November 14th – November 17th
Author's note :-) I'm going to write in some detail about Bukit Lewang as I loved the time I spent there. The story serves more as an aid to help me remember the experience rather than to entertain whoever may be reading the blurb I am writing.
A boat, a bus, a minivan taxi, another bus and then a motorbike with a side carriage brought us from the serenity of Lake Toba, through the madness of the city Madan (appropriately the name translates to “Battlefield”), slowly along roads with large potholes all over them to the wild jungle town of Bukit Lawang, in North Sumatra. As I later found out, it was no coincidence that I got talking to a jungle guide on the bus from Medan. Guides often have to make trips to the city to look for tourists as there are so few that travel to the region these days – a flood in Bukit Lawang in November 2003 killed 280 people and tourists have been advised to avoid North Sumatra in recent years due to the unstable political situation. It was also off Sumatra's northern coast that the 2004 Boxing Day Tsuanami originated. Husani, my guide-to-be, sat in the seat across the aisle from me, was friendly and sincere and carried a book full of compliments about his treks written by tourists of all nationalities who had ignored the advice and travelled to his town. I consequently signed myself up for a two day trek with him and as the rain poured that night, I lay thinking about having committed myself to possibly a very wet trek.
The following morning, Husani was knocking on my door at 7.30am. Although we had agreed 8am departure he came to tell me that the other girl who had signed up for the trek was ill so it would just be the two of us. With my own personal Tarzan guide, the trek turned out to be one of the best experiences I have had so far on this trip.
We had barely set foot in Gunung Lenser National Park when we saw a bright blue bird and then Thomas Leaf Monkeys leaping in the trees above us. My heart started beating quicker with the excitement and the delight of seeing animals moving so freely. Husani had an incredible knowledge of the environment he had grown up in. During the course of the trek, he pointed out rubber trees, or “condom trees” as he liked to call them, resin and eucalyptus trees and explained how different leaves, bark and roots we came across are used to cure anything from bee stings to polio. The trees and plants began to merge into one with me but Husani could distinguish them like Westerners might pick out a packet of paracetamol or throat lozengers.
We were about an hour into the trek when we encountered what I'd really come to Sumatra for: orangutans. Better said, the large, orange mammals found us. At the time, I was both focusing on not slipping over tree routes as we strode upwards through thick jungle vegetation and contemplating what would be worse ... finding a leech crawling up my leg or feeling a spider drop down onto my head from one of the branches my body kept brushing against. I was therefore taken by surprise when Husani, with his sixth jungle sense, turned to me and calmly said, “Ok, Mina is behind us”. Mina is an aggressive orangutan who had been released back into the wild a while ago by the Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre in Bukit Lawang. She has bitten over 40 tourists and recently gave birth. I turned around and saw her swinging on a branch about 3 metres from us, her baby clutching her tightly. She was heading straight for us so Husani told me to go, “go quickly”. Impulse took over and I didn't look back. I climbed until I came to a path. Husani was right behind me, a jungle connoisseur and bodyguard all in one, and as I started to catch my breath, Mina swooped up over our heads and out of sight in a matter of seconds. Wow. Wow. Wow. We heard more leaves moving below and soon another of Mina's children came into sight and swung up over our heads following its mother into the denser part of the jungle. It was an amazing, adrenalin-high experience to be so close to wild, or semi-wild (Genung Lenser National Park has both) and unpredictable, animals. More branch snapping noises then drew our attention to a fourth orangutan, another female who wasn't in so much of a hurry to pass us by. She came within about 7 metres of us and then just hung. I watched her in silence, barely daring to breath, and thought about the sign I had read at the park's entrance about orangutans sharing 96.4% of human genes. What was she thinking as I crouched there, watching her watching me?
