Exploring The East-Coast of Sabah/Borneo

After working in the Kota Kinabalu office for 2,5 months I was ready to explore a bit more of Sabah! My friend from the Netherlands visited me and we did the Sandakan Wildlife Safari tour (4D/3N) organized by Borneo Eco Tours. It was awesome! So let me share that with you.

On day 1 we departed from Kota Kinabalu to Sandakan using the early morning flight from AirAsia. The guide was already waiting for us at the airport and brought us to Sepilok Orang Utan Rehabilitation Centre. We first got to see a short movie about the Orang Utans; how they live, their threat because of the deforestation, why there is a rehabilitation centre etc. The movie is really touching. After the movie you walk on the boardwalk to the platform. That is before 10, the feeding time. If you are lucky you will see them already before the feeding time. Unfortunately we were not that lucky, but there were a lot of Macaques, who were erasing the fleas from each other. Looked really funny! When it was feeding time the Orang Utans came and it was just very impressive to see the Orang Utan in real life and to see them really act and move almost like human beings, except for hanging and eating upside down on a row, haha! Did you know that their genes are 96.4% identical to the human beings genes?

After lunch we proceeded our journey to Sukau. Which is situated 2,5 hours south of Sandakan. We went their by boat, a real relaxing boat where you can enjoy the nice wind and the beautiful nature surrounding the Kinabatangan River. Suddenly our guide and captain started to get really excited. That meant that now, we were really lucky, because we saw a Pygmy (Borneo) Elephant!

And then we saw another one, and another… Suddenly there were like 15 elephants all just enjoying their meal: grass! They were close to the bench of the river and even 1 elephant went for a bath in the river. We have watched this phenomenon for more than 30 minutes, because it was just so hard to say goodbye! After 10 minutes sailing something exciting happened again! They saw an Orang Utan high up in the tree! To be honest, the vision was not really good, but you could see a little brown fuzzy thing up there. So YES, we saw a wild Orang Utan! So, this first boat ride, from many more to come, we saw already two rare

endangered animal species, in the WILD! How can you not count yourself lucky :-)!

To be continued