We engaged the services of Way Out Experiences (M) Sdn. Bhd. to Sandakan Sabah, from 2 - 8 May 2010 and again to Kuching, Sarawak from 6 - 10 August 2010.
The experience of working with the company has been a pleasant one. The sterling service provided by the company began with the careful tailoring of the programme for the first trip according to the needs of our students. In addition to the continuous communication by e-mail, two of their facilitators made a trip to our school from Malaysia to discuss the finer points of the programme and to ascertain the school's requirements. Many suggestions and options were offered during this discussion and the subsequent recce trip made to both Sandakan and Kuching so that we could have a programme best suited to our students.
During the trips, the facilitators attached to the group spared no effort in ensuring that the learning outcomes of the trips would be achieved with the minimal of disruption to the local environment and community. We were deeply impressed by the passion and extensive knowledge demonstrated by the facilitators. The facilitators were able to establish a strong rapport with the students and in so doing, help them to come to a realisation of the complexity and interconnectedness of several environmental issues.
The success of both trips can be attributed to the sound programme crafted by the company as well as the expertise and experience of the facilitators at both destinations. We are especially appreciative of the accommodations and adjustments made on both trips by the facilitators from the feedback of the school's staff.
Ms Chock Siew Hwa - Deputy Principal
Ms Yvonne Lim - Deputy Principal
Mr Patrick Soo - Year Director
27 September 2010
Original Letter
Hi All,
The past two weeks or so I've spent in Sabah, the Land Below the Wind as it's also known. It was a former British colony so helpfully enough lots of people speak English and they also drive on the same side of the road as the British. But it was most definitely a Borneo experience otherwise.
When I joined my fellow volunteers and our guide we started off on the tourist trail, visiting Mount Kinabalu nature park with the botanical garden and Sepilok Orang Utan rehabilitation centre for a feeding. We were quite lucky as the welcoming committee including a couple of young orangutans hanging around the walkway to the feeding platform.
But that's all that was truly touristy. Our nine days at Kinabatangan River were spent collecting wildlife data (species, count, GPS coordinates), planting trees (rewarding, but hard work in the heat of the equatorial sun), helping out on a community project and teaching a class on recycling at the school in Sukau. It has definitely been quite an experience!
I believe we observed 60 species, about 2/3 birds. Feel free to envy me (lots!) for seeing all of the following in the wild (ie the rainforest around the river bank):- mother & baby orangutans, dominant orangutan settling into his nest for the night,- five pygmy elephants with a baby feeding on the grass on the river bank,- numerous boisterous families of long-tail and pig-tail macaques,- curious proboscis monkeys eyeing us from above,- a gibbon perched high up a tree at sunrise and calling a mate (or should I say singing as the call is more like a bird call than what you'd expect from an ape)- baby croc and a 4m crocodile sliding into the waters and heading towards us,- 6 of the 8 species of hornbill, including the rare helmeted hornbill who's call starts with whooping and ends in a ha-ha-ha sort of laugh- all sorts of colourful birds such as kingfishers and trogons, and a few strange ones like the oriental darter which has a neck very much like a snake ... especially when it's the only thing you can see poking out of the water when it's fishing... and water monitors, kites, eagles, pygmy and black squirrels, bats, mangrove snakes, etc, etc, etc. I'm sure I've forgotten a few! And actually you didn't really need to go far from the lodge - we had a resident macaque family who occasionally woke us up by going on the roof or making noise from the trees just outside the windows. Most of the time though, we did need to get on our trusty green boat to go a bit further afield to see wildlife.
So data collection was definitely rewarding. Amazingly we only got caught up in one rain storm but what a storm that was. The sky went black as we turned around a bend and the wall of rain enveloped us. Wall is probably not the right word: the rain was driving at us, feeling very much like pins and needles being stuck in your face. We were soaked through but I managed to keep my camera dry.
The hard work was planting trees. But it was certainly gratifying to see the neat piles of freshly laid leaves around saplings, the rows in the weeds cleared with a machete and ready for planting, and finally the newly planted saplings in a new patch of land given to WOX to improve. It's part of a bigger WWF project to create safe corridors along the river so animals can move to the safety of the primary rainforest. The issue is that there are lots of palm oil plantations in the north of Sabah and around Sandakan (ie along the Kinabatangan River) and the early logging has destroyed some of the connections between safe environments, so various organisations - and fortunately, some palm oil owners - are now replanting stretches of land to address this problem.
Given that a lot of the products we use palm oil - soap, toothpaste, foodstuffs - you can see why there's an economic benefit to the local communities to invest in plantations. But the great thing is that there's now recognition that this needs to be balanced with the needs of the wild animal populations and conservation of the rainforest.
What I perhaps enjoyed the most was the class we did at the school. Groups of volunteers teach the children about protecting the environment and our module was on recycling. We made up three games and a song and it was such a fantastic feeling when the children didn't want to stop playing and when the staff at the lodge sang the refrain of the song! You really feel like you've done good.
I was expecting just a visit to the school, but it was so much better that the visit was more meaningful than just getting to know a few children. I was amazed at how good their English was and am so happy that I got them books for the library because they're so bright and willing to learn.
If you ever want to see Borneo, I would definitely recommend combining it with something like my project. You see and experience so much more!
1. Take care of its volunteers - who have usually paid a largish sum of money to be part of the project.
2. Assist its volunteers to meet and work with local people, in the area the project is based.
3. Give its volunteers a sense of making a contribution (other than a money contribution) to the project.
4. Send its volunteers away richer for the experience and with positive feelings for the project. There is a fifth criterion, although there is an element of a "wish list" about this one. The project should:
5. Hope its volunteers will stimulated to engage further with the same, or other, environmental projects as a consequence.
The Orangutan and Pygmy Elephant (Borneo Wildlife Safari), conducted by Way Out Experiences (WOX), from August 27 to September 8, 2008, met all these criteria very successfully
