Larry Sweetland
Formerly 'Larry Wheatland'
Wow, Large Frogmouth with no tape...nice one :t:
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The Malay Archipelago, 2009 (9 Viewers)
- Thread starter Chlidonias
- Start date
Chlidonias
Well-known member
read on to the night birds of Mt. Kerinci with no tapes.....Larry Wheatland said:
Chlidonias
Well-known member
SUMATRA, Kerinci-Seblat National Park, 13 - 19 October
It wasn’t much fun getting from Way Kambas National Park in the south of Sumatra to Kerinci-Seblat National Park in the middle. I had been planning on taking a ten hour train ride from Bandar Lampung to Palembang then another ten hour train ride to Lubuklinggau followed by a ten hour bus ride to Sungai Penuh and finally a one hour bus ride to the final destination of Kersik Tuo, but from one of the film crew from Indonesian TV station Trans7 who were staying at Way Kanan I learned that there is an overnight bus from Bandar Lampung to Bangko and then its just a four hour bus to Sungai Penuh, so that is what I did. Overnight buses are good in theory because you’re saving on the cost of a hotel room for the night and you’re not wasting a day in travel, but in practice they’re not great. I had a twenty hour “overnight” bus ride in Sulawesi which was the worst trip I’ve ever had. This one was also twenty hours as it happened and while not as bad as the Sulawesi one was still very uncomfortable, largely because of the lack of room. The bus had started its trip in the town of Solo in Java (yes there’s a town in Java called Solo which by rights should have Star Wars fans making pilgrimages to visit but no-one outside Indonesia has heard of it); it was therefore already full by the time it arrived at Bandar Lampung, most of the passengers had been on it for twenty hours already, and I got the only empty seat. There was less leg-room than in a movie theatre. It was like spending twenty hours sitting in a television carton with a couple of other people jammed in beside you. You get a bit of sleep but the cramped conditions and the constant slamming on of brakes at near-misses on the highway make real sleep little more than a fleeting hope. Once in Bangko I had a couple of hours to grab some food before the next bus left for Sungai Penuh. This bus turned out to be a car, the 2pm departure time turned out (remarkably) to be 1.30pm, and the four hour journey turned out to be six hours. Because it was already dark when we arrived in Sungai Penuh I stayed there for the night at the Hotel Yani which is conveniently placed for everything a traveller needs except strip clubs. In the morning I took the opportunity to update my blogs and send emails because I’d been out of contact for a couple of weeks and with a recent devastating earthquake in Sumatra (over 700 dead) more or less right where my itinerary had placed me, there was some concern over my continued existence.
The next morning I continued my journey to the little village of Kersik Tuo, smack in the heart of a 6000 hectare tea plantation, apparently the largest in the world. A tea plantation is a funny thing. The plants are only a couple of feet high, the trunks and branches are all gnarled and twisted like those of ancient bonsai trees, and the tops of the bushes are completely flat because that’s where the leaves are plucked from. The effect is like having whole hillsides covered in neatly-clipped topiary.
Kersik Tuo sits at the base of Mt. Kerinci, which is the birdy place I was heading. The forest on the mountain is fantastic, easily the best I’ve seen anywhere in Indonesia and possibly all of southeast Asia. Its sort of weird though having so many different species of begonia growing all along the trails when you just automatically associate them with indoor pot-plants! The mountain is actually a volcano, and an active one at that. On the rare days when its not covered by rain clouds you can see a thick column of smoke rising from the summit, and when you’re standing on its slopes you can hear its odd almost-continuous rumblings sounding variously like a constantly-circling jet airliner or the roar from the firing up of a hot-air balloon. But there were occasions too when everything would suddenly fall silent. No noise from the volcano, no wind, no rain, no birds or insects calling, just complete and utter silence. I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere before where there was absolutely nothing to be heard at all. It was an incredibly eerie experience every time.
The last two places I'd been (Ujung Kulon and Way Kambas) were a major struggle to find birds in, so its lucky I just like wandering in forest even if there's no birds around. Mt. Kerinci had marvellous forest for rambling around in, and as a bonus it was positively chock-a-block with birds! Yay! There were literally birds everywhere. Often large mixed flocks of all sorts of little birds like mountain tailorbird, Sunda warbler, grey-throated babbler, golden babbler, Sunda bush-warbler, snowy-browed flycatcher and lesser shortwing would surge past through the undergrowth, making the plants heave and writhe like they were trying to pull themselves out of the ground, while accompanying them in the branches higher up would be mountain leaf-warbler, yellow-breasted warbler, indigo flycatcher, large niltava, grey-chinned minivet, Sumatran bulbul, white-throated fantail, grey-headed canary-flycatcher, etc etc. A lot of the species were ones I’d already seen in other mountain forests in the region, at Mt. Gede-Pangrango on Java and Mt. Kinabalu on Borneo, but there were a number of “new” ones too like the blue-tailed trogon. Normally I’m not that great at finding trogons but the montane species seem to be much more active than lowland ones. I’d found lots of Whitehead’s trogons on Mt. Kinabalu and I found lots of blue-tailed trogons on Mt. Kerinci; and I have to say that the blue-tailed leaves the Whitehead’s in the dust as far as beauty goes -- and the Whitehead’s isn’t exactly a slouch in that department! It seems to be a lot easier here seeing some of the more retiring ground birds as well, like the lesser and white-browed shortwings and such nice wren-babblers as pigmy and rusty-breasted (I didn't manage to find some of the other nice wren-babblers that are found there, but is there really any better bird to find on the forest floor than the pigmy wren-babbler? Seriously!). Among the other birds I missed were that stupid pitta that's found there (can't remember its name, don't care), the whatchama-call-it pheasant, and something by the name of the Sumatran cochoa. I did try really hard to find the cochoa but apparently its a difficult bird and difficult birds were never my forte (although I forgot to mention in an earlier post that I did see the Javan cochoa at Gede-Pangrango which was nice). One of my favourite birds wasn’t actually in the forest but in the fields outside. The long-tailed shrike is a common bird and attractively coloured, but the reason I liked it was because of the way it pumped its tail up and down after landing as if winding itself up for its next burst of activity, and then when it flew its plump body and frantically-whirring wings even made it look like one of the wind-up toys you put in the bath-tub.
A day-trip to the Tapan Road section of the park, about two hours from Kersik Tuo, fixed me up with many more birds, including black-thighed falconet, Sumatran tree-pie, barred cuckoo-dove, hill prinia, spot-necked bulbul, Sumatran drongo, cream-striped bulbul, black-and-crimson oriole, black laughing-thrush, cute little long-tailed broadbills, excellent views of a rhinoceros hornbill perched in a tree and calling for about ten minutes, another tree with about forty Sumatran green pigeons jumping around in its branches, and (after a long time creeping around like a hobgoblin in narrow gullies) black and crimson pitta. I decided I did like pittas after all.
Apart for birds the forest here is also very mammal-y. The local subspecies of mitred leaf-monkey is very pretty, all reddish and grey like an orangutan with a tail. There were several species of squirrel sighted, such as the spotted giant flying squirrel (also almost-oxymoronically called the lesser giant flying squirrel!), variable giant squirrel, slender squirrel, Low's squirrel, three-striped ground squirrel and Sunda black-banded squirrel. Fresh droppings of a sun bear on the track was both exciting and unnerving at the same time given that species' reputation for unpredictable aggressiveness, but I didn’t see the bear in the end. As at Way Kambas, siamang were calling every morning but I just couldn’t connect with them. I’d seen siamang before, in Malaysia in 2006, but I was hoping to see the Sumatran subspecies as well. Interestingly, the montane siamang here started calling an hour later than the lowland ones at Way Kambas, and only called for a short sporadic period whereas the Way Kambas ones called almost through-out the day. Possibly its because there aren’t as many siamang here because there’s less forest to support larger populations. I thought I wasn’t going to get to see siamang in Sumatra at all, but in the very last hour of my very last day on Mt. Kerinci I stumbled across a pair in a tree. Maybe its my memory but they seemed much larger than the Malaysian ones I’d seen, and certainly larger than any captive ones I’ve seen. Their thick fur to cope with the cold of the mountain made them seem even bigger, like small gorillas. I was very pleased to see them. The siamang weren’t so pleased to see me though. The male hung upside-down to get a better look at me through the branches then decided I was too threatening and he and his mate took off through the trees.
The night-birding on the mountain went surprisingly well for once, with the three main target birds all seen over two nights: Salvadori’s nightjar, short-tailed frogmouth and Rajah scops owl. The nightjar is a mountain bird also found at Gede-Pangrango in Java but it had rained every night I was there so I never managed to get out to find it. I had thought that was it for the nightjar as far as I was concerned because the field guide I had for the region (published 1993) says the only Sumatran record is a single specimen caught in 1878, but when I arrived at Kerinci I discovered it was easily seen here by every birder who visits. (Other Kerinci birds for which the field guide has out-of-date information are the black and crimson pitta, last record in 1918 according to the book but common at Tapan Road where I saw it; and the Sumatran cochoa, in the book known only from four specimens and for which the call and the appearance of the female and immature are all unknown, but which many birders see on this mountain, although I was not so lucky in that case). Unlike most nightjars, of which I normally only get flight-views, the Salvadori’s that I saw kept returning to the same perch between hunting moths so I got some really good looks at it in the torch-beam. The frankly bizarre-looking short-tailed frogmouth and the magnificently-scowling Rajah scops owl also provided excellent viewing, but a barred eagle owl refused to turn to face me so all I saw was its back.