I started to film her with my camera and was about to stop after Husani explained to me that orangutans can hang in the same spot for two hours, when all of a sudden she started swinging forwards. In seconds she was down onto the ground and walking on two legs onto the path, now just a couple of metres in front of us. This time Husani very calmly said, “run.” Desiring to carry on filming her but unsure of what the consequences would be of staying around, I ran, in true Forrest Gump style, as fast as I could. At first, I heard Husani running behind me but then I ran so fast that I soon found myself on my own. I heard Husani calling my name and laughing. He said he had never seen anyone run so quickly. The way I saw it, if a guy who has spent all his life in the jungle tells you to run, you run. I went back to where he was standing, now smiling and laughing myself about the “hairy” moment we'd just experienced. The female orangutan had found another branch to hang from and seemed settled again. We watched her a while longer and then, as if bored with our presence, she swung off, back down into the jungle below us. I told Husani that I felt so lucky to be where we were, in the depths of nature, and that whenever things so wonderful and unexpected like that happen, I always want other people in my life to experience them too . He just smiled and said, “welcome to the jungle,” which set the “Guns N' Roses” track going through my head.
Husani was a great guide. We had regular stops to eat delicious fruit (passion fruit, bananas, oranges, pineapple) which he produced just at the right moments from his rucksack. We had lunch next to a little stream and again I was surprised at what came out of Husani's bag. First fried rice wrapped in paper, then fresh tomatoes and cucumbers were sliced and added. Prawn crackers were placed along the edge of the paper and then a fried egg (!) produced from a plastic bag and placed on top of everything. It was a right-hand-only eating affair with fingers, which I'm not too good at when it comes to rice, but found that the slices of cucumbers made good enough spoons.
We chatted over lunch about our lives, discovering we were the same age, both born in the Chinese year of the monkey, but obviously brought up worlds apart. I had recognised Husani carrying out “wudu” before eating so asked him about his Islamic faith and how important it was to him. He said it was very important but that he wasn't always a “good” Mulsim because he doesn't always pray five times a day and sometimes drinks beer. Indeed, he likened himself to the animal of our birth year: playful but a little bit naughty. “Well me too”, I said, and told him not to be too harsh on himself. Drops of rain brought our conversation to an abrupt end and Husani remarked on the fact that we should get going as we were still a long way from where we were camping that night. As we set off in the rain, I thought to myself about the topics we had been talking about. The economies of the world are apparently crumbling, there are riots in Thailand where we were just a few weeks ago, floods in Vietnam where we were a couple of months ago and Obama is now the President of the United States but these things seem so irrelevant when you are in the middle of the jungle in Sumatra. Astronomy, religion and family were the topics of the day.
The rain never eased. In fact, it got harder and harder and began to thunder. Husani started apologising to me frequently fearing that I wasn't having a good trek and it was his fault. There was absolutely nothing to apologise for. If you want to see animals in the wild, you have to take the rain just as well as the sunshine and there was a point when I just couldn't be any wetter or much dirtier so it didn't matter anyway. After about 3 hours of walking though non-stop rain, we started a steep descent at the bottom of which, Husani told me, our camp and some other trekkers were awaiting us . The path was just mud now, so I had to concentrate hard on making sure I didn't slip. I mocked Husani for saving the best part of the trek til the end for me.
When Husani had mentioned “the camp” I had imagined tents with four sides and a closing door. “The camp” was, however, a three-sided, insect-inviting shack, made by pulling plastic sheets over some wooden posts. As I approached, I saw a group of lads inside with their jungle guide. They had been there a couple of hours so were all clean and in fresh clothes making me feel a little ridiculous as I stood before them, dripping wet, probably stinking, and quite dirty. Names were exchanged, tea and biscuits were offered and I was told that dinner would be ready soon. It was a warm welcome and I knew then that I was in for a special evening.
I jumped into the river next to our base with Husani to wash the dirt away and ended up clinging to a rock so as not to be taken by the strong current. When we returned, dinner had been set out across a long plastic mat on the floor: chicken, beef, tofu, vegetables, a whole fish, home-made chilli sauce, prawn crackers and some huge bowls of rice, all separated by little candles. I never cease to be amazed at the wonderful meals people make with so little equipment – with a camp fire and a pan, five amazing dishes had been produced.
