Travelogue 2018/2, Negotiating North Sumatra (Indonesia)

From Doha we travelled via Kuala Lumpur to Medan. A rollercoaster of cultures, levels of development, climates, time zones and day-and-night rhythm.  Sumatra is roughly the size of Spain and has a similar number of inhabitants, but its infrastructure is way less developed. So we designed a non-ambitious tour of the province of North Sumatra.

Medan city

At first sight Medan is large, busy, dirty and noisy. At second sight too, but then you also see the relaxed and cheerful people, always willing to give you a big smile and have a chat. Nobody gets upset, everybody is helpful. There are nice vegan eateries and trendy coffee shops. The mood is pleasant, and if the noise and air pollution wouldn’t chase you away, you’d happily stay for a while.

One could measure the degree of development of a country by the number of meters one can walk on the pavement. In Medan the sidewalks are usually blocked by shop fronts, parked cars or motorcycles, or heaps of building materials, mud or dug up sewage sludge. There are holes big enough to fall into the sewer, unexpected steps, loose slabs or ends of reinforcing steel sticking out.

So mostly you walk on the street, between parked cars and the traffic, hoping the drivers will see you. Traffic mainly consists of relatively new cars, motorbikes and becaks – bikes with a side car that you rent for a ride.

One morning after looking at old colonial buildings and Little India, we took a becak home. It was the oldest and most ramshackle one of Medan. The engine stalled all the time, the front wheel wasn’t in line, petrol came via a tube from a jerry can hanging on the steering wheel. When the driver lit a cigarette he held it in his hand right next to the jerry can. We drove slower than the flow of traffic, which was a real problem as weaving in and out of lanes is crucial for negotiation traffic here. Because of the one way system we had to make quite a detour. All in all we took half an hour inhaling exhumes for what would have been a 2½km walk. Still, we survived. And most drivers were relaxed, gave each other room to move, hardly used the horn and didn’t dive into non-existing spaces.

Bukit Lawang jungle

Usually I don’t feel at home in places that are purely touristic. Bukit Lawang is such a place. It’s a village on the edge of a National Park where an orang utan rehabilitation center used to be. The feeding platform used to be a great spot to watch the mighty animals. The platform is closed now and the only way to see the semi wild orang utans that stuck around is on a long, overpriced jungle trekking – and that is what all the tourists do here.

(Here is the story of my 2000 jungle trek)

Bukit Lawang survived thanks to the treks, the river, the fresh air and as a backpacker hangout. We stayed a couple of days in the strip along the river, in the one guesthouse / restaurant that was busy, cozy and had good food.

Then we moved upstream for a couple of days to a rather remote guesthouse, 1km over a small footpath. There we found the real jungle feel. The place was well designed and decorated with lots of wood and bamboo, the Australian-Indonesian couple that ran it made you feel relaxed.

The raging river,  the green wall of jungle on the opposite shore, the monkeys and the butterflies, one more cup of coffee on the veranda – I could get used to that.  Dinner with our hosts in the evening, total darkness at night, the sounds of monkeys and crickets in the morning. After a rain shower water vapor would slowly rise from the forest and form clouds.

Berastagi volcanos

Berastagi is a former Dutch hill station at 1400m. Now it’s an agricultural town, the center of growing non-tropical vegetables. The wholesale market where the farmers bring their produce was a fascinating chaos where huge quantities of carrots, cabbages and potatoes where hauled around in old trucks that got stuck in the mud.

In the weekend Medan people come to escape the city. The dozen western tourists vanish in the crowd. There are two active volcanos nearby, one of which can easily be climbed – and that is what all the tourists do here. We went straight to the hot springs at the end of the descent to soak up the sulphur.

A trip to the foot of the other, even more active volcano was canceled due to the weather. There were daily eruptions, but they lasted just 5 minutes, so you had to be lucky to see one. After one such eruption the mountain had totally hidden itself behind its own cloud of ash. When it started raining a thin layer of volcanic ash covered everything, including our roof terrace.

