Posts Tagged ‘jungle’

After our really great diving trip out of Mabul Island, we moved on to the last part of my Malaysian adventure: the Kinabatangan river and the jungle areas near it.  This river is a really special place for seeing wildlife – there are several species of monkeys, orangutans, crocodiles, elephants, hornbills, eagles, and many more to be seen.  The reason it’s so special, though, is rather depressing – since so much of Borneo has been converted into palm oil plantations, the once-vast jungle around the Kinabatangan has been reduced over time to its current size – just 1 km to either side of the river.  There is simply nowhere else for the wildlife to go, so you can easily see it from the comfort of your riverboat.

Nevertheless, it is a place that still manages to feel like it’s out in the middle of nowhere.  We stayed at Nature Lodge Kinabatangan, one of many outfits that offers lodging and daily trips out on the river.  I picked this particular place because of both the good reviews it got on the Web and because of the price – which was far lower for the basic Kinabatangan adventure than many of the other spots.  In addition, the staff were responsive to my emails and informative in their replies – something that is rare in Borneo.  Our accommodation was sufficient – it was rather basic and small, but comfortable – and all the on-site staff were super friendly.

To get there, we took a rather nice coach from Semporna to a random “coffeeshop” – just a strip of restaurants on the side of the road – where we were supposed to meet up with the tour bus.  Of course (being Malaysia) the bus was late, but we met a few other couples on their way to the same place and that gave us confidence that we’d actually be arriving to our destination!  The tour bus that did eventually come was a massive 4×4 setup, and we ended up needing it to get past the potholes and puddles and other things that we found on the way to the lodge.  A short boat ride across the river took us the last leg, where we were greeted with a short introduction, welcome juice and a few forms to fill out.  Before long we left on our first boat ride of the 3 day / 2 night trip, and we weren’t disappointed!  There were 4 boat trips all together – two afternoon and two morning.  We saw tons of wildlife! I’ll start with the birds:

Hornbills Abound

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Since I’m so incredibly behind on these blog posts this tour may not get quite as much attention as deserved.  However, Justin has already put up our wildlife report and I’ll sketch out a few of the tour details.

Firstly, we went to the Manu National Park Cultural Zone with Amazon Trails Peru and would absolutely recommend this company.  Since we only had a short time in Peru we did the shortest tour that got us close to the wildlife reserve.  We had been a little concerned that if we didn’t make it all the way into the reserve we wouldn’t see very much.  This turned out to not be a problem though and for the short amount of time we had we saw so, so much.

We also need to give a lot of credit to our guide, Carlos.  He was excellent – knew all the birds, found us all kinds of things to look at that we would have missed, and could tell us all about the plants and how they are used by the people who live in the jungle.  He also carried about 80 pounds of wildlife reference books (including one he had put together with his friends) and spent lots of time helping us record what we saw.  Awesome!

The tour was 4 days and 3 nights.  We started in Cusco and had a very long van ride out to the jungle.  On the way we stopped at some pre-Incan burial ruins.

Pre-Incan burial towers

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Hazel and I just got back from our trip to the rainforest! We had a blast, and that will be explained in another post, but we also saw and photographed TONS of wildlife! In this post I’ll introduce you to most of the species we saw by name and picture!

We couldn’t have done this without the great help of our guide Carlos, who was working for Amazon Trails Peru our tour operator. He did a really spectacular job!

Even though this post has a TON of pictures, there are many more on SmugMug. Check out our BEST photos, and the REST of them!

Reptiles and Amphibians

I saw each of these on my second night walk in the jungle, except the last two which we found during a daytime walk:

• Phyllomedusa Palliata
• Phyllomedusa Tomopterna
• Oreobates Quixensis
• Poison Dart Frog
• Juvenile White Cayman!

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