Camp Leakey was founded in 1971 by Biruté Galdikas with a single hut and a promise to stay two years. She stayed fifty.
That decision made the Sekonyer River one of the most closely studied stretches of rainforest in Southeast Asia, and it turned a peat-swamp reserve into the reference point for every tanjung puting national park orangutan tour that follows the same water today.
The park covers roughly 4,150 square kilometres of lowland dipterocarp forest, peat swamp, and heath forest between the Sekonyer and Kumai rivers. Dutch colonial authorities gazetted the area as a game reserve in 1935. Indonesia elevated it to national park status in 1982, and UNESCO named it a Biosphere Reserve in 1977. Its population of wild and rehabilitated Bornean orangutans is estimated at around 6,000 — the largest protected concentration of the species anywhere.
Three feeding stations structure the interior: Tanjung Harapan, Pondok Tanggui, and Camp Leakey. Each was built to support released orangutans during rehabilitation, and each now anchors a different half-day of the standard river itinerary. Wardens carry bananas and milk to raised wooden platforms at fixed hours. Attendance is voluntary. Fruiting seasons in the surrounding canopy empty the platforms; lean months fill them. The proboscis monkeys along the riverbank keep their own schedule, clustering in the nipa palms at dusk.
What distinguishes a wildlife-specific tanjung puting national park orangutan tour from simple boat transport is the naturalist on board. The klotok — a slow wooden houseboat named for the sound of its engine — is not merely a vehicle. It is a floating observation platform. Guides read the water for false gharial, scan the emergent trees for rhinoceros hornbills, and time arrivals so that the light falls behind the platform rather than into the lens. Night moorings on the Sekonyer bring proboscis troops overhead and fireflies in the mangrove line.
The conservation entrance fee of 250,000 IDR per person funds ranger patrols against illegal logging and palm-oil encroachment, the two pressures that have shaped the park's boundaries since the 1990s. Speedboat operators compress the same route into a single day; klotok operators stretch it across three. Both depart from Kumai. Neither reaches Camp Leakey without passing the tannin-black tributary where the water changes colour mid-channel — the visible line between protected peat swamp and the agricultural land beyond it.
72 hr
