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Hi Guys!!!
So sorry its taken so long to write this but the beer has been flowing and the sea calling, plus after the shenanigans with uploading the photos (which i still dont know how we are going to get up on there), we kinda gave up for a while. Its ok when you can find a fast internet connection at a cheap cafe but otherwise you just wanna tear your hair out!
Anyway, so i guess you wanna know what we got up to in Borneo huh? huh? well tough coz i'm not gonna gonna tell you! ...only joking! Having said that i really dont know how to put into words how amazing an experience it was and how beautiful....if you can try to imagine the greenest forest you can, set among dark red huge rivers (died that colour by the dying leaves that fall into the water), traditional longboats passing you buy on the river, the sun beating down from a deep blue sky, the wind in your hair and of course the noise of the speedboat that you're screaming down the river in!
After 2 days in Jakarta, which was pretty nasty and smelly as all big cities are, and being eaten by mosquitoes despite jumping around our room squatting as many as we could on the walls with our flip flops! We flew to Central Kalimantan, to the town of Palangka Raya where Chanee, the founder of Kalaweit picked us up wit his adorable little son Andrew and took us to the centre. We had a look around, went for unch in a Pedang Restuarant (West Sumatran food) where the tradition is to put all the dishes on the table with a big pot of rice and you choose what you want. You pay only for what you eat, and you eat with your hands!! very messy but incredibly delicious. Channee also explained that if you dont have any money you can just put a bit of each sauce on your rice and then its free! He then took us to the speed boat and off we went on a 45 minute trip to the camp up the river.
The camp was set on an island, and as we got off the boat there was a huge macaque to our left staring at us through a fence. The camp cosisted of a green grassy area where washing was dried daily, a toilet and bathroom, and a raised wooden building with 3 bedrooms to fit 2 people in each, plus the kitchen. Tita the cook and her loud and stroppy but nevertheless loveable daughter Ceyla, slept in a room behind the kitchen, and oppisite was the Clinic/Surgery where the medicines and operating table were, and of course where a 2 month old baby gibbon called Inea lived. He had many parents as the volunteers took it in turns to hand feed him milk every 3 hours.
Either side of the camp were hundreds of gibbons in various group sizes or alone in quarantine in cages. Our favourites were in quarantine just next to camp. Dan loved the three babies together whose names were Romeo, Smoke and Delan. (We promise you will see the photos at some point). Romeo loved to hold your hand for comfort, while Delan sat there and sucked his thumb and gazed into your eyes until your heart broke, and smoke shoved his bum in your face on request! delightful. Hayleys favourite was Klassi, an older gibbon next door, who had caught Herpes Simplex virus, (carried without affect in 80% of humans but deadly to gibbons). He had managed to recover but was so thin he was literally skin and bones but such lovely natured. Due to this human carried virus everyone had to wear masks while around them and wash hands before and after and not touch the gibbons unless you have to. So when we have surgical masks on in all the photos it wasnt to protect us but the gibbons.
Charlotte was the first volunteer we met who was on the hammock reading her book while the others were round the back with the staff playing volleyball, which was taken very seriously by the staff and the days pretty much revolved around playing it, in between gibbon feeding. The other volunteers were Albane and Fred. They were all French, as Kalaweit is a french organisation most of the volunteers they get there are French. Not a problem unless they all get together and decided to talk in French and then it can get a bit lonely...after a few days it was ok though and we started to remember our GCSE French and all was well. Well Dan remembered a lot more than me actually and is a bit of a linguistic genius but thats what happens when you have rubber fights all lesson....
The daily schedule consisted of waking up at 5am to the most beautiful sound on this earth i swear...the sound of gibbons calling! Its loud enough to be an alarm clock but even after the second week it was still as beautiful as the first morning, and i wish i'd got a better recording of it coz i can't be described... So you get up at any time but they feed the gibbons at 7am and you can help, they each have 4 bananas each and a piece of melon. Then we have breakfast at 8am. this was rice, usually with egg or sardines in spicy oily sauce or sometimes noodles, but always rice!!! Rice with every meal, 3 times a day rice rice rice! lol i thought it was great but others got really bored with it after a while. To Hayley indonesian food is the best on the planet and she will try to cook it as often as she can when we get back. I mite even have spicy rice for breakfast!
its pretty much free time after that till lunch, apart from 2 times a week we go around all the cages and give vitamins to the gibbons (like the childrens ones) which to them are like sweets and its very hard making sure they all get one. Lumch is the same Rice, meat, veggies... then we feed the gibbons at 2pm and then free time all afternoon. In our free time we did lots of things, like swimming in the river (while you're thinking to yourself 'i am swimming in a river in the middle of the Bornean jungle surrounded by gibbons and orangutans....wow!'. but also crocs and water snakes however we didnt see any) Over the water were houses floating on the river where some of the staff lived as they were fishermen too. We would regularly go over either swimming or by longboat and use Nanto's fishing rods and sit on his front step and hope for just one! That was when Andri the paramedic/vet was there on week one. The week after he swapped with Rio and we had the speed boat all week and we had bough some maggots in the bait shop in town so we caught loads of fish!! they were only tiny though and not much meat on them, and hayley stopped after a while coz she couldnt bear to take the hook out after she'd caught one and felt guilty catching any more coz she's a wus.
Sometimes we would just go for a walk and see all the gibbons, we also had to observe two couples for release for a week and we finally released Toby and Ra Ra into the pre-release cage in the forest over the water, which thanks to Chanee is now protected and safe for them to live. He estimates that for every ten houses there is a captive gibbon in a cage somewhere in the house. Chanee came over here when he was 18 learnt indonesian, set up kalaweit, obersved gibbons in the wild and now tens years later he is saving hundreds of gibbons and macaques, has a local radio station where he helps the locals with theirn personal problems as well as allowing people to come forward and give their gibbons to kalaweit, a centre and has negotiated hundreds of hectares of forest to be protected and is working on hundreds more. A true inspiration and has left me questioning how much time i have wasted in my life already.
In the evenings the generator is put on before it gets dark which pumps water to the camp so we can have shower and wash up plates and clothes the next day and also gives us electricity. Of course one light bulb in the middle of the jungle is a beacon to all flying insects isn't it!? hmm very interesting trying to have a shower (which is just a huge container of water and a cup which you pour the water over you with) while dodging the huge camacaze flying beatles that swirl around the light, burn themsleves and bomb down at you diagonally! i'm sure i got a bruise of one of them. The spiders above were ok though, as long as they didnt decide to re spin their web and drop down on your head while your having a shower, and it was fun to spot which ones had moved every night. The bulb over the communal area was the worst for attracting bugs and there was nothing so unusual that we hadnt seen them already, but everything from cockroaches to stickinsects, to huge graasshoppers all had bloody wings too!!! I mean seriously is there any need??! At night we played jungle speed, a card game similar to snap but much harder and where you have to grab a wooden thing in the midle before your opponent with the matching card does. it was great fun and good practise for giving vitamins to gibbons that were aggressive and tried to grab you! We also really got into chess towards the end and Rio played with us and was very good. When he took our king, He would say "i eat you!". lol you had to be there but in an indonesian accent it was fab. He also had picked up french and his favourite sentence was Pour Quoi? Even when it didnt make sense. And when something was very good it was 'super bon!'...ahh how we miss him... and the noise Inea and Romeo made when you let go of them...if i heard that now i would cry!
So after 2 glorious weeks there we flew to Surabaya in Java and then got a connecting flight to Bali....for the next step of the adventure please read the new blog...
love to all hope you enjoyed...xxxxx
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