A jungle river trip from a book (or the movies)

You may wonder, as I did, what a muslim party is like considering they don't drink, and I don't think they dance much either. So I took the invitation and joined Mahjid at his house for the party. A few women were in the kitchen, but other than that it was about 20 muslim men that came. When they entered, they all went immediately to me to shake my hand. Then everyone sat on the floor and there was praying and chanting for about an hour. Then food was brought out and everyone chowed down mostly in silence. Lastly cigarettes were passed around and then everyone left. A pretty quiet and easy going dinner party I'd say.

The next day Mahjid took me around on his motorbike in the morning so I could go to the ATM, buy my plane tickets, and get my health forms stating I didn't have any diseases that could be passed onto the orangutans.

In the afternoon I met up with the other 5 people who would be on the tour with me. Evan (an american in pyschology grad school in carolina) and two separate groups of two italians: Diego and Vivi from Turino and Valentina and Mateo from Florence. I was excited about this group b/c it was good to have an american that I could talk full english with as I hadn't been able to do this since I left bali (turns out I was lucky to b/c after looking at the log books in the national park there had only been 3 americans here in the last 2 months). And I love Italians b/c they just have a great flare and I love how they talk with adding a's to everything and using their hands so much (we-a just-a really miss-a the pizza from-a back at-a home-a), and they are also always so hip and in fashion no matter how deep into the jungle they are. And my intitial excitement was well founded b/c they all turned out to be great and a lot of fun. Mateo and Valentina are starting university this year. Diego is a doctor, who looks exactly like Frank from VT, and Vivi is a beautiful ethologist (studies animal behavior) working on her Ph.D by studying lemur calls in Madagascar. It was actually nice to be with some tourists again as well. All of these guys in my group were on pre-arranged tours, and that seemed to be the common thing here. Tanjung Puting NP is the most popular tourist spot in Kalimantan, but there were really no other toursists in Kumai or Pangkalan bun. This is because they fly into PB and then just get transferred directly to their boat as most people are on package tours bought in Bali or Jakarta (which also explains why airline tickets here can be hard to come from b/c the travel agents all by them up during the high season). Still, with this being the high season at the most popular place, there were only 29 people in the whole national park according to the log book when we were there.

When we'd all become acquainted, we boarded our Klotok, which is a local boat you can sleep on. It's 1 and half stories high with the below deck being only 3 feet tall and the deck just having a shade covering. And it's about 40 some feet long. We were immediately served tea and a delicious lunch and headed off. We left the main river and headed into a smaller tributary. And immediately there were proboscis monkeys everywhere and jumping all around. This whole trip seemed like something that you read about in books written much before my time like, Into the Heart of Borneo of similar stories up the amazon, in which these jungle river trips are very romanitisized, but then you realize when you do it, that it's not like that anymore b/c the forests have been significantly cut or the animals hunted. Or there are the movies where the characters board some boat and they show a 30 second clip of them starting the journey and there are monkeys jumping everywhere, naked village people waving, birds flying overhead, but then you realize that that 30 seconds took several days to get that much footage of animals, and it's all just hollywood. But no, here it was actually like it! like that hollywood portrayal. It was that romantisized jungle river trip I had always dreamed of. There we were on this open aired local boat slowly motoring through a very narrow river with rainforest on both sides and trees hanging over the river. Proboscis monkeys covering the trees, jumping here there and everywhere. Long-tailed macaques peering through the ferns. King fishers and hornbills flying ahead. An occasional hidden house or canoe along the banks. Of course the trip wasn't as full of wildlife as the days of yore back when there were lots of orangutans, elephants, and pygmy rhinos here, but we didn't seem to notice as we watched the monkeys play around in the trees. And of course just like in the movies, we were there sipping on tea and eating while watching all of this. We had more of the budget tour, so we ate on a mat on the floor, compared to some of the other people with chairs and tables, but I think our way was better anyways.

We motored on at a slow pace upstream through the narrow and winding river just watching the monkeys. As it started to get dark we watched the monkeys bed down and then were treated to a gorgeous sunset. We continued to go upriver into the dark, listening to the sounds of the rainforest and eating a delicious meal. After dinner, we all sat out on the bow of the boat and just enjoyed the breeze. At one point we went around a bend in the river and were treated to perhaps the highlight of the day. Right in front of us framed on either side by large trees and reflected in the perfectly still water was the huge orangish-yellow globe of the rising full moon. It was completely stunning. It may have been the most gorgeous moon I have ever seen. The only one that could compete was a full harvest moon rising up over the hills near dakota ridge after a cross country meet at DRHS.

Far upriver, we finally stopped and tied the boat to some trees along the bank. We removed the eating mats from the deck and brought up mattresses and mosquito nets and went to sleep right there on the deck of the boat in the middle of the rainforest, right next to monkeys sleeping in the trees.

Sometime during the night our boat battery died so after waking up with the monkeys to the morning rainforest noises and having a tasty breakfast, we just kind of lounged around on the boat and waited for a boat to pass by that could jump start us. Once we got the battery going again, it was off again to go further upstream, of course watching monkeys and enjoying the reflections of the rainforest in the calm water. Along the way we also saw several crocodiles, mostly small, but one big guy, hanging out in the river.

Later in the morning we arrived at Camp Leakey, an orangutan research center that has been studying orangutans since the 70's and also serves as a rehabilitation center for orphaned organgs and orangs found being sold in the illegal pet trade in thailand and china. The whole national park has a pretty healthy population of oranguatans and in the camp leakey area they have a few completely wild orangutans and then several orangs being rehabbed, which means they are slowly reducing their dependency on the local rice alcohol arak... No, j/k. It means that fruits are put out on a feeding platform once a day. The orangs are free to come for the food, but they also have free range of the whole rainforest and it's fruits, so they don't always show up for the food. So they are wild in the sense that they can come and go as they please and can usually feed themselves fine on the wild fruits; however, they are tame in the sense that they are overly habituated and have little fear of people, and do enjoy the tasty and sweet fruits brought to them from the kumai market.

Well, my bus for kuching from Pontianak, a town in NW kalimantan straddling the equator, leaves in about and hour, so i've got to run and get some food, so I don't miss my bus into malaysia, but i will finish this post later, perhaps in kuching.