Bali… beautiful Bali.

Paul arrived earliest of all the travellers. He hiked his way past the touts trying to get him into their cars and cabs and flagged down a taxi just outside the airport gates. Eventually they made their way through the crazy traffic to Legian, one of the three towns in the Kuta/Legian/Seminyak tourist trap triumvirate. He got the keys to the rooms that they would be staying at their first night and then headed back out to the airport to pick up the stragglers. Unfortunately, Paul waited alone, as Kristen’s flight was delayed until just before the 2:30 am arrival of Tracey and Dale.

After some hugs, kisses and stunned conversation Paul led Kristen and the travel drunk Dale and Tracey to the hotel. Then, without giving them time to get their heads on straight, Paul and Kristen promptly hit D/T with the news that we were pregnant! Talk about timing! It was pretty awesome to see their faces as they took in the news, and wonderful that they were still excited and able to celebrate even after almost 24 hours without sleep.

One of the Billion Temples in Bali

Champion Parents, running on no sleep!

The next day we tooled around the beach in Kuta, wandered around the tourist shops and booked a tour to Komodo by boat. The day was spent acclimatizing to the heat, the food, the time difference and the feeling of being somewhere new. It was great for us to witness how exciting everything is for the first time traveller. I am pretty sure at one point Tracey even said “wow, look! A bridge.”

We travelled the next day up to Pemuteran on the North coast of Bali. To get there we crossed over the central ridge, and stopped at a coffee farm. It was super low pressure (which was great) and they let us try the coffee, tea, hot chocolate and other goodies that they produced at the farm. We got to see the famous Luwak (civet cat… actually a type of weasel and a close relative of the mongoose) that eats the ripe coffee berries and digests the bean, leaving behind the world’s most expensive coffee. If you are into the kind of thing.

Pemuteran was relaxed. So few tourists were there that we were practically the only people in our hotel for the first couple of nights. We had great service at a pretty snazzy price for a decent clean bungalow and access to a pool and internet but we did have to  put up with crowing roosters every morning which was a problem that followed us around for the next few weeks.

First Snorkel outting and Loving it!

This is Kristen`s Happy Snorkel Face

Paul`s art shot!

Pemuteran’s beach was just so so and the water was a little garbage-full. However the life underwater was spectacular. We took Dale and Tracey on their first snorkelling adventure to Palau Menjangan (one of the premier diving sites in Bali).  We got to see Lionfish, trevally, cowfish, aggressive triggerfish and an incredible variety of corals and brightly coloured reef fish. They were blown away by the colour and diversity, and we were pretty proud of their pluckiness. It’s not often someone gets into the water for only the first or second time and is so unperturbed by a steep drop off and the immensity of the dark ocean. They did great and we came away with huge smiles. And sunburns. Dale especially learned not to underestimate the power of the equatorial sun and was quick to slap on sunscreen after broiling the back of his legs.

Not our boat, but truthfully you wouldnt be able to say for sure it wasnt!

Civet Cat, looking shifty

Lake Toba

Lake Toba. Paul didn’t know much about it, but he had an extra day in Northern Sumatra and thought: “Hey it sounds cool… Danua Toba. Cool climate. Volcanic Caldera. Agricultural heartland of Northern Sumatra. Home of the Christian/Animist Batak people…. Let’s check it out.”

Infrastructure in Northern Sumatra being what you might expect, the highways are all one lane roads, potholed, twisty, dusty and packed with honking motorcycles, scooters, bikes, trucks, vans and buses. The buses and vans were all decorated which was pretty awesome. These old beat up Mitsubishis would have a full underkit, spoilers, and chrome rims. They were covered in neon orange paint, or decals of Mickey Mouse, giant-incredibly muscled bulls and Charelton Heston from the Ten Commandments. They were often packed to the roof with passengers. Literally. People would sit on the roof of a van ripping down a tiny road at 100 plus kms an hour. With their kids. And a picnic lunch. Crazy.

