is Sarawaks oldest, but one of the smallest national park in the region.
Bako National Park is situated north from Kuching on the tip of a jagged peninsula. It is special because it has beaches,
cliffs and
rainforest.
The walking trails are very hard, but luckily it is not a must to walk very long to see the different attractions in the park. An overnight visit to the park shoved us a lot of different types of animals plus different types of landscape. We walked a little and went for a boat ride.
We saw wild boars, long tailed macaques, proboscis monkeys and three different types of snakes.
To get to Bako National Park we first had to take a local bus almost an hour. After the bus ride we took a boat from a tiny fishing village.
The little fishing village "Kampung Bako" had only the jetty and some small houses.
After about 20 minutes in the little boat we arrived to a jetty from where we walked about 10 minutes to our very basic lodge.
The long tailed macaques are probably the most fearless monkeys in the world.
They steal everything they can get hold on.
And they really like soft drinks altough they still have some learning on how to use the can...
They are the same monkeys as we saw in Bali in the monkey forest.
But sometimes they are just cute and
look so innocent.
Bako National Park is home to approximately 275 proboscis monkeys found only on Borneo.
The male is an odd-looking creature with a huge pendulous nose and a large pot-belly. The average male weight about 20 kg.
The monkeys are mostly arboreal, moving about the forest or mangroves in small groups and feeding on young leaves, shoots, sour fruits and seeds.
Markus saw the first monkeys on a trail where he went alone, but the monkeys also came to the part of the rain forest where our lodge was.
We both saw them early in the morning while we were having breakfast and before all the day tours arrived in small boats and scared everything away from the forest around the lodge.
The Bornean bearded pig is Bako's largest mammal.
Markus saw these boars on the trails, but they were also around our camp. We saw many of them and some of the had small piglets. They were really ugly, but cute in the same time. :)
We saw many brownish/greyish skinks or sun lizards scurrying away from the paths. These small fat lizards are many places around in the different parks and reserves in Borneo.
Bako National park is home to a number of snakes, most of which are harmless. They are well carmouflaged, and often slide off into the undergrowth at the first sign of danger or distubance.
We saw some snakes.
We saw the grass green viper snake. It has pencil thin body and has a long snout.
The only poisonous snake we saw is the Wagler's pit viper.
We recognized it by its broad, flat triangular head. This snake was green and not more than 30 cm. The only reason we found it was that a guide for tour group showed it to us. It was in our camp and we were told that it was totally drained for energy and just sat there and waited for some kind of little "food" to come by and then it would strike.
It was only Carina who saw the third snake. It was in the forest, but snaked away as soon as it felt me. It was red and black, thin and long, but we have no idea what kind of snake it was.
In the evening we went on a short walk. But it took us more than an hour to climb the less than two km.
We walked to a viewpoint and when we were finally up there we were rewarded with a great view over out camp.
On our boat ride
we really saw some amazing cliff formations.
Millions of years of erosion of the sandstone have created a coastline of steep cliffs, rocky headlands and stretches of white sandy bays.
Wave erosion at the base of the cliffs has carved many of the rocky headlands into fantastically shaped sea arches and seastacks with colored pattern formed by iron deposition.
Bako National Park is famous for this (below) rock formation.
Also on the beach in front of the park HQ there was some nice rock formations.
And an example of a boat that we traveled with.
After two days and one night in Bako we went back to Kuching where we had booked a room from the Grand Supreme that we liked a lot.
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