Orang-Utan: Person of the Forest

The first thing on the itinerary for today was a walking tour around Kuching. I really enjoyed this because even though we've been here for two days, I don't really feel like I've gotten a good feel for the city yet. The first place that we visited was a Chinese Taoist Temple. According to them, the color red represents good luck and the color gold represents prosperity. So obviously, the entire temple was red and gold and it looked really cool. I also appreciated it a little bit more because we got so see people come in and do their prayers. I really like seeing the differences in cultures and religions and the way that they prayed was completely different from anything I have seen so far.



We continued on to the original Sarawak museum which was the first museum ever built here. It was built by Charles Brooke, the son of Sir James Brooke who was the first Rajah of Sarawak.  The museum featured a lot of preserved indigenous wildlife, but unfortunately we weren't allowed to take pictures. I did learn a lot about the history of Sarawak and about the animals that live there. I am a visual learner, so when we learned about all of this in class it didn't click. So now that I was seeing it in person, I was finally starting to understand and apply everything that we learned about in class. After the museum we went to Little India and walked around. Something that I really am not used to is walking down the street and seeing so much fresh produce and other food sitting out in the open. To me, that is the biggest culture shock that I've experienced so far.

Once we finished the tour we ate lunch and then immediately got on a bus to the Semenggoh Wildlife Center. The Semenggoh Wildlife Center is famous for it's Orangutans, which I learned means "people of the forest" in Malay. Coming in to this trip, I was expecting to be in nature a lot and today was the first day that we really did that. I really enjoyed just being out in nature and being able to see Orangutans hanging around everywhere made it that much better! But they didn't just have Orangutans, they also had crocodiles. Although, those weren't very interesting because they just laid there and occasionally opened their eyes. The Orangutans were really fun though, especially since our tour guide gave us a lot of background on a few of them. It felt like I already knew their personalities before we went to go see them. I used this opportunity to get a lot of great pictures that I'm really excited to share. The sad thing about this place is that it is a rehabilitation center and the reason that they stay here is because they have something wrong with them that inhibits them from returning to the wild. Orangutans are actually one of the many endangered species in South East Asia and I really hope that we, as a human race, can and will do something to help them.

                

 


We had the opportunity to choose where we wanted to eat dinner tonight, so my friends and I decided to get a classic Malaysian dish called "Laksa". I know that I have said this so many times, but this meal has to be my favorite meal of the trip so far!



Sal Puma