Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre

About this place

The best-known place in Malaysia to see Bornean orangutans, opened in 1964 as the first official project to rehabilitate orphaned young orangutans rescued from logging sites, plantations and hunters, or kept as pets. Here the young learn what their mothers would have taught them, climbing, finding food and building nests, and are released into the forest once they are ready. The centre lies inside the Kabili-Sepilok Forest Reserve, more than four thousand hectares of mostly virgin rainforest where some sixty to eighty orangutans live free. A wooden boardwalk leads to the feeding platform, where rangers put out fruit twice a day, at ten in the morning and three in the afternoon, and semi-wild apes swing in along the ropes, sometimes a mother with a baby clinging to her. Nothing is guaranteed: they choose for themselves whether to come. There is also a hall overlooking the outdoor nursery, where visitors watch the youngest orangutans through a large window as they practise playing and climbing. A foreign adult ticket is thirty ringgit and a child's fifteen, valid all day so you can see both feedings; it opens from nine to twelve and from two to four, with the morning session ending at eleven on Fridays. Arrive at least a quarter of an hour before a feeding, keep quiet on the platform, and leave food and bags in the lockers at the entrance, as the bold macaques snatch whatever they see. The sun bear centre and the Rainforest Discovery Centre are next door, so combine them in one day.