I would like to end this entry on a happy note talking about all the fantastic animals I saw, but the Kerinci-Seblat National Park is in just as much trouble as every other natural site in Indonesia. At Mt. Kerinci the forest is being eaten away from the edges a little more each year. From Kersik Tuo, standing in the doorway of the Subandi Homestay where I was based, you can easily see how the forest is being pushed up the mountain to make way for fields to grow cabbages, tomatoes, potatoes and other temperate crops. The forest edge is now a kilometer from the entry sign, which itself is now half-demolished with what look like bullet holes in the remaining section. Every day in the forest I heard chainsaws and every evening I saw motorbikes heading back to town laden with firewood. There’s no hiding which individuals are responsible because you just need to stand there and look at the people working the fields, but there’s absolutely nothing being done to stop the destruction of this supposedly protected area. I can see a time not too far in the future when there’s no forest left on the mountain at all, but by then all the animals will have gone to the poachers anyway. Subandi says the Salvadori’s pheasant is getting harder to find, and I suspect that rather than there being a proper population there, birders are just seeing the same few individuals. The formerly-common silver-eared mesia appears to have been trapped out completely (Google Image it and you’ll see why its such a popular cage bird). On my second day, coming down from the higher slopes in the late afternoon, I ran into a pair of bird poachers which fair made my blood boil. I did briefly contemplate just walking on by but then I thought, nah to hell with that, there’s only two of them and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let poaching go unhindered right in front of me. They had a number of bamboo tubes into which long-tailed sibias were stuffed and I made them release them all, then made them empty their bag in which were more empty tubes and a small box containing a decoy green magpie which ungratefully slashed my thumb open with its unexpectedly-sharp beak as I was getting the string off its leg. I have little doubt that that particular bird was recaptured as soon as I’d left because once I’d released it and it had shot off into the undergrowth it was clear that it could no longer fly, either because it had been cooped up in a little box for too long or because its wings had been broken. Once the birds were released and their equipment smashed up into pieces there wasn’t much else I could do. If I’d done what I would have liked to have done to the poachers then I’d have been the one getting in trouble, and the conservation laws here are so pathetically weak that even if I’d dragged both of them all the way to where-ever the nearest police station is, all that would have happened was that they would have been told not to do it again and then sent home with their nets and snares, and then probably that night the police and the poachers would have got together for a drink and had a laugh about stupid interfering tourists. It’s the downside to being a wildlife traveller that its not all just looking at cute animals and pretty birds, you have to be constantly faced with seeing the destruction of the very things that you’re travelling to see. It would be like going to Egypt and seeing the locals chipping away at the face of the Sphynx with picks and not being able to do anything to stop it and knowing that they’re going to just keep chipping away until all that’s left is a shapeless chunk of worthless rock. Releasing those birds made absolutely not one iota of difference, except to the individual birds themselves. Those men would have gone right back to catching more - they’re probably out there catching birds even as you read this - but at least….well I don’t know how I’m supposed to finish that sentence, but at least “something”.
It wasn’t much fun getting from Way Kambas National Park in the south of Sumatra to Kerinci-Seblat National Park in the middle. I had been planning on taking a ten hour train ride from Bandar Lampung to Palembang then another ten hour train ride to Lubuklinggau followed by a ten hour bus ride to Sungai Penuh and finally a one hour bus ride to the final destination of Kersik Tuo, but from one of the film crew from Indonesian TV station Trans7 who were staying at Way Kanan I learned that there is an overnight bus from Bandar Lampung to Bangko and then its just a four hour bus to Sungai Penuh, so that is what I did. Overnight buses are good in theory because you’re saving on the cost of a hotel room for the night and you’re not wasting a day in travel, but in practice they’re not great. I had a twenty hour “overnight” bus ride in Sulawesi which was the worst trip I’ve ever had. This one was also twenty hours as it happened and while not as bad as the Sulawesi one was still very uncomfortable, largely because of the lack of room. The bus had started its trip in the town of Solo in Java (yes there’s a town in Java called Solo which by rights should have Star Wars fans making pilgrimages to visit but no-one outside Indonesia has heard of it); it was therefore already full by the time it arrived at Bandar Lampung, most of the passengers had been on it for twenty hours already, and I got the only empty seat. There was less leg-room than in a movie theatre. It was like spending twenty hours sitting in a television carton with a couple of other people jammed in beside you. You get a bit of sleep but the cramped conditions and the constant slamming on of brakes at near-misses on the highway make real sleep little more than a fleeting hope. Once in Bangko I had a couple of hours to grab some food before the next bus left for Sungai Penuh. This bus turned out to be a car, the 2pm departure time turned out (remarkably) to be 1.30pm, and the four hour journey turned out to be six hours. Because it was already dark when we arrived in Sungai Penuh I stayed there for the night at the Hotel Yani which is conveniently placed for everything a traveller needs except strip clubs. In the morning I took the opportunity to update my blogs and send emails because I’d been out of contact for a couple of weeks and with a recent devastating earthquake in Sumatra (over 700 dead) more or less right where my itinerary had placed me, there was some concern over my continued existence.
The next morning I continued my journey to the little village of Kersik Tuo, smack in the heart of a 6000 hectare tea plantation, apparently the largest in the world. A tea plantation is a funny thing. The plants are only a couple of feet high, the trunks and branches are all gnarled and twisted like those of ancient bonsai trees, and the tops of the bushes are completely flat because that’s where the leaves are plucked from. The effect is like having whole hillsides covered in neatly-clipped topiary.
Kersik Tuo sits at the base of Mt. Kerinci, which is the birdy place I was heading. The forest on the mountain is fantastic, easily the best I’ve seen anywhere in Indonesia and possibly all of southeast Asia. Its sort of weird though having so many different species of begonia growing all along the trails when you just automatically associate them with indoor pot-plants! The mountain is actually a volcano, and an active one at that. On the rare days when its not covered by rain clouds you can see a thick column of smoke rising from the summit, and when you’re standing on its slopes you can hear its odd almost-continuous rumblings sounding variously like a constantly-circling jet airliner or the roar from the firing up of a hot-air balloon. But there were occasions too when everything would suddenly fall silent. No noise from the volcano, no wind, no rain, no birds or insects calling, just complete and utter silence. I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere before where there was absolutely nothing to be heard at all. It was an incredibly eerie experience every time.
The last two places I'd been (Ujung Kulon and Way Kambas) were a major struggle to find birds in, so its lucky I just like wandering in forest even if there's no birds around. Mt. Kerinci had marvellous forest for rambling around in, and as a bonus it was positively chock-a-block with birds! Yay! There were literally birds everywhere. Often large mixed flocks of all sorts of little birds like mountain tailorbird, Sunda warbler, grey-throated babbler, golden babbler, Sunda bush-warbler, snowy-browed flycatcher and lesser shortwing would surge past through the undergrowth, making the plants heave and writhe like they were trying to pull themselves out of the ground, while accompanying them in the branches higher up would be mountain leaf-warbler, yellow-breasted warbler, indigo flycatcher, large niltava, grey-chinned minivet, Sumatran bulbul, white-throated fantail, grey-headed canary-flycatcher, etc etc. A lot of the species were ones I’d already seen in other mountain forests in the region, at Mt. Gede-Pangrango on Java and Mt. Kinabalu on Borneo, but there were a number of “new” ones too like the blue-tailed trogon. Normally I’m not that great at finding trogons but the montane species seem to be much more active than lowland ones. I’d found lots of Whitehead’s trogons on Mt. Kinabalu and I found lots of blue-tailed trogons on Mt. Kerinci; and I have to say that the blue-tailed leaves the Whitehead’s in the dust as far as beauty goes -- and the Whitehead’s isn’t exactly a slouch in that department! It seems to be a lot easier here seeing some of the more retiring ground birds as well, like the lesser and white-browed shortwings and such nice wren-babblers as pigmy and rusty-breasted (I didn't manage to find some of the other nice wren-babblers that are found there, but is there really any better bird to find on the forest floor than the pigmy wren-babbler? Seriously!). Among the other birds I missed were that stupid pitta that's found there (can't remember its name, don't care), the whatchama-call-it pheasant, and something by the name of the Sumatran cochoa. I did try really hard to find the cochoa but apparently its a difficult bird and difficult birds were never my forte (although I forgot to mention in an earlier post that I did see the Javan cochoa at Gede-Pangrango which was nice). One of my favourite birds wasn’t actually in the forest but in the fields outside. The long-tailed shrike is a common bird and attractively coloured, but the reason I liked it was because of the way it pumped its tail up and down after landing as if winding itself up for its next burst of activity, and then when it flew its plump body and frantically-whirring wings even made it look like one of the wind-up toys you put in the bath-tub.
A day-trip to the Tapan Road section of the park, about two hours from Kersik Tuo, fixed me up with many more birds, including black-thighed falconet, Sumatran tree-pie, barred cuckoo-dove, hill prinia, spot-necked bulbul, Sumatran drongo, cream-striped bulbul, black-and-crimson oriole, black laughing-thrush, cute little long-tailed broadbills, excellent views of a rhinoceros hornbill perched in a tree and calling for about ten minutes, another tree with about forty Sumatran green pigeons jumping around in its branches, and (after a long time creeping around like a hobgoblin in narrow gullies) black and crimson pitta. I decided I did like pittas after all.
