The first days in Indonesia

We touched down in Medan at 2:40 pm after a long day of bus rides and waiting, only to have not the slightest idea of what we should do to get to Bukit Lawang. Left with only a few Malaysian Ringgit, after paying for our visa, we set off through the crowds of taxi-drivers and money changers to look for an ATM and a plan. A rather old man, who said he was the Tourist Information, told us where we could get money and offered us a ride to the bus station 11km away and we went with him , well knowing that we were probably being ripped off. He was very nice though and gave us some good advice where to go and which bus we should take. Our ride to Bukit Lawang was a mini-bus that was supposed to be a few hours faster than the ig public bus. We again paid more than the trip costs and knew it but this is what happens to everyone new to this and we just wanted to get out of the big city.
Medan is the 4th biggest city of a country which has a  population more than 240 million people and it was a mess.
I told you about the traffic in KL and how hectic it was . Medan is much worse. It is a very good example of Darwin's theory of the "survival of the fittest" . The bigger your vehicle is the more power you have to force the others to get out of your way and you better get out of their way. The horn is the most important instrument on your truck/car/bike and it is used to let the others know you are there, to greet, to complain, to annoy and for everything else as well. Our driver was particularly fond of his honking device and made no secret of it. When you read about the bus transport in Sumatra you hear a lot of bad things that can happen to you. They're all true! The trip from Medan to Bukit Lawang (about 90 km) took us three hours in a smelly, hot and by times overcrowded bus over roads that sometimes looked like the surface of the moon. It was very bad but everyone says that the big buses are even worse. We met a young guy who turned out to be a jungle guide ( what a funny incidence...) and we agreed to follow him to a cheap hostel run by his friends. He signed us up for a tracking tour starting the next day and promised to find us some shoes and sleeping bags.

We left at 9am with another guide ( the first guides cousin) called Aldi and his student Baik.Two Aussies had booked the tour as well and so our little group set off into the jungle. It was a beautiful day, maybe a bit sunny for a tracking tour, and we had a great start to our trip. Our fellow trackers were really nice, a young couple from Melbourne who were on a trip through Sumatra before they leave to teach in the middle-east. We saw a lot of monkeys and of course Orang-Utans. It was great to see those lovely animals so very close and another plus was that this time of the year all the mothers had babies and it was so much fun watching them play around and tees their mums. One little monkey kept us watching him for 30 minutes swinging around, taking rocks high up into the trees and throwing them back down again. The track was fun too. It was a great thing to hike through the jungle through huge ferns, lianes and around some of the highest trees I've ever seen. It wasn't quite this "the jungle and I" experience which I had expected because every time we saw a monkey we saw groups of tourists and I didn't loose the feeling of walking in loops. Nevertheless the tour was great and we had a really good time. In the afternoon some clouds formed and we could hear a distant thunder. Our guides started chasing us up and down the mountains because they didn't want to get wet but we didn't make it. We were only 15 minutes from our camp when the skies opened up and covered us with raindrops the size of watermelons. That is probably a slight exaggeration but I was drenched to the bones in seconds. The path down the hill to the camp was very steep and got really slippery with the rain. We all made it though and went for a swim in the warm river. The evening was fun, we had good food and played games and exchanged stories. Aldi had a lot to tell us about his time with the "Banda Acheh Freedom Association", to my knowledge a terrorist group. The guides had forgotten to bring our sleeping bags so we slept on a very thin mattress and without a cover. It was cold and hard and we didn't sleep well but the morning came with beautiful sunshine and made us forget about the night. We had a quiet day at the river, showered under a waterfall and swum in the rapids of the river. In the afternoon  we packed our stuff together and rafted down the river towards Bukit Lawang. It wasn't a hardcore rafting trip but we lost one of our "steering sticks", broke the other one, popped one of our rafts and lost one guide. It was a great end to a great trip!

The apes. Let me introduce: Till,

Jonas and Jette. MMMUUHAHAHAHAHAHA

The feared Mrs.Mina. She looks nice to me...

Dinner with Aldi and Yussuf

We're the kings of jungle, baby

Our trekking team Beck, Becks, Louies and Me

A beautiful jungle morning

The next days we just relaxed in Bukit Lawang. Our hostel, the "Rainforest Inn" was a nice little guesthouse at the river amongst other guesthouses. The part of Bukit Lawang that is down at the river is a pure tourist area. Little shops(all selling the same things), restaurants and guesthouses on both sides of the walkway offer far to much "things" for the small number of tourists and it looks far better than the actual village.
We walked to a cave 5km away which was a big flop. An entrance fee and guide costs for a dark, smelly, boring cave...
Bukit Lawang was a great experience though with its "semi"-wild jungle, great music culture, the river and its people and a delicious fresh pressed fruit juice. It's a place I would like to come back to, to do a track over a couple of days, maybe a week, to get deeper into the jungle to see other wild animals like Rhinos, Tigers and Elephants.