Welcome to the Jungle

So I FINALLY got around to sorting, editing, and selecting pictures from my trip to Kalimantan in June! And I realized I had so much awesome stuff to show you that it would probably make one ridiculously long blog post. So I’m splitting it in half. And I’m actually posting the second half first so that when I post the first half second, they will show up in their proper order on my blog!

You’ll see later what the first half is about, but this second half is all about our trip into the JUNGLE! Like, for real. One friend has really been dying to see an orangutan in the wild, so we decided to go hunting for one. Just to be clear, NOT hunting with guns. We were actually in a national park/orangutan preserve. No guns allowed.

Pretty much all we were told beforehand was that we would have a guide and that all food would be provided and that we would be hiking and sleeping in tents. So that made for some fun packing. None of us had really brought jungle/hiking gear with us from Java. None of us even had a pair of shoes… Pontianak was BLAZING hot, but we didn’t know what elevation we’d be at after hiking to know what the night temperature would be like. We didn’t have any sleeping bags, sunscreen, mosquito nets, or bug spray. Between the five of us, we had one hiking backpack, but the rest of us had normal backpacks. So we made do. We borrowed some mosquito nets and then hit up the mall to get the rest of the essentials! We each packed one flat sheet and hoped that would provide enough warmth.

We woke up early one morning to fly 30 minutes to the nearby city of Ketapang (we actually boated back to Pontianak after the trip – 8 hours!). Fun fact – Kalimantan is SO beautiful from the air! It is so heavily forested and known for it’s myriad of winding rivers! But our airplane had SUPER dirty windows, so you don’t get to see any pictures of that, sorry. After landing in Ketapang, we rode in a car for about 3 hours. The roads were extremely rough, but our driver apparently did not value his car or the comfort of those in the backseat (ahem… me) whatsoever, and he rarely dropped below 80 kph. I literally bashed my head against the ceiling a few times. No big deal though – I REALLY enjoyed the drive. I love road trips and getting to see places I’ve never seen before!

We kept seeing buildings like these all along the drive. Tall, narrow buildings with no windows and only one door but lots of holes in the sides. Any guesses what they’re for??

They’re to collect birds nests! People build these buildings then just leave them, waiting for a certain type of bird to start nesting inside. After a certain period of time, the owner will come in the door at the bottom, collect the nests, then sell them for the production of birds nest soup. Now, I’ve never tried birds nest soup. It’s a pretty Chinese thing, and frankly, Chinese people do some weird things. But I’ve heard it’s quite expensive. If I remember correctly, our driver told us that one kilo of nests can be sold for around $1500! I’m so curious about this whole operation. I’ve already told you everything I know, but I have so many more questions. Like what does the inside of the building look like? How does the person get to the top to get the nests? How do you cook a poopy birds nest? We have a few of these buildings in my town, so maybe someday I’ll get to learn more.

As I’ll probably mention in my next, more general, post, West Kalimantan is comprised of three main people groups – Dayak (the local tribal people), Melayu (of Malaysian descent), and Chinese (of Chinese descent, clearly). This area was mostly Melayu Muslim with a smattering of Javanese and Balinese people who came due to transmigration. We passed through several small villages, and most houses looked about like this.

It felt weird to see houses not made of cement. Driving in the car, I almost felt like I was on a missions trip to a third world country somewhere else – like in Central America or something. I mean, houses made of wood? Who does that?

When we weren’t driving through a village, we were driving through the countryside, which was FUN. I haven’t seen this much unoccupied land since… Ummmm… I guess last time I was in America in 2011.

We drove over a lot of rivers that looked like this one. It kind of made me sad to see how dirty the waters were in an otherwise clean part of the country!

Two of our friends, having never been hiking/camping before, were a little bit nervous about our jungle adventure. As we drove over nasty river after nasty river, they began to conjure up images of us being eaten by monster river crocodiles that thrive in the murky waters of Borneo. Hoping to ease their fears, I asked our driver if crocodiles even exist in that part of the country. That was a mistake. His answer was, “Oh, yes. Sometimes they go in people’s houses and eat them.” Oops.

After our three hour drive in which we were like popcorn kernels being thrown around a hot pan, we finally arrived at “base camp”, which was our guide’s house at the very edge of the national park. He had the creepiest bird I’ve ever met. The thing talked in a man-child voice and said weird things when you weren’t looking.

So from left to right, we have some guy I don’t know who jumped in the picture; Pak Musliyanto, our good guide; the five of us; and Pak Idris, our creepy old guide. This is our “before” picture, in front of Pak Idris’s house. Before we knew he was creepy.

And here we are after hiking a mountain in the middle of the day through a jungle in 235978346% humidity. I don’t know which parent I get it from, but I have the supernatural ability to barely sweat. All the other kids were jealous.

We were super pleasantly surprised to find that we were NOT sleeping in tents but that the national park had actually constructed a tree house of sorts for researchers and guests to stay in! Since we were with the only two available guides for the entire national park, that meant we were the ONLY people on the mountain! Pretty cool.

