Maliau Basin Trip

I have spent the past 5 days on expedition in Maliau Basin Conservation Area, this is a huge basin of primary and secondary forest with a buffer zone between the forest and the plantations. MBCA is 7 hours drive from our main base at Tabin, mainly on tarmac roads following the coastline and meandering through the oil palm plantations, which cover any land that doesn't have rainforest on it. On the way we passed some huge lorries full of logs and yards packed with stacks of logs that had all be chopped from the surrounding forest. I was on expedition with Penny and two of her workers Di and Lee, we were checking camera traps that were set in June by teams on another expedition. We managed to capture some great pictures on the cameras and had pictures of 8 Banteng individuals at 3 different sites :D. We also had photos of Malay badgers, banded palm civets and sun bears along with lots of pigs, deer, macaques and some rats! We were staying at a camp site but sleeping on the decking under a big wooden gazebo in our sleeping bags, a bit hard but the sounds of the jungle are amazing. There is an amazing canopy walkway just by our camp which we did on the last evening and made a nice change from hacking our way through the thick jungle floor...I now have my own Parang (jungle knife) and a lovely dirty pair of jungle rubber boots!! My paddling came in useful when we did a day in a blow up raft on the river looking for signs of hunters, in particular their camps along the river. We found loads of signs of the hunters and lots of camps full of their litter but luckily I didnt see any! We are going on another expedition to check two grids of 72 cameras tomorrow so i'll let you know how that goes!