Apart for birds the forest here is also very mammal-y. The local subspecies of mitred leaf-monkey is very pretty, all reddish and grey like an orangutan with a tail. There were several species of squirrel sighted, such as the spotted giant flying squirrel (also almost-oxymoronically called the lesser giant flying squirrel!), variable giant squirrel, slender squirrel, Low's squirrel, three-striped ground squirrel and Sunda black-banded squirrel. Fresh droppings of a sun bear on the track was both exciting and unnerving at the same time given that species' reputation for unpredictable aggressiveness, but I didn’t see the bear in the end. As at Way Kambas, siamang were calling every morning but I just couldn’t connect with them. I’d seen siamang before, in Malaysia in 2006, but I was hoping to see the Sumatran subspecies as well. Interestingly, the montane siamang here started calling an hour later than the lowland ones at Way Kambas, and only called for a short sporadic period whereas the Way Kambas ones called almost through-out the day. Possibly its because there aren’t as many siamang here because there’s less forest to support larger populations. I thought I wasn’t going to get to see siamang in Sumatra at all, but in the very last hour of my very last day on Mt. Kerinci I stumbled across a pair in a tree. Maybe its my memory but they seemed much larger than the Malaysian ones I’d seen, and certainly larger than any captive ones I’ve seen. Their thick fur to cope with the cold of the mountain made them seem even bigger, like small gorillas. I was very pleased to see them. The siamang weren’t so pleased to see me though. The male hung upside-down to get a better look at me through the branches then decided I was too threatening and he and his mate took off through the trees.
The night-birding on the mountain went surprisingly well for once, with the three main target birds all seen over two nights: Salvadori’s nightjar, short-tailed frogmouth and Rajah scops owl. The nightjar is a mountain bird also found at Gede-Pangrango in Java but it had rained every night I was there so I never managed to get out to find it. I had thought that was it for the nightjar as far as I was concerned because the field guide I had for the region (published 1993) says the only Sumatran record is a single specimen caught in 1878, but when I arrived at Kerinci I discovered it was easily seen here by every birder who visits. (Other Kerinci birds for which the field guide has out-of-date information are the black and crimson pitta, last record in 1918 according to the book but common at Tapan Road where I saw it; and the Sumatran cochoa, in the book known only from four specimens and for which the call and the appearance of the female and immature are all unknown, but which many birders see on this mountain, although I was not so lucky in that case). Unlike most nightjars, of which I normally only get flight-views, the Salvadori’s that I saw kept returning to the same perch between hunting moths so I got some really good looks at it in the torch-beam. The frankly bizarre-looking short-tailed frogmouth and the magnificently-scowling Rajah scops owl also provided excellent viewing, but a barred eagle owl refused to turn to face me so all I saw was its back.
I would like to end this entry on a happy note talking about all the fantastic animals I saw, but the Kerinci-Seblat National Park is in just as much trouble as every other natural site in Indonesia. At Mt. Kerinci the forest is being eaten away from the edges a little more each year. From Kersik Tuo, standing in the doorway of the Subandi Homestay where I was based, you can easily see how the forest is being pushed up the mountain to make way for fields to grow cabbages, tomatoes, potatoes and other temperate crops. The forest edge is now a kilometer from the entry sign, which itself is now half-demolished with what look like bullet holes in the remaining section. Every day in the forest I heard chainsaws and every evening I saw motorbikes heading back to town laden with firewood. There’s no hiding which individuals are responsible because you just need to stand there and look at the people working the fields, but there’s absolutely nothing being done to stop the destruction of this supposedly protected area. I can see a time not too far in the future when there’s no forest left on the mountain at all, but by then all the animals will have gone to the poachers anyway. Subandi says the Salvadori’s pheasant is getting harder to find, and I suspect that rather than there being a proper population there, birders are just seeing the same few individuals. The formerly-common silver-eared mesia appears to have been trapped out completely (Google Image it and you’ll see why its such a popular cage bird). On my second day, coming down from the higher slopes in the late afternoon, I ran into a pair of bird poachers which fair made my blood boil. I did briefly contemplate just walking on by but then I thought, nah to hell with that, there’s only two of them and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let poaching go unhindered right in front of me. They had a number of bamboo tubes into which long-tailed sibias were stuffed and I made them release them all, then made them empty their bag in which were more empty tubes and a small box containing a decoy green magpie which ungratefully slashed my thumb open with its unexpectedly-sharp beak as I was getting the string off its leg. I have little doubt that that particular bird was recaptured as soon as I’d left because once I’d released it and it had shot off into the undergrowth it was clear that it could no longer fly, either because it had been cooped up in a little box for too long or because its wings had been broken. Once the birds were released and their equipment smashed up into pieces there wasn’t much else I could do. If I’d done what I would have liked to have done to the poachers then I’d have been the one getting in trouble, and the conservation laws here are so pathetically weak that even if I’d dragged both of them all the way to where-ever the nearest police station is, all that would have happened was that they would have been told not to do it again and then sent home with their nets and snares, and then probably that night the police and the poachers would have got together for a drink and had a laugh about stupid interfering tourists. It’s the downside to being a wildlife traveller that its not all just looking at cute animals and pretty birds, you have to be constantly faced with seeing the destruction of the very things that you’re travelling to see. It would be like going to Egypt and seeing the locals chipping away at the face of the Sphynx with picks and not being able to do anything to stop it and knowing that they’re going to just keep chipping away until all that’s left is a shapeless chunk of worthless rock. Releasing those birds made absolutely not one iota of difference, except to the individual birds themselves. Those men would have gone right back to catching more - they’re probably out there catching birds even as you read this - but at least….well I don’t know how I’m supposed to finish that sentence, but at least “something”.
Larry Sweetland
Formerly 'Larry Wheatland'
Great write up Chlid. Wish I'd known about Tapan Road when I visited Kerinci about 14 years ago, you saw a fair few birds that I dipped on there. And well done for doing so fantastically well with the nocturnals.
From your site description it looks like the forest on the mountain I'd have spent most time in has probably gone :-C. It was these lower reaches that were good for Bronze-tailed Peacock- and Salvadori's Pheasants, Schneider's Pitta, Sumatran (Long-billed) Wren-Babbler etc. It used to be a c5k predawn walk from the homestay through the tea plantations to the start of the forest. Such a shame it's all going to go.
From your site description it looks like the forest on the mountain I'd have spent most time in has probably gone :-C. It was these lower reaches that were good for Bronze-tailed Peacock- and Salvadori's Pheasants, Schneider's Pitta, Sumatran (Long-billed) Wren-Babbler etc. It used to be a c5k predawn walk from the homestay through the tea plantations to the start of the forest. Such a shame it's all going to go.
Birdingcraft
Well-known member
So true about those overnight buses! I have fallen into the temptation trap of supposedly saving time and money with an overnight bus on many an occasion in the Americas and Thailand. Although some were better that others, on most trips I always ended up asking myself, "why oh fricking why did I decide to take one of these overnight buses again" as babies cried, sickly people hacked, odd smells reached the nostrils, sleep was evasive, and cockroaches crawled.
Excellent write up of Kerinci-Seblat by the way. I found myself laughing, thrilled, and then downright angry at the end. Great comparison (albeit tragic and true) to chipping away at the Sphinx in Egypt.
Excellent write up of Kerinci-Seblat by the way. I found myself laughing, thrilled, and then downright angry at the end. Great comparison (albeit tragic and true) to chipping away at the Sphinx in Egypt.
Chlidonias
Well-known member
ah yes, all the birds I missed. Thanks for reminding me lol. The long-billed wren-babbler was one I did particularly want to see as it apparently looks like a little teeny kiwi!Larry Wheatland said:
Chlidonias
Well-known member
you should go back to Thailand; the overnight buses there now are great (at least the ones I've been on). The only issue I have with them is that they are so proud of the air-conditioning that they have it turned up full all the time and provide blankets to keep you warm. The locals turn up for the trip with gloves and woolly hats!Birdingcraft said:
Chlidonias
Well-known member
SUMATRA, Bukittinggi, 21 October
After I had finished my stint at Mt. Kerinci, I moved on via yet another horrible overnight bus experience to the town of Bukittinggi eight hours north. Bukittinggi is a popular place for tourists to visit and all the cheaper hotels seemed to be full, although it turned out that wasn’t due to tourists but to the recent earthquake having destroyed all the hotels in Padang so all the local travellers had to come here instead. I arrived at 6am and quickly found a hotel (the Hotel Asia, because I’m in Asia of course) so that I could get some sleep for the day (!).
Once the bodily recuperation was taken care of, the next morning I set off for the Batang Palupuh Rafflesia Reserve just outside town, this being the reason I had come to Bukittinggi in the first place. First I had to find the public car that went there, and as I was walking the streets in search of it I heard the whooping of a siamang greeting the morning. I couldn’t imagine where it could be coming from and at first wondered if the school I was passing had a pet one, but then I suddenly (or maybe that should be, slowly!) realized the city zoo was on the hill nearby. When I found the stop for the public car I was told it would be leaving at 10am. I returned at 9 just to be on the safe side and the car did in fact leave at 9.15. You just can’t trust the Indonesians to be late anymore, tsk tsk.
