Efforts paid off.

Tripoto
9th Feb 2014

Proboscis monkey

Photo of Efforts paid off. by Discover wild world

For long, I was hoping to visit the National Parks, especially the famous jungles of Borneo, surrounding Sarawak .... and here I am, done with my planned trips, revelling on the experience I have been through. I will try to put as much as possible in words but friends, my sincere suggestion is that if you want to get a real feel of it, just visit atleast once....it will be worth the effort and time. The key highlights of my trip were my meetings with the Proboscis Monkeys (long nosed monkeys) who I got to meet in Semenggoh and Bako NPs respectively. Semenggoh NP was the one within driving distance, on the outskirts of the city of Kuching, and easy to reach but Bako NP was not the same. I had planned to spend a night at Bako NP so I booked and packed accordingly and left the city early in the morning. The journey started with driving from Kuching to a small fishing village 40 minutes away where we had to leave our car and take a 30-minute boat ride to the island. The complete journey was quite smooth and quite uneventful except for the 30-minute boat ride which I feel the need to elaborate a little bit. As per habit, I kept my camera ready to take a few good clicks of the mangroves surrounding the river mouth leading to the sea, so my natural choice was my 5D MK II with the wide angle lens. We were on the Santubong River leading to an island in the South China Sea. In the beginning I was sitting happily at the helm of the boat clicking away to glory and slowly I realised that sitting there trying to balance myself and click simultaneously, was getting more and more challenging. To confirm my intuition, the boatman soon instructed me to sit in the centre of the boat since we were hitting open sea and really choppy waters. The sea was really rough and turbulent and it almost seemed like we were facing nature's fury. Our progress was really slow since we had to tackle wave after wave and to deal with it, our boatman decided to take a long winded route and play it safe. Soon, this was my state.....I had my camera hanging around my neck, totally forgotten, and I was holding on to the boat rails really tightly....with a scared expression, definitely not enjoying the roller coaster ride...if only anyone would have taken a picture of me at that point in time !!! The entire scene in totality was made scarier by the colour of the water which was brown and not the standard blue. Anyway, 30 minutes later we were on solid ground, safe and sound, thanks to Mr Kamri, our boatman. To my happiness we were welcomed by wild boars, kingfishers and eventually Proboscis monkeys who helped us to forget the ordeal we had to go through to get there and made the entire trip really worthwhile. Since the check-in was only at 1400 hrs, I had a few hours to relax in the cafeteria, set up my Canon 1D, 600 MM and get a few relaxed shots at the beach front. The maximum time at Bako was spent observing and capturing the activities of the Proboscis Monkeys and before I knew it, it was time to return to base.

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