Spot Pygmy Elephants From a Boat on the Kinabatangan River – Before They Disappear

Along Borneo’s Kinabatangan River, the needs of wildlife, tourists, palm oil farmers and Indigenous communities might seem irreconcilable. Yet new conservation efforts might benefit all parties.

Article by Louise Coghill / Photography by Louise Coghill

Tourist boats travelling down the river.Tourist boats traverse the Kinabatangan River in Sabah state, Borneo, spotting wildlife in the dense jungle.

“Move back!” yells a ranger as a large male orangutan lumbers down the wooden walkway at Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre. “Move back!” other rangers yell, louder this time, as the tourists are proving slow at following directions. With no enclosures or fences in the park, rehabilitated orangutans are able to roam outside its boundaries. Wild apes such as Malim, the 24-year-old orangutan who is making his way past the now safely distanced tourists, are also free to wander in to snack on bananas left out on the feeding platform.

The Sepilok sanctuary spans 43 square kilometres in the north-east of Sabah, in Malaysian Borneo (the island is shared by Indonesia and Malaysia, while a small remaining region comprises the sultanate of Brunei). Opened in 1964 to rehabilitate orphaned baby orangutans, the centre offers visitors the opportunity to see great apes up close, with the money raised funding their much-needed care. Borneo is known globally not only for its diverse wildlife, but also, sadly, for the immense deforestation that has critically endangered its endemic species, requiring a growing number of conservation projects.

The Borneo trip had been a surprise; I hadn’t planned to make another overseas journey anytime soon. While I’d travelled extensively in my youth, global travel today feels burdened by its exacerbating effect on climate change, environmental damage and cultural loss. When I received an invitation to a good friend’s wedding in Malaysian Borneo, however, it seemed an unmissable opportunity to see the country’s natural wonders. While researching what to do in Sabah, I discovered the state has a growing focus on conservation and ecotourism, which sparked the question: Can tourism effectively support conservation efforts — and alleviate some of my travel guilt?

It’s later in the day and we’re on a motorboat, gliding swiftly along the turbid water of the Kinabatangan River, on our way to Sukau Rainforest Lodge. The Kinabatangan is one of Borneo’s hotspots of ecological diversity and a good place to see wild orangutans. It’s exhilarating to observe these animals in their natural habitat, but the reason they’re so visible is sobering: habitat loss around the river leaves these animals with nowhere else to go.

Gerosa moved into the 2,100-square-foot space, which has a basement studio of the same size, in 2020, in search of a place where he could both live and work. “But I didn’t want to make a typical architect’s loft,” he says. “That’s not my style.” Instead, he’s created a warm, irreverent home and atelier that speaks to a lifetime of collecting and curating forgotten objects. The layout of the single-story building — which is open save for the guest suite at the back and the primary bedroom at the front — allows Gerosa to keep his various passions at his fingertips. In the span of a few moments, he might arrange flowers in the kitchen, pull reference books off the shelves in the office, then disappear into the workshop, where he resuscitates vintage furniture.

Mohd Shahrul Ikhwan drives a small boat in search of orangutans
Mohd Shahrul Ikhwan drives a small boat in search of orangutans and other endemic species.
A long-tailed (crab-eating) macaque
A long-tailed (crab-eating) macaque watches the author’s boat from the trees.
a crocodile dozes on the riverbank.
a crocodile dozes on the riverbank.

Suddenly, the boat slows. I look over at the driver, wondering what’s going on.  “Elephants,” he exclaims, pointing excitedly to the left. Three wild pygmy elephants play in the water, eating elephant grass and locking tusks. “You are lucky to see them,” says our guide, Jimmy Abdul (Motalib). Abdul is a member of the Orang Sungai (Malay for “river people”), the Indigenous tribes who live in Sukau and the neighbouring fishing villages, and has been working in the conservation and tourism industry since 1988. “In fifty to sixty years, these elephants won’t exist — their genetic pool is too small,” Abdul says. Forest fragmentation due to logging, palm oil plantations, agriculture and other human activity impacts the corridors the elephants can move in, cutting them off from other herds throughout Borneo.

The boat docks at Sukau Rainforest Lodge, a beautiful timber structure built in 1995, the first of its kind on the shores of the Kinabatangan River. Elevated on one-and-a-half-metre stilts to avoid disturbing the forest floor and to minimise the impact of regular floods on the Kinabatangan floodplain, the lodge blends seamlessly with its natural surroundings. As we settle into our temporary jungle home, monkeys watch us from the trees just outside our villa, chirping to one another before swinging between branches in search of food. Abdul tells us that 80 per cent of Sukau Rainforest Lodge’s staff are employed from the local community. Albert Teo, the owner of the lodge and the founder of the Sukau Ecotourism Research and Development Centre (SERDC) and Borneo Eco Tours, is a pioneer in local ecotourism. He believes that providing more employment opportunities to local communities will help encourage people to protect the natural environment. It’s a view supported by many conservation organisations, including the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which states in its 2023 annual report that projects co-managed by local communities perform better than those led by government agencies alone.

The next morning, as the sun rises from behind a vine-laden canopy, we cruise farther along the Kinabatangan River in search of orangutans. Although several other boats are exploring the various tributaries, it remains peaceful. With only a small number of lodges on the river, the Kinabatangan isn’t suffering from overtourism, which means locals have a greater opportunity to get involved in the industry. The Bilai Kito Homestay association, formed in 2000, helps local villages offer homestays to tourists. It’s supported by the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture, which maintains infrastructure such as public toilets and jetties. The Sabah Tourism Masterplan, written in 1996, emphasises the necessity of the local community benefiting from tourism to ensure the effectiveness of the conservation-tourism connection.

