Week 1

I’ve been here over a week now, and i’ve learned that the mosquitoes love me!! Our journey in Borneo began last Thursday we made the 10 hour journey from Kota Kinabalu by jeep over the mountains by Mount Kinabalu and across Sabah to Tabin. The first 7 hours were with Benoit (in charge at Danau Girang- DG) in his car, mainly on tarmac roads but a few gravel roads too, and then we met Penny (Banteng PHd Student) at the DG boat crossing point and she drove the rest of the way to her house in Tabin. Her house is on the nature reserve and is an hour and a half from the nearest town of Lahad Datu. It has 2 bedrooms, an office, a living room, a wet shower room (an actual shower and an actual toilet!) and a kitchen. The house is run completely by a generator, which luckily runs nearly 24/7 here. There is running water in the house which is pumped up from the river and its used for washing and cooking, any drinking water has to be collected from town.

This first week we have just bee settling in and learning how to set up and use the camera traps and GPS. We have been charging batteries for the 2 grids of 72 camera traps in Malua Forest reserve, each camera trap holds 12 batteries so it’s been a never ending process since last Friday to get enough charged ready to go!

I have seen 2 orangutans up in the trees outside the house and a family of bearded pigs out on the road when we went for a walk at the weekend. When we went down to the nearby safari lodges we saw a pair of very rare white crested hornbills and their juvenile feeding in the trees. Today we are heading to Malua forest reserve where the Banteng camera traps are set up at the moment, it’s 3 hours drive from Tabin so another chance to have a good look at the landscape and try and see some more animals. :)