• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Julia of the Jungle ; JULIA ROBERTS Has Portrayed Many Tender Stories on the Silver Screen. But, She Reveals, Her Deepest Passions Were Stirred When She Travelled to the Steamy Forests of Borneo to Meet a Giant Orang- Utan, Who Held Her in His Huge Hands

Posted on: Sunday, 16 October 2005, 18:00 CDT

Held tight in the powerful hands of a 20-stone orang-utan - an alpha male ape who thought I was a doll - I was justifiably terrified.

But then I relaxed - somehow I felt I could trust him. I was in Borneo, one of the chain of islands that make up Indonesia. Somewhere in its vast, tropical rainforest I had come face to face with the increasingly rare orang-utan - a creature that lives very much as our ancestors did, a reminder of our prehistoric past.

He's enormous and I was scared. He seemed oblivious to my presence, and I was convinced he wasn't interested in me. We sat together on the path and when he finished eating an apple he came closer. I was still nervous because he's so huge, and the closer he got to me, the smaller I felt. He had quite a long beard and was a little smelly.

He reached out to me, but I knew instinctively-that he didn't want to hurt me. He wanted to play as though I was a doll, or carry me off and have a smooch. He got me in a strong grasp and wouldn't let go. It got a bit out of hand, but I knew his intentions were playful and so I think that he paid me a compliment. His hands are enormous, they are the size of my head, and he has the strength of an entire person's body in one finger. He could have crushed me with his weight, the equivalent of three of me. It was scary, because I didn't know where it was going, but not as scary as being mugged in my home town, New York, from where I had gone to Pangkalanbuun, a hip little town in southern Borneo, the last piece of civilisation before I headed off into the jungle.

Orang-utans are massive, solitary creatures who live alone for most of their lives in the rainforest. There is something disturbingly human about an orang-utan, which is hardly surprising when you discover that they share 96.4 per cent of our genes. But just how alike are we? To find out I needed to meet this threatened species. I've known since I was a child that forests are strange and magical places, but what I hadn't realised is what hard work it is just moving at all. It's hot and oppressive, even when the sun has to fight through the thick canopy 100ft above my head.

Somewhere, there were birds and orangutans and frogs and all kinds of animal activity, but the forest seemed quite empty, and quiet. Yet I kept sensing the orang-utans were out there. The people who lived on the river we travelled along were traditional Dyak tribespeople who have a great respect for orangutans. The name orang- utan means 'jungle person' in Malay, and the people tell stories of huge males carrying off the prettiest women in the village. The goal of my journey was to meet the real loner of the forest - a majestic but forbidding adult male orang-utan. The fearsome male is the source of most of the myths about orangutans. Glimpsed through the forest it is easy to mistake them for a kind of half-man, half- beast.

I'd heard that there was a huge dominant male in this area of the forest, a 400lb creature called Kusasi. Nearly 30 years ago, hunters killed Kusasi's mother and kidnapped her baby for the pet trade. As a three-year-old orphan, Kusasi came under the care of Dr Birute M. Galdikas, in the camp where she has been researching orang-utans for more than 40 years. Today, Kusasi is a king among his kind and father to a new generation of wild-born orang-utans.

For 15 million years orang-utans roamed tropical forests from China to South-East Asia. Today, as the rainforest is cut down by logging companies, or cleared for agriculture, the orang-utans find themselves squeezed into ever-smaller areas. They are vulnerable to hunters, or simply die of starvation.

The young are captured and exported as pets - and many die in captivity, or are disposed of when they get too big.

Thanks to we humans, there is now an increasingly large population of homeless and orphaned orang-utans. In recent forest fires, a horrifying 3,000 of them may have died, reducing the population in these forests to as few as 15,000, and leaving many more as orphans. It's an urgent problem that should concern us all, but in the meantime it has been left to a few individuals to try to help.

Under the guidance of primate researcher Louis Leakey, Dr Galdikas joined Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, both pioneers of Great Ape field research.

Together they were known as the 'trimates', or 'Leakey's Angels'.

Yet, while Goodall's chimpanzees and Fossey's gorillas are familiar through films, the orang-utans are still largely unknown to television audiences.

Their solitary lives high in the tree canopy make them difficult to follow and film. But driven by a cunning and tenacious spirit, Kusasi did not behave as the other ex-captive infants.

From the moment he arrived, Dr Galdikas has watched Kusasi fight to succeed at life in the wild. And he's achieved what had once seemed impossible: reaching the top of the power hierarchy and ruling for ten years.

The people who work at Camp Leakey enjoy his charisma, and even those like me, who only visit him in his forest kingdom, are struck with awe.

