Indonesia 2: Into the Wild...

"Jungle Trek, Jungle Trek, in Bukit Lawang. See the monkeys see the birds, see Orangutan... hey!" the guides chanted as we walked through Bukit Lawang to start our long awaited journey into the jungle. We walked down the river along the same path we had followed on the first night, except this time we were all decked in dark coloured shirts and matching camouflage ajumma pants hoping to blend into the jungle enough that the animals wouldn't see us (it was only our bright red arms and faces, and possibly our lumo Korean made socks and shoes, that gave us away). We veered off the path between some clothing stalls and climbed some steep concrete stairs which lead to a very rickety rope bridge leading across the river and away from the main Bukit village. We stepped carefully to avoid falling through and giving the villagers washing their clothes or swimming in the river a nasty surprise. 

The adventure begins...

The locals washing their clothes in the river

After crossing the bridge Iman (our official guide) led us up through the village's rubber plantations which border the National Park. (Who would have guessed - rubber comes from trees! AND its white!) We reached the border of the park, which is basically just a series of concrete pillars which tell people not to plant any more rubber trees beyond that point. We found this baffling since this reserve is not only home to apes but to elephants and tigers as well. 

The pillar marking the edge of the jungle

Temperatures instantly dropped as we entered the park. The deeper we went the taller the trees got and the more the jungle sounds intensified. Interesting sights and smells hit us from every direction. As we lumbered through the forest it was clear we were not going to hide from anything - no matter how camouflaged our pants were. In contrast to us, Arif, who had decided to tag along, bounded off effortlessly in every direction to bring us interesting tasting or smelling plants and to hunt for animals we could take photos of. For the first part of the hike we were never more than 100m off from another group of tourists. It looked like Jungle Trekking was rather in vogue, but with all this noise going on we doubted we would see anything - we were wrong. Before long we stumbled (completely by Imans design) across a group of tourists huddled in a circle taking photos. A whole troop of Thomas Leaf Monkeys had stopped to check out the new batch of foreigners tramping through their jungle. They looked about as comfortable as socialites in front of the camera and came so close we didn't need our zoom lenses. No one had told them the "stay 10m from the animals" rule we were supposed to be following. 

Thomas Leaf Monkey

Iman exchanged a couple of words with the other guides and led his four man army off to find something else to take photos of. This time we were even luckier. We soon came across a mother Orangutan with a youngster lounging in the in canopy above us. This time it was one of the guides that hadn't read the rules... A guide from another camp who was leading a group of Danish tourists tried to coax the apes closer to the ground with a piece of fruit. Chris noticed the constipated look on my face and firmly told him to stop. Feeding the animals is strongly discouraged because the Orangutans who get too comfortable with people and associate them with food often become highly aggressive and are known to attack tourists. One such Orangutan regularly terrorises hikers in the area, and although she has been moved several times, she always comes back for the easy pickings. The other reason is that human food has the nasty habit of housing human bugs, which can make primates very sick because of the DNA we share. 

We were getting ready to move off when Alex noticed a rustling in the trees in the opposite direction. Arif suddenly got very excited and started springing around to get a better look. He explained that we had spotted a Siamang. An endangered, completely black gibbon which is not commonly seen by hikers. Arif and Iman quickly led us through the trees to a spot where we could see the gibbon better. High above us the Siamang had encountered a troupe of Long tailed Macaques which it started chasing through the trees. As we followed the ground became thick with tourists and all of a sudden we were standing along side the feeding platform we had visited two days before. Only this time instead of there being action on the platform there was a whole lot of action taking place opposite it. The Siamang and the Macaques had disturbed a pair of mating Orangutans. Arif was ecstatic. His smile was so broad he could hardly contain himself. Apparently free Orangutan blue movies are even scarcer than Siamangs. So there we were, literally surrounded by monkeys everywhere we turned. The Siamung and cheeky Macaques continued their title bout while the Orangutans ignored everything around them and proceeded to change to a more 'comfortable' position. 