So here’s a quick tour of our house. This is the kitchen. There is a little enclosed room next to the kitchen that can be locked. They use this for storing all the cooking supplies, like pots and pans. Those would be heavy to carry in and out every time. Pak Musliyanto carried up all the firewood and food though.

Here he is cooking us a lovely dinner our first night here. We didn’t have a lot to work with. Mostly rice and veggies. But he made do with what we had, and his cooking style is apparently to make small portions of tons of different foods!

One meal we had included fried potatoes, green beans, spinach, shredded coconut, cucumbers, fried eggplant, and some other greens that I don’t know the English word for. And coffee and tea made from river water.

Here is our dining/living room. This particular day, we were having English lessons. Pak Idris has been a guide for 14 years, so he’s used to working with foreigners and actually knows a fair amount of English. Naturally, being the creepy old man that he was, he mostly knew how to tell gross stories in English. Pak Musliyanto had only worked there for 4 years and we were the first group of foreigners he’d ever met who could speak Indonesian! He was prepared for us to only speak English and had actually packed an English-Indonesian dictionary in his bag so that he could talk to us!

On the left is our bedroom, the upstairs of the house. On the right is our outhouse which contained an actual squatty potty! High rolling.

 

Our house was in between two little rivers (or one river that curved around – I’m not actually sure as the foliage was too dense to see through) that we used for bathing, washing dishes, and drinking. Here is a view of our house from across the river. It kind of just blends in with the jungle! I love it!

Aaaaand a few other shots from around our site.

We pitched our mosquito nets and wrapped ourselves like burritos in our sheets. It did get quite cool in the middle of the night and stayed pretty chilly on into the morning, but we were all toasty enough. The weirdest thing happened in the middle of the night though. I don’t know that any of us can fully describe it, but what essentially happened was that a massive bomb went off. But it didn’t. But whatever happened was loud enough to leave our ears ringing and close enough to cause our house to shake pretty hard. Pak Idris jumped out of bed with a flashlight and went to investigate. He didn’t find anything though.

We discussed it the following morning over breakfast. We ruled out basically every possible natural cause. Pak Idris told us that has happened more than once when he has brought groups up. He says it is the spirits of the mountain trying to keep people away. Oddly enough, I believe that. That answer wouldn’t satisfy me in America, but here, it does. Pak Idris went on to say we’re lucky we didn’t hear the voices. Naturally, we had to ask about that. Apparently, sometimes when people come up, they can hear a woman’s voice laughing or crying right next to them when there is nobody there. Yes indeed, we are lucky we didn’t hear the voices.

After we hiked in the first day, we had a quick lunch, then spent most of that evening hiking around, seeing what we could see. Once it got dark, we headed back for dinner, creepy stories with Uncle Idris, then it was lights out for us. Until Pak Idris was bathing in the river and found a huge turtle that he thought would be cool to put in our room. I passed him my camera under the mosquito netting, asked him to take a picture, and put the turtle back. Here is Pak Idris managing to take a picture of his prized turtle AND his own feet at the same time.

The next day, we had breakfast, then set out for more hiking until early afternoon. Unfortunately, there were no orangutans on our mountain. No fruit was in season when we were there which means the orangutans have trouble finding enough food, so they tend to move around a lot more in search of fruit or other foods. We did find some abandoned orangutan nests though. See this one?

And we also got to see lots of other jungle wildlife, some more welcome than others. Monkeys are incredibly hard to take pictures of, but I did get some terrible shots of one monkey our guides called a makaka. I have no idea what that translates to. He’s the reddish blur sitting toward the bottom left of the photo.

We also saw several gibbons and other monkeys frolicking around the treetops. We saw one hornbill (bird), and lots of jungle insects. The most scary thing in there was the ants. There are two main types. First you have the giant man-eating ants.

They are about twice as long as the width of my thumb. I have NEVER in my life seen ants so HUGE! Luckily, none of us were bitten by these particular ants, but our guides said it hurts worse than a crab pinch.

The even scarier ants are the ones you can’t see. I think all of us at one point or another got bitten by those. The bite is terrible. It basically feels like a wasp sting or like you stepped on a nail or like someone is stabbing you with the strength of a thousand needles. For about 10 minutes, then it suddenly goes away. When they bite you, your instinct is basically to scream and run because it feels like you are being attacked by a swarm of 100 ants when really there is only one. Nasty little guys.

Here are some other cool animals we found. In order of appearance: a chameleon, some sleeping bats, and a dragonfly that watched me bathe.

And since I don’t have any exciting pictures of orangutans to show you, here are some boring jungle shots!

 

One last fun fact – if you know the word orangutan, then you know at least one word in Indonesian! Our English word orangutan comes from the Indonesian name for the same creature – orang hutan. Orang means person and hutan means jungle. Hence, orangutan = jungle person!