Day 64 & 65 (9-10 August)

I spent these two days in Bako National Park which is close to Kuching but an effort to get to and back from since you first have to take a bus to a boat jetty and then wait for a sufficiently large group of people and take a boat into the park since there are no trails or roads that lead into it. Given the amount of time it takes to get to the park only about 40 people visit a day in peak years. I spent most of the time wandering around in the jungles and on the beaches and looking for wildlife in the world's oldest continuous growth forest which is located there. (The rainforest there is over 100 million years old as Borneo was unaffected by the ice age. It was much more impressive than the only other rainforest I've been to which was in Costa Rica.) The wildlife I saw included Probiscous Monkeys with big noses (which are unique to Borneo and there are only about 200 left), silver monkeys, wild boars, a lepoard (that was more scared of me that I was of it when we stubbled across paths in the park's highlands), flying lemurs, an estuarine crocidile, and numerous small lizards.

Observations:
1) The rainforest and the jungle is just like any other economy. There is a limited amount of resources (soil, light, space) and all of the plants and animals are competing for them; basically its a big optimization problem. That means that in a continuous growth forest like this one was, things get very competitive to the point that you cannot see the soil and tree roots grow intertiwned over each other in the forest, which are then covered by moss that has new trees growing out of it. The animals then find unique ways to camaflouging themselves.
2) Natural bug zapper. All you need is an open florescent light and a bunch of little lizards that can hang on to the ceiling upside down. Where the park headquarters had one of these, all the lizards flocked to it as did the bugs which they ate; this kept the bugs off the people spending the night in the park.