For many people, Sepilok is the most exciting moment of a trip to Borneo: the face-to-face encounter with orangutans, those red-haired 'people of the forest' who share almost all of their DNA with us and who live in the wild only in the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra. At the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre, orphaned orangutans or those rescued from trafficking and deforestation are cared for and retrained to return to the forest, and visitors can see them up close —swinging along ropes, eating on the platforms, carrying their babies— in a protected rainforest setting. It's an experience that mixes tenderness, wonder and a dose of awareness about what's at stake.
But Sepilok is much more than orangutans. Right next door is the only centre in the world dedicated to rescuing the Bornean sun bear, the smallest bear on the planet, and a short distance away is the Rainforest Discovery Centre, with its canopy walkway for watching birds and the forest. And a couple of hours away lies one of the best wildlife settings in Asia: the Kinabatangan River, where from a boat you can see wild orangutans, Bornean pygmy elephants, proboscis monkeys with their improbable noses, crocodiles, hornbills and wildlife that seems straight out of a documentary. All based out of Sandakan, a city with an intense history and wartime memory.
This guide organises this fascinating corner of Borneo for you: Sepilok's feeding times (key for planning), how much admissions and 'camera fees' cost, how to combine the orangutans with the Kinabatangan River and its wildlife, how to get there and get around, and what to expect from a real rainforest safari. Plus the practical side: carrying cash, preparing for the heat and humidity, and understanding that seeing wildlife always involves a bit of luck, but that few places in the world load the dice so heavily in the traveller's favour as this corner of Sabah.
The Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre was founded in 1964, one of the first of its kind in the world, inside a protected rainforest reserve, with the mission of rescuing and retraining orphaned, injured or illegally traded orangutans and returning them to the wild. Its creation responded to an emergency that continues today: the destruction of the orangutan's habitat by logging and, above all, by the massive expansion of oil palm plantations, which turned Borneo into one of the most dramatic fronts of tropical deforestation. Sepilok lies near Sandakan, which was the capital of North Borneo under the British company and, during the Second World War, the scene of the infamous Sandakan death marches, in which almost all the Allied prisoners of war held there died. Today the region combines that historical memory with its role as a great refuge for Borneo's wildlife. The full history of Sandakan, orangutan conservation and the Kinabatangan rainforest is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The northern tip of Borneo: the 'land below the wind' of the British chartered company, with Mount Kinabalu, the orangutans of Sepilok and the memory of the Sandakan marches.
Read the history of Borneo — Sabah →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The name says it all. 'Orangutan' comes from the Malay 'orang hutan', which literally means 'person of the forest' or 'man of the forest'. And it's no coincidence: look an orangutan in the eye and many people feel there's someone behind that gaze. They share around 97% of their DNA with humans, use tools, build a new nest in the trees every night, and have a very long childhood in which the young learn from their mothers for years. Their intelligence, tenderness and individuality are deeply moving. They are the only great apes in Asia, and in the wild they survive only in the rainforests of two islands: Borneo and Sumatra.
For millions of years, orangutans ruled the jungles of Southeast Asia. The Indigenous peoples of Borneo lived alongside them and wove them into their mythology and beliefs. But over the last two centuries, and above all in recent decades, the story of this species has turned into a race against extinction. The main cause is the destruction of their habitat: commercial logging of the rainforest and, devastatingly, the unstoppable spread of oil palm plantations, which have wiped out millions of hectares of tropical forest in Borneo and Sumatra to produce an oil found in half the products on supermarket shelves.
On top of habitat loss come hunting and trafficking. When a forest is cleared or a mother is killed, the orphaned young often end up captured and sold illegally as exotic pets, a cruel trade that condemns these animals to life in a cage, far from the forest they need to survive. The Bornean orangutan is classified as critically endangered, and its numbers have fallen dramatically. Places like Sepilok were born in response to this emergency: not as tourist attractions, but as hospitals and schools of last hope for the man of the forest.
The Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre opened in 1964, becoming one of the world's first projects dedicated to rescuing these apes and returning them to the forest. Its story is linked to a pioneering figure: Barbara Harrisson, a conservationist who, together with her husband Tom Harrisson (curator of the Sarawak Museum), was among the first to raise the alarm about the orangutan crisis and to experiment with methods for rehabilitating orphaned young and reintroducing them into the wild. Sepilok took up that drive and gave it an institutional home inside a protected forest reserve near Sandakan.
The idea was — and still is — as simple to state as it is hard to achieve: take orangutans that arrive traumatised (orphans that have lost their mothers, animals confiscated from traffickers or rescued from plantations and homes where they were kept as pets), heal them, and teach them step by step the skills they need to survive on their own in the forest: climbing, building nests, finding food, recognising danger. It's a long process that takes years, because in the wild they would learn these things from their mother over an extended childhood. The orangutans move through stages, from the nursery for the youngest to an increasingly independent life in the surrounding forest.
