The rainforest is burning!

Once at camp leakey, we first took a walk through the rainforest. Along the way we saw several orangutans hanging out in the trees. Once we got back closer to the camp, we came across one of the rehabbed ones, named Phen, who is very habituated. He came right down out of the tree towards us and grabbed Vivi's hand and walked with her back to camp leakey. The rest of the day when we'd come near him he'd get all excited and run up to touch Vivi. Apparently, I wasn't the only one who thought she was good looking. After the walk in the jungle, we went back to the boat for some dinner and then back to camp leakey to watch them feed the rehabbing orangs. They put a bunch of fruit up on this platform and then a bunch of orangutans come up really close.
We were the last ones to leave and when we got back to the administrative building Phen was there waiting for us as well as a female with her baby. So we sat and watched them for a while as they were very close and the baby was quite cute. And of course it was funny to see phen flirting with vivi.
Got on the boat that evening and started downstream. The stars were gorgeous and bright that night, so we lied on our backs and watched the stars as we motored on.
The next day we went to two more feeding stations to watch the orangs, which were great of course. We also did some jungle walking in the area and were lucky to find a couple bornean gibbons swinging around in the trees. After the last feeding station we started motoring slowly back towards kumai. Once again we passed through hundreds of monkeys playing in the treetops as the sun set. Just so fun to watch them all. After the sun set, we had another 2+ hours to go on the boat before getting to kumai. This part of the journey had amazing fireflies on both sides of the river. The trees were covered in them for miles and miles along the river. They looked like trees lit up through Elkhorn Ave. in Estes during Christmas. Quite umbelievable. Upon arriving in Kumai, the other 5 had a car waiting for them to take them to pangkalan bun as they were on a package. Mahjid invited me into his house again for cake as it had been his son's birthday party that day and than took me on his ojek to PB where I met back up with the crew. Once there Mahjid bought us all drinks before a sad farewell. He was such an amazingly nice guy and helped me so much that I wished I could have thanked him better. He also told me the frustrating news that the airline I had booked with IAT hadn't flown it's route in the past 3 days due to a cracked windshield in the plane (these are the type of small flights and routes where they just use one plane and pilot that starts in the morning at point a and stops at several points along the way and then makes the same trip in reverse in the afternoon, so they only have one plane assigned to the routes) and they were awaiting repair, and he wasn't sure if it had been repaired yet. The other airline flying to pontianak, kalstar, was of course full and there was no overland route to pontianak and a ferry takes over 25 hours. So I just hoped for the best.
The next day I was relieved to find out when I got to the airport that the plane was delayed, which meant that it was actually flying. The airport was your typical tiny airport. Just an airstrip in the jungle and relatively little security, which of course makes sense considering the planes are so small. But I found this one a little funnier than others I had been at b/c it did have the x-ray machine where you send everything through, which is standard, and the metal detector you walk through. As a good airline traveller I put my back through and dutifully took out my metal items from my pockets to walk through the metal detector. But the whole time I was sitting in the waiting room I was amused to watch that no one removed anything from their pockets, let alone their packs from their backpack, so the metal detector was constantly ringing, but no one cared. Of course some people couldn't be bothered to walk through the detector and were just coming in through the exit only door. There was a tv in the waiting room and although it was in indonesian I could tell from the camera shots and the words terrisma that they were talking about a foiled terrorism attack at jakarta airport as well as showing old footage of the recent bombing in jakarta. Of course tiny twin otter planes aren't really terrorist targets, so I just found it humorous. It's just like how Hugo joked when Daniel asked if westerners were worried about terrorism in indonesia (after he had explained that 99.99% of indonesians are so saddened and upset by the bombings in bali and jakarta, which I do truly believe). Hugo said, "you just have to know where to go to avoid it. I wouldn't stay at that ritz in jakarta (which has been bombed twice), instead I stay at places like the Hidayah 1 (the dumpy place we stayed at in samarinda), where a bomb might actually do it good". Anyways, as the only whitey on the plane, it apparently meant I was entitled to first class, which meant the front row in the sweltering chose your seat airplane.
We stopped at one other town along the way before reaching pontianak where people were literally waiting on the runway to be picked up, just like at bus stop. The view back down to earth from the airplane was quite sad as we flew over acres and acres of primary rainforest being burned for slash and burn agriculture, namely for oil palms. Pontianak was in a thick haze from all the smoke, which was why the plane had been delayed, and when we landed, it appeared to be snowing as I walked across the runway from all the ash. No one on my flight spoke enough english for me to see if they wanted to share a taxi, so I waited for the kalstar flight where I was able to share a taxi with a malay guy and an italian gal who were the people who coordinated volunteers for help with the orangutan research and they were on the same bus as me going to malaysia for a visa run. Pontianak, which straddles the equator, was your typical dirty polluted kalimantan town made worse by a thick fog from the smoke. Mahjid had a friend in Pontianak who had booked my bus for me so that I wouldn't run into any full busses problems. He had certainly gone all out on the bus he booked. I would have been very happy with just an aircon bus with reclining seats, but this was like an executive first class bus with huge seats, foot rests, blankets (for the always freezing busses), and other luxuries.

