What’s new on My Sarawak Adventures? My first trip to Kuching. The first destination is Matang Wildlife Centre.
Matang Wildlife Centre
It is located 35km from Kuching. It houses endangered wildlife in large enclosed areas of rainforest. Matang Wildlife Centre is part of Kubah National Park. It aims to protect and rehabilitate surrendered or rescued or confiscated indigenous wildlife with special emphasis to Protected and Totally Protected Species.
Matang Wildlife Centre focuses to rehabilitate orang utans, primates and sun bears. At present, altogether there are 28 individual orang utans (5 as living exhibits, 6 on rehabilitation process, 7 on quarantine attention and 11 in the free semi-wild jungle. Some orang utans who fail in the rehabilitation process will become a permanent inmates as living exhibits for educational and research purposes.
The facilities in Matang Wildllife Centre include the administration block, the 8-door long house hostel, camping sites and 2-room chalets. Accommodation may be booked online. For more details, visit the online booking page HERE.
My long house hostel room. Basic but enough for my basic needs. There was a refrigerator too.
There are 6 rehab process that the orang utans have to go through. 1 ) The admission where the recording of entry. 2) They will undergo health check to determine their health care and dietary. The first training stage is for them to attend a nursery.
Next, the Primary School Stage where they will go through daily training such as climbing trees and finding jungle food at nearby forest. They will also be staying as far as 3 km from the centre for 1-5 nights. They need to learn how to build nests. This is pertinent to determine their level of survival in the free open forest.
As for the Secondary School Stage, the orang utans will be brought as far as to Sg. Buloh area and released into the surrounding forests spending longer nights. Here, they need to learn greater survival skills in order to prepare for semi-wilds. The feeding behaviour and moving patterns of orang utans are monitored closely.
Then, after being released, orang utan will be continuously monitored and assessed of their jungle survival to ensure that the animal is healthy and active for at least a year.
There are some pleasant riverside picnic spots a short walk from the information centre and four jungle trails. The riverside was just less than 5 minutes walk from our long house hostel.
In the picture:- Lauren and Vaughn were enjoying themselves in the river.
There’s also a special trail near the long house hostel.
Other animals that can be found in Matang Wildlife Centre are the estuarine crocodiles, Sambar Deer, masked palm civet cat, lesser adjuntant stork, buffy fish owl, binturong and Malayan porcupines.
If you are interested to participate in the volunteer work in Matang Wildlife Centre, please refer below:-
Once you get to know the sweethearts of Matang, perhaps you can go on a frog adventure in Kubah National Park where you can find more than 60 species of frog.
This trip was made possible by Sarawak Tourism Board on 9th – 11th June 2014.