We arrived at Balikpapan, Borneo, a bustling city of 750,000 inhabitants, and
often voted as one of the most beloved cities in Indonesia. It has a high
number of ex-patriots, and is known for its nightlife, which is, ironically,
minus any alcohol in this part of the world.
We had no
opportunity to spend time in the city because we were scheduled for a long tour
to Samboja Lestari Rainforest and the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, a
survival facility founded in 1991, and the Kawasan Wisata Pendidikan Lingkungan
Hidup, otherwise known as the Sun Bear Center. The drive was long. The small bus
with narrow seats honked its way through the big city and into the countryside
of shady trees and lush foliage. After an hour it turned onto a gravel-and-dirt
road that would put any tires to the test. For fifteen minutes we jostled along
until we came to a point in the road where even smaller vehicles waited. The
pot-holed road was too rough for busses.
After fifteen more bumpy minutes, we stopped and got out in a large forest, with a moat of reedy,
fresh water dividing it. Across the moat a few young orangutans came to watch
us, as we watched them. On the other side of the road, we saw a beautiful adult
male with a long shaggy copper coat that had been in the circus. He walked upright,
with his arms raised in a “don’t shoot” gesture. Very bright, he seemed to
tease the onlookers by putting peas in his mouth and smiling so that it looked
as if he had green teeth. And he showed us objects that he’d collected. A
female nearby had been traumatized by her captors and was very shy. Another
nodded her head constantly. These orangutans would stay in the center for life
because of their previous, negative interactions with humans. Other younger ones would be rehabilitated and returned to the wild.
The vehicles
then drove us to the Sun Bear Center a few miles away. Sun bears are the world’s smallest bear species, and they’re endemic to Borneo. The center is dedicated to saving rescued bears and educating the public about the importance of preserving Borneo’s flora and fauna. The 40 bears seemed content in
their four-acre forest environment that included metal ‘houses’ that allowed an
escape from the rain. These bears would not be returned to the wild. They
seemed very sweet, and eager to interact with us. Many of us wanted to pet
them, but the bears’ very long claws hinted that they could do some very real
damage if they wanted to and we were told not to touch them.
We sailed east crossed the
Makassar Strait some 310 miles to Parepare on the island of
Sulawesi, which, at one time, consisted of multiple islands with many different
soil types. It’s a mountainous area
and nomadic people still live in the forests. At this point, we’d crossed into
the Southern Hemisphere, and the water depth fell from shallow to over 5000
feet—a shift that demarks “The Wallace Line,” a finite border between the
species of Asia and the species of Australia. Bali is Asian in its species, and Lombok, across the Lombok
Strait, is Australian.
Alfred Russell
Wallace spent eight years in Indonesia, collected beetles, and wrote a book
about his discoveries in the region—birds, leopards, orangutans. He visited
Sumatra, Java, and Bali where tigers and elephants roamed freely. He also went
to Nusa Tenggara where he found quite different animals—komodo dragons, and
birds like the honeyeater. He traveled to Lusawesi to see macaques, tarsees,
kuscous (marsupials), and Halmahera and found a new species of butterfly, the
Golden Birdwing, and a new species of Bird of Paradise. In New Guinea he found
cassowaries, and another bird of paradise—a bird hunted for its plumes. Borneo
has fifty-nine endemic species, and Sulawesi over a hundred.
Wallace believed
that the two islands were once connected by land shelves—bridges of woodland
and savanna. Animals could easily
cross from one to the other when the sea level was lower. This bio-geographic
region is still called Wallacia. Because the animals changed once the regions
separated, the plants did too.
Long-tailed macaques were important seed dispersers, but the plants on
the other side of the ‘line’ adapted to entice different dispersers. Likewise,
animals adapted to become a separate species. The sail-fin lizard, also found
in Sulawesi, became vegetarian, surviving only on fruits and vegetable matter.
A flying lizard, birds like red knobbed hornbills, serpent eagles, several
species of king fishers, the satanic nightjar that camouflages itself at night
and sleeps on the ground, are all well known, although maleos are scarce
because they’ve been hunted. When the eggs, which are buried in volcanic soil,
hatch, the baby birds scramble to the surface. Various snakes, dwarf buffalo,
frogs, bats, stick insects, jumping spiders, pitcher plants, and all sorts of
things exist in Sulawesi. It’s a lively place.
