Orangutown

It is the second day of our Sumatran adventure.  We are climbing up the side of this mountain in the jungle rainforest of Bukit Lawang in search of orangutan.  We have two guides beating the bushes for us and our little group consists of Irene and Miles, and Irene’s older brother Ralph, and myself. 

We are clawing our way up this muddy path by pulling ourselves up along tree roots and hanging vines.  We have seen no orangutan since leaving the orangutan rehabilitation feeding station (sort of a meet and greet juice bar for recovering primates). 

Our guide stops in the middle of the ascent and peers closely at the ground.  He gathers us around him we’re all atingle with curiosity. “ Look here” he says holding up a small twig, “we have some giant ants in the jungle here”.  Indeed it is a big ant, but we have some pretty big ants in the States too.  I am not impressed.  Our guide appears disappointed that I did not whip out my camera to document this magnificent specimen.  We trudge on.  After a little while he stops again and peers intently  into the forest.  Ralph stares with him.  Miles appears bored as Irene and I approach.  “What is it?”  I whisper to Miles.  He shrugs.  It is a red headed woodpecker.  I quickly pull off a shot before it flies away.

  Still no orangutan.  I am starting to wonder if the guide is getting a little desperate.  I feel his pain. 

A little ways on, I stop and stare at a tree top on the far side of a hill.  What is that big brown thing up there.  My eyes cannot make it out and I have no binoculars . . . but it very well could be . . .  I take a dozen pictures, thank God for flash memory cards.  They have some magnificent dead tree limbs in this forest. 

We push on and up.  As we pull ourselves up another muddy path, Miles cries out.  Something has bitten him on the hand.  I rush over but see nothing.  I tell him not to worry, he probably just was scraped by a sharp stick.  Maybe it was an ant.  But it was nothing.  He starts to whine that this really is not much fun and he wants to go back down.  We are not going to back down from this hike.  We are here for adventure I tell him.  He whines some more.  He is thirsty.  He is tired and he was bitten.  So I do what any good parent would do in such circumstances.  I give him a drink of water and bribe him.  I tell him that if he stops complaining, and hikes with a good attitude, and does not complain anymore during this vacation, and remains engaged with his surroundings, then I will give him twenty dollars towards a new starwars lego set.  With that his droopy eyes brighten.  “Deal” he exclaims and scampers up to our guide. 

I am very proud of myself for solving that problem.  I start to think about how I really should write a book entitled “The Banker’s Guide to Raising Your Child”.  Here’s how it works:  You simply bribe your child to do as you want, with small amounts of money and larger promises in the form of IOU’s when the small bribes are not enough.  Eventually you build up a huge debt load owed to your child which you can never repay.  By the time your child is ready to enter college you are forced to declare bankruptcy because you can not pay your debt to him or her.  Although your bankrutpcy is in the form of a re-organization, it really amounts to a no assets chapter seven.  Which means that you extinguish your debt but now qualify for government college tuition loans and scholarships.  You can now afford to send your (perfectly behaved) child to college, and because he is now (almost) an adult, he no longer is interested in playing with lego star wars and nerf guns.  You are off the hook on all those unfulfilled promises of future booty.  Then, when he is in college, you take all of those old lego star war sets (which are unopened because he had far too many to ever finish building) and you sell them on ebay for a small fortune thus recouping your initial investment, plus interest.  It is a win win for everyone. 

But in the meantime I am getting mud on my pinstripe suit as I claw my way up another mountain pass.  I look at my arm and see that I have two leaches just about ready to have lunch.  They are not the same type of leach that lives full time in the water aka the African Queen, but some local version with a thousand sticky little legs.  They are harder to remove.  This, I suspect is what bit Miles earlier and now I am feeling ashamed for telling him it was nothing but a stick.

But shame is not an emotion that lingers long for our guide now is pointing into the trees and has a big smile on his face.  This time I can see them for real:  Orangutan.  A mother and large son

   We take a bunch of photos.  The mother is apparently used to this type of event for she comes within a dozen feet of us.  When she realizes we do not have any food for her, she climbs back up higher into the trees.  We move on. 

Over the next rise we find another mother with a much smaller baby clinging to her. 

Again, the mother is fearless of humans.  As she should be.  She probably only weighs 70 or 80 lbs and the baby weighs probably only 5-7 lbs, but she can fling herself through the trees from one hand over the next with the greatest of easy.  I suspect she could dislocate my shoulder without blinking if we were to get into a tug of war.  After lingering around us for about five minutes, she and her baby swing on off down the mountainside.  We walk on and again encounter another mother and child. 

We then encounter Meena. 

Meena is a bit of a legend in these parts.  She is a rather large, somewhat schizophrenic orangutan, who is known to engage in unprovoked attacks against humans.  She was probably abused as a pet.  But there are several guides who have rather ugly scars from Meena as they tried to protect the tourists they had been guiding along the trails.  We were told before we began this trip that if we encounter Meena, we should give her a wide birth and do whatever the guide told us to do.  He tells us to walk quickly down a path and not stop.  As we do so, we pass by a Thomas Leaf Monkey. 

I quickly take a blurry photo, but do not stop. 
 Meena follows us and then runs ahead and cuts off our path.  We head back down the same path as one of our guides bribes Meena with bananas.  That does the trick.  Meena is sated and she climbs back up to the tree canopy. 

We push on, and we walk up and down the mountain for about an hour without encountering any more orangutans.  We have now been hiking for about three hours.  But then one of our guides goes off path and starts hooting.  The other guide tells us that a big male had come into this area last week in search of a new female.  Males and females will often bond long enough for the female to get pregnant and give birth.  Then after the baby is about four months old, the male moves on and the female is left to raise the child on her own.  I tell Miles that it sounds like a very sensible arrangement.  Luckily  Irene was not within earshot.

Our guide returned to the path triumphant, he pointed to the tree canopy and I could see two orangutans slowly descending.  One was a huge male who stood about five feet tall.  His girlfriend was about four feet.  Our guide cautioned us to give the male wide birth so we kept a good thirty foot distance from him, and we were in some pretty dense forest so I could not a clear shot with the camera. 

Nevertheless he was impressive.

After that we saw no more orangutans, but we had our fill and were ready to head back home.  It took us about fifty minutes to hike back out of the forest.  All in all we had been hiking for about four hours and we were all tired.  All except our guides who had another group waiting for them back at the stream crossing.  While we were all covered in dirt and grime from the hike, our guides were still clean and fresh.  They looked like they could have stepped into a happy hour at TGIF. 

 But it was time for us to head back.  We struck out on the path back to the Jungle Inn.  Miles thought I needed lunch and a beer. 

Next stop:  Lake Toba