Bukit Lawang
INDONESIA
Last of the Orangutans
By LYNDI
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
It’s just fine to have a travel itinerary – an idea of where you’re going to go and when, approximately how much it will all cost. But with the type of travel Aaron and I do, you become accustomed to things going completely wrong and rolling with the punches.
The plan was to get to Georgetown in northwest Malaysia so we could take the morning ferry over to Sumatra for a week of enjoying the Indonesian jungles. So it was a big sucker-punch in the face when we arrived in Georgetown at 4pm only to find out that there was no ferry. And there hadn’t been a ferry in over a year. And the only way to Sumatra now was to fly – though bargain tickets would be hard to come by the night before we wanted to leave. Hmm. We visited several travel agents, but come 8pm could not find a feasible option of getting to Indonesia, and began the disappointing task of filling up our highly anticipated week with other backup options.
But that’s when Future Lyndi reared her ugly head.
For those of you not familiar with this influential temptress, it’s really just a decision-making tool. On more occasions than I can count, if I’m trying to decide between one or more options, I always ask myself what “Future Lyndi” would want me to do.
For instance, would Future Lyndi want me to pierce my tongue just because I lost a bet to a friend? Sure, why not? Tongues regenerate. Would she want me to cage dive with Great White sharks in South Africa even though it is completely out of my budget? Of course! Would she want me to just buck up and head to Indonesia even though it will be expensive and probably a lot of trouble? You betcha.
So around 8pm, Aaron and I headed to an internet café, credit card in hand, miraculously found rock bottom tickets for the following morning, and booked a week in Sumatra. And to celebrate, we headed out for some of Georgetown’s renowned street food and gorged ourselves on wan-ton noodles, dumpling soup, and satay chicken on a dimly lit, crowded alley. Yes – we know how to celebrate in style.
And the next day found us wheels down in Medan, north Sumatra’s busy city, attempting in vain to pay local prices for public transport to Bukit Lawang – home to hundreds of orangutans. I won’t say Sumatra isn’t touristy – it is. Especially in the places we wanted to see. But compared to Malaysia where you pay the set price for a comfy seat on an air-conditioned bus on a beautifully paved road, Sumatra was a bit of a step backwards.
The local price for the 3 hour journey to Bukit Lawang is 15,000 rupiahs, or just under $2 – what a bargain! But when it’s late afternoon and the bus drivers know they’re our only option, the price raises to 100,000 rupiah, or $12. After searching in vain for 2 hours in the hot humidity, I was ready to give in. I’ll just pay the extortion rate and let them take advantage of me because I’m a tourist – but I’ll get to where I’m going. However, Aaron wouldn’t have any of it. Not until we got them down to 50,000 rupiah for 2 could we hop in the cramped minibus and head down the pot-holed highway to the jungle. Whew.
Any trouble we had getting to Bukit Lawang – from cancelled ferries, last minute flights, visas on arrival and extortion rackets on public transport – was worth it. We arrived to a small, tourism-infused village set within the Gunung Leuser National Park as the sun was setting behind the rainforest. We had just enough time to be steered to a guesthouse on the river – only accessible by a crumbling suspension bridge – and have a quick dinner of nasi goring surrounded by guides trying to get us to sign up for a jungle trek the following day.
The guides’ persistence was actually admirable. The second we were able to get one potential guide away from us, the next one would sit down and quickly segue into the tours he offers. To be honest, a 3 hour trek in the jungle sounded pretty good, but the touting was a quick turn-off. So Aaron and I decided to visit the Orangutan Rehabilitation Center in town the next morning and then sign up for a trek if we’d decided we hadn’t seen enough of the giant apes to satisfy us.
There are two species of orangutans, both of which are native to Malaysian Borneo and Indonesia. They are the largest tree-dwelling animals and are considered extremely intelligent. Both species are endangered, though the Sumatran Orangutan is critically endangered due with under 6,500 left in the wild. Local indigenous tribes still hunt them for food, their habitat is continuously cut down and eliminated for rubber plantations or development, and mothers are killed so that their babies can be sold as pets or to illegal zoos. So when Aaron and I headed to the rehabilitation center for feeding time, we weren’t sure how many we would see.
The Gunung Leuser National Park is almost 8,000 square kilometers large, so simple math told me a short walk in the jungle could quite possibly yield zero results. The entry fee is a bargain at only 20,000 rupiah per person (just over $2, though cleverly the camera fee is 50,000 rupiah) and we took the 15 minute walk to the platform where rangers bring fresh water and bananas for any orangutans that happen to be passing by. And as luck would have it – we were there for about 5 minutes when we saw a giant orange furball appear from high in the distance.
The first thought I had seeing a wild orangutan swing in was, “Whoa. These guys are way too big to be using trees for transport”. Every branch they touched bent over backwards under their weight, and since jumping and lurching their large bodies from tree to tree is out of the question, they have to swing back and forth to gain momentum to grab the next tree – quite a show!
Over the course of an hour, we probably saw seven orangutans including a full grown male and a mother with her baby. Watching the baby was really interesting, since the mother actually held the baby up by both arms – exactly how humans help their babies learn to walk. She even sat under a tree as the baby tried unsuccessfully to slide down a tree, and caught him when he lost his grip – incredible.
Needless to say, we were highly entertained and extremely satisfied with the orangutans we saw in the hour and a half, so we headed back to the guesthouse, swam in the river, and hiked in the nearby jungle once the sun got a little lower. Since we only had a week in Sumatra, we decided to head out the next day to a nearby lake – and bit the bullet and booked a tourist bus. A lot more expensive than public transport, but worth every penny if we didn’t have to deal with the bus touts again.
After just one stop in Sumatra, I was already happy with “Future Lyndi”. We always say “we can always come back”, or “we’ll do that when we have more money” – but do we? I mean, would Aaron and I ever be 50 minutes away from Indonesia ever again? Once we’re settled down in a cozy home with a white picket fence, will we pack up and trek in the jungle halfway across the world to see wild orangutans? Probably not. At the rate we’re going – will there even be orangutans left in the wild by the time we’re ready to come back?
I guess Future Lyndi knows better than we do, and this was definitely an experience we didn’t want to miss.
