"Are they bothered by the presence of so many humans?" I ask our guide. "No, but I wish they were, " he replies. "They keep me up all night rubbing against the stilts of the staff room." Oh, for the life of a Sabahan guide.
The next day we're on the boat heading up a tributary, when we happen across another boatful of tourists, and Fernando the guide pauses to speak to the boat driver. Suddenly he turns tail, speeding us back the way we've come, executing the equivalent of a right-angled wheelie onto the Kinabatangan and racing up towards a bend, where we first see the boats, and then the elephants, grazing at the water's edge.
They're definitely smaller than other elephants - some of the female adults are shorter than me. There are a lot of babies snuffling about too, playing with each other and occasionally getting into trouble with the adults. Although the boats have to keep a certain distance away, we're only about three metres from one mother and child. She doesn't seem at all concerned. I am though - last year, a pygmy elephant trampled a woman to death in eastern Sabah after she used the flash on her camera.
It's a massive herd; I count forty elephants including babies, and can hear the trumpeting of more in the forest, hidden from the camera lenses. This is a good thing, because the only place in the world this subspecies is found is in eastern Sabah, and there's only around 2,000 of them altogether. They're in trouble because of the fragmentation of their habitat - illegal loggers and palm oil plantations cut into their forest homes, and create barriers on their migration routes. The migration route here is being grabbed back in stages by a government-WWF partnership. It's a rather lovely route: the elephants meander up one side of the river, then swim across, and wander back down the other side. The river crossing is something to behold, creating a traffic jam on the river as palm oil transport, tourist boats, and local canoes are forced to stop and wait for them. One day, one day...
At night, the wildlife, unconcerned by the rattle of a dinner trolley bearing our meals to the floating restaurant, move into the lodge's canopy to eat, hunt and sleep. One night there's a flying lemur who defies photography, another night a troupe of sweet-faced Silvery Lutungs settle in with their startlingly ginger babies.
Unfortunately, they're not very aggressive, which of course means that they make good pets, which is one reason their numbers are declining rapidly. Another is the ubiquitous palm oil plantations stealing their habitat. Is it nagging if I ask you again to stop using palm oil? Sorry. But stop it. Really.
Okay, so when I was a child, I was completely freaked out by the Ground Hornbill. It terrified me, with its visceral markings and evil eyes. Borneon hornbills are nothing like this, though, which is lucky... Sarawak is often called Land of the Hornbills, but Sabah has a few too - eight species, of which I have now seen eight. My sister Lisa managed to rack up five on our trip to Sukau. Most of them aren't difficult to find, and as we drift down the river, Oriental Pied and Rhinoceros hornbills drift regularly overhead. The difficult thing is getting photos of the damn things. Here's one, for example:
Yeah, that's a Rhinoceros Hornbill. I swear it. An Oriental Pied Hornbill stays at the lodge overnight though, and he's a little more amenable.
Despite what you may think, had you thought of such a thing, hornbills aren't feminists. When the time comes, the male walls the female up into a hole in a tree, where she lays her eggs. A single opening remains, just big enough for the male to pass food to the mother and chicks, and there they remain until space becomes an issue, when the female will break out.
There's a whole lot of analogies to be drawn out there...
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