Tanjung Puting and other stories

My intended next post on "transmigrasi" will have to wait as I delayed too long and now have many other events to report on. I have decided that I need to write more frequently, even if it means an even less polished result. Last weekend, I went away for the weekend to Tanjung Puting National Park in Central Kalimantan and while I was gone my life (here) turned upside down.

Let’s start at the beginning. Kari (a conservation volunteer who lived with Ashti and I in the pink house) and I had a trip to Tanjung Puting National Park in Central Kalimantan planned for a few weeks ago that we postponed till last weekend for various reasons (luckily plane tickets turn out to be quite flexible here). We were joined by Kari’s husband Loren, currently a gibbon researcher in Gunung Palung National park (what ASRI is trying to save) and Millie, an accountant for Yayasan Palung (another NGO in the area) and the keeper of the “research house” in Ketapang (where the researchers stay when not in the forest). Thus, we made a neat group of four.

We set off early Thursday for Pangkalan Bun, the closet airport to Tanjung Puting. After registering with the police (ahh the bureaucracy here), spent a pleasant half-day strolling along the riverfront and eating lunch. After exhausting the options in PB (not peanut butter…those options are never exhausted) we negotiated a trip to Kumai, the launching off point for trips into the park. For about a dollar each we shared a creaky old van with some medicine being transported as well.

En route, it turns out that Millie has a cousin in Kumai whom she hasn’t seen in years, and so, after giving her about half an hour warning, we dropped down on her doorstep. What an experience. There was a wedding going on two doors down that was blaring music, and quite a number of people milling through the house when we arrived, none of whom appeared to actually be Millie’s cousin, but who let us in quite cheerfully. The communal open-ness and friendliness of Indonesian households truly astounds me sometimes.
The erstwhile cousin returned and we exchanged pleasantries and drank disgustingly sweet tea that is customarily served here. Finally, her cousin invited us to spend the night if we wanted. After some hemming and hawing we decided to accept and that was how I spent my first night truly Indonesian style, sleeping on a mattress pad on the floor in the middle of a hallway, listening to a wedding until 10 pm.

The rest of the day was essentially spent finding and negotiating a houseboat trip up the river into the park. Friday morning Kari and I went to the market with the guide and chef that we had hired and bought fresh fruit, vegetables, tempe, and fish for the trip. We had a blast and bought a ton of food. It’s really such a shame that we don’t have markets like this in the US.

We spent the next two days and nights on the boat where we ate 3 delicious meals a day cooked for us and slept on the top deck on mattresses they brought out and mosquito nets that got strung up. It was lovely. From our vantage point on the river we could see probiscus monkeys and red-leaf monkeys high in the trees bordering the river, as well as all manner of birds. We stopped at a village and three different “camps” at various points along the river.
The village was actually the home of our guide, as well as many of the rangers and those who worked on the reforestation project. The camps are each the site of former research and rehabilitation of orangutans (there is still some research going on Camp Leaky, the third). Because of the rehabilitation process each of the camps has a feeding platform a few km into the forest where they put fruit out once a day for the orangutans. Thus what started as part of the rehab process became the secret to tourism in Tanjung Puting: guaranteeing that tourists can see orangutans. Finally getting to see my first orangutan (even if they were only semi-wild) was incredible. They are so human-like in some respects. The way the orangutans move is also kind of remarkable. As Loren put it: gibbons swing through the forest by the trees, orangutans swing the trees through the forest.

On Saturday at Camp Leaky we also went on a more extended hike through the forest. Soon after we set out it started to pour. And when it pours here, it really POURS. I discovered I absolutely love the feeling of walking through the rainforest in the rain. You are absolutely soaked, but comfortable and there’s a sort of steamy feeling of life humming all around.

Sunday we made our way back, and thus discovered that while we were gone everything went haywire and all the housing got turned on end as, in order to make room for the new volunteers, the “boys’ house” and the “girls’ house” switched (the former boys’ house was bigger, but there were many more girls) as well as some other maneuvering. I had been living in the “Yale house” or “pink house,” right next to Cam and Kinari, but was moved to become a new resident in the massive new girls’ house (7 bedrooms). Needless to say, it was a bit of a shock to come back from a long weekend and find that all of my belongings had mysteriously walked down the street, but I recovered. The upshot is that I no longer have internet access in my house (before we could steal Cam and Kinari’s) or a sink, but also that I now live with a group of lovely Indonesian women which is helping my Bahasa Indonesia. Life is all about balance I guess.