Day 59: Bukit Lawang

Photos: http://princeton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2052285&l=92809&id=1101094

While we sat on the bus waiting to leave Banda Aceh to head back to Medan, the bus driver insisted on keeping the bus door open. Never mind that the bus was air-conditioned and that all the passengers were already on board. Well, all the human passengers, that is—something like 200 mosquitoes managed to board the bus in that half hour, and all of them flew directly toward Kendyl and me. I started killing them two and three at a time, but all the clapping made everyone else on the bus shoot me evil glares. So, we got off the bus, pulled the Deet out of my pack, and coated ourselves in it. The mosquitoes migrated to someone else’s seat.

That bus ride also turned out to be the coldest I’d ever taken. Even with all our warm clothes on, we struggled to sleep in the frigid environment—created artificially, of course, by the air conditioning. I guess air conditioning is such a luxury in Sumatra that people want to get as much of it as possible, even though that means we were all huddled under blankets and hypothermic by the time we reached Medan.

We dropped our bags at a hotel in Medan and caught a bus to Bukit Lawang, a town 100km west of Medan that is surrounded by orangutan filled forests. We had planned to trek around ourselves for a half day, hoping to spot an orangutan if we could. But we met a guide named Alec aboard the bus, and for a reasonable price he agreed to lead us around the forest for three hours. Assuming we would need all the help we could get to spot orangutans, we took him up on his offer.

Just before arriving in Bukit Lawang, we passed a truck filled with young boys who were all sporting pellet guns that they had received for Idul Fitri. As Kendyl leaned out the window to snap a photo, one of the boys took aim and shot her in the wrist! These Sumatran kids mean business.

For the first hour of our hike through the forest, we saw a whole lot of nothing and had to rely on Alec to entertain us with his stories, which were really quite good. But then we came around a corner and bingo—three orangutans hung in the trees waiting for us.

The encounter with the apes was really quite exciting. Sapi, a female ape who was the friendliest of the ones we encountered, grabbed Kendyl and me by the arms with her human-like hands. Then, apparently being a sucker for shiny objects, she grabbed the sunglasses off Kendyl’s head and bounded up into the trees as Alec yelled, “No! She’ll try to eat them!” Fortunately Alec had some watermelon along that we were able to trade Sapi for the sunglasses.

We saw four more orangutans over the next two hours, including one large male who was so mean that Alec made us walk around him while he created a diversion. When Alec told us that he had been bitten by him once before, we were more than happy to scamper on ahead.

It started raining during our walk back to town, so we decided to stop for lunch at a restaurant by the river and wait it out. We ordered a pizza, but somehow it took over an hour to make and by the time it was finally ready, we had to put it in a bag and take it to go if we wanted to make it to our bus in time. By this time it was pouring, and we ran through the driving rain and mud desperately looking for a becak to take us to the bus station. As we ran through a particularly mucky patch, Kendyl lost her balance and face-planted directly into a pool of mud. As soon as I realized she was ok, I burst out laughing. That was perhaps the best fall I’d ever seen. And the best part was that the managed to keep the pizza from hitting the ground. Truly amazing.