Our favorite Borneo tours and excursions

From multi-day rainforest treks to tribal longhouse stays, Borneo offers some of the most unforgettable travel experiences on the planet.

You don’t come to Borneo to do things by halves. You want the very best guides, in the very best locations, with the very best range of activities, or nothing. In the world’s greatest wildlife destination, why settle for anything less?

By its very wild and untamed nature, much of Borneo impossible to explore without a guide – and we’re only interested in working with the very best. You can always spot them: they’re the ones who’ve never stopped being enthused about the sheer magnitude of the forest, and the ones who are as excited by a big cat’s pawprint as by the tiniest rare spider, even after years of guiding. Those are the people we want to show you Borneo.

Borneo isn’t just an untouched rainforest paradise. It’s a living, breathing island full of culture and contradictions, with street-food markets to explore, mountains to climb, coral reefs to marvel at, conservation challenges to face, and scores of different indigenous groups with whom to share an evening and a little tuak rice wine. These are the experiences that’ll get you beneath the surface.

Meeting the Iban people

Borneo’s Iban people may have abandoned their former practice of headhunting, but thankfully their traditional culture survives in many other forms.

Iban live in longhouses with up to 30 families under one roof, and in the evenings, these houses are filled with drinking, dancing and general merriment. Spend the night and be prepared to be plied with tuak rice wine and roped into a dance or two, to the inevitable amusement of your hosts! The Iban way of life may not have all the mod cons (or privacy) you’re used to, but it affords a sense of community that’s long faded from Western culture, and for us it’s one of the highlights of a trip to Borneo.

Gaya Island marine sports

Borneo is a firm contender for top marine destination on the planet, and there are few natural environments more magical than the coral reefs around Gaya Island.

This is a vivid, alien world of rippling anemones, spiky sea urchins, luminous butterflyfish and huge shoals of squid – expect every snorkeling trip or dove to feel like an episode of Blue Planet. And if you like to eat seafood as well as look at it, we can charter you a trip to Mengalum Island to land yourself a wahoo, dorado, or giant trevally. However you want to experience Gaya’s underwater world, we’ve got you covered.

Evening street food tour of Kuching

Kuching is the gastronomic capital of Borneo, and this guided tour is about sampling its many delights.

Slurp Sarawak laksa, invented by a Chinese hawker in 1945, then cool off with a mung bean pudding believed to lower the body temperature. Eat shaved ice piled high with sirups, fruits and jellies, then take a sampan across the river in search of the Battenberg-on-steroids that is Sarawak layer cake. Sample sugarcane coconut drinks, rojak fruit salad, and stuffed Bornean kompia pastries, then finish it all off with some mangrove palm ice cream topped with black sugar. All we can say is – pace yourself!

Semenggoh Orangutan Sanctuary

Just south of Kuching, the Semenggoh Wildlife Reserve has provided a sanctuary for rescued orangutans since 1975.

They spend most of their time roaming the forest, but they visit the feeding platform twice a day for a free meal of coconut, banana, and hard-boiled eggs. At these times, you can see adult orangutans swinging through the trees, babies playing, and mothers teaching their young to climb as they follow the ranger to the feeding platform. Though sightings are likely, do be aware that when fruit is particularly abundant in the rainforest, the orangutans won’t always turn up for their free meal.

Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Center Insider visit with Dr Wong

Named after the crescent-shaped patch of fur on its chest, the sun bear is the world‘s smallest bear.

Sadly, it's threatened not just by habitat loss and the pet trade but by poaching for its bile – which is prized in Chinese traditional medicine. Dr Wong started the center in 2008 with seven rescued bears and the ultimate aim of returning as many as possible to the wild. Now, the center has over 40, and you can observe them in rehabilitation, watching from boardwalks and platforms as they go about their bear business – all while Dr Wong explains what makes them so special.

Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Center

Established in 1964, this sanctuary (the first of its kind in Borneo) rescues baby orangutans orphaned by logging or the illegal pet trade and rehabilitates them so that they can be released back into the wild.

It’s a process that can take up to seven years, and at the SORC you can see them at every stage of development – from youngsters being cared for in indoor nurseries through to adolescence and release. After release, the orangutans might still come back to the center for bananas and sugarcane (although the meal is kept monotonous to encourage them to find their own food), so keep your eyes peeled to see them playing in the branches and swinging down from the trees.