Borneo is a great place for adventure travel, and it’s not bad for the semi-adventurous type of travel either.
For those of us who want balance exploring the street food paradise in the urban jungle while sprinkling in time for the real jungle, your options are tilting towards booking a half-day guided tour.
To get a real Borneo wildlife experience only 40 minutes out of Kuching, here is my experience with the Santubong River Wetland Cruise (Spoiler Alert: it was a bit disappointing).
Booking the Tour
My first mistake was only giving myself one night in Kuching. There is too much to see and eat in Sarawak that you would want to give yourself a bigger buffer. The morning before I arrived in Kuching, I did a Google search on half-day experiences and came across the Santubong Wildlife Cruise. I emailed the tour agency to get more details about about my last minute booking. They responded quickly with what was available and we switched to WhatsApp communication to solidify the details. So far, so good! It looked like there was going to be smooth sailing on the Santubong River!
What’s Included in the Tour
The tour agency (called CPH Travel) offers a variety of tours across Sarawak and has two similar half-day wetland tours. One is a morning tour that prioritizes sightings of the Irawaddy dolphins and crocodiles.
The other tour is the one I chose. For two people, this is what 342 Malaysian Ringgits (approximately 80 USD) will get you.
This is what 342 Malaysian Ringgits will get for two people
You and other tourists will get picked up from your Kuching hotels (I stayed at the LimeTree Hotel – affiliate link) in the afternoon around 4pm for a 40 minute drive out to a small pier on the Santubong River. The boat captain will take your group just a few minutes out from under an automobile overpass to the mouth of the river where fishing villages present themselves and signs of urban civilization slowly vanish.
Once your boat passes the leaning ‘wizard hat’ mountain, you enter the zone to begin searching for wildlife.
First you’ll spend up to an hour quietly and patiently looking for Irawaddy dolphins. They are more active in the morning, but if you are lucky you will see them briefly pop out of the water in the late afternoon.
Then you enter the wetlands looking for floppy-nosed Proboscis monkeys among the mangrove forests. Fireflies will then light your way home as your captain searches for the giant crocodiles. Be careful as these crocs have been known to devour humans.
After a few hours, your brackish water tour ends and you can stop for light snacks (provided by the tour agency). Then you’re dropped back off at your hotel in time for a late night dinner – hopefully some Sarawak laksa!
Reality
With high hopes dedicating my limited, precious Kuching hours to the tour, I was ready. Armed with binoculars, a baseball cap, and GoPro, I was really looking forward to seeing the proboscis monkeys in their natural habitat.
Our guide/driver/admin guy, the multi-talented Mr. Wilson (no relation to the Dennis the Menace character) arrived a little bit late as he had to pick up and wait for other guests. The drive to pier was tolerable and after arriving, we waited just a short time for other tourists to arrive.
Captain Jim, similar to Mr. Wilson is a Sarawak native, and welcomed us to his boat. The boat has a a tent cover but didn’t protect much during golden hour due to the low angle of the sun, so make sure you have sun protection!
We spent about 30 minutes searching for the Irawaddy dolphins, and with Captain Jim’s expertise of the area, we were able to see about five of them. They don’t fully expose themselves and aren’t keen on loud noises but it was still interesting to watch them for another half hour or so.
As we made our way to the mangroves to search for monkeys, this is when the tour took a turn. An ominous rain cloud deterred us from entering the wetlands, so Capt. Jim popped a U-turn, hoping we could wait it out and search for other wildlife. Instead of dissipating, the cloud grew deeper and darker exponentially, and began steaming straight towards us. It was suddenly a race against time, the Goliath rain cloud vs. a tiny speck of naive tourists on a boat.
Jim had no choice but to make a bee-line for the pier, but it was too little, too late. In short, Goliath won.
The sky was falling and water attacked us from all angles. The same tent that didn’t protect us from the sun, didn’t protect us from the rain. We were clobbered for what felt like an eternity, the entire ride back. In that span of sitting hunched over, bombarded by rain, we couldn’t do anything but realize how powerful the force of nature is and how insignificant we are as humans. At that point, all we could do was laugh as we high-tailed it back. Captain Jim then shared his simple but meaningful words – This is the real Borneo.
This is the real Borneo
Summary
It was disappointing that our limited time felt wasted, as the opportunities to search for wildlife was but short by about two hours. But this is life. The tour agency has explicit information on their refund policy, and having spent over an hour in the water, our tour did not qualify for a rescheduled trip. However it would not have mattered much for us anyway as we had a flight out the next day.
Anyways, our guide was nice, the captain was knowledgeable, and the tour agency communicated well. They all expressed remorse but nobody can linger on the minute matters. There are no guarantees that you will see wildlife at all, so in a way we were lucky to at least peacefully spot the dolphins.
When you first arrive in Borneo, you quickly learn that it is not all jungle. It’s pretty developed. But don’t let that fool you. It is still Borneo, and I encourage you to humble yourselves to its natural power. And check your weather app before booking a tour!
Check your weather app!
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