Siamang vs Macaque

When the excitement subsided we left the action thoroughly pleased that we had put off our hike for a day. Arif and Iman couldn't get over how lucky we had been. As if all this wasn't enough we also saw a White handed Gibbon, several more Orangutans and heard, but didn't see, the local hornbill. This meant that in one day we had seen 5 of the 7 primate species that live in Gunung Leuser National Park and one of the two we didn't see - the slow loris - is both endangered and nocturnal so chances are we weren't gonna see him.

Our celebrations after being crowned jungle royaly by Arif

We stopped for lunch next to a creek where we dug into our much anticipated leaf packed lunches. Just as before, they didn't disappoint. We were even given our fill of exotic fruit for desert. Arif, never able to sit still for particularly long, took to practicing his Mowgli skills while we lounged about on the rocks. 

Arif = Mowgli = Awesome

Over the course of the day Arif and Iman showed us all sorts of interesting things, like the clove tree, cinnamon tree and a massive decades old gum tree the sap of which is apparently used to make incense.  So when Arif came bounding out of nowhere at one of the more tiring parts of the trek (we had just reached the top of a mountain) with what he called 'Jungle ice cream' we bit into the strips of tree he handed to us with little thought. Lips pursed, faces contorted and a lot of spitting ensued. Iman laughed and comfortingly stated that at least now we wouldn't catch malaria. Arif had given us quinine - in its original form. This is the stuff that gives tonic water its bitter taste, so you can just imagine the facial expressions it caused in undiluted form... 

Tired and inoculated we gritted our teeth and pressed on. The last part of the journey was a game of tag with a group of German tourists who kept passing us whenever we took a break. We were very relieved when our camp site came into view before theirs. The cherry on top was the tea, biscuits and condensed milk that emerged from the food preparation hut just after we arrived. None of us had had condensed milk since starting in Korea so it quickly became a multipurpose condiment. We used it as sugar, as milk, as dip for biscuits, as butter for more than one biscuit and  just ate it out of the can with our biscuit spoons. We were very happy bunnies. 

Photo by Leighton Wattrus (blurry but awesome)

The afternoon was a relaxed one floating about in the river, skipping stones , meeting monitor lizzards and taking some photos and before we knew it, the sun was going down. Arif had to get back to the kitchen at Green Hills, so he unfortunately had to leave us. Meanwhile, we had no proper tents, our toilet was literally a spade and a jungle and we were out in the open for every type of creepy crawly to harass us - we were content, relaxed and truly at home. The camp had a small tent where food was being prepared and our shelter was sided and roofed by black plastic with an open front. Dinner was soon served and it was fit for a king. We had a few different meat dishes to choose from and a plate of rice to fill the gap which was accompanied by four tall boy beers we had managed to acquire (none of us are sure how).

Monitor Lizzard (Just under a metre long)

Dinner

After dinner we sat in front of the big TV and watched Dark Knight Rises while our electric blankets were heating up our beds. Not quite. We actually had way more fun than that - Iman found a box of matches and started showing us tricks and giving us problems to solve, which were not easy! (*cough cough* clear throat* Alex came out victorious * Aggim)... We then started to drink a little and the games came out - I forget the name, but we played one game where each person gets assigned an animal and an action and sound to describe the animal, then while slapping your legs and clapping your hands, you do your actions and then someone else's actions to pass it to them. They then do their actions and someone else's and it passes again till somebody messes up... It is as confusing as it sounds at first, but once we had it down we were oblivious to the world! We were laughing, we were crying, we were inventing animals, elephants started making ape sounds, snakes and elephants couldn't be distinguished... It was chaos.

After the excitement had worn off, we turned in for a rather uncomfortable but well deserved sleep!

