Sumatra Pt. 1

Christmas Eve, Medan. We knew we'd only be spending one night there so we decided to splash out on some  middle-range accomadation. We stayed at the Hotel Antares. The hotel is located on Jalan Sisingamangaraja, a main thoroughfair running through the city.

The next day, Christmas day, after an Indonesian breakfast of fried rice and sickly sweet coffee, Steph and I set about trying to find a way to call our families back home. We walked down Jln Sisingamangaraja asking around at different stores for phone cards or sim cards. This proved to be a huge challenge. The sun, the smell, the traffic and the sermons blaring from the nearby mosque all combined felt like a club to back of the head. Perhaps this was culture shock. I became quickly overwhelmed and wanted to scurry back to the hotel room. Eventually we did find a lady that sold us a sim card, but all of our attempts to put credit on it and makes calls failed.

Afer giving up on the idea of calling home for the day, we walked across the road and booked a bus to take us to the town of Parapat, on Lake Toba. Our plan was to catch the ferry that night from Parapat to the town of Tuk-tuk on Samosir island. We hopped on the bus at lunch time. The driver dropped us off somewhere else in Medan, where we then waited another half an hour for the next bus. Traffic was heavy all the way to Parapat. We arrived there at 7pm. The last ferry to Tuk-Tuk had left at 6pm, but luckily a local family offered us a ride on their ferry for a slightly increased ticket price. This meant waiting around for a couple of hours though, so I wandered up the street and looked for a bite to eat. A man waved to me an d invited me into his kedai kopi for a long neck of Bintang (Indonesian beer). We sat down and the man told me that when he used to work in one of the nearby hotels many years ago a group of Yugoslavians had  visited and invited him to drink with them and he drank so much that he nearly drowned in the lake. Then he started telling me about how much he liked Thai girls - that they were the best - and I told him I had a ferry to catch.

The ferry to Tuk-tuk from Parapat took half an hour. When we arrived in Tuk-tuk that night it was like a ghost town, and we ended up staying in a ghost room.

Tuk-tuk could be called Desolation Row. In the 90's Tuk-tuk was a top party destination for western tourists, but when things started getting bad in nearby Aceh,  the westerners packed up and left for Thailand. And they haven't come back. We stayed in Tuk-tuk for five nights and four days. The weather was nice for most of the time we were there. We hired a motorbike and rode out of the town looking for some hot springs, but never found them. What we did find were a lot of empty hotels, bars and restaurants, many of them with signs out the front advertising things like pizza, hamburgers, and magic mushrooms. Even the secondhand bookshop advertised magic mushrooms, which seemed strange in a country known for it's harsh anti-drug laws. I borrowed a Raymond Carver book from this store. The following days were mostly spent sitting out the front of our Batak-style longhouse accomodation reading and staring out at the lake and surrounding mountains. On one of the days we found a vegan café about  fifteen minutes outside of town by motorbike selling delicious food. The curry there was nearly incentive enough to stay on Samosir island.for a few more days. Eventually though we got restless, and made plans to go to the village of Ketambe, near the Gunung Leuser national park in Aceh province. 

We left Tuk-tuk the day before New Year's Eve.

A lady working in the rice fields on Samosir island.

Michael and Steph somewhere on the outskirts of Tuk-tuk, Samosir island, Lake Toba.

Michael being cool.

Steph being cool and putting on a helmet.

Kuching & Bako National Park

After leaving the Kinabatangan River, Steph and I spent our final night in bleak Sandakan. We flew out the next morning for Kuching, Sarawak. To get to Kuching we actually had to fly out of Borneo to KL and then transfer flights in order to go back to Borneo. Sarawak is a Malaysian province, but for reasons difficult to grasp is still treated as an international destination by Malaysian authorities, which required us to go through immigration again. The alternative was a two day bus trip.

We arrived in Kuching in the late afternoon and got a cab to our hotel.

The next day we walked around the town and saw the sights. Kuching has been described as resembling Melbourne in some parts. I couldn't really see the similarities, but there was a nice esplanade and some cool cafés. The word 'kuching' in Bahasa Malaysia translates to 'cat'. The city's namesake is acknowledged all over Kuching (see photo below).

The following morning we set out for Bako National Park. We spent four days and three nights there. The park is the oldest of its kind in Sarawak, established in the 1950's. It's located on the tip of the Muara Tebas peninsula. The trip there from Kuching takes around ninety minutes - one hour by bus, then half an hour by boat (on the day we went the ocean was very rough).

On our first night in the park we took up the opportunity to go on a night walk through the forest. Among the things we saw were: a subspecies of the Sunda Flying Lemur, Galeopterus variegatus borneanus (which incidentally is not an actual lemur, nor does it fly), bio luminescent fungi, and many species of froggies, buggies, and spiders.  Steph was lucky enough to spot a tarantula, however when she went to point it out to me it had disappeared - leaving her unnerved as to its whereabouts. We also saw several sleeping birds perched on branches along the trail - a phenomenon we had witnessed before at the Kinabatangan river. You can stand very close to these birds, make noise and take photos and they remain completely still.

