Last Days

Malone and I had originally planned to see the orangutans in Bukit Lawang, then travel to a nearby spot to visit with some elephants. Instead of riding an elephant in any of the other places we had visited, we did research to find the best place where the elephants were treated well. We had settled on a spot in Indonesia where elephants had been rescued from mistreatment and trained to patrol the forests, looking for illegal loggers. But we fell in love with Bukit Lawang and decided to spend our last days together there. Unfortunately, we had no money left because our trek was so expensive, and Bukit Lawang had no ATM. So we took a terrifying ride on the backs of Haidir’s and Andy’s motorbikes to the nearest ATM, about 10 kilometers away. I was afraid for my life and could do nothing but put all my faith and trust in Haidir. I survived, but the ATM didn’t accept VISA. So we went back into town, shared a plate of fried banana with coconut and chocolate, and later had a delicious dinner with Rick and Emily from our trek. I ate the Indonesian national dish—Gado Gado—peanut sauce on mixed vegetables with rice and hard-boiled egg. It was so good; I was eating so well in my days leading up to my trip to Pulau Bangkaru, where I was told the food was simple and not very exciting (which wasn’t entirely accurate). In the evening, we got together with Haidir and Andy and sat by the river with palm wine (which was disgusting) and strawberry Fanta (which was also disgusting) and sang songs and talked. The natural serenity of the town and the positive energy and friendship were so fulfilling; these were some of my happiest days in Asia.

The following day, Malone and I had to take the public bus to Binjai, the nearest town, to use the ATM. This wasn’t terribly exciting, but I got to read on the bus, and we ran into Hendri at a pancake stand, so I tried an Indonesian pancake with chocolate and peanuts while Malone tried Obama’s favorite dish, Bakso. When we got back to town, I was slowly walking along the main street, thinking about what souvenirs I wanted to purchase, when I ran into Gabe (pronounced Gabby). He was an older man, sitting on the steps of his little shop, carving wooden sculptures, bed posts, and other things. He said hello to me and asked me if I spoke German. (I guess I look German?) I said I could, ein bissien, and then was surprised to find I could have a conversation with him. He told me to sit down and he would buy me a drink. I asked for an iced tea, but he came back with a strawberry Fanta, which I was forced to drink. It was sickeningly sweet. But I sat in the heat with my strawberry Fanta, mosquitoes clustering around my ankles, and talked with Gabe for about an hour. He had been a sailor and traveled a lot. His wife was German and had died in the flood that ravaged Bukit Lawang in 2003. His demeanor was light-hearted, but you could tell that he was lonely. I was happy to give him some company, even though he kept poking my arm and tried to tell me that he went to school with Obama, and Obama had punched him in the schoolyard, knocking out nearly all of his teeth.

I spent the evening with Emily, Malone, and Andy, and in the morning, Malone and I had our last breakfast together before she caught an earlier bus to her next destination. It was strange to watch her walking away; we had spent the past two months together, becoming closer friends than we had been before. It was even stranger to leave Bukit Lawang by myself, later that morning. I said goodbye to Nora, and Andy gave me a hug. As I walked down the shop-lined river path, I passed about everyone I had met in the town, except Haidir, who was out on a trek. I said goodbye to our river-rafting guide (never did catch his name), Gabe, and finally Hendri, who gave me a big hug and told me to stop thinking so much. Even people I had never met stopped me to say goodbye, ask where I was headed next, and wish me well. It was the first place I’d visited in Asia, other than maybe Pai, where it was sad to leave, knowing that I would probably never be back, and definitely the first place where I felt like I had made friends, and friends who would remember me if I returned. But I continued on my journey alone, prepared for my final destination: Pulau Bangkaru to volunteer with the sea turtles for the rest of the month.

On the River Again

Our trip leaders cooked us dinner over a fire when the rain let up. We sat on a matted floor in a circle under the larger tent, with a bowl of white rice in front of each of us and bottles of boiled and cooled river water spread out amongst us. In the middle were bowls and bowls of food. They made me my own bowl of scrambled eggs since I wasn’t eating meat, and there were fried tofu and soy beans and a delicious vegetable curry. It was the vegetable curry I’d been wanting the whole trip but could never have anywhere else because it was always too spicy. It was a wonderfully filling dinner.

After we ate, we moved back to the smaller tent and played card tricks, matchstick games, and silly laughing games that I probably wouldn’t do any justice describing. In any case, it was a fun evening. The rain continued falling but I stayed dry and it wasn’t cold outside. Amar was right about his promise that there would be no mosquitoes at the campsite.

