Pygmy Elephants in Borneo

The Kinabatangan River lies in eastern Borneo Malaysia, running for about 350 miles and emptying into the Sulu Sea near Sandakan. I’m in Sandakan for four days and it’s an easy decision to overnight upstream and witness the river’s wildlife with my own eyes camera.

Most hostels and hotels in Sandakan offer this sort of tour — a morning drive to Sukau (main town along this part of the river), followed by lunch, an afternoon river cruise, then dinner, a night cruise, bed, and a final 6am cruise before heading back to Sandakan. This way guests can experience the Kinabatangan at various times of day and increase the odds of spotting exciting wildlife.

A few of the highlights we’re expected to see are orangutans, proboscis monkeys, pygmy elephants, alligators, and many species of birds. There are even rhinos much further down the river, but it’s unlikely we’ll see them here.

We prepare for the first of our three river cruises. I love the color of that water… deep brown feels legitimately exotic and even a tad dangerous, like something could pop out at any moment.

We search for alligators in this area but nothing turns up. We’ll try again at night…

Another boat speeds by to report there’s a heard of pygmy elephants a few minutes upstream. We take off and soon spot this:

There is an entire heard nearby, but only this elephant has ventured out to say hello.

He moves to another section of grass and our boat driver zooms over to get us a good angle.

With a final flip of his ears, he moves deeper into the woods.

We catch up with his heard, hiding in the tall grass nearby.

Unfortunately they’re almost entirely obscured by the grass, but we ready our cameras just in case they decide to make an appearance.

We can just make out their shapes in the grass and there are clearly a few babies (or midget elephants… is that a thing?) shuffling mere feet away from us. How frustrating that we can’t see them.

UPDATE: dwarf elephants became extinct 11,000 years ago. But they used to be a thing. For my fellow southern California residents, this wikipedia page notes that dwarf elephants lived on the Channel Islands about 40,000 years ago.

While we’re all waiting impatiently for the elephants to outgrow their camera shyness, I happen to glance down the river and see something squatting in the distance. I snap a quick photo and then return my attention to the elephants in the brush. When I upload my photos later, I look more closely at the figure below… and I’m shocked to realize it may have been an elusive orangutan.

Or is it Sasquatch? It doesn’t quite look human. Here’s the same photo blown up:

We are so distracted by the elephants that we miss a chance to move closer to this guy. Turns out in all three of our river cruises, we never spot a wild orangutan… so this would’ve been our only chance. And no one else saw it! Heck, I’m not sure a quick shot through a zoom lens even counts as “seeing” it.

But we do encounter the more ubiquitous proboscis monkeys (say that three times fast). These creatures have long penis-shaped noses and I’ll write about them in-depth when I visit Labuk Bay Sanctuary in a few days.

We also spot loads of birds… like this Great Hornbill, which appears to have two beaks(!) but the top one is a casque.

We head back to shore as the sun sets.

Tomorrow I’ll share my photos from the night cruise — for reasons you’ll soon see, it was the most special of the three times we went up and down this river.

Right now I’ll skip ahead to our 6am cruise. There’s mist in the air and a serene, low-key vibe along the river, as though the wildlife would like to sleep in just as much as the humans on the boat.