Now a new film, The Orangutan King, has been made about his life, and it could be our last chance to see him in power. I'll never forget my encounter with Kusasi. I firmly believe he meant me no harm. He was motivated purely by curiosity and wonder - although I did think, 'He doesn't realise how tiny I am.' There was a frantic attempt by the people I was with to prise me away from him. It was a bit like a little girl with a toy, when you tell her it's time for bed and try to take the toy away but she won't let it go. There was a struggle and it was like, 'No, I want to play with it.' It was like that for a while and it was intense for me. He could have hurt me in a second if he'd wanted to. I patted him to reassure him, but I didn't want to scare him into thinking he'd done something wrong.

After meeting Kusasi I felt completely overwhelmed, as though I'd had the most intense encounter that a person could ever have. Kusasi may live for 50 years, almost all of that time alone. This is what separates us from the orangutan, for although we find the idea of the loner romantic, most of us would find the reality of it purgatory. But Kusasi seemed happy with only his thoughts for company, and is content with himself in a way we'll never truly know. It's Kusasi's secret, and he's not telling.

Willie Smits is a Dutch botanist who came to Borneo as a forest manager.

Then he got involved in looking after a single orphaned orang- utan, and now runs a rescue and rehabilitation operation on the island. Willie has travelled all over Indonesia to confiscate young orang-utans from people who illegally keep them as pets. One of his orphans is Holly.

Holly was sold by poachers after they killed her mother. The forest is a frightening place to a new arrival, so Willie built a shelter, a kind of orang-utan motel, high up in the canopy where the orangs spend their nights and begin to adjust to their new home. It seemed odd to imprison Holly, having brought her back into the forest, but she had time to get her bearings and find a place to build a nest for her first night in the wild. As evening falls the forest wakes up. Animals such as proboscis monkeys gather together and stay up late. But orang-utans love a good night's sleep, and like to have a comfortable place to snooze.

At the end of each day they build elaborate nests as big as a double bed.

It's not certain whether the orangs released in this way ever truly feel at home in the forest, so rangers keep an eye on them after they've been freed.

The best hope is that the orangutans that have been released will mate and rear young that grow up as truly wild creatures. Although every little bit helps, in the end the rehabilitation process is a Band-aid on the problem, not a permanent solution. There's been a tendency for orang-utans to become more and more solitary, and also to get bigger. This includes their brains, and they are already amazingly large-brained creatures. Their brains are about one third the size of ours, once you adjust for body size. The only creatures that exceed that ratio are dolphins. There is something thoughtful about the way an orang-utan deals with the world, which makes them seem more human than other great apes.

They seem to have an almost human consciousness, as if they're aware of their own existence. The test for self-awareness is to show an animal a mirror. Most animals ignore the reflection, or attack what they think is another animal, but orang-utans, like us, find their own reflection amusing and fascinating, perfectly aware that they are looking at themselves.

I feel more and more at ease with the orangutans, and the kinds of relationships I'm having with them can only be described in human terms. As for Kusasi, the hope of this film is that he will not be the last of his kind to rule with such strength in his forests. If the forest destruction can be stopped, there is a long-term future for Kusasi's extensive bloodline.

Today his spirit still burns brightly, but his physical strength is fading.

Two fights with challenging males have left him badly injured. But his battle scars have not diminished his appetite for life. He's lost catastrophically in terms of the physical battles, but I don't think he's lost psychologically. That's his genius. That's the genius of Kusasi.

The Orangutan King, Wednesday, 8pm, BBC2.

Orang-utan facts

. Alpha males Adult male orang-utans are four-and-a-half-feet tall and weigh 16st. Their long arms can span up to seven feet. Adapted for life in the trees, orang-utans travel by grasping branches with their hands and feet and swinging from tree to tree. The chief diet of orang-utans is fruit.

. Palmed off The increased Western demand for palm oil is driving orang-utans closer to extinction. The oil is used in products ranging from crisps to bread, lipstick and soap - and harvesting it from Asian rainforests destroys the creatures' habitat.

. Vanishing point The orang-utans' home environment is disappearing at an alarming rate.

Conservationists claim that 90 per cent of the animals' habitat in South-East Asia has disappeared; that fewer than 20,000 now exist in the wild - about 40 per cent less than a decade ago - and that wild orang-utans could be extinct within 12 years.

. Ape academy U.S. scientists at Washington Zoo are testing the IQ of orang-utans. So far, the apes have been able to solve simple puzzles, open boxes and even operate computers.

. Adopt an ape The World Wildlife Fund runs an orang-utan adoption scheme to help preserve the species. For Pounds 2.50 a month, you can help to conserve these threatened creatures. Visit www.wwf.org.uk or www.orangutan.org for further information.

Source: Daily Mail; London (UK)

More News in this Category