Sandakan Town and Sepilok

There aren't many places that we've been to that we can honestly say we didn't like. Sandakan was one of those places. We came here for a couple days after leaving the Kinabatangan to clean ourselves up, enjoy a nice air-conditioned room, and catch up with stuff on the world wide web (it had been 6 whole days!). Sandakan allowed us to do all that, but it wasn't exactly in comfort. The town is, in a word, a dump. It's dirty, overcrowded, with no good food and almost nothing interesting to see. The place we stayed at was a dump too. The bathroom/shower, as they do it in Asia, wasn't draining properly so the entire floor would be covered in water for days after taking a shower. We were happy to not have to bathe in the river, but this wasn't exactly a huge step up. Needless to say, our flight to Kuala Lumpur couldn't come soon enough.

Doesn't look so bad in this pic

In retrospect, staying somewhere in Sandakan's suburbs would have been better. The suburbs looked a bit nicer than the city and it would have put us closer to Sandakan's two main draws - the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Center and the airport (to get outta there!). Sepilok, luckily, is world-class. They rescue injured, orphaned, and illegally-kept orangutans and slowly rehabilitate them with the ultimate goal of being released back into the wild. They run off donations (check out the Orangutan Appeal UK if you want to adopt one) and the money brought in by allowing tourists to come in and watch the feedings. We were there for just such an occasion. They have built a platform in the forest where they lay out some fruit twice a day for the orangutans to come and eat. It's not an enclosed forest, so while most of the orangutans that come to the feedings are ones the center is rehabilitating, wild ones can also show up so you never know what you're gonna see. Initially two juveniles showed up and but had to be pretty sneaky in getting some food, which was being guarded by an aggressive and greedy long-tailed macaque.

Time to eat!

Obviously the most comfortable position to eat in

Once the juveniles left we thought the show was over, and many of the tourists left. After about 10 minutes a big male and female showed up for a feed. It was while we were watching them that the resident "naughty orangutan" came walking up the boardwalk behind everybody. He seemed unimpressed by us but did enjoy watching us scatter as he casually walked through the crowd. The rangers were telling us to move out of his way, which seemed pretty obvious until one french lady stood her ground and let him walk right up next to her. It wasn't until the rangers told her that he likes to bite that she finally moved, before the orangutan had a chance to sink his teeth in her leg as I was hoping. This went on for about 5 minutes - orangutan walking around and tourists scattering - until he apparently had enough and walked back down the boardwalk. On problem was, this was also the way out for us. We gave him a few minutes then cautiously followed. We caught up with him at a junction, where a ranger tried to lure him down a different path so we could make our exit. This worked just long enough for us to slip by, but he then decided that he wasn't done playing with the tourists and started following us down the boardwalk. So that's how we found ourselves - getting chased by a naughty orangutan. It wasn't a high-speed chase - he never went faster than a slow walk - but Steph was freaked out nonetheless and wouldn't let him get any closer than about 100 feet. I thought it was pretty cool and could have sworn he only wanted to give me a high-five, but wasn't about to find out. He followed us all the way out to the parking lot and climbed onto the roof of the cafeteria building until one of the rangers walked over, handed him a banana, and they walked off hand-in-hand. So that's what he wanted!

Naughty boy

The chase is on

The next day we showed up at Sandakan airport about 3 hour early (did I mention we were ready to leave?) and off we were to Kuala Lumpur! Click HERE for all our Borneo pics.