Malaysia: Born to be wild in the jungle

A macaque monkey in Bako National Park, Sarawak. Diana Balham

Borneo. It's a word that has held an exotic fascination for me since childhood: the steaming jungles, the bizarre creatures, the sheer, middle-of-nowhereness of it. And now here I am, standing on a boardwalk over a swamp looking up at an animal that looks like a cross between a computer nerd and a Terry Gilliam cartoon.

The poor darling is a male proboscis monkey: he has a hairy tummy, a ginger Donald Trump comb-over and a nose like a pink cucumber. They are endangered, but not because they can't attract the ladies. However, they are plentiful here in Bako National Park in the Malaysian Borneo state of Sarawak.

Bako, Malaysia's oldest park, is a short drive north of Kuching. You then take a trip up the wide Bako River in a motorised longboat.

On either side is thick, green jungle and I just know it's full of the weird, the wonderful and the best-left-alone. We pass secluded beaches and weathered sandstone stacks of rock, some rearing up out of the ocean.

Our welcoming committee at the little jetty is a gang of ne'er-do-wells with long tails and eager expressions. They are macaques, a naughty breed of monkey that is more likely to be thinking, "I wonder what's in that backpack?" than, "Hi tourists.

I hope you have a lovely day."

They converge on our party of three looking cute but a little menacing and Edgar, our guide, hustles us off to the park headquarters. (He tells us later that he was pounced on by a group of them the week before and is clearly still shaken by the experience.)

Near the path, we spy a tiny green snake with a triangular head. It is coiled around a branch. We have a quick look but Edgar says it will still be there this afternoon. It is a pit viper.

It's hot, 37 or 38C, apparently, and about 450 per cent humidity, but I am so excited to be walking through my "childhood" Borneo that I don't care. We see tiny squirrels shimmying up trees as we head down a track to Telok Paku, along a boardwalk over a mangrove swamp.

That's when we first spot the proboscis monkeys: like a lot of plain folk, they are shy and hide their homely faces from us as we approach. If the macaques are the all-night-clubbing good-timers of monkey society, these sober-looking chaps must be the Amish people.

Out of the swamp, the track follows a jungle path through a green and mysterious world. We scramble over enormous tree roots and up steps cut into the earth, climbing and descending a trail that simply follows the contours of the land and occasionally coming to a lookout point.

It's not an ambitious walk, but the humidity makes the going tough and, by the time we reach Telok Paku, a beautiful, sandy and almost deserted beach, we are dripping wet and looking longingly at the ocean. We haven't brought our togs, dammit, but the temptation is too great and, after checking with Edgar, we slide in wearing T-shirts and knickers.