Watching the Great Apes

Borneo is famous for being the home of the orang-utan and last Saturday I finally got round to seeing some.  Semenggoh Wildlife Centre, outside Kuching, is a shelter for injured, orphaned and kidnapped orang-utans, where they are rehabilitated to go back in the wild.

We gathered at the Centre in the morning with maybe fifty other tourists and, after a briefing, walked a couple of hundred metres through the jungle to the feeding station.  As we filed down the path, cameras in hand, the orang-utans made their way through the forest canopy.  We could hear the odd crash above us and every now and then see a wise, hairy, quizzical face looking down at us through the foliage.  Orang-utans move very slowly.  They hang from one branch then carefully test the next before swinging across and stopping to check out their next handhold.  Sometimes they will test a rope or a creeper several times before trusting their weight to it.  They eat lugubriously, like an absent-minded old man chewing on a sandwich while reading a newspaper.

At the feeding station we bald apes worshipped in silence, raising our cameras and Ipads in supplication to our new god - experience.  All of us eager to capture something of the moment to take home and show our friends.  Snap, snap, snap we went.  Most of us know we are only going to see orang-utans in the wild, or semi-wild, once in our lives, so we do our best to make the most of it and fight off the inevitable feeling of anti-climax.  After I'd had my fill of taking pictures of the orang-utans I took some more of the humans taking pictures, desperately trying to get that perfect David Attenborough shot and never quite succeeding.

I wonder what the orang-utans make of it all.  One moment their home is being smashed down and torched by crazed bald apes and the next they are being petted, looked after and photographed reverently.  No wonder they look puzzled and a bit sad.