Growing Up Around Camp Leakey

I spent the first few years of my life there, although I don’t remember much from that time. I really only have one clear memory and that was of a hole at the end of a jetty that I would jump over. I remember looking at it and thinking, What will happen if I miss? Then, on the next jump, I missed and went into the water. My parents remember what happened next more than I do. I was rescued by a student of my mom’s who jumped into the water and pulled me out.

That is basically my only memory from my first three years at Camp Leakey.

Most of what I remember comes from going back when I was older. From about the age of three until I was fourteen, I returned every year to visit my mom. Because of that, I was able to see Camp Leakey and Tanjung Puting change over time.

When I was young, Camp Leakey was still a fairly small research camp. There were only a few klotoks (a boat with an upper deck and a living area) arriving each week, a handful of research assistants, and small groups of visitors. It felt remote, and it was remote.

Over the years, it became much busier. What once was a few klotoks a week became a few a day by 2001 which turned into over twenty boats a day crowded along the Sekonyer River by 2019. Small groups of people became larger groups. A handful of assistants became dozens. Camp Leakey had gone from being a small research station to the best-known tourist destinations in Indonesian Borneo, the third-largest island in the world.

As a child, I didn’t really think about any of that. Camp Leakey was not a famous conservation site to me. It was where my mom lived and worked. I remember playing with the orangutans and spending time with the people there. Some faces were new each time I returned, while others had been around since nearly the beginning.

It grew from a small place where nearly everyone knew one another into a destination visited by people from all over the world, new buildings added along the way. At the time, I probably did not understand how unusual that was — it was just part of my childhood.

Now it’s a busy tourist destination, one of the main reasons people come to Kalimantan in the first place.

That gives me a different relationship with Camp Leakey. I do not know it as a visitor, a tourist destination or a name from a nature channel documentary. For me, it was first a place connected to my family and childhood.

It is hard not to feel involved in orangutan conservation when it is what you grew up knowing. By the time I was thirteen, I could tell you what an orangutan ate, how it moved through the trees and how strong even a small orangutan could be.

None of that seemed especially unusual to me at the time. It was just information I had grown up around, almost like part of the family business.

In my early twenties, I returned to Camp Leakey and spent about three years there as a volunteer. I was still trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, as people in their early twenties often are, and going back to a place I already knew seemed to make sense.

Being there as an adult was different. As a child, Camp Leakey had mainly been the place where my mom lived and worked. As a volunteer, I began to understand how much work went into caring for the orangutans, maintaining the camps, and dealing with the steady increase in tourists, volunteers, scientists and politicians.

It also made me see the place less as part of my childhood and more as something I had chosen to be involved in. Orangutan conservation was no longer only something my parents did or something I had grown up around. I had returned on my own and taken part in it myself.

As a child, I jumped without knowing what I was jumping into. Coming back in my early twenties, I finally knew — and jumped anyways.