We were both knocked up by 6.15 this morning . I'll rephrase that – the taxi driver from last night called at 6.15 this morning to return Johns missing bag, camera and other enclosed bits and bobs- so all is back to normal now and John has stopped sulking in time to enjoy his birthday today.

As we were already up we decided we should take advantage of the early hour to visit the Orang-utans at the Semenngoh rehabilitation centre. Dressed like sister Mary from the convent ( this obviously refers to me not john)we hiked down to town to catch the shuttle bus from the Waterfront lodge. The park is about 45 minutes from Kuching set well back from the road. The rest of the area comprises botanical research gardens, although we didn’t have enough time to explore these as well.

The centre opens twice a day to enable people to see the orang-utans in their natural setting for an hour each time. The wardens provide the orang-utans with food at feeding stations in the hope of enticing them down to feed, and enable the human crowd to satisfy their hunger for photographs. On the day it’s pot luck whether any come down so we were lucky to see a pregnant female and then another female with her two young orangs. I never understand at times like this why people don’t realise that being quiet means no talking. We were lucky to see any at all with some of the folks in the group making enough noise to scare off anything within a 3 mile radius. It was difficult to get good shots because of the distance, but hopefully we managed one or two good ones to give you an idea what it was like. We both had a great time watching them.

The orang-utan trip only lasts three hours so we spent some time in town trying to catch up on the blog and downloading the photos. We then got completely soaked on the way back to the homestay and are now trying to dry out, so please forgive us if the pages are a bit soggy.