Published on Feb, 2019
We contacted Mr. Aji for a 2D1N trip and luckily he had availability at quite short notice (mr.ajisdk@gmail.com) quick reply.
He picked us up from Sepilok at 10.30am. We drove to Kinabatangan which was about 2 hours away, checked in to our room. Basic but yes it was clean and there was AC which is all we really wanted. We did the afternoon cruise which was about 2pm to 6pm where we saw orangutans, and lots and lots of different types of monkeys. We then went back for dinner, and did our jungle night walk. We were so lucky to spot a clouded leopard. Weren’t expecting to see any at all as Mr. Aji said he had only seen them on 4 occasions in 2018, and this was the first of 2019 (it was only 27th Jan but still!!!) other than this we saw bats, fireflies, lots of spiders, and other cats I can’t remember what they were called. Next morning we did morning cruise from 6.30am to 8.30am, we saw snakes (again very lucky) lizards, baby croc (quite hard to spot crocs during rainy season because the water is high so again lucky) more orangutans, more monkeys, and a flying lemur. After this we were dropped back to Sepilok by lunch time.
We thoroughly enjoyed our trip with Mr. Aji. He has some kind of magical vision that allows him to spot wildlife from far I’m sure!! We found him to be friendly, if he didn’t answer our questions it was because he was concentrating on what he was doing, not because he was ignoring us!
Mr. Aji actually does a lot of work on the river, he showed us some rope bridges he had built which allowed the monkeys to cross the river. And all of this is his own expense, the government don’t fund this.
It rained for about an hour on our cruise, and there is no roof on boat, so Make sure you take a rain jacket. We wore wellies also which we are happy about as our feet remained dry and we also felt comfortable wearing these on the jungle walk as it kept all the bugs and biting ants out! So I’d definitely reccomend wearing wellies.
P.s take snacks like crisps or something because breakfast isn’t huge and you might not like dinner (all Malaysian food).