On New Year's day we finally got the jungle trek under way. We had a small group of our guide, an older but fit Australian, and my lumbering Swiss friend Peter. I was a bit skeptical at first how much of a "trek" it would be with two older men, especially since I'd had a good sample of Peter's fitness the day before. Much to my delight, our guide didn't take things easy for them, and while we did have to slow down a bit for Peter and take a few more breaks that I would have liked, the hiking was intense. We were climbing hundreds of meters up steep rock faces, sliding down clay and mud banks, pulling ourselves up slopes by the roots of trees, and almost always either ascending or descending. Our focus was on finding animals, and the different guides would text each other when things of interest were spotted, and we'd take off trying to find them. Through the course of the day we saw gibbons, macaques (which are the usual monkey seen everwhere in SE Asia), Thomas Leaf Monkeys, and two different orangutans, which are the real prize of the national park.
The rest house we stayed at for the night was alongside the river. Luckily we didn't have to stay in a tent, since it rained rather hard all night again, but we were in the open air under a tin roof. Dinner was a vegetarian mix of dishes from things grown in the jungle nearby, as was the dessert of passion fruit, bananas, pineapple and oranges.
No comments:
Post a Comment