Tourist Slogan

I have sometimes thought that Indonesia should adopt the following tourist slogan:

“Indonesia: where small things are big and big things are small”

In our travels here, all the amazingly large things we have seen are relatively small things(walking sticks, beetles, bats, moths, rats) and all the amazingly small things we have seen are relatively large things (Javanese hippos and rhinos, Sumatran elephants, Indonesian people).

The validity of this observation was confirmed again this week as we visited Kalimantan (Borneo) for a 4 day tour which involved flying into a very remote part of the island (Pankalan Bun) with 27 others from our school and taking 6 small river boats (about 30 feet long and 8 feet wide) up into an Indonesian national park. During the trip we saw the world’s smallest species of ape, the Gibbon (see picture below), and what had to be one of the world's largest ants, the Bull Ant (sorry the picture just didn't do it justice, so I didn't post it) .

 

Gibbon outside an information center- while it looks like a monkey, notice that it has no tail



The name of the National Park was Tanjung Puting and it protects orangutans and also serves as a rehabilitation center for some of them to transition back to the wild, which accounts for their friendliness. The remote park borders a river, which has spawned a scenic river boat industry where locals charter out their small boats so visitors can easily traverse into the park to view all the exotic wildlife, which, in addition to lots of orangutans, includes proboscis monkeys, wild boars, hornbills, kingfishers, sun bears (didn't see), spotted leopards (didn't see) and crocodiles. Here are some pictures of our trip:



Eric on a boardwalk with Orangutan

Proboscis Monkey-  notice the large nose (males have even a larger one)



River boats, called Klotaks,  heading up to the national park.





Neil, hanging out on the bow of our boat


Borneo has the reputation as one of the most distinctive and unique ecosystems in the world, and it didn't disappoint as we were amazed by what we saw.  In fact, we just scratched the surface as we heard about many other scenic travel options on the island that we will never be able to visit.  Sadly, Borneo's abundant native environments are under tremendous pressure as its resources are easy pickings for opportunistic people seeking quick profits from cutting down forests, planting palm oil plantations, extracting coal, natural gas and oil. To multiply the tradegy of this is the reality that most of the money earned from these sales will not help develop infrastructure, education and health care on the island but will flow to Jakarta and points beyond (China, Japan, South Korea, Europe and North America).

Sadly, this was easily observed as we flew over the island on our way in and on our way out.