The next day I went for a trek on the Tajor trail. There are around twenty separate walking trails inside the park, each varying in length and adversity. The Tajor leads through a small waterfall and ends at a beach. It was high tide when I arrived at the end of the trail and I couldn't see any beach. I had more luck the next day when Steph and I went to the Kecil beach, even got to catch some waves.

On Dec 23 Steph and I went back to Kuching. We left the next day for Sumatra.

Our bus driver to and fro Kuching. He slept for an hour in the car park before taking us back to Kuching.

Spot the spider. Steph somehow saw this on the night walk.

A kingfisher sound asleep, oblivious to the tourists below.

It was nice listening to the calls of frogs at night.

View from the top of Bako.

Nepenthes rafflesiana.

I saw this army of ants streaming endlessly through the forest on the Tajor trail.

All of the trails were colour-coded. This tree had been snapped.

Silver-leaf monkey, or silvery langur (Trachypithecus cristatus)

Nepenthes ampullaria.

A male proboscis monkey, lounging near the beach.

The same male proboscis monkey chewing on something resembling celery.

Rainforest in Bako.

Kinabatangan River

Sorry it's been a while since the last post. The internet is hard to come by in the jungle. It doesn't grow on trees, or...

Coming back from Semporna, Steph and I stayed in the desolate town of Sandakan for a night before hightailing to the Kinabatangan River on December 15. We stayed there for two nights. The Kinabatangan is Sabah's largest river. Sadly most of the forest around the river has been cleared for palm-oil plantations. This has led to a high density of wildlife amassing in the remaining strands of forest. Steph and I stayed at the Bilit Adventure Lodges, where we met three German guys and two girls from England. On the first afternoon all seven of us, plus two guides, went on a boat down the river. We saw Proboscis Monkeys and both Short-tail and Long-tail Macaques in the trees. We also saw Hornbills and other birds. After dinner we set off on a night walk and saw an incredible array of insects, arachnids and frogs - plus a Mouse Deer (a tiny species of dear the size of a large rat). 

The next morning Steph, myself and the Germans boarded the boat for a dawn cruise. Our guide spotted something moving in the trees two hundred metres away. As we got closer I saw a human-like arm stretch out from the leaves and grab a branch. It was an orangutan. The guide stopped the boat's engine and we all whispered in amazement at what we were seeing. Looking through the telephoto lens I could see a small shape clinging to the orangutan's dark red hair - a baby! We stared up at the mother and her baby for a long time before setting off again down the river. Here we saw more Proboscis monkeys and macaques.

Later in the afternoon, having said good-bye to the Germans and the English girls, Steph and I went on a trek to the Kinabatangan's Ox-bow lake. Along the way our guide (the same one from our night walk the previous night and the morning boat ride, whose name I never caught) somehow caught sight of another orangutan in the treetops hundreds of metres away. Although it was hard to get a clear view of it through the canopy, it was visibly large and I could see it's orange hair. Our guide said it was a male. The path leading to the lake was made up of deep mud. Luckily the lodges rented out gumboots and leech socks. Before reaching the lake our guide pointed out to us some tracks in the mud made by pygmy elephants. We were weary of these because of a piece of news that we had read a couple of days before.

Later that day we went for one last boat cruise. Amazingly, we saw another orangutan high up in one of the trees on the riverbank. And it also had a baby! We couldn't believe our luck. Traveling further downriver we saw kingfishers, bee-eaters and horn bills. Finally the forest thinned out into palm-oil plantations and we turned around and headed back. 

Below are some photos we took. Prizes for anybody who can name some of the species whose names have eluded us.

Kinabatangan flow.

A female Proboscis monkey.

A concerned looking Pig-tailed macaque chewing on its food.

A baby macaque chewing on fruit.

Another chewing Pig-tailed macaque.

Kinabatangan at dawn.

Orangutan. Person of the forest.

The orangutan watching us from the tree.

A little baby holding close to its mother.

Oriental-pied Hornbill.

Crested Serpent Eagle.

Daddy Long-legs, Bornean variety.

Stork-billed Kingfisher.

The view at Ox-bow Lake.

Ground tortoise, Bornean variety.

Our guide called this a milipede, but I'm pretty sure it was a form of slater (woodlouse).

Slater in a ball.

Our guide. He could spot an orangutan through dense forest from half a kilometre away. Sadly I couldn't remember his name.

Milipede.

Upon realising.

Upon reflection.

Forest giant.

Going back to the lodges at dusk.

Swamp

During our time in Semporna we stayed at the Scuba Junkie backpackers lodge.