I was one of the first to wake up in the morning and I met Hendri down by the riverside. We sipped some tea and talked as the sun came up. Breakfast was sandwiches of scrambled eggs and tomato on fried toast, served on forest leaves, and watermelon and pineapple drizzled with passionfruit. Once we had eaten, we commenced on a difficult, barefoot journey less than a kilometer away to a waterfall. We had to cross the raging river twice to get there. Rick, the man from Holland, led me across the first time (the current was too strong for me to make it across by myself), and one of the rafting guides in the other group gave me a piggy-back ride across the second time. Hendri strung everyone’s cameras around his neck to make it across, which seemed like a risky move to me, but they all stayed dry.

 

 
The waterfall was cold for swimming, but I went in anyway, since I was already wet from crossing the river. After a while, we went to sit on some large rocks in the sunshine, and Haidir made us crowns of fern leaves and painted our faces with red mud. When we had dried off in the sunlight, it was time to get wet again, and I was ferried across the river in a tube and then led across by holding Haidir’s hand and literally floating behind him. We had noodle soup for lunch and packed up. My clothes, which had been soaking wet that morning, were completely dry now on the rocks where I had spread them, and butterflies collected on my undies.

All of our belongings were packaged into large plastic garbage bags and strapped to our raft, which was made of four inner tubes lashed together. None of this looked trustworthy and I worried that everything I had brought with me would be soaked. But Haidir and Hendri seemed confident about it. Once our gear was strapped in, we got into the raft. Haidir sat in front and another guide in back, and Malone, Emily, Rick, and I shared the two center tubes. It wasn’t exactly comfortable, but it wasn’t a long ride back into town. The trip downriver was exciting, especially because I had never been rafting before. There were a couple of slow spots on the river, but overall, it was a bumpy ride. Our guides used long wooden poles to steer us away from rocks, and at one point, they turned the raft around so we were floating backwards.

The sun was out, the sky was blue, the river was topped with small, white waves, and to either side of the river, the trees rose up like giants. There were people hiking along the shore or sitting by the river and every person we passed smiled and waved. It was such a refreshingly friendly place. We floated and bumped our way back into town, where we found that our things had, indeed, stayed dry, and we temporarily parted with our guides and went back to Nora’s for a shower and a nap.

"You look like an Orangutan in Bukit Lawang..."

When we flew into Medan, Indonesia, and made it through Customs, we walked out into flooded streets. The paved roads could in no way absorb the rainwater that had gushed out of the sky the night before, but our taxi driver slugged through the water anyway and dropped us off at the bus station, where we avoided all the hecklers trying to sell us a mini-bus and took the hot, stuffy public bus to Bukit Lawang.

Ah, Bukit Lawang. How I loved it! The walk along the riverside to Nora’s Rainforest Lodge was beautiful enough and our bungalow room was comfy. I ate a homemade bowl of tomato soup while Amar, a trekking guide, showed us his album of photos. The tour he offered was expensive, and I was somewhat reluctant to pay for it initially, but it was completely worth it. We booked a two-day trek for the following morning and had a delicious night of sleep before departing on our trek with Amar’s son, Haidir, and Andy, a local who worked at Nora’s. Rick from Holland and Emily from Canada were also a part of our tour, and here and there we met up with a group led by Hendri. There was a couple in our group who only stayed with us for a part of the day, but the black man was quickly nicknamed “Obama.” Indonesians LOVE Obama. We discovered this in the short time that we were in Medan and en route to Bukit Lawang. Whenever anybody asked us where we were from, we would tell them America, and they would respond, with a huge smile, “America! Obama!” This happened every time, without fail.

Anyway, I have to admit: the first hour or so of the trek was pretty miserable. It was hot. We weren’t completely in the rainforest yet so the sparse shade didn’t offer much relief and mosquitoes were flocking to me like Christmas shoppers to the mall on Black Friday, despite applying and reapplying bug spray. But we learned about the mango tree and the rubber tree and saw the white-handed gibbons—the same ape that I had held, diapered, in Phang Nga.

We were sitting on the trail, eating a snack of bananas, oranges, and passionfruit, when Haidir disappeared for a few minutes, then returned and told us to leave our bags where we sat and bring only our cameras. We followed him back the way we had come to see four orangutans. There was one large female and three smaller apes hanging in the trees. Their rusty fur against the green foliage is a striking color combination and we watched them swinging through the trees, as limber as if their arms and legs were made of rubber, their bellies big and round. To switch from tree to tree, the apes would hang on to the edge of a branch and let their weight bend the tree until they could reach the branch of a second tree. Then they would pull this branch toward them, grab on, and go for a ride, causing the tree to swing and shake back and forth, sending leaves and sticks to the forest floor.

