Quick Update
Hey everyone, still alive – landed in Singapore late Monday night, caught up with Karen and introduced her to murtabak, chicken livers, the Arab Quarter and Little India. I should be back with my laptop today and processing photos, so expect a bunch from my last week in Indonesia at Danau Toba and some touched up photos from other places too.
No commentsTrekking Update, Part Three.
After going to sleep on day 3 at about 10 pm, I was woken up by John at around 1:30 to see this :
Thats floodwater coming up to our tent.
My bodgy made in china torch decided to only work very intermittently, so we were left to scramble up a hill through the jungle in the dark, carrying the tent and all cooking equipment etc. That was a total blast. There were big cracks going off all over the place as boulders rolled through the river, it was pretty intense. We did safely make it to higher ground though, but after that I couldn’t get back to sleep.So, the next day, we headed off to look around the area for orangutans again, and we found these dudes:
They were pretty sleepy as it was later in the day, just sitting around munching on stuff.
Then, it was time to do the trek all the way back to Ketambe. Got some nice photos along the way
More Jungle
- View overlooking Ketambe
- Shoes, end of final day.
And that was it for Ketambe and the jungle.
Trekking Update, Part Two.
Woke up early in the morning, got ready to hike to the waterfall. John mentioned in passing that this hike was “very, very difficult”, but that when we got to the top we might see some Orangutans that were really wild, unlike the ones in the lower areas. He’d brought 10 groups up to the top of mount Gurah in the last few years, and 4 of them had seen some Orangutans. Worth a try, anyway.
These were all over the place.
Along the way, there were some incredible views:
River Crossing
River Crossing 2
Which brought us to the waterfall, which I took a video of:
After a brief rest at the waterfall, which was a fairly difficult climb, we got to go upwards even further from there to the top of Mount Gurah. After about 15 minutes of very, very heavy going up a trackless 60 degree incline, John informed me that the only other people who had come up to the waterfall and higher were ecology students or hikers who did this kind of thing all the time. I was the first Orang Kantor (Office Person) to have even made it to the waterfall, let alone the top of the peak. Yippee.
John, Laughing at me. This happened a lot.
After an hour and a half of climbing up a jungle mountain as in the picture above, we were at the top. First up, we saw some awfully big wood fungus (The largest would have been at least a meter and a half in diameter):
Wood Fungus. Delicious.
However, the whole, 2 hour trek up the side of a goddamn mountain was worth it when we saw a big group of Orangutans in the trees above us. I won’t be able to develop pics until I get back to Singapore, as it was quite dark under the canopy, but here are some videos I took of them. All up, we saw 6 that day – 2 juveniles, 3 adult females and an adult male.
Thats all for today, more videos and an almost fatal flood tomorrow.
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