It’s hard to believe, but this New Year’s Eve will mark our 30th wedding anniversary. Who would’ve thunk it?! What a ride it’s been – ups and downs (of course) and a few rocky patches but through it all there’s been immense, enduring love and a shared passion for adventure and living life to the full. It’s traditionally known as the pearl anniversary – symbolizing strength and endurance (definitely!) wisdom (hmm, the jury’s out on that one), and patience (haha, definitely some work to do there).
We think it’s a pretty big deal so we decided to treat ourselves to some special trips.
First, we made a quick trip back to Cairns for Millie’s “Fairy 1st” birthday, which was just delightful and so wonderful to see how much she’s grown – now walking and learning new things every day. Sally and Nick did an amazing job of creating the fairy theme, and how lovely to see so many blokes happy to don a pair of fairy wings! Great fun had by all.
And then on our way back we did a side trip to Borneo to see the orang-utans in the wild. Several of our cruising friends had done this trip up the river at Kumai, and it was always a regret of mine that we never got there in Toucan. But there’s more than one way to skin a cat as they say, so we hopped on a plane from Jakarta to Pangkalan Bun in Kalimantan province (it’s not big enough to have its own airport, so the commercial flights use the army base airstrip) and from there we were picked up by our lovely guide, Adin, from Sister Tour and whisked off to Kumai to join our houseboat (or klotok as they’re known locally). The klotoks are wooden, two-tiered traditional boats with the upper level reserved exclusively for the use of the guests (usually just a couple or sometimes a family), with a western toilet and shower, double mattress with mosquito net, dining table, and lounging chairs. The crew, consisting of the captain, cook, deckhand, and guide, are quartered in the lower deck. We signed up for the 2 night/3 day tour.
Kumai is only a small town (approximately 25,000 people) but it’s the centre of the very lucrative bird’s nest soup industry, where large concrete birdhouses attract the many thousands of swiftlets to nest. The nests, made out of the bird’s saliva, are considered delicacies in Chinese cooking, and reportedly have medicinal benefits such as helping collagen production for women’s skin, and for male virility. A kilo of birds’ nests can fetch up to $3000 these days, so it’s a very large export market for Indonesia. It’s kind of weird to arrive in Kumai and see all these large concrete buildings with small holes for the birds to enter, and to hear the amplified recordings of the birdsong, which supposedly attracts the swiftlets to nest. These types of strange food choices always make me wonder – who was that first person who decided that cooking a bird’s nest would be a good idea? I mean, it’s not like it was an accidental discovery. Aren’t humans fascinating?!
Anyway, I digress. The trip up the Sekonyer river takes you into the Tanjung Puting National Park, an area of roughly 1 million acres dedicated to the conservation of diverse ecosystems and the protection of the endangered Bornean orangutans.
Adin, our guide, was incredibly knowledgeable and informative so we learnt a lot during our trip. For instance, there are approximately 1600 wild orangutans in the national park, and an additional 400 that are ‘semi-wild’ – those that have been rescued from captivity or orphaned, who are then rehabilitated and returned to the wild. This work started in 1971 when Birute Galdikas established Camp Leakey (named after her mentor, the famous paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey) to study orangutans for her doctorate. Apparently, Leakey jokingly referred to his three primatologist proteges – Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikas- as the “trimates”. Sadly, Galdikas is the only surviving “trimate” now, and is still actively working in Borneo on her life’s work of studying and protecting the orangutans. There are now two other “camps” or release sites on the way up the river to Camp Leakey, where tourists can observe the orangutans up close at the feeding platforms. I’m so glad that we did this trip in the low season as there weren’t many other boats and only maybe a dozen tourists at each camp. In the peak season of June- October, Adin told us there could be as many as 200 people at the feeding stations! Ugh! My only regret is that we didn’t have a better camera with a telephoto lens, so we had to make do with our phone cameras and my little Olympus TG6, hence the resolution on the photos isn’t great. But hopefully you get a sense of how amazing it was to see these magnificent apes in the wild.
The monkeys can be quite threatening to orangutans and humans alike – one of the comments Adin made to us as we approached a group of monkeys on the boardwalk was “whatever you do, don’t look them in the eye” – they really are the gangsters of the jungle!
Here’s a little clip of an interaction between the orangutans and the macaque monkeys:
Despite being the rainy season, the weather was perfect – a couple of showers at night, but the days were fine and sunny. We chugged our way slowly up the river, stopping at the three camps for the scheduled feeding times, and looking for wildlife along the way. Adin and our skipper Abdul were extremely good spotters so we were treated to several sightings of wild orangutans, as well as macaque monkeys, the comical-looking proboscis monkeys, and flashes of vividly coloured greater kingfishers.
At night, we tied up to the riverbank and had a very comfortable night’s sleep under our mozzie net.
Ani, our cook, served us up huge quantities of the most delicious food for every meal. All in all, the tour was everything and more that I hoped it would be, and we came away with many wonderful memories.
And now we’re back in our island home enjoying the peace and quiet once more. There’s always lots to do when we come back after a time away, so the last ten days have been spent cleaning, raking, getting the watermaker going again, removing plastic from the beach and generally tidying up. We’re also recovering from a cold/flu virus we must’ve picked up from travelling (in hindsight, the wisdom definitely needs more work – we should have worn masks on the plane), but hopefully we’ll get back in the water soon so I can play with my new camera ( a little extra anniversary present – lucky me!). The island Christmas tree is up, Nigel the duck has forgiven us for being away, and Elvis the palm cockatoo is still doing his daily beach walk.
In these times of so much turmoil and hate in the world, we give thanks for the life we’ve managed to build together, and for the love of our family and friends. Every day is precious. Wherever you are this Christmas, may peace and love surround you, and may 2026 bring many more adventures and happy times for all of us.