We watched for about half an hour before continuing on our trek. We ran into a flock of long-tailed macaques on our way back to our packs. There were so many babies—skittish and falling out of trees. They were all eating leaves. A male was trying to get with one of the females; he would approach from behind, lift up her tail to take a peek, and then she would run away. Does this sound maybe a little familiar to anyone else? Or am I anthropomorphizing?

 

Moving on from the macaques, we kept hiking and came across another orangutan hanging from a tree above the trail. After finding a safe way to move past her, we continued to a clearing where we stopped for a delicious lunch of fried rice with peanuts and vegetables and fresh tomatoes and cucumber that Haidir and Andy had prepared the night before. We sat on logs, eating our rice with our hands, when all of a sudden Haidir and Andy told us to pack up our food and move up the trail. We did, as out of the woods and into the clearing emerged a male orangutan. We ran up the path to get out of his way; he had been drawn by the scent of the food. In groups of two, Haidir took us down the path to get a closer look at the giant. In watching the orangutan, I had equal feelings of wonder and fear. It was hard to believe how large he was and how close I was. He was the last orangutan we saw on our trek.

That afternoon, we kept hiking. It was exhausting; to the top of the ridge and up and down and up and down. We finally reached the riverside campsite. Haidir took our bags across the river while Hendri ferried us to the other side in an inner tube. When we reached the campsite, we immediately went into the water. I was so sweaty, so muddy, and so itchy, and cold water never felt so wonderful, even though the current was strong. I went swimming in all my clothes but before I could hang them to dry, it started to rain. I dried off and was given a cup of hot tea as I sat under a tent, watching the rain fall down and the river run by. There were white seeds of some plant floating by in the rainy sky and the tall trees grew wet and the night sky darkened.

Four Days in Penang

Our next stop was Penang, an island off the western coast of Malaysia. We took a ferry there, found a place to stay, and ate dinner. The next morning I found something that I had long been missing… a bagel with cream cheese. It’s the simple things in life! I referred to this find in my journal as “like, the highlight of this trip” and “I’m having the same breakfast tomorrow…and the next day, and the next day.” I guess I had really been missing Western food.

We spent the day walking around historic Georgetown. The Hindu temple that we went to was closed, but we went into a very beautiful reconstructed Buddhist temple—the Teochew Temple—built in 1870. We went to the first mosque I’ve ever been to—the Kapitan Keling Mosque, where we donned the veil and a long robe to enter. A man with terrible teeth taught us about Islam and its similarities to Christianity. The main part of the mosque was for men only, and we were guided around the outskirts, not allowed to enter the inside, then taken to a small, closed-off room where women can pray. It seemed pretty patriarchal and was a bit unsettling for me. We also passed by a Christian church and the Goddess of Mercy Temple—another Buddhist temple built between 1728 and 1800 and enveloped in clouds of burning incense. The city really is an intersection for various religious cultures.

We spent about an hour in the Penang State Museum, which was filled with information about British occupation of Penang, the island’s role with the East India Company, World War Two, and more. My favorite part of the museum was a small art wing with paintings of the island during British settlement. The bottom floor was devoted to Malay culture and customs, detailing the practices of the different ethnic groups of Malaysia. After the museum, we walked along the Esplanade to Fort Collins, a historic site on the island.

Our second day in Penang was not as interesting. It rained most of the day, and we spent the majority of the day trying to get tickets to take a ferry to Indonesia which was advertised at many businesses and in the Lonely Planet guide. It turned out that the last ferry had run on June 16, 2010. So we had to book a flight to Indonesia instead, for $70. This was one of the more frustrating experiences of the trip, and showed us that even though Lonely Planet comes out with a new edition of their travel book each year, that doesn’t mean that they’ve actually updated anything. Following that debacle, we took a bus to Penang Hill, which offers an excellent view of the city, only to find that it was closed, so we took the bus back. The third day was also a rainy, uneventful day. We spent some time at the mall and went to see Rango. It was the first movie we’d seen the whole trip, with the exception of movies on the plane on the way there. It’s interesting what you go without on a long trip and to discover what you miss (bagels) and what you don’t really miss (movies).

