Elephants and Ocean

I didn’t get enough jungle in Bukit Lawang, so after my ape-filled trek I took a motorbike down a long rough gravel road to a different village called Tangkahan. In Tangkahan I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to wash elephants! The elephant  that I was brushing is named Ooni, and she seemed to enjoy the scrub-down.

The villages located around the perimeter of the national parks, such as Tangkahan, have issues with wild elephants and apes leaving the park and eating the villagers' crops. To combat the issue, the government captured the problem elephants and trained them to do work. The elephants at Tangkahan are used to help patrol the park against illegal loggers and poachers.

Ooni the elephant is well trained, and helped rinse herself (and me) by shooting water out of her trunk. After the cleaning I was allowed to feed her bananas. She thanked me by shaking my hand and kissing me on the cheek!

I did a day hike in Tangkahan to get a sense of what the jungle is like away from the well-touristed Bukit Lawang area. It turns out that real wild animals are much harder to spot than the semi-wild ones in Bukit Lawang.

I did manage to glimpse one black gibbon high up in the trees. We also found a bat cave that was packed with bats. When I walked into the cave it stirred them up, and they were flying around everywhere.

Probably my favourite part of the hike was the wild elephant path that we followed through the dense jungle. The wild elephants seem to act as kind of bulldozers, making it easier for us to hike. My guide started to get nervous as the elephant tracks were getting fresher and fresher as we walked deeper into the jungle. While I wanted to see a wild elephant, he made it clear that he wasn’t comfortable with that at all. He claims that the wild elephants can be very aggressive towards people.

After feeling the size and power of elephants from washing Ooni, I can understand that facing off with an angry elephant would not be ideal. We did hear the wild elephant making trumpeting sounds a few times, but we purposefully avoided coming into contact with it.

Now I am in my final stop in Indonesia; at the very northern tip of Sumatra at an island just off the coast from the town of Banda Aceh. The island is a great place for diving and snorkeling.

I’m enjoying my picturesque bungalow, the delicious food, turquoise waters lined with living coral, and cheap prices.

Yesterday, after a much needed refresher course on my scuba diving skills, I took to the water with a group of other divers. We dove in two spots: the first was an underwater tugboat wreck not too far from the shore, and the other was to see underwater geothermal fissures.

The water is warm enough that I can dive without a wetsuit, but it was still nice to sit at the bottom of ocean and soak up the heat emanating from the ‘underwater volcano’.

Hopefully I’ll get a bunch more dives in here in Indonesia, and I might even get a chance to surf waves for a day or two before I fly back to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

I really love Indonesia, and I already can’t wait to come back to this country in the future. Indonesia is huge, and I haven’t even explored most of the better known places – Bali, Gili Islands, Komodo Islands – for example. Not to mention all of the active volcanoes here. Indonesia is a traveler’s paradise.

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!