We (Paul chartered a mini van with two Danes) took the back road to Lake Toba because our driver had never been that way and wanted to take a picture at the border between North Sumatra Province and Lake Toba Province. It turned out to be a great idea, as it didn’t take much longer (what’s another hour on a 7 hour ride) and we passed through farmland and tiny villages. Betel nut chewing old women, and men on donkeys turned to wave and smile at us as we bounced our way through their hamlets.

Eventually we made it to Lake Toba and took a boat from the harbour to TukTuk a peninsula on an island in the middle of South East Asia’s biggest lake. Paul met a Russian fellow who had been on the trek into the jungle with him, and they ended up sharing a room at a resort on the peninsula that night. Cost us each $3 and there was air conditioning. J

The next day Paul had until 1:30pm to poke around the traditional villages and go for a swim in the refreshing waters. Then it was back on the boat and into a mini-van that would take him back to Medan.

This time the ride back was excruciating. The van was filled with locals, and Paul had to share a bench seat with two of the largest Indonesian men he had ever seen. Stocky, overweight and broad shouldered, they made for singularly poor traveling companions! They did help Paul identify some edible food at the bus station we stopped at for dinner so it wasn’t all bad.

We arrived late into Medan, and Paul found himself a nice squalid box of a hotel room to crash in before boarding his morning flight back to KL and on to Bali to meet up with his wife and the Rieus.

The Great Escape: Jan/Feb 2012

So, we are back in China after more than a month of gallivanting around South East Asia. And it’s about time we updated the blog.
We have a tonne of stories and pictures to share, so we will divide it up over several blog posts and string them out over the next week or so. Keep checking back for more updates!

Part One: Paul’s Primal Primate Encounter.

Because Paul’s school is so very different from the high school, they finished a full week earlier than the rest of the students. This meant Paul found himself with a week of vacation time without Kristen. Knowing that she –brave and adventurous as she is- would likely never wish to visit the Sumatran jungle with him, he decided that this was a good time to check that particular destination off his list.

Paul spent a full 24 hours travelling from Dalian to Sumatra. First a short puddle hop from Dalian to Tianjin, then a flight from Tianjin to Kuala Lumpur, a night spent trying to sleep on the hard, brightly lit budget carrier’s airport in KL and a final flight to Medan in Indonesia.

Medan is a bit of a cesspool. It sprawls, low and dirty, for many tens of kilometres. It’s hot and humid and the traffic is worse than anywhere else we have travelled so far. Other than that it is a delightful city. Paul found an old man who spoke a little English and who offered to take him to the bus station for a price significantly lower then what the taxis wanted to charge. They weaved their way through slums and shops, dodging brightly painted vans stuffed with people and crazy Grandmas on scooters to get to the staging point for all the local buses.

The best part of Medan were these sweet flower billboards advertising everything from engagemens to markets to Coca-cola. Awesome.

The bus took some six hours to get from Medan to Bukit Lawang. It probably should have been four, but the driver stopped often to have a drink and a chat with a friend, or cruise slowly down a street while trying to drum up some more customers. The ride was hot and bouncy, and the bus cruised through some beautiful and some very depressing scenery.

Most of Northern Sumatra used to be covered in some of the worlds thickest, most impenetrable rainforest. Only recently has that begun to change, but the rapid pace of the change is staggering. We drove through mile after mile of recently burned forest. Acres and acres of land cut, burned and replanted with oil palm. Thousands of acres. Oil palm is a monoculture that brings in a lot of money for communities that hover on and around the brink of poverty. It is one of the few crops that can grow in the depleted soil left when you cut down a rainforest and it provides a chance for communities to develop an economy based on something other than subsistence farming. However, the destruction of the biodiverse rainforests and the speed at which they are disappearing was really hard to look at.