Our last day in Penang ended up being sunny. We took a bus to Batu Feringgi, a beach on the north coast of the island. The beach was beautiful—broad with pebbly, soft sand; flat, clear, blue water; forest-covered hills in the distance; blue sky and finally some sun; and best of all, quiet. There was hardly anyone there. We rented chairs for 5 ringit each and I sat in the sun and read. Malone and I swam for a little while. I was about to get out of the water and was swimming back to the shore when I was stung by a jellyfish. I could feel its individual tentacles swirling around my leg and I tried to swim away from it, but I just swam into it again, its tentacles spikily swarming on me. I ran out of the water and looked desperately in my bag for Benadryl, which, of course, wasn’t there. The welts on my leg began to swell rapidly. Then a stranger appeared (from I don’t know where) with a leaf of aloe vera. He peeled the outer leaf aside and rubbed the cooling goo on my stings. I continued to use the aloe on my leg as a strange, constricting pain—worse than the pain of the sting itself—moved up my leg, into my stomach, my lower back, my chest, my upper back. I was pretty nervous and felt immobile; all I did was sit there for about an hour, enduring the pain, until it went away. When I finally got up, I ran into somebody else who gave me a peppermint oil that really helped ease the pain. I spent the rest of the day in the shade, eating fried rice and reading Tom Robbins.

Shortly before we left the beach, I took a walk. The sun was getting lower in the sky, making everything glittery and warm-colored. The sky was one of the bluest I’ve ever seen, even after all that rain! I picked up a lot of sea glass on the walk and enjoyed the sun on my skin. We got ice cream before taking the bus back to the city. The next morning, we got up early to catch our flight to Indonesia, the last phase of our trip.

Malaysian Towns

We arrived in Melaka just in time for bed. The next day, we spent the morning in the hostel and then took the town bus to the zoo. We saw macaws, small primates, rhinos, birds, tapirs, giraffes, deer, cattle, tigers, leopards, cassowaries, sun bears, monkeys, apes, a reptile house… The coolest part about the zoo was that you could go into some of the enclosures with the animals, like the lemurs, flying foxes, and birds. The tigers and the giant gaur were some of the Asian animals we saw in the zoo that we never would have seen in the wild. We spent a long time resting on a bench and contemplating the giraffes.

It was a hot day, and walking around the zoo tired us out, so we rested and read back at the hostel before heading out at dusk for a romantic Melaka River Cruise. The sky was beautiful, but blackened quickly as we set out in the boat. The river was very flat, because it is dammed at the mouth, and lined on both sides with new and old buildings, whose many-colored lights created beautiful reflections in the dark water. We floated under several bridges, past the giant, historic waterwheel, past the town square and clock tower area, past the carnival-like area with a pirate-ship ride and Ferris wheel, and past cottages built in the 1920s for boatmen and fishermen. Their wives rolled cigarettes for sale while the men worked on the river. The lights, the dark, soft water, and the hot air cooled to a warm and breezy temperature created quite the atmosphere, so afterwards, Malone and I continued the romantic evening by sharing two pasta dishes in town.

In the morning, we walked briefly around the historic part of town before getting on a VERY crowded bus to Port Dickson, where all of the locals were headed for the weekend. Port Dickson wasn’t really a place that catered to tourists, so we ordered food without really knowing what we would get. The next day, we had a breakfast of fried rice in the food stalls along the beach and then rented an umbrella, chairs, and a table for 20 ringit for the day. The beach was really pretty—clear water and reddish sand—but it was also really crowded. The water was filled with anchored motorboats and jet skis and the beach was filled with tubes, banana boats, and umbrellas and tents. We were the only foreigners there for a good part of the day, so it was cool to have a really local experience. However, because it was a Muslim population and everyone at the beach was fully clothed, we didn’t feel comfortable wearing just our bathing suits.

Malone flew a kite that she had purchased while I read Tales of the South Pacific and sustained myself with watermelon, a grilled cheese, fried bananas, and a vanilla ice cream cone, all purchased at the various food stalls along the beach. We watched the sun set over the water. It was beautiful—balmy air, lots of clouds lit by the sun, and the waves breaking on the muddy sand.

Cameron Highlands

The next day, I woke up in the Cameron Highlands to a very quiet town, but after a slow morning, I embarked on a full-day tour with our guide, Spencer, a young man from Japan, a Dutch woman and two German women. We piled into the back of a Jeep and drove to our first stop, an Orang Asli (“Original People”) village, where government funding has provided the people with houses, running water, and other amenities. These people still use many traditional subsistence methods, like planting crops such as beans and yams and hunting for wild pig, deer, and porcupine in the jungle with blow dart guns. A man from the village demonstrated how to use the blow dart gun—a long, bamboo stick through which a dart is blown to pierce an animal. Traditionally, poison from plants or frog skin are used on the darts. A piece of “jungle cotton” is stored at the opening so the darts don’t fall out. I was given the chance to try the dart gun and was surprised to land my dart quite near the center of the target!

