We arrived at the school bazaar and set up camp in a classroom. We’d put up the orang-utan bridge between two trees the day before and I’d quickly typed out a sign for it on Saturday morning:
Orangutan Bridges
There are several orangutan bridges in the Kinabatangan. They’re used to link patches of forest that have an obstacle between them, like a river. Orangutans can’t swim and it is hoped that they will use these bridges to move between forest fragments so that they are able to interact with orangutans in other parts of the forest.
The classroom was decorated by our ‘Save the *insert endangered species here*’ posters, focussing on orang-utans, elephants, wild cats and sun bears, and we shuffled over to make room for the scary face-painting team. It was actually quite a relief having someone else do the face-painting as I think we would have resorted to simply painting all the children orange and trying to convince them that they were orang-utans. Instead we focussed on our primate colouring sheets and mask making. João, one of the new students at Danau Girang and Farina were also there manning the darts game outside. João provided us with entertainment just by being quite tall when one of the little girls making a tiger mask said “Wow, you’re so tall, your arms are like an orang-utan! If you reach up really high, birds can make a nest in your hands!” That, on top of us introducing him to everyone with ‘This is João. He’s from Portugal, the capital of Spain!’, must have topped off his week. Overall, the bazaar went very well and it was good to work with the guys from Sukau and get to know them a bit better.
Last night was ‘Earth Hour’: Sixty minutes where people were encouraged to turn off the electricity to give our planet’s resources a well-earned break. I couldn’t work out how to turn the corridor lights off in the hostel, but I did make everyone sit in the dark until half past nine. Unfortunately we were hoping to go out to The Loft to enjoy a drink in the candlelight but as I couldn’t shower in the dark we missed it! Nevermind. We still had a good evening and I found someone who was willing to buy my rum and coke for me, which was rather nice.
Today we’ve been helping Farina get her wedding outfits made. I’m getting really excited about it now that we’ve found out we can come out to Kota Kinabalu for it! This evening we’ll meet up with Benoit after him and João have finished playing ‘futsal’ with the WWF guys and at some point I’ll carry on fiddling with orang-utan data. At the moment I’m just enjoying the sea view from The Coffee Bean. I came in here just to check emails and put this thing on the internet, only to find that the internet connection is down, which is annoying as I didn’t really fancy a coffee in the first place. The saving grace is that it’s a Sunday, so I get to drink tea today (which I’ve given up for lent) and there’s plenty of time to find somewhere else with connection to the www at some point!
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