Batang Palupuh is a tiny village of 400 people about twenty minutes from Bukittinggi. You can actually take any bus that passes that way and get off at the roadside, but the public car was more convenient for me to catch and furthermore goes right into the village -- and fortuitously for me one of the passengers was a lovely woman named Umul who runs the local business producing kopi luwak, which for those not in the know in coffee matters is the coffee made from beans excreted by civets (kopi means coffee and luwak is the local name for the civet). The local product is better than that produced in places like Bali because there they keep the civets in cages while at Batang Palupuh the droppings are collected from wild civets in the forest. Apparently the other fruits that the civets eat in the wild makes for a tastier end-product. I had heard of kopi luwak before coming to Indonesia but I was a bit dubious as to its supposed delicious flavour, believing it to be more hype than anything, but in fact it proved to be far superior to any other coffee I’ve had in Indonesia. I even bought a packet of it to take back home to New Zealand with me to share with others (on the condition that they were very nice to me). Unfortunately, once back in New Zealand I discovered that in fact kopi luwak does not taste nice after all. I think the reason I thought it was nice at the time was because the usual Indonesian coffee is so disgusting that the kopi luwak just tasted great in comparison!
The species of Rafflesia found in the reserve at Batang Palupuh is Rafflesia arnoldi, the largest species of the genus and the largest flower in the world. As I wrote in the entry for Poring Hot Springs, where I was lucky enough to have seen R. keithii, these flowers are noted for their irregular blooming and you need to be in the right place at the right time to see one. On the previous day when I was at the Turret Café getting some food, one of the people there (it doubles as a tour outfit) phoned his friend to ask if there were any Rafflesia flowering at the moment. During the conversation I heard the words “bunga bangkai” and my ears pricked right up. Bunga bangkai, which translates roughly as "stinky flower", is the Indonesian name for another enormous flower, Amorphophallus titanus, which is even more difficult to see in the wild than Rafflesia (although unlike Rafflesia it can be cultivated in gardens and can be seen sometimes in bloom at several Botanic Gardens around the world). It only flowers every three or four years, and after the bud growing for two weeks the fully-open flower only lasts two or three days before collapsing and rotting away. Although it is truly enormous, reaching a height of up to ten feet, it is actually a spathe and not a single flower so technically isn’t the largest flower in the world. It was one of the things I most wanted to see on this trip but also was one of the things that I thought I was most unlikely to see. Once off the phone, I was told that although there were no Rafflesia flowering at the moment there was an Amorphophallus at the reserve. To say I was excited would be an understatement, but I had been burned before so decided to just be cautiously optimistic. When the guide turned up at Umul’s house he told me that there was a Rafflesia bud as well as the Amorphophallus but that the latter was also still a bud. We went to see it anyway of course, and it really was awesome. Even though a “bud” it was still about five feet tall. I was informed that it wouldn’t be fully open for another ten days or so by which time I would have already left Indonesia, which was gutting. The Rafflesia bud was also good, obviously being much bigger than those of R. keithii. Unfortunately the bud I saw was growing at the base of a tree that had recently been uprooted in a storm so the bud was probably dead. What I found really interesting though was that, because it had been pulled up by the tree, I could see the Tetrastigma vine's roots on which the Rafflesia is parasitic. I had been imagining that with the size of the flower, the roots must also be pretty hefty but they're just skinny little things. There was a tiny brown ball on another section of root that was the beginnings of another bud.
In the rice fields between the village and the forest reserve, I also saw nesting baya weavers which were a new species for me. (That's the bird part of this post!)
So it looked like that was it for me as far as the Rafflesia and Amorphophallus were concerned, because the next day I had to leave for the Gunung Leuser National Park in the far north of the island.
After I had finished my stint at Mt. Kerinci, I moved on via yet another horrible overnight bus experience to the town of Bukittinggi eight hours north. Bukittinggi is a popular place for tourists to visit and all the cheaper hotels seemed to be full, although it turned out that wasn’t due to tourists but to the recent earthquake having destroyed all the hotels in Padang so all the local travellers had to come here instead. I arrived at 6am and quickly found a hotel (the Hotel Asia, because I’m in Asia of course) so that I could get some sleep for the day (!).
Once the bodily recuperation was taken care of, the next morning I set off for the Batang Palupuh Rafflesia Reserve just outside town, this being the reason I had come to Bukittinggi in the first place. First I had to find the public car that went there, and as I was walking the streets in search of it I heard the whooping of a siamang greeting the morning. I couldn’t imagine where it could be coming from and at first wondered if the school I was passing had a pet one, but then I suddenly (or maybe that should be, slowly!) realized the city zoo was on the hill nearby. When I found the stop for the public car I was told it would be leaving at 10am. I returned at 9 just to be on the safe side and the car did in fact leave at 9.15. You just can’t trust the Indonesians to be late anymore, tsk tsk.
Batang Palupuh is a tiny village of 400 people about twenty minutes from Bukittinggi. You can actually take any bus that passes that way and get off at the roadside, but the public car was more convenient for me to catch and furthermore goes right into the village -- and fortuitously for me one of the passengers was a lovely woman named Umul who runs the local business producing kopi luwak, which for those not in the know in coffee matters is the coffee made from beans excreted by civets (kopi means coffee and luwak is the local name for the civet). The local product is better than that produced in places like Bali because there they keep the civets in cages while at Batang Palupuh the droppings are collected from wild civets in the forest. Apparently the other fruits that the civets eat in the wild makes for a tastier end-product. I had heard of kopi luwak before coming to Indonesia but I was a bit dubious as to its supposed delicious flavour, believing it to be more hype than anything, but in fact it proved to be far superior to any other coffee I’ve had in Indonesia. I even bought a packet of it to take back home to New Zealand with me to share with others (on the condition that they were very nice to me). Unfortunately, once back in New Zealand I discovered that in fact kopi luwak does not taste nice after all. I think the reason I thought it was nice at the time was because the usual Indonesian coffee is so disgusting that the kopi luwak just tasted great in comparison!
The species of Rafflesia found in the reserve at Batang Palupuh is Rafflesia arnoldi, the largest species of the genus and the largest flower in the world. As I wrote in the entry for Poring Hot Springs, where I was lucky enough to have seen R. keithii, these flowers are noted for their irregular blooming and you need to be in the right place at the right time to see one. On the previous day when I was at the Turret Café getting some food, one of the people there (it doubles as a tour outfit) phoned his friend to ask if there were any Rafflesia flowering at the moment. During the conversation I heard the words “bunga bangkai” and my ears pricked right up. Bunga bangkai, which translates roughly as "stinky flower", is the Indonesian name for another enormous flower, Amorphophallus titanus, which is even more difficult to see in the wild than Rafflesia (although unlike Rafflesia it can be cultivated in gardens and can be seen sometimes in bloom at several Botanic Gardens around the world). It only flowers every three or four years, and after the bud growing for two weeks the fully-open flower only lasts two or three days before collapsing and rotting away. Although it is truly enormous, reaching a height of up to ten feet, it is actually a spathe and not a single flower so technically isn’t the largest flower in the world. It was one of the things I most wanted to see on this trip but also was one of the things that I thought I was most unlikely to see. Once off the phone, I was told that although there were no Rafflesia flowering at the moment there was an Amorphophallus at the reserve. To say I was excited would be an understatement, but I had been burned before so decided to just be cautiously optimistic. When the guide turned up at Umul’s house he told me that there was a Rafflesia bud as well as the Amorphophallus but that the latter was also still a bud. We went to see it anyway of course, and it really was awesome. Even though a “bud” it was still about five feet tall. I was informed that it wouldn’t be fully open for another ten days or so by which time I would have already left Indonesia, which was gutting. The Rafflesia bud was also good, obviously being much bigger than those of R. keithii. Unfortunately the bud I saw was growing at the base of a tree that had recently been uprooted in a storm so the bud was probably dead. What I found really interesting though was that, because it had been pulled up by the tree, I could see the Tetrastigma vine's roots on which the Rafflesia is parasitic. I had been imagining that with the size of the flower, the roots must also be pretty hefty but they're just skinny little things. There was a tiny brown ball on another section of root that was the beginnings of another bud.
In the rice fields between the village and the forest reserve, I also saw nesting baya weavers which were a new species for me. (That's the bird part of this post!)
So it looked like that was it for me as far as the Rafflesia and Amorphophallus were concerned, because the next day I had to leave for the Gunung Leuser National Park in the far north of the island.
Birdingcraft
Well-known member
Actually I recall my few Thailand overnight buses as pretty good and yes, I think they were cold! It was the Latin American jaunts and Grayhound buses in the United States that were particularly challenging.
Larry Sweetland
Formerly 'Larry Wheatland'
Hotel beds? what you on about you wusses 
Hey Chlid, the latest draft updates for the IOC list splits Tricoloured Grebe (including vulcanorum) from the rest of Little Grebe. So providing you've seen Little Grebe anywhere on mainland Eurasia, then the ones you saw at Danau Ramanesse on Flores earlier in this trip report would be an armchair tick. B
Hey Chlid, the latest draft updates for the IOC list splits Tricoloured Grebe (including vulcanorum) from the rest of Little Grebe. So providing you've seen Little Grebe anywhere on mainland Eurasia, then the ones you saw at Danau Ramanesse on Flores earlier in this trip report would be an armchair tick. B
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Chlidonias
Well-known member
you know me, I judge the acceptibility of hotel accommodation on the eligibility of the receptionist...Larry Wheatland said:
nope, never seen any other Eurasian little grebes of any description, so just the Flores one it is for me.