 
We brought an older Orang Asli man with us on our next part of the trip as a guide. It was a good thing because after only about five minutes of driving up the muddy, rutted road, we got stuck. I’m not really sure why Spencer thought he would be able to make it up this road. He only got the vehicle more and more stuck. Finally, he gave up, and the Orang Asli man took us into the jungle while Spencer walked back to town to get a tow.

I never got the name of our guide, but he led us on a vigorous hike in search of the Rafflesia, the world’s largest flower at up to a meter wide. We walked along the muddy road, where large clusters of bamboo grew tall, curving to the sky. From the gaps in the vegetation we could see a forest-covered mountain peak shrouded in mist. It was humid and I was sweating before too long. I saw a few leeches on the ground but, luckily, none on my body. We hiked over a bamboo bridge, through trails, over fallen trees, across a sandy spit and a small creek, and took a small side trail to find a few dead Rafflesia, fungus-like, dark brown and decaying, and one that had not yet opened but sat like a red cabbage on the forest floor. We then continued to make the longer trek to the flower that was in bloom.

 

 

 

On the way back to the main trail, our guide stopped and cut into a piece of bamboo with his machete. “Water bamboo,” he told me, and I looked inside the long tube, which was filled with water. He told me to try it, so I tipped the long tube back. “Slowly, slowly!” he warned, but the water sped down the chute and landed all over my chin and chest anyway. We continued down the trail, where butterflies flew about the rainforest, umbrella-like tree ferns grew, and bamboo predominated. We reached a raging, muddy creek, where we took our shoes off and our guide led us across the rocks to the other side with a walking stick. Once we crossed the river, we soon left the main trail again and headed up a steep, slippery path, grabbing the trunks of small trees to keep from sliding back down to where we had started. Our guide chopped down branches in our way, and he soon revealed the giant Rafflesia before him.

The flower was perched on the hillside, rusty red and beautifully bright amongst the brown, leaf-strewn forest floor. Its petals, thick, uncurled and unfolded themselves along the ground. Its center was like a hollowed-out gourd, inside of which a spiky heart sat. Insects buzzed around the spiked center. Near the flower, two baby buds claimed their spaces on the ground, and several more dead Rafflesia decayed.

Once we were finished marveling at the flower, we headed back down the muddy slope, reached the trail, and continued back down to the road. I led the way, walking as the hot sun came out. The bottoms of my pants were wet with mud and water from the creek. Butterflies hovered over the path, and at one point, after hearing a rustling in the bush, a wild pig—smaller than I would have expected one to be—sprinted across the path. As I walked toward where the pig had been, I noticed its digging in the mud, where it had been looking for worms.

 
When we finished the hike, Spencer was waiting for us, the Jeep pulled out of the mud but still muddy. We piled in, despite how dirty we were and how much we smelled, and dropped our guide back off at the village before continuing to the tea plantation. The scenery there was absolutely stunning. The sun was briefly out, but everything was misty and wet. We drove by rolling hills, covered with rows and rows of neatly trimmed tea bushes. The greens were brilliant—jade, emerald. We wound around the hills of tea until we reached the Boh tea factory, where we went on a very brief tour and saw the machines and workers breaking the leaves down, drying, and sorting. Then we had a light lunch—apple pie and vanilla tea—at the tea shop. Malone had gone on a different half-day tour, and her group was visiting the tea factory at the same time, so I got to sit on the misty porch with her, overlooking the green tea fields.

I bought some black tea soap (which I have yet to use!), some green tea (which was delicious), and a postcard before we left and headed for the strawberry farm. There wasn’t much of the farm to see—just a few rows of strawberries growing in a large greenhouse—but we got to sample strawberry jam and dried strawberries and I bought 5 ringit worth of fresh strawberries, which were delicious.

Our last stop was the Butterfly Garden, which also housed insects and reptiles. I held a leaf-bug, a lazy gecko, and a leaf frog and got a closer look at a rhinoceros beetle and some red palm weevils when Spencer took them out of their tanks. The orchid praying mantis was particularly beautiful. There were tanks and tanks of snakes, some with ten or more tangled together, making it impossible to tell which body belonged to which head! Other tanks held geckos, chameleons, and other reptiles. There were beautiful butterflies and flowers in the butterfly garden. Between the butterflies, flowers, Rafflesia, strawberries, and tea leaves, it was truly a colorful day!

 

For dinner I had mushroom soup (it was actually Campbell’s soup, which isn’t something I normally eat, but it was nice to have some Western food for a change!) followed by a quiet evening. In the morning, we packed and got on a bus to Kuala Lumpur. It was an unpleasant bus ride down the windy mountain roads, but we got off in the capital city for lunch. Our bus to our next stop left later in the evening, so as our bus departed, we got to see the city skyline at sunset.