Orang-utans at Rasa Ria

The last time I was in Borneo I took the plane across to Sarawak to visit the orang-utan sanctuary. This time I took the easy option of taking a bus (through 90 minutes of Kota Kinabalu traffic) to the Shangri-La sister resort which has a nature reserve attached. This has just a couple of orphan orang-utans, two 4 year old boys, but that's enough for me.

The starting point is that the orangs are fed by leaving a pile of fruit out for them on a platform. We the visitors are allowed to stand on a two-deck viewing platform nearby.

The orangs do face competition from a troop of long-tailed macaques

 

Okay enough orang-utans. As I had spare time to kill before the shuttle bus back to my hotel, I proceeded to have a look around. As I said, they have a nature reserve so orangs (and macaques) are not the only animals they keep,

Rasa Ria has a lovely stretch of beach, as you can see here. Perhaps at this juncture I should say something about the weather. According to the locals, I had come here in the rainy season (and most of the year is the rainy season). According to my lonely planet guide, it was the dry season. And according to the BBC weather forecast I endured thunderstorms every day.

In fact it only rained twice while I was out here; once at night and once at about 3:30 this afternoon. So you may notice its a bit cloudy below. Within an hour the heavens had opened.

I can't quite understand why the BBC forecasts were so bad, every day. Frankly they couldn't have done worse if they had been divining the weather by searching the entrails of chickens. Could save a fortune on computing power.