Wild Sumatra

I was crouched down in the pitch black with my shorts around my ankles and there was a bee on my behind. This was not your average honey bee; this was a bee to be taken seriously. We were camped at the top of a 400m hill in the middle of the Gunung Leuser National Park in western Sumatra. Our guide, Jhony, who had led us through the thick jungle to this spot and in whom I entrusted my survival, had summed up the power of these bees’ venom earlier in the evening: “If you are stung seven times, you will die.” His words now ringing in my ears, I stayed perfectly still and silently willed the bee to leave me un-stung. After 20 seconds it obliged; I pulled my shorts up and high-tailed it back into the (relative) safety of our tent. Just as that was no ordinary bee, this was no ordinary jungle. I had dipped my foot in the arboreal ocean a couple of times previously but past experiences had little prepared me for the utter wildness of Sumatra. Jhony had no problems listing the many possible ways I could die here: mauled by a tiger, bitten by a snake, swept down the swollen river, lost in the wilderness – not to mention the seven fatal bee stings. Yet, somehow, all these warnings faded into the background as I trekked in awe of nature’s magnificence. Sumatra had become something of an obsession during the last year. The island’s name was pure poetry; full of exotic Asian mystery. It just sounded… wild. And wild it was. We regularly stumbled across groups of wonderfully fluffy and ginger Sumatran orang-utans. The closest we came to an elephant was a huge footprint we discovered on our severely sweaty and much-fallen-over-on hill climb. We heard the bark of a sun bear but failed to locate the beast. Long-tailed macaques were much more obliging, raining unwanted fruits down upon our heads from the canopy while the 40-a-day smokers’ cough call of the Thomas Leaf Monkey provided background music. Lying in our jungle shelter on the final morning, I listened to the woof-woof of flapping hornbill wings and whooping of the white-handed gibbon. We’d spent just four days in Gunung Leuser, but it felt like weeks. I had no idea which weekday or month it was – or even what year. Modern life in the concrete jungle was all but forgotten in the face of this pure, unadulterated wilderness, with nothing but the ground to sleep on and our bodies to travel by. This is what our planet is supposed to be, I thought. We all should spend some time in the wilderness, every once in a while.