Just like the rain forest, volcanos create their own clouds. Steam rising from the cracks in the rocks rise and form a cloud that will stick to the top of the mountain.

The weather. The monsoon lasts long this year, it’s cooler than usual with just 23-26 degrees and mostly overcast. Sometimes the sun sort of breaks through, and most rain is at night.

Lake Toba

Travelling in Sumatra isn’t harder than in say India, but over there I know my way around things better. A night in a lousy hotel, a sick day, serious harassment at a bus station, a meal that doesn’t go down well, a credit card that gets rejected – it can be tough and exhausting at times.

All the more pleasant that we could relax at the shores of Lake Toba – and that is what all the tourists do here.

We stayed there for a week and it was the first place on Sumatra where we really felt at home. The mood was relaxed, nature was beautiful. Even though it is rather touristy, there’s enough couleure locale in the small shops and cafes. And it just takes a couple of steps off main street to be among rice paddies and water buffaloes.

Lost in the jungle of Sumatra

Lately there has been a boom of news and TV programs about people getting lost in the jungle, dying, or just barely surviving.  That made ​​me think back to one of the most perilous experiences I've had myself.  I am blessed with a decent sense of direction, but getting lost in the jungle can happen more easily than you think.

November 2000. We had planned to cross Sumatra from south to north. I had travelled a lot in Asia, but I had never been in such a vast and sparsely populated area. Besides long-distance night buses (which I avoided) there was hardly any public transport. And if there was, it was slow and unreliable. In one town we waited three mornings in a row along the side of the road before a van actually left. And three times we got off a bus at dusk, well before our destination, in order to find a hotel by daylight.

Sparsely populated it was.

So we progressed with difficulty and slower than planned and were spending more time on the go, than enjoying the beautiful places. But in the town of Sungai Panui (Sungai Penuh) in the Kerinci valley we allowed ourselves a break for a couple of days.

View from the valley to the hills

Around the Kerinci valley was the Kerinci National Park, an area of hundreds of kilometers. A walk in the jungle would be great, but we did not do irresponsible things, so first we went to inquire at the NP headquarters. Where could you take a nice walk, and what about transportation to the starting point and a guide? A group of rangers explained the different possibilities. The area where we had driven through on the bus from Tapan, appealed to us. One of the rangers said he had a car to drive there and was willing to be our guide. For him it probably was a little extra on the side.

He went home to get a car, his brother's blue mini pickup truck, that had no first gear and hardly any brakes.
We parked 15km away, at a small eatery along the way. At 10 o'clock we went out, first ten minutes on the road, and then onto a path. The path soon became worse, and the forest thicker. There were so many branches, ferns and thorny bushes on the path that I had to walk with my head bent down, sometimes it was almost crawling. It seemed a kind of tunnel between / among dense fern bushes. Being the tallest of the three I suffered most, and it took away the pleasure in the walk and the surroundings.

After an hour we had a discussion: to return or to find better trails? I didn't want to be a spoilsport and stop too soon, so we tried to make clear to our guide that he should find us better paths; he seemed to understand.

But after another 30 minutes, he seemed less and less sure of himself, retracing his steps regularly. We made it ​​clear that now we really wanted to get back to the main road. Yes, follow me, this way, he gestured. We asked explicitly whether he knew where the road was, he said we must trust in Allah. That is when I lost faith in him. Where we walked couldn't be called a path. All the time we had to push our way through the creepers, brambles and undergrowth.  When I saw on my compass that we constantly changed directions and were just zigzagging, I began to worry. I knew he did not know the way back, but I had not paid attention myself how we had walked. Normally I would always know the same way back, but not now. After all, we had an official ranger of the park management organization with us. Can you do better?

Not knowing what else to do, we followed our guide again. He pointed to a hill top, and said over there he would certainly be able to see the road. Meanwhile, this was absolutely not a path, it was a battle with the vegetation that was giving us bleeding scratches and torn clothes. It was really scary when we ended up on top of a layer of ferns covering the underbrush, meters above the ground. Every now and then a branch would break or you'd stumble, and drop down a meter. The idea to break or even just sprain your ankle was terrifying.

