Perhaps the most eye-catching thing about the jungle in north-east Sabah is how little of it is left to catch the eye. On the three-hour drive east from Ranau, the commonest view is one of the oil palm, twenty-year-old dark green hulks, pale and tender babies, a spiky carpet from roadside to horizon. Palm oil is the difference between squalor and wealth for many families - from a single hectare, harvesting twice a month, a farmer can make RM2000 a month with ease, in a region where the average wage - if you're lucky enough to have a paid job - is around RM500. It's easier to condemn the palm oil industry when it doesn't mean the difference for you between bare subsistence and an education for your child.
However. Most of these plantations belong to Big Business, not Little Farmer. They replaced primary jungle with a non-native weed. The palms are a perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes, and malaria and dengue fever are on the rise. Pygmy elephants, unable to cross the fenced and guarded plantations, are trapped in small pockets of forest. The birds are badly affected - in primary Bornean jungle, you'll find more than 220 species; in secondary forest after cultivation that drops to around 60. Palm oil plantations support ten. Just ten.
Palm oil is in everything you use, from shampoo to lipstick to cooking oil. For the sake of my view, which is far better when it's of jungle, please check the label next time you shop, and buy the product that doesn't contain death and destruction!
Besides, if your lipstick's got palm oil in it, then your beauty regime is killing orangutans, and orangutans are quite simply the most touching creatures I have ever had the privilege to meet.
They're being poisoned, starved, maimed and orphaned in large numbers by the plantations, but if they're lucky, they'll be found and taken home by the Sepilok Rehabilitation Centre. I wasn't originally going to go to the Centre - I'd had visions of a cramped zoo. But what it actually is is 43 sq km of forest, and a team of amazing, loving, foresighted people, who gently coax traumatised orangutans back into an independent life in the forest. Starting in the orphanage, the babies and young adults are fed daily at a series of feeding stations, each one deeper into the forest, each one serving smaller amounts, encouraging the orangutans to forage for the rest of their meals. So far, every orangutan has become independent - some are never seen again, some return now and then, to show off a new baby or say hello to a ranger.
Part of the Centre's income derives from Feeding Station A, which is open to the public. You watch from a separate platform as a ranger brings milk and fruit to a platform in the trees, but the orangutans have little care for the separation, and as I was standing there, a young male came swinging onto the boards, loping so close to me I could have cuddled him.
After the sanctuary, we set off on a 90-minute drive south, to a jetty on the Kinabatangan River, the second-longest river in Malaysia, and one of the best-protected reserves - not that you'd think so to look at it. Even here greed has won over thoughtfulness, and in between ten pockets of secondary growth forest, the palm oil plantations are huge. In some places they start right on the riverbank, but there's positive news - the WWF has wrested back control of a 100-metre corridor between each forest pocket, and in most places has ripped out the palms and replanted indigenous trees, allowing wildlife to move more easily. The farmers are not happy, but they've mostly submitted.
At the jetty, I and my co-travellers board a speedboat to travel 45 minutes upriver to "Uncle Tan's Wildlife Camp."
The website and other travellers have warned that it's the roughest camp on the river, that there's no luxury, that it's extremely basic - in short, that it's no 5-star hotel. But I find it far above my expectations. Yes, the accommodation is a mattress under a mosquito net, and you share a cabin with five other people. There's no bathroom as such, and you wash from buckets of river water in the open air. On the other hand, the buildings are wooden and on stilts; beneath them is moss and water, turtles, fish and monitor lizards, and above is the forest canopy, filled with birds. There's a big eating area with a staff cooperative that sells cold beer (there's no electricity except for a few hours in the evening, but they've got ice). And everything's spotlessly clean, which is a little short of a miracle in Sabah.
And it's beautiful and quiet, and on my first night a spotted civet pauses in its prowl less than a metre from me, watches me for a minute, and then silently slips into the forest.
The guys who work here are passionate about conservation and the forest, and knowledgeable. One is studying birdlife, another patrols the nearest corridor in his free time to make sure farmers are staying away. It's all a world away from the Hyatt, my first experience of Borneo, and all the better for it. We're lucky enough to see four orangutans in the wild, and hornbills, and an owl during his nighttime fishing. Eagles glide overhead, and down on the forest floor, we get to see tiny frogs, and chameleons, and what the ranger insists on calling a trilobite - it certainly looks like the fossils, but aren't trilobites extinct? This place is pretty prehistoric - I wouldn't put a live trilobite past it!
I could have done with a few more days, but had to make do with the two nights of boat rides and jungle trekking on offer, before getting back to the village for work...