Over the decades, Sepilok became a model copied elsewhere and a global symbol of the fight to save the orangutan. It helped change public perception, build pressure against trafficking and deforestation, and rehabilitate hundreds of individuals. But the people who run it are the first to point out that a rehabilitation centre is a patch, not a solution: as long as the forest keeps being destroyed, orphans will keep arriving. The orangutan's real future isn't decided in Sepilok, but in whether Borneo manages to protect the forests that are its only possible home.
Sepilok's neighbouring town, Sandakan, has a much longer and more dramatic history. In the late 19th century it became the capital of the territory run by the British North Borneo Chartered Company, the private British company that governed northern Borneo. Sandakan flourished as a port exporting precious timber, tobacco, rubber and other forest products, and grew into a prosperous, cosmopolitan town with a large Chinese community of traders and workers, so much so that it earned the nickname 'Little Hong Kong'. Its busy bay was one of northern Borneo's windows onto the world.
That prosperity was shattered by the Second World War. The Japanese occupied Sandakan in 1942, and the town became the setting for one of the most atrocious chapters of the war in Asia: the Sandakan Death Marches. In a prison camp on the outskirts, the Japanese held some 2.700 Allied prisoners of war, mostly Australian and British, used as slave labour to build an airfield. In the final months of the war, as the Allies advanced, the prisoners were forced to march on foot through jungle and mountains towards Ranau, in inhuman conditions. Those who collapsed from hunger, disease or exhaustion were executed. Of those 2.700 men, only six survived, all of them because they managed to escape.
The war left Sandakan in ruins, flattened by Allied bombing aimed at driving out the Japanese. After the conflict, the territory's capital moved to Jesselton (later Kota Kinabalu), and Sandakan was rebuilt, losing some of its former splendour. Today, Sandakan Memorial Park, on the site of the old prison camp, honours the victims of that tragedy. It's a part of the past worth keeping in mind when visiting this region: beneath the lush nature of Borneo there also beats an intense and, at times, terrible human history.
Not far from Sepilok flows the Kinabatangan River, the longest in Sabah and one of the best places in all of Southeast Asia to see wildlife. Its banks hold an astonishing density of life: wild orangutans, the unmistakable proboscis monkeys (endemic to Borneo, with their enormous noses), pygmy elephants, macaques, hornbills, crocodiles and hundreds of bird species. For travellers, cruising the Kinabatangan at dawn or dusk and watching all that life emerge from the forest is a magical experience, one of the great river safaris on the planet.
But behind that wonder lies an uncomfortable truth. The reason so much wildlife gathers along the river is, to a large extent, tragic: deforestation wiped out much of the lowland forest around the Kinabatangan to make way for oil palm, and the animals have been pushed into the narrow strip of forest that survives along the banks. What visitors enjoy as a fabulous concentration of life is, in reality, the symptom of a cornered ecosystem: the species have nowhere else to go. Pygmy elephants, for example, increasingly come into conflict with plantations as they search for food and space.
That's why the Kinabatangan is both a refuge and an ecological front line. Wildlife sanctuaries and corridors have been created to try to reconnect the fragments of forest and give animals room to move, and many lodges and local communities have bet on ecotourism as an economic alternative to oil palm, showing that a living forest can be worth more standing than felled. The fight is far from won, but responsible tourism — the kind that funds conservation, supports communities and creates incentives to protect the forest — is one of the best tools for giving this extraordinary refuge for Borneo's wildlife a future.
The Sepilok and Sandakan area is today one of Borneo's great nature and wildlife destinations, a place where travellers can experience up close both the wonder and the drama of Southeast Asia's rainforests. In Sepilok, seeing orangutans in rehabilitation and rescued sun bears is a moving experience that, approached the right way, leaves you with more than a photo: an awareness of why these animals need rescuing, and of what threatens them. The centres also play an essential educational role, raising awareness among thousands of visitors every year about the crisis of deforestation and wildlife trafficking.
That tourism plays an ambivalent but important role. On the one hand, it generates the income that funds conservation, gives the living forest economic value and offers local communities an alternative to logging and oil palm. On the other, it has to be handled carefully so as not to stress the animals or over-humanise them, or turn their tragedy into mere entertainment. Serious centres work hard at that balance: strict rules on distance and behaviour, honest information about the threats, and the clear message that the ultimate goal is to return the animals to the forest, not to put them on display.
For anyone visiting this corner of Sabah, the best way to honour what you see is to take it home with you: to understand that every orphaned orangutan in Sepilok, every rescued sun bear, every proboscis monkey cornered along the Kinabatangan is a symptom of a forest that is being lost, and that everyday choices — from the palm oil we consume to the responsible tourism we choose — have something to do with their fate. Sepilok is at once one of the most moving experiences of a trip to Borneo and a lesson in responsibility. The hope of the man of the forest depends, in the end, on the rest of us humans deciding to leave him a forest to live in.