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Chlidonias
Well-known member
SUMATRA, Gunung Leuser National Park, 22 - 27 October
Once more I was off on another overnight bus trip. Its almost like there are no other schedules on Sumatra except overnight! I had been variously told that the Bukittinggi to Medan run took 14 hours, 18 hours, 20 hours and 24 hours, so I didn’t quite know what to expect. It took 20 hours, and it wasn’t too bad of a trip actually, far more comfortable than any of the other overnighters I endured in Indonesia. The bus left Bukittinggi at 1pm, and almost the entire way up to nightfall the road went through forest. There were small villages here and there and some associated fields but the forest was right there behind them, and for a lot of the time the trees were crowding right down to the roadside. It made a big change after places like Malaysia and Java.
Medan was not as nice a town as Bukittinggi. I fact it’s a bit of a hole really, and it had this weird creepy paedophile air about it. There were shops everywhere selling lifesize stuffed toys of little girls in mini-skirts; I saw a portrait shop where all the photos on display were of little girls posing; and I saw a little boy wearing a denim jacket with a slogan on the back that read “OZ KIDS Easy To Enjoy”
There are certain things you discover as soon as you arrive in southeast Asia, one of which is that certain words on buses don’t mean anything at all, they’re just put on the signs to look nice, words like “express”, “non-stop”, even “AC”, but the bus that took the cake was one I saw in Medan that was labelled “super exclusive executive royal”. (Other words that are meaningless are “open 24 hours” and “no smoking”).
I went looking for the Hotel Alamanda, listed in Lonely Planet. It no longer exists. Neither does my second choice from Lonely Planet, Sarah’s Guesthouse. I ended up at the Pondok Wisata Angel, which was pleasant and cheap and not in Lonely Planet. The reason I’d gone up to Medan, apart for the obvious one of that was where my flight left from, was to visit the Gunung Leuser National Park to see orangutans. For the next morning I arranged a pick-up from my hotel by a public car (rather than going on the only-slightly-cheaper bus) on the understanding that we would be leaving at 9am, giving me plenty of time to get first to the town of Kutacane six or seven hours away and then from there to the little village of Gurah an hour further on. At 10am I was still waiting. At 11am I was still waiting. At 11.30am the car finally arrived. We drove round town for a while trying to find the hotel where another couple of passengers were waiting, then we went to the company’s office where we sat for another while longer. At 1pm we finally left the city. I was not a happy camper. It took seven hours to get to Kutacane over roads that just kept getting worse and worse, passing through villages that just kept getting progressively more and more squalid until I was beginning to doubt the wisdom of this little excursion. On the way we had passed through a popular tourist town called Berastagi. All over Indonesia there are odd town statues, usually seen from the bus so one cannot take photos of them. In Bandar Lampung, down in the south of Sumatra, there is a big one featuring four elephants, each of which is resting its front foot on a soccer ball. But the most peculiar I’ve seen must surely be Berastagi’s cabbage on a pedestal! It was almost 8pm by the time we rolled into Kutacane, meaning I had to stay there the night.
Surprisingly, after the rough trip between Medan and Kutacane, the road the next morning towards Gurah was almost perfect the whole way. The transport was a small open-sided black truck of the sort that in the rest of Indonesia you usually see the police or military in. There were 13 people packed inside the truck along with various items of cargo, 7 or 8 hanging off the back, and maybe 10 on the roof. With the good road we tore along at an exceptionally fast clip and no doubt would have arrived in record time if we hadn’t been side-swiped by a larger truck coming around a blind corner from the other direction at even more of an exceptionally fast clip, sending us spinning off the road, flipping the length of the vehicle, then rolling/bouncing several times down a bank to end up upside-down in a fortunately-shallow river. With outstanding good luck (from my personal point of view) the only people seriously injured were people other than myself, unless you’re wussy enough to count a full-body tenderizing, various cuts and gashes and a couple of cracked ribs as serious injuries! At the time I didn't think anyone died in the crash which was pretty amazing, but looking back on it I really can't see how that's possible. With the speed of the impact and the number of people hanging off the outside of my truck there should by rights have been bodies flying everywhere! In any case, most of the other passengers headed back to Kutacane or where-ever the nearest hospital was, but I wasn’t going to let a slight misadventure dampen my spirit, and so caught another truck onwards to Gurah.
Before setting out there had been some uncertainty in my mind as to the physical status of Gurah. Nobody that I talked to in Medan had even heard of it, the driver to Kutacane said Gurah was just a different name for a place called Ketambe, someone in Kutacane said they were different places: it was all very confusing, not least when I arrived and the guesthouse was called Pondok Wisata Ketambe. It turned out that Gurah is sort of like a sub-village of the village of Ketambe, as if that’s any clearer! My en-route fears about what sort of conditions I’d find in Gurah also proved unfounded. Gurah/Ketambe is a very nice little place, the Pondok Wisata Ketambe is very pleasant, and best of all there was a troop of Thomas’ leaf-monkeys frolicking in the trees right outside. They have to be one of the most attractive monkeys around, with their crisp white bellies and striped Mad Max-esque head crests.
I probably should have lain up a bit after arrival but I didn’t want to waste any of the short time I had so even though it was close to midday and my ribs were giving me hell I struck out into the forest. Gurah is only about 500 metres above sea-level hence still pretty hot. Being midday there were basically no birds around (fluffy-backed tit-babbler, scarlet-rumped trogon, tiger shrike, little spiderhunter, ashy tailorbird, grey wagtail) so I decided to concentrate on primates instead which are active all the time. As well as more Thomas’ leaf-monkeys I soon saw the ubiquitous crab-eating macaques and the rather less obnoxious southern pig-tailed macaques, and after only two hours of searching I found a mother and baby Sumatran orangutan feeding high up in a fruiting fig tree. (Two hours means it was “easy” -- “difficult” would be several days of searching). On Sumatra orangutans are only found up in the far north, with Gunung Leuser National Park being one of the prime localities to spot them. Most tourists just go to Bukit Lawang (sort of the Sumatran version of Borneo's Sepilok) which is only two or three hours from Medan so its an easy day-trip and you’re pretty much guaranteed of seeing orangutans because they feed them, but to me its no different to going to see them at a zoo with all the hoards of people around, the same as at the similar facilities in Borneo. I’d much rather put in the effort to get out into the back-and-beyond to see them in the "real" wild, the way you should be seeing orangutans. Not many people can be bothered with that though - Ketambe only sees about 150 tourists a year I was told, whereas Bukit Lawang no doubt sees several thousands.
There wasn’t much in the way of birds in the forest around Gurah when I was there, even in the morning it was fairly quiet, but of course I was finding it rather painful clambering around the steep trails so that may explain that. The next day I managed to find just 18 species, one of which was a lifer (spectacled bulbul), one new for the trip (yellow-breasted flowerpecker), and the rest commoners I'd seen plenty of elsewhere although they were none the worse for that. The main reason I’d come up here though was for the orangutan and Thomas’ leaf-monkey so I didn’t mind. Another north Sumatran mammal specialty that I’d hoped for was Kloss’ squirrel, but the problem I had with that one was that I hadn’t been able to find out any information on it except for its name and that it was endemic to north Sumatra. I couldn’t find any illustrations of it anywhere so didn’t even know what it looked like. I did know that some authorities consider it to just be a subspecies of the common plantain squirrel and so as its scientific name is albescens I imagined it must look like a paler version of that species. I did see a squirrel in the forest that looked like a plantain squirrel, maybe a bit paler. So was it a plantain or a Kloss’? I don’t know, but I have a sneaking suspicion that Kloss’ squirrel is probably a montane species that is replaced at lower altitudes by the plantain squirrel, which would mean the one I saw was just a plantain squirrel. If there are any random mammologists or sciurophiles reading this, let me know!
Once more I was off on another overnight bus trip. Its almost like there are no other schedules on Sumatra except overnight! I had been variously told that the Bukittinggi to Medan run took 14 hours, 18 hours, 20 hours and 24 hours, so I didn’t quite know what to expect. It took 20 hours, and it wasn’t too bad of a trip actually, far more comfortable than any of the other overnighters I endured in Indonesia. The bus left Bukittinggi at 1pm, and almost the entire way up to nightfall the road went through forest. There were small villages here and there and some associated fields but the forest was right there behind them, and for a lot of the time the trees were crowding right down to the roadside. It made a big change after places like Malaysia and Java.
Medan was not as nice a town as Bukittinggi. I fact it’s a bit of a hole really, and it had this weird creepy paedophile air about it. There were shops everywhere selling lifesize stuffed toys of little girls in mini-skirts; I saw a portrait shop where all the photos on display were of little girls posing; and I saw a little boy wearing a denim jacket with a slogan on the back that read “OZ KIDS Easy To Enjoy”
There are certain things you discover as soon as you arrive in southeast Asia, one of which is that certain words on buses don’t mean anything at all, they’re just put on the signs to look nice, words like “express”, “non-stop”, even “AC”, but the bus that took the cake was one I saw in Medan that was labelled “super exclusive executive royal”. (Other words that are meaningless are “open 24 hours” and “no smoking”).