The boat passes a large palm oil plantation, and the diverse, animal-filled jungle is suddenly replaced by a monocrop of oil palm trees. My heart jumps at the sight of these controversial trees, the prioritising of which has contributed to the addition of numerous species to the critically endangered list. “They fruit twice a month and are productive for over twenty years,” Abdul says, “so you know there’s a lot of money in these trees.”

Palm oil plants produce four to 10 times more oil than other vegetable oil crops per unit of cultivated land, and palm oil remains the world’s most widely used vegetable oil. According to the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute, a research body dedicated to sociopolitical, security and economic development in Southeast Asia, 40 per cent of Malaysia’s palm oil industry is made up of smallholdings. In 2021, there were 53,000 such smallholdings in Sabah, where palm oil contributes between a third and half of household income. The industry has brought economic growth to previously impoverished towns, where other employment opportunities are scarce.

While immense ecological damage has already been done, the state government and palm oil industry are attempting to slow and hopefully reverse the damage. In 2004, in collaboration with the WWF and others including the Malaysian Palm Oil Association (MPOA), the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) was formed, outlining environmental and social criteria that companies must comply with in order to produce RSPO Certified Sustainable Palm Oil (CSPO). In 2022, RSPO members set aside and managed 362,657 hectares designated as necessary for conservation.

Some conservation groups are utilising tourism within palm oil plantations to advance their objectives. For example, 1stopBorneo Wildlife leads tourists through a conservation zone within the Sabah Softwoods plantation. Here, visitors look for elephants and help plant fig trees, which serve as a food source for the elephants and help deter them from consuming young palm oil plants. The overarching goal is to promote the elephants in this area as valuable assets, thereby safeguarding their habitat.

The stilted walkways through Sukau Rainforest
The stilted walkways through Sukau Rainforest Lodge blend into the trees.
The open-air Melapi restaurant.
The open-air Melapi restaurant.

“Ecotourism can be seen as a potential opportunity for plantations to tap into to diversify their income,” Donna Simon, orangutan conservation manager for the Sabah Landscapes Programme at WWF-Malaysia, says in an email. “Linking this opportunity with conservation may be a way to encourage plantations to include conservation into their business model. For example, Sawit Kinabalu Plantation — a plantation in Sabah — has shown some interest in integrating ecotourism development in Sungai Pin Plantation, Kinabatangan. Sungai Pin Plantation is where they have also set aside about 2,000 hectares of land to plant trees to support the orangutan habitat there. Hopefully, we see more plantations follow suit in the future.”

The boat keeps speeding along, the palm oil plantation disappears, and we’re back in the protected area of the forest. Mohd Shahrul Ikhwan, the boat driver, spots an orangutan, barely visible in a tree. How he saw it while piloting a fast-moving boat is beyond me. I can only make out a dark shape obscured by foliage, until a long arm with distinctive orange-brown hair comes out from behind some leaves, grabbing at the figs on the tree.

Orangutans are considered the gardeners of the forest, transporting seeds across the jungle in a symbiotic relationship with their home. Without them, several trees and other species would also die off, putting the entire ecosystem at risk. Although the number of orangutans is still declining worldwide, in Sabah the number has remained steady over the past 15 years, with an estimated 11,000 orangutans remaining in the wild. Since 2004, the Sabah Forestry Department has increased the amount of land gazetted and protected from 12 per cent to 26 per cent, highlighting the development of well-regulated ecotourism and facilities in forest reserves as one of their strategies to implement sustainable forest management.

“Are you OK to move on? I just heard some elephants have been spotted further up the river,” Abdul says. We nod in excitement and the boat rushes on again. We zoom past a large patch of elephant grass — an elephant conservation corridor, Abdul tells us. Several of these conservation spaces exist along the Kinabatangan River, aided by tourism operators, palm oil companies and various conservation organisations.

Intrepid Travel is one such operator that seeks to regenerate the environment it profits from. Its Intrepid Foundation has partnered with the RESPonsible Elephant Conservation Trust (RESPECT), which has created and manages large-scale habitats to protect elephants. Nasalis Larvatus Tours dedicates half its land to this effort, planting elephant grass in Kg Bilit, Kinabatangan, with support from The Intrepid Foundation.

“We seek out long-term partnerships that are managed by local people, and RESPECT is a stand-up example of this ethos at work,” says Biheng Zhang, the general manager of The Intrepid Foundation. “The Foundation values local knowledge, and we know this is best-practice international development.”

The boat keeps nosing up the river, pausing for a crocodile dozing on the bank, and another orangutan sighting. By the time we arrive at the napier grass the elephants have been spotted feasting on, large muddy footprints are the only indication that they were here. I don’t mind that we missed them — the river has already offered up more wildlife than I imagined possible. It’s time to head back for breakfast and a swim in the pool to cool off in this tropical humidity.

As the canopy sails past, I wonder what the world will look like for my stepson when he’s old enough to travel independently. After learning about the many ways the tourism industry can have a mutually rewarding relationship with the land, local communities and local industry, I’m left with a faint sense of hope. According to Statista, the global ecotourism industry is projected to grow by 13.9% between 2022 and 2028, injecting an extra $300 billion into the economy. Some of which I hope funds conservation of these precious places. Will those who are profiting most from the land help to conserve it?