All Intensive Purposes

In Sarawak the day begins not with the humdrum sound of the cockerel crowing, but with the haunting melody of the gibbons in the jungle singing to the dawn. From that moment, every minute brings a fresh wonder. A single hectare of the ancient forest contains more varieties of trees than a thousand different types of insect. High up in the green canopy exists a unique world with a wide variety of different species of monkeys, flying lizards, spiders which eat birds (harmless if you don’t happen to be a bird), and all sorts of unlikely things that fly, including squirrels, lizards and frogs… Admittedly, they don’t actually ‘fly’; they glide by using flaps of skin linking their front and back legs. As Somerset Maugham once said, things are just different in Sarawak.

So many things in Sarawak are either the biggest or the smallest in the world. You’ll even find a tiny owl only six inches tall. Some of the butterflies are bigger than that. Other animals just vie for the title of plain oddest. We have all seen pigs before but in Sarawak they sport beards and swim across rivers! Some of these unique bearded pigs have been known to reach into the lower branches of the cocoa trees to steal the fruit. No less unusual are the termites which farm mushrooms by depositing chewed leaves on the roofs of their dwellings. As the vegetation decomposes, tiny mushrooms sprout to provide the termites with a ready supply of food.

// posted by t.s. @ 8:43 PM