I went looking for the Hotel Alamanda, listed in Lonely Planet. It no longer exists. Neither does my second choice from Lonely Planet, Sarah’s Guesthouse. I ended up at the Pondok Wisata Angel, which was pleasant and cheap and not in Lonely Planet. The reason I’d gone up to Medan, apart for the obvious one of that was where my flight left from, was to visit the Gunung Leuser National Park to see orangutans. For the next morning I arranged a pick-up from my hotel by a public car (rather than going on the only-slightly-cheaper bus) on the understanding that we would be leaving at 9am, giving me plenty of time to get first to the town of Kutacane six or seven hours away and then from there to the little village of Gurah an hour further on. At 10am I was still waiting. At 11am I was still waiting. At 11.30am the car finally arrived. We drove round town for a while trying to find the hotel where another couple of passengers were waiting, then we went to the company’s office where we sat for another while longer. At 1pm we finally left the city. I was not a happy camper. It took seven hours to get to Kutacane over roads that just kept getting worse and worse, passing through villages that just kept getting progressively more and more squalid until I was beginning to doubt the wisdom of this little excursion. On the way we had passed through a popular tourist town called Berastagi. All over Indonesia there are odd town statues, usually seen from the bus so one cannot take photos of them. In Bandar Lampung, down in the south of Sumatra, there is a big one featuring four elephants, each of which is resting its front foot on a soccer ball. But the most peculiar I’ve seen must surely be Berastagi’s cabbage on a pedestal! It was almost 8pm by the time we rolled into Kutacane, meaning I had to stay there the night.
Surprisingly, after the rough trip between Medan and Kutacane, the road the next morning towards Gurah was almost perfect the whole way. The transport was a small open-sided black truck of the sort that in the rest of Indonesia you usually see the police or military in. There were 13 people packed inside the truck along with various items of cargo, 7 or 8 hanging off the back, and maybe 10 on the roof. With the good road we tore along at an exceptionally fast clip and no doubt would have arrived in record time if we hadn’t been side-swiped by a larger truck coming around a blind corner from the other direction at even more of an exceptionally fast clip, sending us spinning off the road, flipping the length of the vehicle, then rolling/bouncing several times down a bank to end up upside-down in a fortunately-shallow river. With outstanding good luck (from my personal point of view) the only people seriously injured were people other than myself, unless you’re wussy enough to count a full-body tenderizing, various cuts and gashes and a couple of cracked ribs as serious injuries! At the time I didn't think anyone died in the crash which was pretty amazing, but looking back on it I really can't see how that's possible. With the speed of the impact and the number of people hanging off the outside of my truck there should by rights have been bodies flying everywhere! In any case, most of the other passengers headed back to Kutacane or where-ever the nearest hospital was, but I wasn’t going to let a slight misadventure dampen my spirit, and so caught another truck onwards to Gurah.
Before setting out there had been some uncertainty in my mind as to the physical status of Gurah. Nobody that I talked to in Medan had even heard of it, the driver to Kutacane said Gurah was just a different name for a place called Ketambe, someone in Kutacane said they were different places: it was all very confusing, not least when I arrived and the guesthouse was called Pondok Wisata Ketambe. It turned out that Gurah is sort of like a sub-village of the village of Ketambe, as if that’s any clearer! My en-route fears about what sort of conditions I’d find in Gurah also proved unfounded. Gurah/Ketambe is a very nice little place, the Pondok Wisata Ketambe is very pleasant, and best of all there was a troop of Thomas’ leaf-monkeys frolicking in the trees right outside. They have to be one of the most attractive monkeys around, with their crisp white bellies and striped Mad Max-esque head crests.
I probably should have lain up a bit after arrival but I didn’t want to waste any of the short time I had so even though it was close to midday and my ribs were giving me hell I struck out into the forest. Gurah is only about 500 metres above sea-level hence still pretty hot. Being midday there were basically no birds around (fluffy-backed tit-babbler, scarlet-rumped trogon, tiger shrike, little spiderhunter, ashy tailorbird, grey wagtail) so I decided to concentrate on primates instead which are active all the time. As well as more Thomas’ leaf-monkeys I soon saw the ubiquitous crab-eating macaques and the rather less obnoxious southern pig-tailed macaques, and after only two hours of searching I found a mother and baby Sumatran orangutan feeding high up in a fruiting fig tree. (Two hours means it was “easy” -- “difficult” would be several days of searching). On Sumatra orangutans are only found up in the far north, with Gunung Leuser National Park being one of the prime localities to spot them. Most tourists just go to Bukit Lawang (sort of the Sumatran version of Borneo's Sepilok) which is only two or three hours from Medan so its an easy day-trip and you’re pretty much guaranteed of seeing orangutans because they feed them, but to me its no different to going to see them at a zoo with all the hoards of people around, the same as at the similar facilities in Borneo. I’d much rather put in the effort to get out into the back-and-beyond to see them in the "real" wild, the way you should be seeing orangutans. Not many people can be bothered with that though - Ketambe only sees about 150 tourists a year I was told, whereas Bukit Lawang no doubt sees several thousands.
There wasn’t much in the way of birds in the forest around Gurah when I was there, even in the morning it was fairly quiet, but of course I was finding it rather painful clambering around the steep trails so that may explain that. The next day I managed to find just 18 species, one of which was a lifer (spectacled bulbul), one new for the trip (yellow-breasted flowerpecker), and the rest commoners I'd seen plenty of elsewhere although they were none the worse for that. The main reason I’d come up here though was for the orangutan and Thomas’ leaf-monkey so I didn’t mind. Another north Sumatran mammal specialty that I’d hoped for was Kloss’ squirrel, but the problem I had with that one was that I hadn’t been able to find out any information on it except for its name and that it was endemic to north Sumatra. I couldn’t find any illustrations of it anywhere so didn’t even know what it looked like. I did know that some authorities consider it to just be a subspecies of the common plantain squirrel and so as its scientific name is albescens I imagined it must look like a paler version of that species. I did see a squirrel in the forest that looked like a plantain squirrel, maybe a bit paler. So was it a plantain or a Kloss’? I don’t know, but I have a sneaking suspicion that Kloss’ squirrel is probably a montane species that is replaced at lower altitudes by the plantain squirrel, which would mean the one I saw was just a plantain squirrel. If there are any random mammologists or sciurophiles reading this, let me know!
Chlidonias
Well-known member
SUMATRA, back to Bukittinggi, 29 October - 3 November
Why would anyone, just for the sake of seeing a flower, come off a nine hour bus trip and get straight onto another bus for a further 21 hours? That’s what I did. I don’t know if it can be considered intrepid, inspired, or just insane. The flower in question, of course, is the Amorphophallus titanus by Bukittinggi. When I last saw it on the 21st of October it was still a bud and it wouldn’t be in proper flower for about ten days, by which time I’d have left the country. But the more I thought about it the more I realised that to leave Indonesia without having seen such a profound rarity would be madness. MADNESS!!! You can plan a trip around orangutans or tapirs or Komodo dragons, but not around a flower that displays such obtuse unpredictability in its life-cycle. Really the only course of action available to me was to cancel my outbound flight in order to head southwards again to see the flower, even though I couldn’t actually afford to do this on what were now almost non-existent monetary funds. I couldn’t simply change the flight date because it was one of those cheap budget deals that didn’t allow that. However Fortune must have had a good run on the horses which put her in a good mood because when I went into the Malaysian Airlines office in Medan to cancel the flight the very nice lady at the desk did change my flight date giving me the extra few days needed at no extra cost, on the basis that my original morning flight had already been cancelled by the airline themselves and I’d been rebooked on the afternoon one, and therefore I’d been “inconvenienced” by that.
So after visiting Gunung Leuser National Park I took a truck for an hour to Kutacane and then a mini-van to Medan for eight hours, arriving just in time to catch the 21-hour overnight bus back to Bukittinggi (and I mean literally just in time -- I arrived at the bus station with only five minutes to spare!). A phone call to the Rafflesia Reserve's guide Joni let me know that the Amorphophallus was still in bud so I had a few days to wait, enabling me to finally go see someone who may or may not have been a doctor who poked me in the ribs and said “you’ll be fine”. That’s a relief….
While waiting for the flower I took in some of the natural sights around town, starting with a slow walk to Lembah Anai (as it turned out, the Lembah Anai waterfall and not the Lembah Anai Nature Reserve as I thought). This is a 6km walk along a railway track that I’d been told was only used on two days of the week. It was fairly obvious though that the track hadn’t been used in a very long time. At some points it was so overgrown you couldn’t even see the rails. It was a pleasant enough stroll with a few mitred leaf-monkeys and southern pig-tailed macaques, a lesser tree shrew, and a few birds along the way (white-headed munia was new for my life list), but where the tracks went over a highway was a bit nerve-wracking to someone not great with heights when there’s nothing to stop you falling except your own sense of balance (or lack thereof, as the case may be).
The next morning I went to the town canyon to see if I could find the colony of large flying foxes that pass over town each night. (Whenever I see streams of flying foxes in the night sky I can’t help but be reminded of the scene in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” where Willy says “oh look at the big birds!” and Indy goes “those aren’t birds, sweetheart, those are giant vampire bats!!”). This wasn’t as relaxing a walk as the one yesterday, the first section being a seemingly never-ending set of steps leading straight up the canyon wall. Then there was a wander along a road between the villages of Kampung Sihanok and Koto Gadang, then back down into the canyon again where a rickety old suspension bridge sat waiting. The flying fox colony was way down in the far reaches of the canyon and although I walked for a long way, fording the river many times I couldn’t get there in the end and had to abandon the quest.