Out the back of the lodge there is a well-shaded swamp. One of the staff at Scuba Junkie told me that Komodo dragons lived in there - hundreds of them. I was amazed at this piece of information, and then the staff member pointed at one of the dragons - it wasn't a Komodo dragon, but rather a water monitor lizard. Water monitor's are large in size but far less deadly than Komodo dragons.

Later, when Steph and I were looking down at the swamp through our window we spotted other animals there. We saw egrets, a pair of bitterns, some other kinds of water fowl, and also a kingfisher. Sadly, the swamp appeared to be overcrowded with all of these animals - their original homes having been destroyed, they were pushed into living in this tiny pocket of vegetation in a city otherwise surrounded by palm-oil plantations. In what seemed to me to be a final insult, the water was also completely filled with human/plastic waste.

The swamp.

A bittern, possibly Schrenk's Bittern, Ixobrychus Eurhythmus.

Water monitor, Varanus salvator macromaculatus, lurking in the darkness.

Cattle Egret, Bubulcus Ibis, looking over the water.

A bittern or heron. Species unknown (to me).

Sample of the rubbish that fills the swamp.

Scuba

December 8 and we start our PADI certified open water diving training. We meet our guide, Richie. Richie's chilled-out manner, Northern England accent and long wavy hair sort of reminds me of George Harrison. Originally it is just Steph and I, then later another girl, Leanne from Melbourne, joins us. The first day is spent in the class room watching instruction videos with corny american narrators and that look like they were shot on videotape in the 80's and later transferred to DVD/VCD. We do some quizzes and then a final exam. 

The next day we do our first underwater exercises. These are usually done in a pool, but luckily (or, in Steph's mind, scarily) we get to do these in the shallow waters off the small island of Sibuan. Here we learn to set up our dive equipment and go through some routine safety tests, like transferring and clearing regulators and masks. Probably the most challenging of these tests is taking off our masks underwater, waiting for thirty seconds, then putting them back on and clearing them of water by pressing the tops and blowing forcefully through the nose. It is now that Richie's relaxed ways really help out - he calms Steph and guides her through a moment of panic when she removes her mask.

(Steph's note: The fear of water rushing up your nose while you are 12 meters underwater should be considered as a rational, life saving fear. Somehow neither Michael nor Leanne seemed to mind this utterly disturbing feeling, so I looked like a bit of an underwater weirdo when I grabbed hold of Richie and tried to bolt for the surface). 

Sibuan.

On day three we head for the island of Mabul, where Steph and I will be spending the next two nights. After some more training exercises we do our first proper dives.  Our last dive of the day is cut a little short because Steph and I use up too much of our air in a compass exercise gone awry -  I end up sharing Richie's air, using his secondary regulator. Sharing air with a man underwater is a unique and strangely intimate experience. In the afternoon we sign some documents - we have passed all of the tests and are now licensed scuba divers! 

Day four we do three more dives off Mabul with a new instructor, Jack. We see an incredible array of fish and corals. We also see giant Green Sea Turtles and Broad-club Cuttlefish. None of them appear to be very bothered by our presence. By this time I feel I'm getting better at controlling my breathing and buoyancy. Everything slows down underwater. It is very peaceful and the sensation I imagine must be something close to that of a bird in flight. 

Mabul.

Our final day of diving is off the island of Sipadan. Sipadan is the jewel in the crown of the islands off Semporna. It is considered one of the best dive sites in the world. In an effort to protect the island, all lodgings have been closed there and visitors are restricted to a maximum of one hundred and twenty per day. In the morning there is a storm and the water is very choppy. I get seasick and throw up from the side of the boat right before our first dive. I feel fine once underwater (I'm told that I can vomit into the regulator if I need to - happily, I don't). On this day we took a camera with us. We have written down the names of some of the things we saw, however we are not so sure of others. If you know the names, please post comments below. 

The very stormy boat ride to Sipadan. 

Our diving team. 

Steph underwater dancing. 

Just one species of the beautiful coral beneath. 

A parrot fish brightening up the dark sandy floor. 

Michael replacing the regulator that Steph pulled out several times accidentally. 

Lovely yellow fishies.

An Angel Fish swimming below. 

A school of beautiful Banner Fish. 

Oriental Sweetlips circling in the current.

Two Bumphead Parrotfish playing near our feet. 

Steph bravely swimming upside down. 

Two Crescent Tail Bigeyes.

A school of colourful Dart Fish. 

An Angel Fish kissing the coral. 

Michael taking of his mask with ease. (Showing off!!)

Our first Green Turtle of the day. 

A Batfish obscuring the bottom left.

A sunbathed Green Turtle. 

Swimming below us. 

Swimming above us. 

A coral hideout for fish. 

Our first White tipped Reef Shark.

Swimming safely below. 

OK? OK!