Jeanette Thomas has adopted three orphan orangutans, including Dora.
TV presenter Jeanette Thomas travelled to Indonesia with daughter Charlotte to meet first-hand the orangutans under threat from the excavation of their forests
The flight from Auckland to Jakarta is long but my daughter Charlotte and I arrive and meet Leif Cocks, the president and founder of the Orangutan Project - that's who I've adopted our orphaned orangutans through. He's an orangutan expert and he and his organisation are fighting to save the last scraps of remaining jungle in Sumatra so viable populations of orangutans can survive and hopefully thrive. We also meet Bjorn Vaughan, our cameraman, an English/American who speaks perfect Indonesian.
Flying over Sumatra and into Jambi only serves to cement what I already know. This is palm oil country. This is a place that's lost 80 per cent of its rainforest to deforestation, logging, pulp and paper and palm oil in the past 20 odd years. It's lost almost its entire orangutan population, too. They no longer have their forest home and they're now critically endangered and on the brink of extinction.
Of course it's the big picture from the air, too. And it's devastating. We fly on and it's more of the same. Rows and rows of uniformed palm oil plantations. Only tiny pockets of jungle are left. This isn't as nature intended and it's so incredibly sad.
Jambi airport: there's hustle and bustle and cigarette smoke everywhere - but the Indonesian heat, maybe 35C, is overwhelming.
We have a six-hour drive to Bukit Tigapuluh (BTP) and the orangutan sanctuary, most of it in regular four wheel drives, but the last couple in hard core, jungle-faring work horses.
We head out of Jambi. For every car on the road there must be half a dozen motorbikes. And on every motorbike there's often more than one person.
We leave the city and head northwest. In less than an hour, Charlotte counts more than 150 trucks transporting the fruit from the palm oil trees to factories that turn it into oil. We drive and we drive and we look left and we look right, and as far as the eye can see, it's just oil palms. Row after row. I find it confronting. Even though it's what I know to expect, being here makes it so very real. There are also areas of recently cleared and burned land. They are giant blackened scars on the landscape, waiting for a new crop of palm oil to be planted. Sometimes there's a single tree that survived the devastation, clinging fruitlessly to life. That's jarring.
Suddenly, a reason to smile. A long-tailed macaque is sitting in the middle of the road drinking from a puddle. Char's ecstatic. He's taking his time, is in no way worried about us, and when he's done, casually makes his way up a nearby tree. A few more kilometres down the road and we spot two silver leaf monkeys in a small patch of rainforest that's somehow survived.
We arrive at the point where we swap 4WDs and leave the comfort of air conditioning behind. The heat is totally and utterly all consuming.
Bukit Tigapuluh is a National Park and translates to mean "30 Hills". It's incredibly raw and I feel so privileged to be here.
It's been a heck of a long day. The six-hour drive became eight (because we're filming this) but finally, just on dusk, we make it to the orangutan sanctuary. As we roll in, so does the most spectacular thunderstorm. What a stunningly beautiful place. It's simply a clearing in the valley of the most incredible rainforest I've seen.
BTP is stage two of a three-step process in the release of orphaned babies back to the wild. The only way orangutans can become orphans is if their mothers are killed. They just will not give up their babies for any other reason. Horrifically, the mothers are either burned alive in deliberately lit fires to clear land, or beaten to death with a machete because they're seen as pests by the palm oil industry. Their forest homes have been decimated, they're starving and if they're unlucky enough to wander into a palm oil plantation looking for food, that's what happens and the babies are then sold off into the illegal pet trade. Some of the lucky ones, however, are rescued - and these are the ones we have come to see.
Stage one of the rehabilitation process is at a centre in Medan, a city north of where we are. That's where the infants stay. And that's where they get as much love and nurturing by humans as possible to mimic the start to life their mothers would've given them.
The orangutans at BTP are equivalent to human toddlers. It's here, in Forest School, they're taught all the skills their mothers would've taught them. Things like identifying at least 150 different forest foods in the jungle, digging for termites (a good source of protein) and determining which branches will hold their weight when they're swinging through the jungle. During the day they're released into the forest under the watchful eye of technicians to do and learn all those things, and more. At night they happily come back to their cages and learn the technique of building a nest. It's important they get this right because they build two nests every day.
I set the alarm to wake early but by 5am discover I needn't have. The jungle is alive. Although, to be fair, it actually never sleeps. There's a crazy mix of creatures creating the most incredible soundtrack to the dawn. Gibbons, geckos, hornbills, cicadas, silver leaf monkeys, frogs and birds too numerous to list all screeching and calling and singing in the most beautiful languages.
After breakfast we make our way across the river to some of the cages where the orangutans sleep at night. They need to be transported from the cages for a short walk to a release site for the day in Forest School. They're carried like an orangutan backpack. Literally, they hold on to their human like they're being piggy-backed. And today, Charlotte and I are those humans.
Charlotte Thomas enjoys piggy-backing a baby orangutan back to the sanctuary after a day in the trees.
It's one of the most incredible experiences of my life. Before I know it there's an orangutan on my back. Her name's Dora. She has her arms wrapped tightly around my shoulders and her legs around my middle. I'm carrying her like I would my own child. She's warm, she smells wild and amazing and she's totally and utterly gorgeous. She keeps adjusting her weight around my waist to get the best grip and she's breathing in my ear. She's so gentle and I feel like somehow she trusts me - that she's on my back but I have hers ... and I fall instantly in love.
We walk for a while like that - we cross a river and navigate the jungle path up to the release site. There, I'm told which tree to stand beside and when I do, suddenly my new friend is gone. Agile and fast, she's up that tree and ready for a day of Forest School. Me, I'm in total shock at what just happened.
It's Dora and another orangutan in Forest School today - a male called Jackie Chan. We discover later that Jackie's a showman. He puts on the most hilarious display of orangutan antics for us at the end of the day and has us in stitches.
When the orangutans start to show signs of not wanting to come back to their cages after a day in Forest School, it's a great thing - it means they're ready for stage three - a soft release back into the wild for good.
Dora and Jackie play out in Forest School until about 2pm and then they easily come back to the technicians for the walk back to their cages. This time, it's Charlotte who gets to give the piggy back ride. It's truly a magic moment watching Char wade down the river with Dora on her back. She's wearing a mask over her mouth and nose but I know there's a giant grin beneath it - her eyes tell me so.
There's no denying that orangutans are people. They just look different to us. Having now spent time at BTP, I'm so certain of that. They share 97 per cent of our DNA - they think, they feel and they know exactly what's going on.
Our family's already adopted two orangutans through the Orangutan Project. We're now adopting Dora, too. Fact is, now that I've met her, now that I've cuddled her, I simply have to. Being here at BTP and seeing where my money goes and seeing what's being done to get the orphans wild again is invaluable. It's brilliant being in a place where everyone loves these creatures as much as I do. But I also love that there are more and more people at home - family, friends, FB friends and workmates who are beginning to understand how critically endangered these creatures are. That they're too incredible not to care about, too amazing not to want to save. The fact is though, time's running out and if we're going to save them, then we need to do it now.
I guess the perfect ending to all this is still a few years away. It's the day Dora makes it back to the jungle for good and it's a time when she has her own baby in a part of Sumatra that's safe for her to do so. That's the dream - I shall keep you posted.
Jeanette Thomas is a host on TVNZ's Good Morning.
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