, for a week or so now, and it being our last day today we decided we really had to go and say hello to the orange hairy apes for which Borneo is famous. We went to Semenggoh wildlife centre where they’ve rehabilitated and released over 30 orangutans - this morning feeding time attracted one big male swinging sedately out of the forest to peel a few bananas and eat them sat in the bend of a creeper.

We’ve been to a few national parks since our last post. The first, at a place called Niah, features enormous caves hollowed out of limestone hills which poke out of the jungle. The Great Cave is most famous for a 40 000 year old human skull found buried there, but it’s cool to visit because it’s BIG. The caverns are measured in hundreds of metres, they are home to a quarter of a million swiftlets (small birds) and about as many bats, and some areas of the cave floor are 10m deep in guano! A few of the locals make a living clambering about in the abyss collecting the birds’ nests to sell to the Chinese to make soup. It’s hard to say which is more bizarre - guys clambering about with candles 100m up on home made wooden scaffolding, or someone paying so much for soup made from bird saliva.

Next we hit the beach at Similajau, a deserted national park covering a strip of coastal jungle. We didn’t escape the noise of the surf for 3 days, and spent the time wandering along the beautiful beaches trying to spot turtles (failed) and through mangrove forests trying to avoid spotting the saltwater crocodiles (succeeded). It was so nice and sunny one day that Eppu and I got engaged sitting on a log on a deserted golden beach..

Finally we’ve just returned from Bako, again on the coast, where we spent some time tracking down the Proboscis monkeys in the jungle. They’re the biggest of the monkeys and have long noses, pot bellies and a disarmingly human posture - I found it surprisingly exciting to be within a few metres of them crashing about in the trees. Also bearded pigs, flying lemurs, silver-leaf monkeys… For all the photos of these and us being silly in Sarawak check out the Sarawak photo album.

Borneo has really been a fantastic place - not the remote frontier we’d pictured but full of extraordinary things and places nonetheless. It has to be said that the national parks are well presented and the casual tourist could easily remain oblivious to the fact that the majority of Borneo’s ancient rainforest (the oldest in the world) has already been logged and floated down the rivers to the sawmills. We’re both a little ashamed still to be so ignorant of this reality. Still, we’d strongly recommend visiting Borneo to anyone.