Understated - Kuching, Malaysia is a colorful place. This quaint town on the Island of Borneo is accented by lush vegetation and creative architecture. Both accents are bright with color.The surrounding jungles are humid and thick. Old Viet Nam war movies often show a dense jungle. Malaysia looks similar. Being there made me feel bad for the soldiers that endured the heat and dampness of the jungles. It's not exactly a place that you would want to be roaming through. But subtly tucked into the jungles are some of the most vibrant flowers anywhere in the
world. The collage seen here shows off the beauty of Malaysia's vegetation. From my perspective, the flower on the top left is one of the most brilliant photos we took. Not only is the flower beautiful, but take notice of the bamboo stalks in the faded background. The stalks were segmented by bright colors. Can you imagine a bamboo stalk changing from yellow to green to orange to red? It happens in Malaysia.Like so much of Asia, colorful architecture is common. Kuching has riverfront
shopping called the "main baazar." The photos seen here were taken on the oldest street in the heart of old Kuching. This area offers numerous stores selling handmade woodwork, crafts, paintings, clothing, and more. We enjoyed the challenge of bargaining and came home with a lovely Malaysian vase and two hand painted and carved wooden masks measuring 3 1/2 feet each, respectively. Wire us a few bucks and we'll ship some sweet stuff to you.
We have seen our fair share of wildlife in 6 weeks of travel. If you revisit our previous blog entries from Maui, Dubai, Jakarta, and Malaysia, you'll see a plethora of exotic creatures. We had close encounters with a number of endangered species including the humpback whale (Maui), Monk Seal (Maui), Green Sea Turtle (Maui), and the orangutan (Malaysia). As seen in our previous video, a mother orangutan and her baby came within inches of us as we watched them in a wildlife reserve near Kuching, Malaysia. These amazing creatures are on the endangered species list and can be found in the wild on the Indonesian island of Sumatra and on the island of Borneo (shared by Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei). The word orangutan is derived from local Malay and Indonesian words. Orang means "person" and hutan means "forest," thus "person of the forest." These extremely intelligent rainforest dwellers spend roughly 90% of their lives in the trees, so capturing video of 4 different orangutans on the ground was a unique experience. As you can see from the video in our last post, the mother orangutan was not intimidated by us at all. She seemed to make a conscious decision that we were not there to harm her or the baby and then she came out of the canopy toward us. The orangutan's cognitive abilities have led many researchers to believe that orangutans are the world's most intelligent animals other than humans. They have been known to utilize tools, build shelter, and even make rain hats or umbrella-like weather guards. We observed some interesting behavior when we noticed that the mother orangutan and the one that followed her both picked up a hefty rock before climbing from the ground. You can see that they place the rocks in their mouths and then climb the electric pole tether. This is purely speculation, but we thought maybe they grabbed rocks as weapons in case something or someone tried to grab them from behind as they climbed from low areas. Once they reached a higher position in the trees, they dropped the rocks. One thing is for sure, with such a small orangutan population remaining, these close encounters in the wild are a treasure.