After dinner, we were entertained by the two jungle guides and the chef with one card trick, joke and puzzle after another. It was obvious that these guys had been trekking with tourists for years as they had an abundance of material at their disposal. When we'd worn ourselves out with riddles and games, we couldn't put off the inevitable any longer. It was time to lie down among the cockroaches, ants and other desirables who had made their presence felt throughout the evening. There was constant body slapping and itching throughout the night. At one point Husani sat bolt upright, grabbed a torch and spent a good fifteen minutes scanning the bushes with the light. Although extremely rare, we were, after all, in a jungle which was home to tigers, rhinos, and wild orangutans and as there was no wall in front of us, we lay, in our line of seven, quite vulnerable to whatever was out there. I had my own drama at one point when I felt something at the bottom of my sleeping bag liner, the only item of security I had, and leaped up to discover one of the biggest ants I had ever seen scurrying around in confusion. In the morning, I didn't so much wake as to make the conscious decision to get up out of my sleeping bag liner. It was, after all, much more comfortable being on my feet than lying down, imagining what could be crawling next to my head.
Ardie, the chef, produced a delicious breakfast of scrambled egg triple sandwiches, fruit, biscuits and coffee for us for which we we were joined by a large lizard-like reptile who peeped through the bushes at us. The guides then instructed us to go for a swim whilst they prepared lunch and got the tubes ready for rafting back to Bukit Lewang. I decided to skip the swim as I figured I'd be getting wet enough rafting and joined Ardie at the fire to chat whilst he prepared some noodles. After eating again within the space of an hour after finishing breakfast, we headed down to the river to get onto quite an incredible raft construction – five rubber tires tied together in a line with the mats we'd been sleeping on on top. By this time a friend of Ardie had joined the group so there was eight of us to fit onto the tubes as well as all our stuff which was packed into four huge plastic bags. When we were all squashed on, we set off, laughing and screaming as we rushed down the river with jungle on either side. We waved to anybody we saw on the riverbanks and as water splashed me across the face, waking me up (although really I had had no sleep to wake up from), I felt so alive and happy. We had done river tubing in Laos, but this was different, more wild, even more surreal. There was no music blaring out of river bars, just the sound of our laughter and Ardie and Alec singing “The Bukit Lewang Jungle Song” to the tune of “Jingle Bells”.
Back in Bukit Lewang, I said my gooodbyes to the group and Husani and I went up to the Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre to watch a feeding session. It wasn't as exciting as having the orangutans pounce on us during the trek, but it was still great to see our orange friends up close again and I thought the centre had done a good job preserving the natural surroundings - there was just one bamboo feeding platform and the orangutans were free to swing down onto it from the jungle as their stomachs urged them to. About five out of the centre's semi-wild orangutans blessed us with their presence.
There was a great atmosphere in Bukit Lewang that Sunday afternoon. You could hear children laughing as they tubed down the river, couples were cuddling together under trees along the banks and music could be heard throughout the village, from the karaoke tunes near to the hut where Robbie and I were staying to Bob Marley and similar classics being strung on guitars. A power cut around 7pm brought the whole village into pitch darkness but the music continued. I had dinner with Husani down in one of the wooden restaurants next to the river and we then went to “Lizard Cafe” where the owner was sat with a guitar trying to write lyrics to a melody he had composed. He soon put his pen down and picked up the guitar to play us some songs. Next a drum came out, someone else joined us and we all sang and tapped away for an hour or so. At the end of the evening, I thanked Husani for a wonderful couple of days and walked back, under the moonlight, over the long wooden hanging bridge to my hut to prepare for leaving the jungle and flying to Singapore, an hour's flight from Medan but probably a place very few people from Sumatra would ever see.