After several hours of travelling through oil palm plantations, pockets of rainforest began to appear on the hilltops. Soon the entire road was being encroached upon by the massive hardwoods with their entourage of vines and ferns. Paul disembarked at Bukit Lawang station (basically the side of the road in the middle of a farmer’s field). He then followed a little local boy up a side track (rather then pay the tuk tuk drivers to take him into “town” along the road). After a few minutes of walking along, munching amiably on rose apples and “water fruit” with the local boy, Paul found himself crossing the river on a rather crude and derelict suspension bridge. He haggled with an inn owner on the far side, and because it was the low season, he managed to negotiate a clean (though bare and basic) room for just under 5 dollars. With breakfast included.

Bukit Lawang- a friendly place.

Bukit Lawang is an interesting place. It relies almost entirely on tourist dollars from people who come to see the apes. It was almost destroyed in 2003 by a flash flood that tore down the river and took a fair number of homes and people with it. Hot, dusty, rainy, the little town spreads up and down the banks of the river for about three kilometres before petering out into the jungle.

Paul booked himself onto a two day trek almost immediately after arriving. There were other tourists along for the trek, most of whom were not nearly as prepared to hike in the Sumatran jungle. Paul showed up in hiking boots with his belongings nicely sealed in waterproof stuff sacks and extra pairs of socks, a t-shirt and three litres of water ready for his arrival at camp. Two of the other trekkers were wearing cotton loafers. One girl didn’t have anything with her but the clothes on her back.

The guides were great. Tiny (less than five feet), surefooted local men who were licensed by the village coop to take people like my companions into the jungle and make sure they came out smiling and safe, these men were extremely competent. They would disappear for a few minutes into the bush beside a trail, then reappear 100 meters down the path silently. Almost always they would lead us to a perfect spot to see this Thomas Leaf Monkey, or that White Handed Gibbon, or a particularly loud Hornbill.

Rocking the leaf hat during a rainstorm... so 2011.

We saw our first orang-utan four hours into the trek. Three apes- mom and two daughters- were slowly meandering their way through the upper canopy. The mom and baby stayed there, but the older daughter was curious and made her way down the vines and trunks of trees to see what these hairless apes staring up at her were all about. It was a pretty magical experience to have her so close, and so interested in us. She bounced around in the trees right above us for almost fifteen minutes before returning to her mom.

This is about the moment Paul started hyperventilating with excitement.

Surreal? Yes.

We saw several other orang-utan, all female, in the next few hours. We also got to see long tailed macaques, Thomas leaf monkeys, white handed Gibbon (another ape species), monitor lizards, and a variety of other extremely cool flora and fauna.

That punky monkey is a Thomas Leaf monkey. He is rocking an elegant hair style and a long (but not prehensile) tail.

About an hour after lunch the rain started to come down hard. It was impossible to stay dry, and pretty soon we were soaked through to the skin. We waded through muddy paths, over streams and up and down hills until we made it down into a little valley. There across the river was the camp. We loaded ourselves into inner tubes and the guides pushed us across the rather swollen river. We stripped down to our skivvies and washed the mud sweat and leeches (yes leeches) off of ourselves by the side of the river.

Camp was an open bivouac. Poles had been pounded into the ground, and a tarps carefully fastened over top. It was dry under the tarp, but one side of the tent was completely open to the jungle and provided no shelter from mosquitoes, leeches or monitor lizards. In the middle of the night this fact was driven home by the fact that Paul woke up with something warm burrowing into his armpit. He freaked out a bit when it suddenly jumped onto his face and then scampered off because of his thrashing and screaming. Naturally this woke the rest of the trekkers, who, not knowing what was going on, also freaked out. The bush rat/monkey/monster bumped into several other people on its way out, which amplified their screaming and made Paul feel a little better. He had one small scratch down his cheek which he washed and covered in antibiotic cream, but other than that escaped pretty much unscathed! However he didn’t get a lot more sleep after that.

The "tent" where we spent the night. Notice the lack of a final side.

The next day the trekkers hung around the camp area, hiking to a nearby waterfall, before we rafted our way down the swollen river and back to Bukit Lawang. The experience was pretty special, and left Paul wishing he had more time and money to spend towards a longer Sumatran jungle excursion. Definitely something to save his pennies for!

Rafts made of inner tubes lashed together with twine. Scary but effective.