If you love tropical greenhouses and can’t wait to be enveloped by the humid fecundity of a real equatorial rainforest, The island’s jungles conjure up remoteness and peril, bringing to mind impenetrable foliage and river trips into the ‘heart of darkness’. But look a little closer on a nature walk with a park ranger, for instance – and nuances emerge: the pitcher plants, lianas and orchids of the lowland forest give way to conifers, rhododendrons and different kinds of orchids. And the vegetation changes just as radically as you sail through the mangroves along the South China Sea.
For many visitors to Borneo, their most memorable moment is a personal encounter with a living creature: glimpsing a wild orangutan swinging through the jungle canopy, spotting an Irrawaddy dolphin in the shimmering waters of the South China Sea, or locking eyes with the reptilian gaze of a saltwater croc. Jungle animals are, by their nature, shy, but a good guide can help you tell the difference between a vine and vine snake (not as easy as you might think) and between a twig and a stick insect as long as an unsharpened pencil; they can also help you differentiate between the call of a gibbon and the cry of a hornbill, and identify a dominant male orangutan (hint: size counts but so do the cheeks). If you’re keen to have close encounters of the animal kind, Borneo’s jungles offer a unique combination of extraordinary biodiversity, unspoilt habitats and practical accessibility.
Borneo brings together an astonishing array of cultures, religions, languages and cuisines, and thanks to the age-old traditions of hospitality in the island communities, all these are easy to approach.”
(Resource: Borneo, 2nd Ed., Lonely Planet.)