Wild Sumatra

Today I arrived back from a 2 day hike in the interior jungles of Indonesia’s huge Sumatra Island. The village I’m at, Bukit Lawang is popular with tourists, and I was therefore expecting a very easy walk through the rainforest before I left on the excursion. My expectations were completely off-base.

The hike only took us a few kilometers in from the edge of the jungle, yet it was thrilling: The path is narrow (when I could even see it), I had to fight off leeches, we had rodents in our tent, and saw lots of wildlife. It rained all last night and much of today, which made the tube ride down the river back to the village very, very extreme. We had to cut the ride short and walk after the tubes dumped a couple of the other hikers. The river is really raging.

 The main attraction at this particular jungle is the orangutans. I recently learned that orangutans, which used to live in most of southeast Asia, are now only found in Sumatra and Borneo.

A rehabilitation centre was set up to reintroduce tame orangutans into the wild. To do this, the centre releases the tame orangutans into the forest near the village to allow them to learn to live in the jungle. The centre offers them bland food so that the orangutans can survive, but also encourages them to learn to find their own food. Therefore, the orangutans that I saw on the hike are semi-wild: they live in the jungle, but are used to humans and are not afraid to come close.

The orangutans are red-haired tree acrobats. They swing around the tree tops on vines and branches, and some of the older ones come down near the tourists and pose. It is fascinating to see the orangutans because when I look at them I feel like I’m looking at a person rather than an animal. Their eyes are quite human-like.

Among the many other animals we saw, were black gibbons. They have similar looking bodies to the orangutans, but are black and smaller. They seem less controlled than the red apes. When the guide made animal calls, they started following us, and would run around us on the ground.

At the end of the trek we swam in some pristine waterfalls to wash away the dirt and sweat.

Before I came to the jungle for trekking, I stopped at Lake Toba, a large lake that is located in the crater of an ancient volcano. The volcano is said to have erupted some (hundreds?) millions of years ago and scattered ash all the way to Greenland. The lake area around the lake is a nice cool climate, and the water is clean and warm, heated naturally by geothermal activity.

The locals of Lake Toba are called Batak people, and have a unique culture that was found to be cannabilistic by the early European explorers. Their traditional culture is still evident today (minus the cannibalism) in their small villages, traditional architecture, and tribal society.

While exploring the area, I was invited for some coffee and betel nut by a few friendly Batak villagers. The man on the far left was an excellent wood carver, and I watched him chisel away on his latest masterpiece. For the villagers, cameras are quite a novelty, so I promised to print this photo and mail it to them when I get home.

Tomorrow I’m hopping on the back of a motorcycle and riding to another nearby village called Tangkahon where I am hoping to see some elephants. Yeehaw!