Iman doing his monkey impersonation (from the game)

Morning came and we awoke to find a mother orangutan and her baby perched in the tree just outside our tent. They had obviously smelt the food and had come to investigate. We sat beneath them drinking our tea and eating our biscuits while the staff members protected their food from the encroaching duo. After tea, the staff members pulled some tubes together and started joining them to create one large raft that we could travel down river and back to camp on. As the staff members were busy, a group of macaques planned their attack on the compound with the objective of stealing the food that the orangutans had failed to acquire. Alex and I spent our time chasing them off so the gents could carry on with their mission. As they had finished, all our bags got put into plastic bags as to not get wet and we boarded our five star cruiser for the voyage home. At this point the macaque's had taken hold of the now unprotected food stash and the battle had been lost.

Defending the fort

Our journey home was a lot easier than our tubing experience. We were dressed like muslim women to protect our sensitive bodies from the sun and we sat relaxed as our raft was guided by Iman at the back on his deflating tube and another guy with a long pole at the front. A mere 30 minutes later we were back at Green Hill with grand stories of adventure to share with our fellow guests. Indiana Jones had nothing on us!

Indonesia 1: Northern Sumatra, Here We Come!

Welcome to Alex and my first joint post! :)

We are going to start off by saying, we just had some of the best days of our lives. We have just returned to Korea after spending two weeks in South East Asia, and it was incredible! We spent a week in Bukit Lawang, which is in Sumatra, Indonesia and then a week in Phuket, Thailand. As these places are so massively different in every way, we are going to break it into a few posts. So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, Bukit Lawang (part 1)...

After a two hour bus trip to Seoul, then another hour to the airport, we settled in to our hotel and prepared for our flight to Indonesia. The other two members of our four man travel team, Leighton and Rob, only joined us later as Leighton had only finished his summer camp that Saturday. When they did arrive, we grabbed some beers and got a little more familiar. (Side note: The Sharks beat the Stormers that night).

The flight with Air Asia took us from Incheon Airport to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia for a short stop over in the "low-cost" terminal, which was the worst terminal I have ever been in. I swear passport control was like a hot dog stand and security looked like something you would expect to find in Zimbabwe... Anyhow, we then carried on to Medan which ended our 8 our flight travelling and began our 3 hour shuttle to Bukit Lawang. This so called Shuttle was not so much a shuttle, it was more like a South African taxi with less people packed into it, actual brake pads (I hoped), a very well used hooter and one of the most aggressive drivers I have ever seen. The roads in Medan are CRAZY! On a two lane road you most commonly see up to 8 flows of traffic - there are scooters with up to 4 people on them, there are taxi's, "shuttles", cars, pedestrians, bicycles and the occasional cow all travelling in excess of 80 kilometers an hour in any direction they think necessary. The surroundings reminded me of the run down areas of Johannesburg City, except they were still very populated with businesses and trade and the smells all told their own stories. If it wasn't the smell of some exotic street food, it was the smell of sewerage, rubber factories or petrol - quite overwhelming.

Over the next three hours the sprawling city slowly morphed into palm oil and rubber plantations with the odd house or village here and there. We stopped at the last of the villages before we drove straight into the forest. We got out of our glorified mini bus taxi and made our way down the winding partly cobbled, partly concrete, partly dust pathways leading between the shops and guest houses that make up Bukit Lawang. We had quite a long walk to Greenhill guest house where we would be spending the next few nights, but the bright faces that popped out of doorways or hung over balconies to welcome us, and the occasional motorbike which almost ran us off the path, made the walk quite an exciting one. All the while we could hear and smell the jungle through the darkness, but we had no idea what we were going to wake up to the next morning. 

We arrived at Greenhill, and sat down for a beer after our long days of travel. The friendly Greenhill staff made us feel quite at home. Before long someone had picked up a guitar and the night dissolved into djembe and acoustic guitar covers of Hotel California, Indonesia political songs, and broken conversation - our bags still beside us with no idea of where we were sleeping. Another side note: the food was amazing! 