Now all there was to do was sit and wait for the Amorphophallus to open, hopefully in the next two days because I had to be on the bus back to Medan on the Monday afternoon. To pass the time I took to forlornly wandering the marketplace, eyeing up Batman wallets and other cheap knock-offs. On the Sunday morning I ran into a group of teenage girls from the local school whose teacher had given her classes the assignment of getting their photos taken with a tourist at the market. As the main tourist in town (and certainly the most attractive one!) this made me a very popular man. I must have had 250 girls approaching me that day for photos. The funniest bit was that ordinary passers-by were also wanting to get their photos taken with me, obviously gaining the impression from all the attention I was receiving that I was - as you may probably guess yourselves - some sort of Western film-star or underwear model.
Despite my best efforts and eternal patience, my attempts to see the Amorphophallus flowering came to naught. The damn thing just stubbornly refused to burst into bloom. You can't force nature's hand in matters like this. Its either too wet or too dry or too cold or too hot; the conditions need to be just right and until they are the bud just sits there biding its time. After waiting for days after the estimated flowering date, I finally had to call it quits, throw in the towel, and abandon ship. It may have flowered the next morning or it may have sat there for another week, there was no way of telling, and I had to get back up to Medan (via yet another overnight bus, this one for 20.5 hours) to catch my flight to Kuala Lumpur. A very disappointing thing but there was nothing else I could do. Ulrich, the owner of the Raja Wali Homestay where I was residing, said he would email me photos of the flower when it eventuated. And guess what -- I had only been gone an hour and Ulrich got a text message saying it was in flower! When I found out about this (a number of days later) I was practically spitting blood. We had checked with the guide Joni that morning as to the flower's status and he'd said it was still not showing, which, as they come into bloom in the morning and not the afternoon, means he hadn't even bothered to check the damn thing. If he had I would have seen it before I'd left! I was seriously annoyed. And just to add insult to injury, Ulrich and the other tourists he took along (none of whom had even heard of the flowers before) also saw a Rafflesia arnoldi in full bloom just 200 metres away from the Amorphophallus, despite Joni having specifically told me that there were none ready to bloom for at least several months! Double bad points for him!
photos: Amorphophallus bud with the guide Joni in a sexy pose; Amorphophallus in flower; Rafflesia arnoldi bud with Joni; Rafflesia in flower. [The two bud photos are mine, the two photos of them in flower were sent to me by Ulrich]
Why would anyone, just for the sake of seeing a flower, come off a nine hour bus trip and get straight onto another bus for a further 21 hours? That’s what I did. I don’t know if it can be considered intrepid, inspired, or just insane. The flower in question, of course, is the Amorphophallus titanus by Bukittinggi. When I last saw it on the 21st of October it was still a bud and it wouldn’t be in proper flower for about ten days, by which time I’d have left the country. But the more I thought about it the more I realised that to leave Indonesia without having seen such a profound rarity would be madness. MADNESS!!! You can plan a trip around orangutans or tapirs or Komodo dragons, but not around a flower that displays such obtuse unpredictability in its life-cycle. Really the only course of action available to me was to cancel my outbound flight in order to head southwards again to see the flower, even though I couldn’t actually afford to do this on what were now almost non-existent monetary funds. I couldn’t simply change the flight date because it was one of those cheap budget deals that didn’t allow that. However Fortune must have had a good run on the horses which put her in a good mood because when I went into the Malaysian Airlines office in Medan to cancel the flight the very nice lady at the desk did change my flight date giving me the extra few days needed at no extra cost, on the basis that my original morning flight had already been cancelled by the airline themselves and I’d been rebooked on the afternoon one, and therefore I’d been “inconvenienced” by that.
So after visiting Gunung Leuser National Park I took a truck for an hour to Kutacane and then a mini-van to Medan for eight hours, arriving just in time to catch the 21-hour overnight bus back to Bukittinggi (and I mean literally just in time -- I arrived at the bus station with only five minutes to spare!). A phone call to the Rafflesia Reserve's guide Joni let me know that the Amorphophallus was still in bud so I had a few days to wait, enabling me to finally go see someone who may or may not have been a doctor who poked me in the ribs and said “you’ll be fine”. That’s a relief….
While waiting for the flower I took in some of the natural sights around town, starting with a slow walk to Lembah Anai (as it turned out, the Lembah Anai waterfall and not the Lembah Anai Nature Reserve as I thought). This is a 6km walk along a railway track that I’d been told was only used on two days of the week. It was fairly obvious though that the track hadn’t been used in a very long time. At some points it was so overgrown you couldn’t even see the rails. It was a pleasant enough stroll with a few mitred leaf-monkeys and southern pig-tailed macaques, a lesser tree shrew, and a few birds along the way (white-headed munia was new for my life list), but where the tracks went over a highway was a bit nerve-wracking to someone not great with heights when there’s nothing to stop you falling except your own sense of balance (or lack thereof, as the case may be).
The next morning I went to the town canyon to see if I could find the colony of large flying foxes that pass over town each night. (Whenever I see streams of flying foxes in the night sky I can’t help but be reminded of the scene in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” where Willy says “oh look at the big birds!” and Indy goes “those aren’t birds, sweetheart, those are giant vampire bats!!”). This wasn’t as relaxing a walk as the one yesterday, the first section being a seemingly never-ending set of steps leading straight up the canyon wall. Then there was a wander along a road between the villages of Kampung Sihanok and Koto Gadang, then back down into the canyon again where a rickety old suspension bridge sat waiting. The flying fox colony was way down in the far reaches of the canyon and although I walked for a long way, fording the river many times I couldn’t get there in the end and had to abandon the quest.
Now all there was to do was sit and wait for the Amorphophallus to open, hopefully in the next two days because I had to be on the bus back to Medan on the Monday afternoon. To pass the time I took to forlornly wandering the marketplace, eyeing up Batman wallets and other cheap knock-offs. On the Sunday morning I ran into a group of teenage girls from the local school whose teacher had given her classes the assignment of getting their photos taken with a tourist at the market. As the main tourist in town (and certainly the most attractive one!) this made me a very popular man. I must have had 250 girls approaching me that day for photos. The funniest bit was that ordinary passers-by were also wanting to get their photos taken with me, obviously gaining the impression from all the attention I was receiving that I was - as you may probably guess yourselves - some sort of Western film-star or underwear model.
Despite my best efforts and eternal patience, my attempts to see the Amorphophallus flowering came to naught. The damn thing just stubbornly refused to burst into bloom. You can't force nature's hand in matters like this. Its either too wet or too dry or too cold or too hot; the conditions need to be just right and until they are the bud just sits there biding its time. After waiting for days after the estimated flowering date, I finally had to call it quits, throw in the towel, and abandon ship. It may have flowered the next morning or it may have sat there for another week, there was no way of telling, and I had to get back up to Medan (via yet another overnight bus, this one for 20.5 hours) to catch my flight to Kuala Lumpur. A very disappointing thing but there was nothing else I could do. Ulrich, the owner of the Raja Wali Homestay where I was residing, said he would email me photos of the flower when it eventuated. And guess what -- I had only been gone an hour and Ulrich got a text message saying it was in flower! When I found out about this (a number of days later) I was practically spitting blood. We had checked with the guide Joni that morning as to the flower's status and he'd said it was still not showing, which, as they come into bloom in the morning and not the afternoon, means he hadn't even bothered to check the damn thing. If he had I would have seen it before I'd left! I was seriously annoyed. And just to add insult to injury, Ulrich and the other tourists he took along (none of whom had even heard of the flowers before) also saw a Rafflesia arnoldi in full bloom just 200 metres away from the Amorphophallus, despite Joni having specifically told me that there were none ready to bloom for at least several months! Double bad points for him!
photos: Amorphophallus bud with the guide Joni in a sexy pose; Amorphophallus in flower; Rafflesia arnoldi bud with Joni; Rafflesia in flower. [The two bud photos are mine, the two photos of them in flower were sent to me by Ulrich]
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Chlidonias
Well-known member
PENINSULA MALAYSIA and THAILAND, end of trip!
For most of my final week in Indonesia I'd just been sitting in Bukittinggi doing pretty much nothing, waiting for that darn flower to bloom. This was sort of the start of the steep decline that hit the end of the trip. I had ten days left once leaving Indonesia, and those ten days were meant to be divided between Taman Negara in Peninsula Malaysia and Khao Yai National Park in Thailand. Instead the trip simply collapsed into a big steaming heap of fail. It really did end with a whimper rather than a roar, a bit of a fiasco actually.
The day after flying into Kuala Lumpur from Medan (in Sumatra) I headed off to Taman Negara, Malaysia's premier national park. There's a hide there deep in the forest where one can stay overnight and hope to spot the Malayan tapirs that come to the wallow in front. I'd been to Taman Negara before, in 2006, so this was just going to be a fairly short visit specifically to try and see tapirs. To get to the hide entails either a 6 or 7 hour walk, or a boat trip up-river followed by a 1 or 2 hour walk. I was going for the latter because I'd be carrying a lot of food and water. The plan was to spend the first night in one of the backpackers at the village of Kuala Tahan, and then the next two or three or four nights in the hide, but I never made it. That very first night I fell foul of some dreaded lurgy and spent the next two full days huddled up asleep in my room with the shivery-shakes, wearing every piece of clothing I had and covered in blankets to try and keep warm, while some invisible person forced sharpened matchsticks into the backs of my eyeballs. It was literally the sickest I have ever been in my life. On the third morning I tried to pack up to head back to KL but I couldn't even walk in a straight line, so it was another day in bed. The fourth morning I managed to stumble to the bus stop and make it back to KL, without even having set foot in the National Park!
