101 Challenges:

Location: Sepilok - Borneo

Details: Off to the national parks in Borneo we go to hug an Orangutan! Any funds raised throughout your stay in this area will go to saving these beautiful creatures from extinction.

Outcome: Today we kind of completed the Hug-U-Tan Challenge. We say kind of because it was in fact Olly, our pet Orang-utan puppet (donated to us by Caroline Cross and www.mightybanana.com) who headed off to the Sepilok Orang-utan Rehabilitation Centre to hug one of his own. You see, Olly’s been living in the bottom of Lee’s bag for the past 4-and-a-bit months and crawled out this morning insisting that it should be him and him only that completes this Challenge as human’s shouldn’t really be touching his Aunt or Uncle or second Cousin Belinda.

The conversation heated up a bit and things could have turned nasty if it wasn’t for Olly’s diplomacy and calming influence. We finally agreed to surrender the onus of responsibility for this Challenge – Olly left the hotel and we stayed in bed. Together. Spooning again. This is no longer unnatural or awkward for us.

So, off little Ollykins went and after a nearly a full day of us worrying for his wellbeing, he returned all happy and proud of himself – the little smug b*stard. He explained in great detail and length of the beauty of his natural home, how his alcoholic and substance abusing brothers and sisters were doing well on their cold-turkey rehabilitation programme and then, how he got patted on the head by his grand-dad.

Technically he failed the Challenge and when we told him this, our ginger little friend went absolutely mental and wrecked the hotel room before storming off. We haven’t seen him since.