Phandi and his crew

[Bukit Lawang is a little village that runs because of the tourist trade that visits it. It is right next to a protected piece of the rainforest which is still home to many ape species, including orangutans, gibbons, thomas leaf monkeys and the long tailed macaque. Even though it is a tourist destination, it is not overpopulated with tourists, it is still very quiet and natural feeling.]

At around midnight we got shown to our room, which was a very basic wooden structure with no actual windows (just a large hole in the wooden wall), mattresses on the floor and only use of a public bathroom, which was a traditional Indonesian style long drop and a bucket to bathe in - which is actually not as scary as it sounds. We threw our stuff down, grabbed our towels and headed for a midnight (slightly tipsy) swim in the river bordering the jungle before heading to bed.

Morning came and we saw for the first time the towering trees that we had swum next to the night before. We were up early so that we could go to the orangutan feeding platform to hopefully see some apes and take a few pics, and boy were we lucky because we arrived to a mother and baby making a feast of a bunch of bananas, not to mention the troop of long tail macaque's we'd past on the way. After getting some truly great picture opportunities, we decided to go tubing down the river... We dropped our stuff at the room, put on costumes and carried tubes to a sensible start point with our guide Arif (who looks like an adult version of Mowgli from The Jungle Book). 

The plan was to tube down to the village, stopping for lunch on the river bank on the way. What we didn't realise was that the village was three hours down the river by tube! So for the rest of the day we dodged rocks, rapids, small children and soaking cows in our tubes made out of the insides of old tractor tires. Arif pulled us over every now and then to feed us local fruits or to locate Rob who seemed to enjoy getting stuck on the rocks further up river or taking a less travelled scenic route. As the river went on the jungle made way for plantations, fish traps and a fallen down tree that got violently attacked by Alex's leg. This seemed like a good point to stop for lunch. After liberally smearing Alex's scratched leg with jungle medicine (chewed up grass) Arif pulled several brown paper packages out of his rucksack. Under the paper was a leaf, and in the leaf was an assortment of rice, chicken, vegetables and curry sauce, which made for a delicious finger licking good lunch (no knives or forks for this meal, or any outdoor meal for that matter). After lunch we had a well deserved nap on the pebbles under some over hanging trees, waking to find our bodies a tad pinker than before, but we pressed on. When we finally pulled our tubes out of the river at the end of our trip we had collectively lost one pair of slip slops, drowned two passports, scraped one leg and all taken on a brighter red hue. After all this Arif still suggested that we sit on top of the bus for our trip back to Green Hill instead of inside it, which we politely dismissed as a silly idea (none of the Indonesians could understand that sunburn was from the sun or that it could possibly be painful). 

Photo Taken by Leighton Wattrus

Photo Taken by Leighton Wattrus

The rest of the evening was spent nursing our burning skin and so we decided to take day two to recover instead of hitting the jungle straight away. Arif, who never seemed to stop, hit the kitchens of Greenhill to give us yet another delicious meal. 

Our rest day turned out to be a very good idea as the sunburn was quite a lot worse than we thought it would be... Alex burnt the top of her feet, so hiking would of been terribly uncomfortable. The day was pretty chillaxed, Alex spent most of the day reading on the porch while us lads took a walk into town to grab a cold Anker. The walk down the river into town is lined with stalls, much the same as a flea market, selling sarongs, various clothing, carved wood pieces and jewellery. The colours really make it feel alive! The odd jungle guide will also be seen walking up stream carrying up to 6 tubes on his back... These small little guys are seriously beefy.

That evening gave us our first proper thunder storm where it bashed, crashed and pissed with rain - nothing like we've ever seen. It was like a 2 hour Johannesburg storm condensed into a bite size 40 minute massacre. Lovely.

This made for a relaxed evening, with another good dinner, another river swim and an early turn in,  after all, we had to be well rested for our jungle trek the next day! Oh, and we can't forget the kittens...