Taman Negara stats:
Total number of birds seen: two (Oriental magpie-robin, common mynah)
Total number of mammals seen: zero
Total number of reptiles seen: zero
Total number of amphibians seen: zero
Total number of fish seen: one in a tank, one on a plate
If that's not a failed visit I don't know what is!
More failures awaited still. Back in Kuala Lumpur I was still too sick to fly up to Bangkok (partly because I was afraid of getting quarantined by Customs, this being the tail-end of the big swine flu scare of 2009) so I spent two more days doing nothing. I did make it to KLCC Aquaria, and I was even going to attempt a little invalid's totter around the park next door to the aquarium to up my status from "disease-ridden" to "disease-ridden bird-watcher" but it was too hot so I thought better of it.
"Thailand" of course translates as "land of Thai girls" but by the time I got to Bangkok I only had a couple of days left before my flight home and I was still feeling pretty dodgy (with a scary full-body rash!), so all I really managed to do was have an early morning wander round Lumphini Park where the water monitors stomp around like they're all that, but really they're nothing but eensy-weensy Komodo dragons; I added variable squirrel to the trip mammal list and streak-eared bulbul to the trip bird list (first bird for the trip list for two weeks!!) but that was all there was to speak of.
On the way home to New Zealand I had a eight hour stop-over at Melbourne Airport but I couldn't leave the building because I was in transit, which was a pain. Australian magpie seen from the windows was the last bird of the trip. It was funny being back in New Zealand after spending so long in one of the most over-populated countries on Earth. Just Jakarta alone has well over twice the population of the whole of New Zealand. I got back and it felt like a public holiday because the country seemed deserted!
It was a great trip. I visited islands that had always been dreams, like Borneo and Sulawesi, and places like Ujung Kulon and the Danum Valley that had always been in my head. I saw animals that most people will only ever see in zoos and that I thought I would never see in my lifetime, like babirusa, anoa, tarsiers and Komodo dragons. There were lots of animals I missed out on seeing, things like Javan rhinos and Flores giant rats, but with a trip of this scope that was inevitable. Maybe they'll be there in the future to see or maybe they won't. Babirusa for example, are pretty much now only to be found at Nantu Reserve, everywhere else they are so reduced in number as to be unviable, and who knows if the Nantu population can hold out even with the constant armed guards patrolling the area. The Flores giant rats according to the locals aren't seen as commonly as they once were, and everyone knows the sorry story of the Javan and Sumatran rhinos.
The whole thing cost me an arm and a leg, and Indonesia was far more expensive than I'd been led to believe. I actually ran out of money a couple of weeks before the end and had to borrow some off my sister to finish. I lost 21kg of muscle, almost 20% of my body weight, through a combination of factors (lack of gym, lack of food, too much heat and humidity....) and I think that may be why I ended up so sick in Malaysia, just because I was too weak for my system to fight off the bugs.
All in all though, a fantastic trip, really the trip of a lifetime, and I'm very happy I did it.
AND THAT'S THE END!!!!!!!
For most of my final week in Indonesia I'd just been sitting in Bukittinggi doing pretty much nothing, waiting for that darn flower to bloom. This was sort of the start of the steep decline that hit the end of the trip. I had ten days left once leaving Indonesia, and those ten days were meant to be divided between Taman Negara in Peninsula Malaysia and Khao Yai National Park in Thailand. Instead the trip simply collapsed into a big steaming heap of fail. It really did end with a whimper rather than a roar, a bit of a fiasco actually.
The day after flying into Kuala Lumpur from Medan (in Sumatra) I headed off to Taman Negara, Malaysia's premier national park. There's a hide there deep in the forest where one can stay overnight and hope to spot the Malayan tapirs that come to the wallow in front. I'd been to Taman Negara before, in 2006, so this was just going to be a fairly short visit specifically to try and see tapirs. To get to the hide entails either a 6 or 7 hour walk, or a boat trip up-river followed by a 1 or 2 hour walk. I was going for the latter because I'd be carrying a lot of food and water. The plan was to spend the first night in one of the backpackers at the village of Kuala Tahan, and then the next two or three or four nights in the hide, but I never made it. That very first night I fell foul of some dreaded lurgy and spent the next two full days huddled up asleep in my room with the shivery-shakes, wearing every piece of clothing I had and covered in blankets to try and keep warm, while some invisible person forced sharpened matchsticks into the backs of my eyeballs. It was literally the sickest I have ever been in my life. On the third morning I tried to pack up to head back to KL but I couldn't even walk in a straight line, so it was another day in bed. The fourth morning I managed to stumble to the bus stop and make it back to KL, without even having set foot in the National Park!
Taman Negara stats:
Total number of birds seen: two (Oriental magpie-robin, common mynah)
Total number of mammals seen: zero
Total number of reptiles seen: zero
Total number of amphibians seen: zero
Total number of fish seen: one in a tank, one on a plate
If that's not a failed visit I don't know what is!
More failures awaited still. Back in Kuala Lumpur I was still too sick to fly up to Bangkok (partly because I was afraid of getting quarantined by Customs, this being the tail-end of the big swine flu scare of 2009) so I spent two more days doing nothing. I did make it to KLCC Aquaria, and I was even going to attempt a little invalid's totter around the park next door to the aquarium to up my status from "disease-ridden" to "disease-ridden bird-watcher" but it was too hot so I thought better of it.
"Thailand" of course translates as "land of Thai girls" but by the time I got to Bangkok I only had a couple of days left before my flight home and I was still feeling pretty dodgy (with a scary full-body rash!), so all I really managed to do was have an early morning wander round Lumphini Park where the water monitors stomp around like they're all that, but really they're nothing but eensy-weensy Komodo dragons; I added variable squirrel to the trip mammal list and streak-eared bulbul to the trip bird list (first bird for the trip list for two weeks!!) but that was all there was to speak of.
On the way home to New Zealand I had a eight hour stop-over at Melbourne Airport but I couldn't leave the building because I was in transit, which was a pain. Australian magpie seen from the windows was the last bird of the trip. It was funny being back in New Zealand after spending so long in one of the most over-populated countries on Earth. Just Jakarta alone has well over twice the population of the whole of New Zealand. I got back and it felt like a public holiday because the country seemed deserted!
It was a great trip. I visited islands that had always been dreams, like Borneo and Sulawesi, and places like Ujung Kulon and the Danum Valley that had always been in my head. I saw animals that most people will only ever see in zoos and that I thought I would never see in my lifetime, like babirusa, anoa, tarsiers and Komodo dragons. There were lots of animals I missed out on seeing, things like Javan rhinos and Flores giant rats, but with a trip of this scope that was inevitable. Maybe they'll be there in the future to see or maybe they won't. Babirusa for example, are pretty much now only to be found at Nantu Reserve, everywhere else they are so reduced in number as to be unviable, and who knows if the Nantu population can hold out even with the constant armed guards patrolling the area. The Flores giant rats according to the locals aren't seen as commonly as they once were, and everyone knows the sorry story of the Javan and Sumatran rhinos.
The whole thing cost me an arm and a leg, and Indonesia was far more expensive than I'd been led to believe. I actually ran out of money a couple of weeks before the end and had to borrow some off my sister to finish. I lost 21kg of muscle, almost 20% of my body weight, through a combination of factors (lack of gym, lack of food, too much heat and humidity....) and I think that may be why I ended up so sick in Malaysia, just because I was too weak for my system to fight off the bugs.
All in all though, a fantastic trip, really the trip of a lifetime, and I'm very happy I did it.
AND THAT'S THE END!!!!!!!
Mike Richardson
Formerly known as Skink1978
Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed and quality report. Having travelled a little myself, it really summed up the backpacker experience for me. I only wish I had spent more time seeking out such exciting wildlife, in the more remote places as you did.
Those mystery foreign illnesses are no fun. A mate of mine caught something in Cambodia and was in bed for over a month. Luckily he made it back to Bangkok where a local girl took pity on him, feeding him etc. throughout his fever. Who knows what would have happened if he was left to fend for himself?
Anyway, I look forward to reading about your next adventure.
Those mystery foreign illnesses are no fun. A mate of mine caught something in Cambodia and was in bed for over a month. Luckily he made it back to Bangkok where a local girl took pity on him, feeding him etc. throughout his fever. Who knows what would have happened if he was left to fend for himself?
Anyway, I look forward to reading about your next adventure.
edenwatcher
Well-known member
Excellent report.
Rob
Rob
Larry Sweetland
Formerly 'Larry Wheatland'
Thanks for the report Chlid. Shame you got ill for Taman Negara, but hopefully thee's always next time :t:
Birdingcraft
Well-known member
Sorry to hear that you were so ill so far away from home. Yeah, sounds like it could have been Dengue. Glad to hear that you survived and most of all, that you wrote up this fantastic report- best one I have seen on Bird Forum!
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Brian Stone
A Stone chatting
A great read, thanks.
