Track orangutans by klotok in Borneo

Tanjung Puting National Park covers 416,040 hectares of Central Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo. It was made a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 1977 and a national park in 1982. Its fame comes from Camp Leakey, set up in 1971, where Dr Birutė Galdikas studied rescued and orphaned orangutans being returned to the wild, work that reached a wide public through a National Geographic cover story in 1975.

What the experience is

The way to see the park is by klotok, a slow, two-storey wooden riverboat. Boats start from the Kumai River near the town of Pangkalan Bun, then turn up the Sekonyer River. Meals are cooked on board and beds are laid out on the upper deck, so the days follow the river: forest edges drifting past, proboscis monkeys and macaques on the banks, and, on shore, walks to the feeding platforms and to Camp Leakey. A speedboat can reach Camp Leakey in about an hour and a half, but the point of a klotok is the slowness.

The park is also home to gibbons, clouded leopards, sun bears and sambar deer, as well as many birds, though most are seen rarely if at all. Orangutans are wild or semi-wild and encounters are not guaranteed to be close; the forest decides.

Behaving well

Keep your distance from the apes, and do not feed them or any other wildlife. Orangutans are vulnerable to human illness, so anyone who is unwell should stay on the boat. About 65 per cent of the park’s primary forest has been degraded by illegal logging and agricultural conversion, which is the reason to choose a guide and a boat that follow park rules.

Why OKYTO recommends it

Because it is a gentle, honest way to meet one of the world’s great apes in its habitat, with the history of orangutan conservation on the same river.