Breakfast is noodle soup and fresh pineapple, fortifying us for the steep climb of several hundred feet out of the river valley, deep as an axe-cut in the earth.Why do I do this, I find myself muttering while the sweat pours off me. My thighs are burning as if the chillis have just reached them. Why do I take adventure holidays when I could be lying on a beach?Then I discover why “Sssh,” says Nasib. He’s heard the sound of an orang- utan somewhere in the canopy up above us. We stop and crane our necks, about the only bit of me that’s not aching – till Nasib spots the dark shadow next to the trunk. Eventually it moves along a branch and the darkness turns to rust-coloured fur, and the shadow becomes a huge male orang-utan.
It rips a bit from the branch and throws it in our direction, telling us he knows that we’re there and doesn’t like it. Want to try one?”Nasib makes it sound so tempting that I can scarcely refuse, despite knowing that many hotels ban them from the premises because of the pervasive odour. Thankfully this one is more raspberry sorbet than latrine.Nasib seems to know every plant and animal, though here on the edge of the jungle it is more flora than fauna – apart from a few small snakes, a turtle and butterflies that looked big enough to carry off your day- pack. All I can say is that he must have brought a lot of red chilli with him. “Well,” says Nasib, “sometimes we do, but I’d say maybe about 20 per cent.”He shows us the peacock fern which is a cure for bee stings, and other leaves to rub on everything from bleeding wounds to nappy rash.As we camp that night by the river, Nasib busies himself crushing red chilli to make a fresh sauce for our evening meal of soya bean cake, rice, sweet vegetables and spicy vegetables. Then we hear an orang-utan calling; a large adult male, says Nasib.”What are the chances of seeing one?” I ask.
We have a break and soak our chins with passion fruit, pineapple and oranges, welcome in the jungle’s humid heat We listen to the sound of white-handed gibbons Near by, a tree crashes down. It’s small money but regular.”Beyond here is a small durian plantation. “Orang-utans and tigers both love them,” Nasib explains, “and the fruits fall in the night so we have to harvest them at midnight, because if we left them till the morning the animals would eat them Westerners say they smell like shit but we like them. One two-year-old took a few seconds to learn how to unfasten my belt, and then how to fasten it again.”We’re interrupted by a call from the canoe man, waiting to take the last of us back over the river “One moment, please,” Tanya asks. If a family has between one and two hectares of rubber trees they should provide just enough to live on Not getting rich, but enough so as not to starve. All visitors to Gunung Leuser must be accompanied by a licensed guide, and ours is Nasib Suhardi, who combines trek-leading with looking after his rubber trees.
We walk through a rubber plantation, where we stop to see how the tree is cut and the sap caught.”You cut the trees at 6am,” Nasib tells us “The trees self-heal if they’re cut properly You cut them three times a week, all year round If you cut them every day you don’t get as much rubber. “I have no more moments,” he says, so we leave.Next morning we leave Bukit Lawang for a two-day trek in the jungle. I’m not surprised to hear Tanya say later that we share 99 per cent of our DNA with these creatures.”They are so intelligent, too,” she goes on, happy to answer questions when we return to the station. “One of the orang-utans recently learnt how to unlock its cage by banging the lock with a rock so that it sprang open. They can give you disease, and you can give them diseases, which we’re more concerned about. It might appear hard to resist a hug from an orang-utan, but I would ask you to make the effort.”As we climb the steep and slippy jungle track up to the feeding station, black gibbons are whooping in the tree tops.
