Ape Business

Wow, what a choice of photos for today!

Where do I begin? So, after a delayed start to our jungle trek in Bukit Lawang (damn my gut!) we headed out at 8am with a couple of Czech guys and our trusty guides...one of which I didn't really trust, but that's another story...

We hiked through the jungle, climbing up the side of very steep hills and sliding down the other side, in search of the orangutans. Our first glimpse was pretty poor - very far away in a treetop one sat in its nest. Disappointing to say the least. I'll add here that the previous day we'd tried to go to the vieiwing platform to see the orangutans get fed, only to get to the dodgy boat crossing to be told that we needed passes from the office, which was 20 minutes back out of the jungle. Needless to say, we arrived 15 minutes late and missed the orangutans. Gutted!

Anyway, so off we went on our 7 hour hike in search of the cheeky apes and in the end we weren't disappointed. We even got to see the notorious 'Mina' who is well known for attacking guides and tourists - our guide had the scars to prove it! She followed us along the path for some time until getting bored and wandered away again. Our favourite orangutan was this fella, he had such a cute friendly face and stayed around for about 40 mins, eating the remnants of our pineapple and bananas.

The remainder of our day was eventful, with a massive incline down to the river which was pretty treacherous then a scramble along the river. To get back to camp, we floated down on some inner tractor tubes tied together by rope! I insisted we had life jackets but in the end it was all pretty tame but great fun nethertheless.

At night there was the most incredible storm, the river in front of our room doubled in depth and was lit up by the constant lightening. The storm lasted a good couple of hours, with a complete black-out. Incredible! Indonesia really is alive!!