Borneo

Home to vast jungles filled with strange creatures, some of the worlds best diving and a sprinkling of British colonial history, Borneo is where it's at.
Following a bumpy, palm sweating flight (for me anyway) we landed at Kuching, which is the provincial capital of Sarawak and together with Sabah makes up Malaysian Borneo, the other 2/3rds of the island belongs to Indonesia. Here's a link to a map of Southeast Asia as a whole if anyone's interested.
Kuching means 'cat' in Malay and dotted around the town are numerous statues of cats, some of them disturbingly big / little! There are also real cats prowling about with their horrible stuby tails that seems to be a genetic trait belonging to cats in Malaysia. We're booked into a very nice hotel called Singgahsana Lodge which Sam found, therefore its twice as expensive as one I would have chosen, but I've now gotten used to the luxury offered here which includes a rooftop bar with cable Tv for the footy (crying sounds). For financial fans out there, I neglected to inform you in previous blogs that the Ringgit (Yes, there have been a lot of Ringgit jokes) is the currency in Malaysia and there are just under 7 Ringgit to the pound. The locals all tend to speak English which makes things easy, although I have learnt the Malay for Hello which is 'Hello' and Thankyou which is 'Tereyma Kasay' not 'Terry Makasay' Emma :)
Kuching, apart from being full of cat related things, is a thoroughly modern city, although not that big a place, it has all the hallmarks of western civilisation mixed with the east, which is to say a McDonalds, several mosque's, some temples and a Hilton hotel. The people are really friendly here, noticably more so than their mainland counterparts and especially the younger crowd who will say Hello to you while just out walking....in a city! What makes Kuching and I'm imagining the rest of Borneos citys different from your usual run of the mill citys is that they're surrounded by jungle. Lots of jungle and lots of rivers, which means lots of wildlife and lots of tribal types.
On our first forray out into the stix we paid a visit to the Semenggoh Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre. This is one of a couple of places where they rescue endangered animals that have been injured or illegaly caged and try to re-introduce them back into the wild. There are about 20 + Orang Utans that they've helped back into the wild and they provide food for them if they want it. They have set feeding times and you aren't guarenteed that any apes will turn up, but when we went we were lucky and saw about 5-6 in total including a big male and a couple of mothers with babys. The dominant male in a group has the big flaps of skin around its face called 'flanges' and only the dominant male has these. Unfortunately Ricky, the biggest male didn't put in an appearence, probably getting his flanges waxed. To get to the feeding area you have to walk about 2-3 mins through the jungle and we were almost there when we heard a massive crashing noise in the trees behind us and turned round to see the massive male Orang Utan swinging through the trees over our heads as it headed for the feeding platform. It was a really impressive sight, they're pretty huge beasts! We spent an hour watching the Utans eating bananas, bread and coconuts before they swung back into the jungle. I'd like to report that it was just the two of us in the quiet of the forest, but there were at least 30-40 other people there along with some very excitable children which was a tad distracting. Selfish I call it. An extra highlight was seeing the Giant Squirrel which is on the endangered list, but put in an appearence to nick some of the monkeys food.
We've just got back from Baku National park (blog to follow) and after all the monkeys we saw there, Borneo could easily turn into one big monkey themed blog, we just can't get enough of watching their simean antics!

More monkey photos.