Washing the Elephants in Sumatra

Sumatra January 2012

The night had been cold and the rain relentless. Sleeping under mosquito nets we only had sheets to cover us so we kept our clothes on for extra warmth.

Clothes we'd washed the day before would take days to dry in this weather.  After a breakfast of nasi goreng and strong kopi (coffee) Andreas, a German  friend of mother and Faridahs living part of the year in Tangkahan came to see us. Word had gotten round on the jungle drums. He took us down to the river and we waded along to a splendid waterfall.

The river here is totally pebble bottomed so I was feeling rather smug aout being the only one to bring crocs along - no sore feet for me! For future reference the two most useful pieces of footwear to have on this trip would be crocs and trekking sandals.

Then we slogged back thru a really strong current to get to the other side where the volcanic spring came out, heating the water deliciously and stinking of sulphur.

Andreas invited us to his house for coffee so we tried to get to it across the river but the river had risen in the night and the current threatened to pull us under - maybe if I wasn't carting my iPhone back and forth across the river all the time it would of been fine if we got a dunking crossing but we judged it too risky so we went up and thru the forest.

A vague path thru the forest eventually led to a rather large and astonishing house perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the river. He spoke about how difficult it was to get any consistent work out of the local Karo people with their natural inclination toward idleness. He was also very carefully not to leave anything outside if he wasn't at home due to the native inclination to permanently 'borrow' things. We talked about the earthquake a few days ago and the odd behavior of the animals in the ocean over in Penang. What were the family of otters doing in the ocean? Apparently a few days later dolphins were spotted in the same area not normally native to those waters. Where had they come from and why had they deserted their natural habitats? Was their migration linked to the earthquake? During the tsunami the preceding earthquake had release hot muddy water up from the magma layer in the earths crust, heating the water and making it black. A lot of the bodies that had been found in Banda Aceh had been half boiled.
In the afternoon we walked several kilometers to meet a group of elephants having their afternoon bath. Before they were allowed into the water the four adults had to poo. Their mahouts helped them out by sticking their hands into the elephants bottoms up to their elbows and pulling clumps of elephant poo out.

This completed the adult elephants and three baby elephants got into the river for a bathe. One of the elephants was pregnant, the gestation period for an elephanis being 22 months. There was one bull amongst the female with lovely large tusks an astonishingly long purplish penis.

A couple of the adults came over to us and lay down on their sides waiting for us, scrubbing brushes in hand, to give their thick skins a good scrub. Afterwards we delighted in poking delicious bananas into their mouths, their thick pink tongues smooth as an eel against our fingers. Any fallen bananas accidentally dropped were picked up with the trunk, the sand rubbed off first along the upper ridges of the trunk before being deposited into the mouth. The baby elephants were still awkward in their trunk manipulations . One baby was very naughty and not only tried to undo Torsten's shoelaces but also delighted in trying to push people over. The pip squeak only came up to our waists!

The bathing over we rafted back down river to our huts, bumping over rushes of white water, our bottoms sitting in water we spotted monkeys in the trees glaring at us.

 Women and children crouched at the rivers edge washing their clothes on the river stones. It's the custom to spread the washing out over bushes to dry because the surface area exposed to the sun is much greater and hence the clothes will dry faster. In the evening we ate rice and banana flower that had been cooked into a mild curry. Sitting on our balcony overlooking the river and jungle we watched a massive front approaching and discussed the possibility of being stranded here by flooding the next day.

Patrol of Illegal Loggging

My mother decided that we should go to Tangkahan from Bohorok, deep in the jungle where they run elephant patrols to into the forest to monitor illegal logging activity. The price of a battered old jeep and it's pubescent driver was negotiated for 800 000 rupiah (about $90 at the time), our glossy red suitcases strapped to its roof and launched onto an 'unofficial road'. Savannah and Faridah being the shortest were squashed in the backseat with the lowest ceiling space. Torsten was jammed in the middle section with India and mother against a wooden board where the window had been. The padding on the seats had long since ceased to exist and mother declared that she would have been better off having a bicycle seat to sit on than the board that was left of the seat. Relief was acheived every time bounced over another rock or pothole and our bums became temporarily weightless before shifting into a new postion. For almost four hours we drove at such a speed that had it been any slower we would have been going in reverse! The dirt road was pitted with potholes full with water from the monsoon rains of the night before. Palm oil plantations leased by Malaysia accompanied us for many kilometers. We slipped and slid down steep hills to crawl painfully up the next one. Suddenly, in the middle of nowhere literally, we came across an enormous factory, sitting in the middle of the palm oil plantations for the express purpose of extracting the oil from the palm fruit. Discarded mounds of already processed husks lay along the side of the road. According to Faridah who knows all about anything edible or medicinal in the jungle, a special type of mushroom grows in these mounds which is particularly delicious. We drove past clusters of houses and huts along the way, presumably housing the palm oil workers families. The poorer people have wooden houses with thatch or tin roofs and those with a little bit more have cement houses with tin roofs. However, nearly everyone has a mesh satellite dish. In fact the majority of Indonesians had satellite dishes pulling in tv stations from arzound the world a decade before Australians even vaguely thought about getting the inferior small white solid dish satellites which even now are not so common. We were also surprised to find perfect mobile phone reception in the middle of the jungle despite the absence of electricity. Finally we reached Tangkahan. An old rusted out bus sat in front of the official lodge, wires hanging out of the steering column, seats spilling foam padding. It was actually still in commision and used as a shuttle to Medan! Whenever we arrive somewhere people immediately start talking to us in halting English only to be completely surprised when mother starts prattling with Faridah (who speaks no English) in Bahasa Indonesian. I studied Indonesian at school for two years but in between visits my Indonesian gets very rusty. Unperturbed Faridah fires away at a million miles an hour in Indonesian to me I really have to pull my socks up and remember long forgotten words if I'm to communicate with her. The great advantage of having two fluent Indonesian speakers who live here is that we never get ripped off or charged tourist prices although someplaces will try it on only to be met with 'the wrath and scorn of Faridah'. Whenever she's angry with someone because they're asking too high a price we can tell because the words shoot out of her mouth like a machine gun firing at the enemy and I think 'Wrath and scorn! Those poor people have no idea what they're up against'. Anyways, we registered with the officials and then proceeded to head down to yet another river where a raft was tied up.

We walked across a wooden plank onto the raft while some boys loaded our luggage on. The current was strong and the pilot pulled the raft across the on a rope strung between the two shorelines. Lucky for us we hadn't come the day before, the rope had broken and the only other couple staying there had had to swim across the river to get to the huts! We climbed to steep hillside  next to the river and sat down in an roofed eating area for some lunch. Faridah started talking to the locals about the plan ts growing around and how to cook them. Apparently they didn't know a lot of them could be eaten so busied herself collecting and cooking them for our dinner, instructing the locals as she went. We were given three huts with balconies overlooking the rushing river. Hot and sticky from the long drive we went down to the river for a swim. Crossing the strong current to the far shore we discovered a hot spring oozing between the rocks from a nearby volcano. Refreshed we went back to our huts. With no electricity and only a  jungle vista for miles around I imagined myself in a Somerset Maugham novel, sipping on a gin & tonic declaring 'purely for medicinal purposes old chap! The quinine in the tonic is good for the malaria!'  as I watched the river flowing past far down below and listened to the thunder and incessant monsoon rains. (I will update this post with photos when I can access proper Internet).