Seat of Our Pants

The Gunung Leuser National Park cuts a big chunk out of the farmlands of northern Sumatra. It is a refuge for Sumatra’s last wild Orangutans, Tigers, Elephants and Rhinoceroses. Using the quaint frontier village of Ketambe as our base, we just enjoyed a couple of days of jungle hiking.

Rolling into Ketambe on a local chicken bus, we didn’t really know what to expect. We were dropped off at the Ranger station, where a helpful woman sold us tea while we waited for her brother to arrive. The brother, it turned out, was an experienced jungle guide After some haggling we hired him for 50 USD/day. The price included all equipment, food and a porter. The guide told us that there was a good chance of spotting wild Orangutans, but that nothing could ever be guaranteed.

Jungle trekking is a preposterously humid affair. It’s like a tepid steam room: as soon as you start moving you’re covered in water and sweat. A cotton t-shirt gets completely soaked (I mean completely) in about 30 minutes. A nice and unexpected feature of this jungle was the almost complete lack of mosquitoes. “This jungle still clean, Martin”, said the guide. He kept calling us Martin. I think he had trouble pronouncing Jaime’s name. We don’t have a lot of room to complain, we never learned to pronounce his name either.

We spent two full days and one night in the jungle. Our base camp was a nice spot by a waterfall, a great place to swim and dry our clothes in between jaunts. When not resting in the camp, we would go out into the jungle for two or three hours at a time to try to find Orangutan. The first day yielded no Orangutans and a lot of leeches. Day two saw us stumble onto five kinds of Sumatran monkeys, but still no Orangutans. We were about to despair, when we encountered another group that had seen Orangutan just a few minutes prior. Sprinting along on slippery paths, we finally got to see the elusive apes: a few gorgeous-looking individuals (and one baby!) sitting far, far above us in the canopies. For lack of other metaphors: at times like that it feels like you’re in a nature documentary. It’s just so cool.

Jungle trekking around Ketambe rocks. I’d love to go further into the Leuser park, but it’s a pretty expensive undertaking. Climbing the Gunung Leuser volcano, for example, would require 14 days and six porters at god knows what cost. There would be a pretty good chance of seeing wild Elephants though, so maybe next time?

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