When good things turn bad in the jungles of Borneo.

Gliding down the river in a rickety wooden boat, the thick humid air of the wilderness brushing us with ominous calm, we are elated to arrive at our stilt hut in the jungles of Borneo – what an adventure it will be to have monkeys venture out of the forest and sit on our roof!

How are we to know though, that we are heading towards a terrifying encounter with these furry little monsters, and with only a handful of people nearby to hear us scream.

We consider ourselves to be pretty good travellers. We respect the culture and the locals wherever we go, and we are most often not clueless morons. In our early days of travel, however, we admit to a slip-up.

After only a few days in Sabah (Malaysian Borneo) discovering mountain forests and caves along the way, we arrive at an old wooden jetty in some nether land to catch a boat to our River Lodge accommodation in Sukau. Our destination is on the corner of the Kinabatangan and Menanggol rivers, is well disguised by the jungle that it sits within, and shares its location with various monkeys, Orang-Utans, utterly gigantic lizards and rare Hornbills that flap overhead and sound how I imagine a pterodactyl would.

Disembarking onto another wooden jetty, we trundle off down the boardwalk toward our hut on stilts, wheeling our ‘inappropriate for the situation’ suitcases along and trying to dodge the holes in the wooden planks that we were walking on. The elephants had come through last week and smashed part of it, while also ripping the light fittings off their poles, and we are sorry that we had missed this spectacle.

The Rules

After settling in, we are given a rundown on a bit of jungle etiquette – the do’s and don’ts that are required of visitors while attending the lodge. My problem is that I am a boundless daydreamer whose ears might technically hear things, but the brain is off somewhere else in fantasy land.

Amongst the list of rules that I’m tuning out to, I do hear “If we hear thumping and noise on the roof of the hut, don’t worry it’s just the monkeys that come in occasionally”. Also, “don’t leave your underwear or anything else out to dry, as they will steal it all”. Hearing this, all I want now is monkeys on my roof as this sounds pretty exciting to me . . . so off I go into a daydream about such things.

Potentially murdered by elephants

The excitement of being in this beautiful location possesses me to cross that little footbridge near our room and venture down the track, away from the lodge and into the depths of the jungle for a bit of a self-guided jungle discovery tour.

I do tend to want to see what’s around every corner and climb to the top of everything when I’m away, and I lead Dan further and further along until he refuses to let me continue. I am happy enough by then I suppose, as we had come across fresh elephant dung and footprints in the mud, so it was time to somehow retrace our steps and find our way back. On our return, our guide finds us and turns pale at the realisation that we could have been killed by elephants if we had found them or they had found us (not long after we arrived home, somebody was in fact killed by an elephant not far from where we were). I guess that might have been one of the rules that I wasn’t listening to.

The beginning of trouble

Hanging around in our hut, we pull a pack of sesame snaps out of our bag that we had stashed away for a snack emergency, as this was an unlikely place to find a vending machine in between meals.

As Dan proceeds to tear open the pack, he immediately drops the sweet, crunchy brick of sesame snaps on the floor. Not wanting to attract ants into the hut by using the bin, our next reaction is to just Frisbee the sweet stack out the door. Onto the forest floor. Into the presence of a monkey. He and quite a lot of his mates had ventured into the area not long before and he was sitting on a huge vine just outside our front porch.

At this point, we are thrilled to experience our first wild monkey/Borneo jungle encounter and delight in the fact that this monkey is also thrilled at experiencing his first sesame snap. We grab our cameras and take some photos before I wander off back up the boardwalk to immerse myself amongst the rest of his family, who are scattered everywhere amongst the other huts. As I’m snapping away taking monkey photos, oblivious at the fact that monkeys are not always as cute as they seem and that you should be wary of them, I start to inch myself closer and closer to one of them. It’s a bit dark under the trees and my camera isn’t that good, so I want to get just that little bit closer…

But this monkey has had enough. How many photos do I need of him? And now I’m just getting in his face. He leans forward and hisses at me. I lean forward and hiss back.

The Chase

Suddenly he rises from his sitting position and starts to move towards me. I back away and immediately see two others approaching from either side to join him. They march in perfect alignment towards me down the boardwalk. If only I could get a shot of that, if not for my life suddenly becoming an urgent matter. I turn and attempt to remove myself from their presence, but they continue with their intimidation tactics and move swiftly. I panic but at least have the sense to realise that if I run they would outrun me, and I curse that I hadn’t gone ahead with that rabies vaccination.

Dan is up ahead still checking out sesame monkey, which is right down the end of the boardwalk where our room is. I’m power walking at this point and only just staying out of reach of the marching monkeys. I start yelling at Dan ‘Is it open? Is it open?’. I can see him trying to work out what is happening and I keep yelling in a bit of a high pitched desperation voice ‘The room! Is it open?’

The Escape

By the time we haven’t even worked out the answer to that most desperate of questions, I’m there and bolting up the steps to the room, Dan right behind me swinging his camera like a helicopter in the offending monkey’s face to try to keep it at some kind of distance (the other two must have dropped off at the last minute – the cowards).

This thing is probably tiny, but I swear they all seemed huge and menacing, and about to eat my limbs one by one. I make it inside, slam the door and leave Dan out there still swinging his camera to fend it off. I don’t even care that I have locked him out at this moment, as I think I have a blood nose from the terror of it all. There is no blood though and I’m fine, but it may be a different situation outside for all I know.

. . . . . .

The next morning we pack up and leave our jungle abode. The monkeys are still everywhere, on the ground, on the roofs, in the trees. I carry my inappropriate suitcase back down to the boardwalk and drag it along the bumpy, broken slats. I feel dozens of eyes burning into me and I don’t dare look up until I reach safety.

Lessons

Lesson one: Don’t be a stupid tourist and (accidentally) feed the wild animals, especially not to cause a sugar high and possible tooth decay in a monkey.

Lesson two: Apparently in our jungle etiquette briefing we were told that if a monkey hisses at you, don’t hiss back whatever you do, as they take it as a challenge.
I guess I was daydreaming at the time and missed that bit.

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