Tanjung Puting - Orang Utan Reservation

Tanjung Puting is located in Central Kalimantan Province (Borneo Island) - Indonesia. The area covered by tropical forest with thousands species of flora and fauna live in it. It is also the home for orang utan, one of the world's endangered species.There are also so many rivers which usually used by the tourists to watch the natural beauty in this place.


Beside orangutan (which means "the jungle man" in Bahasa Indonesia), there are many other species of fauna live here such as bekantan (Nasalis Larvatus), Uwa-uwa (Hylobates sp) and horn bills.

Probably the most famous spot in this 400.000 ha reservation area is a place called "Camp Leakey", a place for orangutan's rehabilitation. This place became famous and the main destination for tourists visiting this reservation area because it's the most ideal place to observe the social behavior of orangutans,how they intimidate each others, how they eat, their exploration pattern, pregnancy, and how they're nesting.

Camp Leakey was built in 1971 by a dutch scientists DR Birutte Galdikas and her husband Rod Brindamour to study orangutan. at first they call it Camp W Silkey, but then the name changed into Camp Leakey to honor DR Galdikas's Professor Louis Leakey, a palaeontologist from Kenya.

The forest in Tanjung Puting is extraordinary since there are at least 8 kinds of forest here. Dipterocarpus forest (dry land forest), perifer mix swam forest which covers about 20% of the reservation area, peat moss swamp forest, transition forest, shorea balengaran forest on the edge of peat moss swamp, kerangas forest which grows on white sand covered land, mangrove and coastal forest, and secondary forest.

For your information, this wild life conservation area has become a biosphere conservation which was pointed by many countries in the world through a cooperation with "man and biosphere-UNESCO" program, so Tanjung Puting is one of the 400 sites of biosphere conservation in 94 countries, another important role played by the conservation beside saving orangutan.

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