Our guide admitted that he was familiar with another part of the forest, but in fact had never been in this area. If only we had known sooner! He talked about sleeping in the woods, hoping that they would come looking for us tomorrow.  But who would actually miss us and who knew in what area we had gone for this walk? And how much of an operation would a possible search be? By now I was really worried how this would end.

After a tough journey of about three quarters of an hour that covered about 100 meters, we were on the hilltop where the guide had put his hopes on. In vain. We saw the rain arrive over the next ridge.

Kerinci National Park

Now it was clear that our guide had no clue, it was time to take matters into our own hands. And our guide was grateful for that. In the sand we drew the mountainside west of the valley. If we would walk steadily to the east, we had to encounter something somewhere. Weak point of the plan was that it could be 10 or 20 km, and we might cover just 250m per hour through the bush. That could take 4 to 8 days. Four days we should be able to keep going without food, shouldn't we? I chose the direction, south east, because I thought the road had to be south of us. In any case, it seemed a straight line had to be better than running around in circles. However hard it was it by now, we took turns cheering each other up.

After a while, again we were standing in front of fern forest that we would have to cross high in the canopy. A horrible prospect. We heard water and planned to follow it downstream - that had to lead somewhere, didn't it?. The descent was very dangerous, the lower we got the muddier and more slippery it got. So either you slid down or you were sucked into the mud. After about 20 minutes we arrived at the river, a narrow, fast-flowing stream, and I was happy to wash the blood off my face. But the vegetation was so dense that it would be impossible to follow. Moreover, it ran to the north, intuitively the wrong direction.

There was no other choice than to climb back up the slope. Clinging from one trunk to the other. After roughly an hour we were back at the place where we had come up with the river plan.  So we had to switch back to the original plan: the straightest possible line to the south east. Our guide had long ago switched to "follow" mode. Personally, I felt already better to at least have a plan, and not aimlessly drift after him. When we rested on a soft heap of fern leaves, and forgot that it was going to rain soon, it felt we could hold on for a while.

In the meantime I was pretty exhausted. We were, after all, fighting through scrub and up and down steep slopes. Lianas grabbed you all the time: sometimes around your feet so you stumbled, sometimes around your body so you had to pull them apart to detach yourself.

The guide searched for broken twigs, so sometimes we walked on a relatively passable animal track (but always lost it again) while I was overseeing the predominant direction to remain south, as far as the terrain allowed. Actually we had developed a good division of labor.

At one point I saw a beautiful single mushroom in the grass, which I was certain to have seen before. If that was true there would soon be a thorny tree trunk on the right, on a place where we were still on some sort of path, many hours ago. Indeed came the spiked stem, and although the guide had already passed it, I called him back and insisted to turn left, to go south. Suddenly it looked as if we were going to come home today! What a relief!  Almost immediately the long-awaited rainstorm erupted. Had that come before I thought that we would get out, I don't think I had managed to keep up my spirits.

Thorny tree trunk

Soon we recognized the tunnelled path that had been so uncomfortable, but where we were not yet lost. We even found the sunscreen I had lost that morning when my backpack was stuck in the branches. Drenched, and sometimes half crawling and always slipping on wet branches and leaves, even our guide was cheerful. When we finally got back to the road he kissed the tarmac.
Back to the diner, I took off my clothes and hung my shirt to dry by the fire while we drank a cup of hot coffee.

Our guide took us back to town. We insisted to go by the now almost deserted office. Although we knew not to expect western standards, we were outraged by the irresponsible and dangerous situation in which the guide had put us, so we wanted to complain to the NP office. If only to prevent future recurrence. To what extent we succeeded in was doubtful, but the message that we were very unhappy came about.

Like vagabonds we walked through town back to the hotel. Dirty, wet, wounded and in torn clothes. The hotel staff came running with thermos of hot water to our room! The scratches on face, arms and legs remained painful for days.

Really, you do not need to do very strange or very stupid things to get lost in the jungle. The vastness and desolation is easy to underestimate.

* November 2000 - August 2001 - April/June 2016 *