It was really good to be back in Kuching after Kalimantan. Very familiar, everyone with great english, and very clean. I had booked a night at the nice hostel where I had watched the tour de france the last time I was here, and the owner was very excited to see me. Oh the American! he exclaimed when I came in. He's a really nice and funny guy. It was very foggy and drizzly and just nasty today. Reminded me of...hmm...let me see...that's right, a caldwell winter term inversion. Nasty! I guess most of it is caused by fires from kalimantan blowing smoke over as well as some natural fires in the area due to an extreme drought. Apparently they're in such an extreme drought here that many of the surrounding towns are absolutely out of water and lots of the guesthouses here aren't allowing showers. Pretty crazy considering we're on a rainforest island and one of the wettest islands on the earth and considering I saw tv reports of taiwan and china completely underwater. The earth's climate appears to be going haywire. Weather is an important factor when you are travelling and wanting to do and see things and it seems that a common theme whereever I go by locals, (who keep in mind don't know who al gore is or anything about climate change) is that things are so different now in the climate. You hear things like this used to be the dry season, and now it's just raining. Or during the rainy season we had no rain. Or we used to have two distince seasons a dry and a wet, and now it's anyone's guess. Anyways, the drought has gotten so bad here that they have started seeding clouds to promote rainfall, thus the drizzle this morning. Hopefully this won't affect my trip to mulu national park. But visibility here right now is close to nil. The weather on this trip has often been quite ironic. Trekking in taman negara rainforest during the dry season where it had just been raining and raining so that there was an excess of leaches, a water logged trail, and impassible river fords. Then onto borneo where the river trip near sepilok almost couldn't happen b/c of the river being too high, then onto kapit and belaga where boats were cancelled b/c the river was too low. Pretty crazy.

Read the borneo post today, which was nice b/c I hadn't seen an english paper in a long time. It was full of stories on the drought and of course H1N1 which is always on everyone's mind here. But there was one article I just had to laugh at its rediculousness. There's a tribe here called the Penan that are nomadic and are regarded as basically the last tribe in borneo to completely keep to their old ways and not be affected by the western world. They still wear their traditional dress, hunt using their old methods, have their nomadic lifestyle, etc. There's only about an estimated 3000 left and they live in an area in the middle of borneo that is all rainforest. Well a big oil palm company is negotiating to buy the area from the government and turn it into oil palms, and they will apparently teach the penans how to be oil palm farmes. Apparently everyone here in the government is applauding the oil palm companies motives. To me this is so tragic as it will obviously wipe out not only a huge tract of rainforest, but a whole way of life. Not to mention the penan will hardly see a dime as most of the money goes to the government and the owners of the oil palm company. My favorite quote by the president of the company is that he believes that this is best for the penans because "by converting them to oil palm farmers, it will be teaching them to live sustainably" Live sustainably? Really? Last time I checked, the penans had been living like this for the past several thousand years. Sounds pretty sustainable to me. And the last time I checked oil palm plantations were good for about 5 rotations before the soil is too infertile to grow anymore, and then the poor penans who have been converted into liking cable tv, cell phones, and other material things will be forced to move to the slum areas of the cities to try and sell fake souvenirs to tourists or charge tourists to take pictures with their long hears or bone noserings.

Just kind of hung out around Kuching today, not doing much. Went to church as I hadn't been in quite a while. On my walk back to the center of town a guy, Harry, in a truck stopped me and asked if I had been the one at church. "We don't ever see tourists at chuch on a weekday" he said. Told him I hadn't been in a while. He wanted to take me out to dinner, so I accepted. He took me to a nice restaurant in the newish part of town, the part with chic restaurants and clubs. He got me a delicious fettucini alfredo and a hot fudge sundae. He's a business man, but helps out with sunday school for high schoolers because he said he gets tired of old people (he appears to be about 50 or 60) because they are so set in their ways and aren't willing to look at things in different ways. He invited me to stay at his house tomorrow, which I think I will and then take me on thursday on a tour to a place along the coast that he likes. He said he wished I would be here longer so that he could show me around more places here, but I have tours and flights booked to mulu and KL, so there's not much I can do about that. He actually studied for a couple years in England and has travelled in europe, southeast asia, and china. I asked him if he had ever been to the states. He hadn't and said he would like to go, but he has reservations because of all the violence in america. It's of course on the news and in the media here all the stuff that goes on in the states. I found this to be quite the interesting statement. Mainly b/c I had I don't know how many people, tell me they didn't think it wise I go to asia b/c it's such a dangerous place, etc, etc. But the truth is that I have found it to be incredibly safe here. I find it feels much safer walking around at night in cities here by myself than I ever did on business trips for sapidyne when I would have to go to boston or new york or dc or san fran. And it's interesting b/c I'll get emails from friends worried about my safety (which I appreciate) but when I go online to cnn.com or the denverpost or the idaho statesman, the top 3 or more stories are always about some sort of murder. But yea, just found it to be an interesting statement considering back home it's always such big talk about whether it's safe to go to these countries and if you look at the us government travel site they have travel warnings for all these places, yet we don't think about the other side how the people here are just as scared to imagine travelling in the US with all the news they hear about our violence and gang stuff and what not.

Tomorrow I'm off to Bako National park which is by the ocean for a day trip. Then on the tour inthe morning with Harry the next day and then a night bus on to Miri for my Gunung Mulu trip.