The group on their Cambodia holidays

Saving the Yellow-Cheeked Gibbons

by | Jun 4, 2019

This was the project that See Asia Differently should have been most well known for and the proudest of as it was a wildlife initiative created from scratch by our company’s founder Peter Jones. Peter with help from Pierre Yves-Clais and Rik Hendricks created a unique gibbon encounter with endangered species of gibbon found only in a small area of Cambodia.

Visiting Ta Prohm temple in Cambodia
Peter Jones our managing director and founder of Gibbonspotting.com at the Veun Sai Conservation Area.

Cutting a long and incredibly sad story short the project was sabotaged by believe it or not ‘Conservational International’, who lied to the local communities, jumped on the projects band waggon for their own personal and company gains and all in all destroyed the project. If you don’t know very much about Conservation International, then please be very wary of them and their message as they are the biggest crooks in the world. Yes, they have celebrity ambassadors and create wonderfully expensive promotional videos and at a corporate level they look like butter wouldn’t melt, but on the ground, they have absolutely no idea of what they are doing and in actual fact are detrimental to conservation efforts rather than having a positive effect.

At See Asia Differently we still do run treks to see these endangered gibbons with our treks still being the original and the best. Even though our horrendous experience of working with Conservation International was a bitter pill to swallow and cost our company in excess of $50,000 in lost revenue, a third of which would have gone to the local communities and gibbon conservation. Anyway, we are still very proud of what we have achieved by saving this endangered species for a little while longer yet.

the female Yellow-Cheeked Gibbon