Making Close Contacts of the Orangutan Kind

Within a minute of our arrival by boat, my wife, Cat, had a baby orangutan thrust into her arms.

“I must make tea. I must make tea,” one of the rangers said frantically. “Could you hold him for a moment? It’s all right, isn’t it?”

All right to hold a baby orangutan? My wife was wearing one of the biggest smiles I had ever seen. “Welcome to Kutai, East Kalimantan,” said the ranger, returning with two glasses of tea.

My wife also let me hold the little orangutan. To hold the infant, to feel its skin and hair and to have it grasp your hand was a unique and wonderful sensation.

Kutai National Park on the Indonesian side of Borneo is where guests can make close contact with orangutans, found in the wild only on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra. These “wild men of Borneo,” as an early explorer described them, are an endangered species.

Because their ultimate fate rests with their habitat, the rain forest, getting to see one of these apes outside of a zoo is a rare event.

Borneo and Sumatra have several orangutan rehabilitation centers, but most restrict contact between travelers and orangutans because they receive many thousands of visitors a year.

Kutai, on the other hand, is different. Because of its remote location, the park gets very few visitors--maybe 25 a year--who generally stay only one or two days. In a busy month, five or six travelers may show up. The rangers spend most of their time in the reserve, which is about two hours by boat from the closest town.

The Indonesian government for years has had plans to develop and expand Kutai Park. Plans include a road that would link the reserve with Samarinda, the provincial capital, as well as guest cottages and larger staff quarters.

The road will make Kutai more accessible, but may also destroy the special quality that the area offers because it gets so few visitors. No one seems to know when the road will be built; virtually no progress has been made on it in the last three years.

Three guest bungalows are under construction now. If you want to see the park in its pristine condition, visit it in the next few years.

After playing with the baby orangutan only a few minutes, one ranger said, “Come quickly. Big orangutan.”

We followed him outside into the clearing where an adolescent orangutan was just coming in from the jungle. The rehabilitation center takes in orphaned orangutans and trains them to live on their own in the jungle.

Occasionally, semi-wild “teenagers” come back for food. This one ran to Cat and climbed up her clothing until he was holding onto her by the back of her neck. He appeared to be as strong as he was heavy.

“He wants some food,” said the ranger. “We call it ‘Orangutan Terrorism.’ He’ll hang on until you give him something to eat. He won’t hurt you, though.”

I went back for the bananas I had brought with us. When the orangutan saw the food, he jumped onto me, plucked the bananas out of my hand and climbed into a tree.

We went for a walk through the jungle, which felt like a scene out of an adventure movie as the ranger hacked a trail through the brush with his machete. He pointed out orchids, trees that had what looked like human hair growing from their trunks and limbs, all sorts of medicinal and carnivorous plants. He made us wait silently while a wild boar ran across our path.

We couldn’t see the sun because of the forest canopy. If the ranger hadn’t made notch marks on trees as we walked, we would have had no idea how to get back. We saw a wild orangutan in a tree and also came across some large monitor lizards near the water’s edge.

Just before sunset some deer came out to feed near the rangers’ quarters. A spectacular hornbill flew by as the baby orangutan crawled on our laps and played. It was about as perfect as it ever gets.

The trip to Kutai Park is rough. First, you have to get to Samarinda or Balikpapan on the Indonesian east coast of Borneo. Direct connections to the outside world are few, the best being a direct flight to Balikpapan from Brunei on the north coast of Borneo (with easy access from Singapore or Hong Kong).

A crowded longboat leaves Samarinda every morning about 6 a.m. to Bontang, an eight-hour trip down the Mahakam River and onto the open sea. A few days a week, from both Samarinda and Balikpapan, a “speedboat” makes the trip in four to six hours.

Once in Bontang, go straight to Kutai Park headquarters, known in Indonesia as Taman National Kutai or PPA. The rangers at the headquarters will help arrange a hotel for the night, and a boat charter out to the park reserve.

Round trip from Samarinda to the park should cost about $40 U.S. per person for everything: transportation, food and lodging. Lodging inside the park is free now, but a nominal fee is expected to be charged when the guest quarters are completed.

Longboats are not comfortable. The hotels in Bontang are definitely not Holiday Inn caliber. And there are no mattresses at the park site. If you go, it’s a good idea to take along a pad or air mattress.

It’s also a good idea to bring some food. The rangers have plenty of rice and are willing to share it. But sometimes they run out of everything else (for three days before our arrival they were living on only rice and sugar).

Noodles, fresh fruit, vegetables and protein, such as dried fish or meat, hard-boiled eggs or canned meat are good ideas. You can buy everything in Bontang. It would be a nice gesture if you shared the food with the rangers. They do a lot for visitors.

For more information, contact the Indonesia Tourist Promotion Office, 3457 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 105, Los Angeles 90010, (213) 387-2078.