In short: two to three slices of cucumber, peeled, and one slice of tomato with every meal. Cheese-flavoured everything (often paired with chocolate in ice cream and cookie form). Palm oil plantations - awfully regular, dark rows, and passing colourful trucks stacked sky-high with the fruit on every road. Condensed milk in coffee and in fruit shakes. Petrol and oil sold in 1.5L water bottles on the side of the road. Little 2kg pastel green gas bottles stacked in the back of little trucks, and in use everywhere. People flying with wee cardboard boxes with rope handles. Milo-flavoured sweets (milk, cookies, muesli bars, chocolates). Helmets on 1/1000 scooterists. Sweet breads. Colourful mosque domes in every direction. Indomaret. Men 'directing' traffic with a handkerchief from the middle of very busy intersections, often in dark clothing and late at night, i.e., practically invisible, getting passed the occasional cash note from passing cars (are they doing this death-defying work to make a buck? Surely no one has employed them to do this?) Similar traffic controllers are found at eatery driveways, but those ones at least normally have a lightsaber to indicate the presence of human life. Rice.
In full: Selamat pagi! One long, bumpy car ride later the four of us are deposited on the edge of the jungle in Bukit Lawang. I think it's 10 pm, but it feels like 2 am. Our bigger bags are motorbiked along a narrow, cobblestoned walkway to the guesthouse, followed by us on foot. All along the river are tall, open-air bamboo structures lit up with strings of lights and lanterns. It's a magical sight; I'm very disoriented and bleary-eyed and it certainly appears that my car nap has transported me to a pixie forest. Greetings, iced tea and cute little lemongrass soaps are handed out. Sleep.
Woken by a bunch of macaques trying with all of their tiny-fingered might to pry open mine and Ruby's bedroom window while their mates thunder about on the iron roof. (At least the sun is up and the hour is respectable.) Have been in Indonesia for just over twelve hours, mostly spent supine, so I have no idea if the strong, black coffee I sip on down by the river is a Bukit Lawang special or standard fare. We're entitled to free breakfast, we try to get two each (sweet and savoury), but we are later told we have to pay for the additional one. Jungle hike clothing equipped - pants tucked into long, thick socks so that there's no juicy white flesh for leeches to latch onto - somewhat regrettably, can't say this is anyone's outfit of choice for a 30-degree and heavily humid day, we set off with our guides Nanda and Bobi into ze jungle! Did we already apply insect repellant? Either way, it's probably time to get it out again. I'm now going to attempt to document most of the next four days, presently from a bus in western Türkiye almost one month after the fact. Good luck to me.
(for now, in short) Rubber trees.
Orangutan the first.
Another orangutan!
Fruit break.
Up a steep ridge and down an even steeper valley, killing time (surely we're walking in circles).
Another up and down and up.
Lunch, in banana leaf and all.
Tortoise.
Orangutans.
Up up down.
Think there was another orangutan duo at this point
Up, down.
Camp, beside creek. Walk up to waterfall to swim.
Downtime. Jungle noises.
Tea + biscuits.
Dark. Dinner.
Games + matchstick riddles.
Tea + monkey nuts.
Tea, coffee + biscuits (sugar on crackers).
AM downtime.
Onto some more up-downs.
Vine handrails.
Source of water big enough to swim in! + fruit break.
Gibbons (how they fly).
Lunch.
Things.
Camp, beside little river.
River rinse.
Tea + biscuits.
Read, write, listen to jungle noises.
Card games.
Come up with Bahasa lyrics to Jingle Bells.
Dinner.
Riddles.
Tea + monkey nuts.
5 am HUGE storm, thunder is louder in the jungle, surely the punching rain will break through our plastic sheet roof.
Banana pancake.
Walk, upriver.
Swim prior to shoes-on.
Straight up!
Fruit break.
Lunch to the sound of a Gibbon family calling the members together.
Camp beside the big river.
Swim, rock jump (flop - into <2m of water).
Tea, coffee, biscuits.
Leisure.
Late dinner.
Riddles and more riddles.
Bonfire.
Coffee + biscuits.
Banana pancake.
Most special, long, close orangutan encounter.
Raft all the way out!
Half a day in Bukit Lawang then we're back to Medan.
Late March, 2023 In short: Volcanoes. Banana trees. Rice paddies. Pointed, terracotta-tiled temple roofs. Steep, narrow, winding roads...
1 Comment
Karin Bathgate
Mar 31, 2023
Sliced tomato and cucumber at every meal reminds me of travelling through Russia in 1990 as a vegetarian - the only thing, plus bread and vodka, they knew I could eat :)
Sliced tomato and cucumber at every meal reminds me of travelling through Russia in 1990 as a vegetarian - the only thing, plus bread and vodka, they knew I could eat :)