Day 282: Bat Cave and a New Year

I got up early in the morning for my trek only to be disappointed by learning it was being postponed a day. According to the planner it was because other tourists had chickened out because of the rain through the night, but I also suspect the guide was eager to stay in town and party for New Year's. I was a bit bummed, since it meant I'd have to stay in town for New Year's as well, and it would probably force me to cut out something else I wanted to do in Sumatra, but I was mostly just making everything up as I went anyway, so I wasn't too heartbroken.

Since I suddenly had a free day I started looking for alternative things to do, and was intrigued when I learned about a fairly extensive cave in the jungle. I ended up going with an incredibly awkward middle-aged Swiss man (more on him later). The organizer for our trek tried to convince us to take a guide, but he was telling us it would be about $10 each, which was ridiculous. $10 doesn't sound like much by our normal standards, but in Indonesia I've generally been able to get accomodations and all my meals for a day for $10, and services are even cheaper. Instead we went on our own, and near the cave met a local man who offered to show us the cave for a much more reasonable $1.50 each. [As an aside, I'm converting to familiar currency for your sake. $10 CDN is roughly 100,000 Indonesian Rupiah. Despite the nice clean conversion, I've had a bit of trouble with the currency because of how many decimal places are involved, and how many bills there are. The only coins in Indonesia are 100 and 500 rupiah, but for bills they have 1000, 2000, 5000, 10000, 20000, 50000, 100000. Having common bills of 1000,10000 and 100000 means that you're always having to double check exactly how much you're giving over. It's also the only country I've ever been to where I'm regularily inconvencieng people by making them try to break the equivelant of a $10 bill.]

I was very pleasantly surprised with the cave. It's totally undeveloped and getting through it requires climbing, crawling, and quite a bit of maneuvering and balance. It's a mix of total darkness you need flashlights to navigate and holes in the ceiling opening up to jungle and sky. The variety of the caves was a lot of fun, and while it wasn't a terribly hard workout for me, poor Peter (my Swiss companion) was covered in sweat and bruises by the time we exited.

After lunch I explored Bukit Lawang. The town is spread along both banks of the river with 3 plank foot bridges connecting the two sides. It's very touristy, but still manages to have some personality. One feature I found particularily funny was a guy that squatted down at the side of the path playing the watch-carefully-and-guess-what-cup-the-pea-is-under game. A crowd would stand around him and people would throw their money down on their pick, and then he'd turn up the cups and pay off any that guessed right. As far as I can remember, it's the only time I've ever actually seen somebody running that game in real life, and he seemed to be there consistently from morning to late evening every night I was there. Another major attraction in the town is tubing down the river. Foreign tourists often combine tubing from deep in the jungle as part of their trekking, but there were far more domestic tourists who were in town for the holidays and they would just set up along the river and spend the day picnicing and playing in the water, much like how we'd go out to the beach for the day.

I had dinner on the hostel's patio and spent the evening talking to an American volunteering in the area and some Europeans who were now living in Indonesia. My entire time in the country I'd been pretty surprised at how flirty and forward the girls were (in a few days I'd accumulated a small collection of phone numbers I could do nothing with and requests for my facebook/email address) and these middle-aged English and German men and their considerably younger Indonesian wives reinforced my suspicion that if I was ever desperately in need of a wife, Indonesia could probably provide me one in a hurry. A lot of the younger crowd in town set up bonfires along the river, and around 11:00 people started shooting off fireworks. Fireworks in Bukit Lawang was a bit worrisome. It felt a bit like the spiritual equivelant of lighting a stick of dynamite and tossing it into the air. It wasn't -quite- that extreme, but only just. The fireworks were about the same grade as you see in the big city-organized displays, only this was locals along the river shooting them off. They were often at quite low angles so they exploded close to buildings and jungle, and a lot of the people were just holding the fireworks as they launched them, which made me cringe. In the end, they made it to 2013 with nobody getting hurt and nothing burned down, and the effect of dozens of big fireworks being launched all up and down the river had an impressive effect.