We soon heard the distinctive whooping calls of the gibbons, and saw them swinging through the treetops. It reminded us of our experience several years earlier when we were working in Singapore and spent a weekend in a hut in the forest near Johor Bahru on the Malaysian mainland: we were woken at dawn by the calls of the gibbons and saw and heard them crashing through the trees very close by.
Even more dramatic, for this was the first time we had seen them at close range, were the proboscis monkeys, the hall mark primates (together with the orang utans) of the remote jungles further east in Borneo. They are quite remarkable: the dominant male with his huge nose and smart white underpants, and the females of his harem with their pretty upturned nose, not to mention their very young baby, already with its distinctive nose. Hierarchy here is rigid: we were there when the keeper gave then their supper. The alpha male, his wife and their baby feasted calmly and undisturbed while the other females and younger males looked on from a distance.
There were of course a few orangs, but we were to see much more of them in the less civilised surroundings of the forest a few days later. A surprise was to see the local Malayan tigers, now a real rarity, and the Borneo pygmy elephants. The sun bears were a delight and the playful otters were to be seen wherever there was water.
