Internet cafe, Medan, Sumatra

We spent 2 great days in the Gunung Leuser National Park, close to Bukit Lawang. The trekking was not that hard, although we only went up and down the hills, as the paths do not run in the valleys. It was very hot and humid, so we were soaked in sweat after only 5 minutes. The surface was quite slippery and the tracks run often very steep, sometimes we had to climb by holding on to the roots of the trees.

There were very frequent stops, because the jungle seemed to be full of orangutans. On the first day, we bumped into one every 10 minutes or so. Most of them were semi-wild that were released from the rehabilitation center in the village. Once we met a group of 9 (normally orangutans are solitary...)!! The guides could recognize many of them by their names. We even met the famous "Mina" who has bitten already 60 people. It actually does not come as a big surprise, because often the poor creatures are surrounded by tourists with no escape route and their bags are smelling so good of bananas, that they used to get from the humans. I would also get aggressive with so many people around me, only wanting my photo without payment... Anyhow, wild or semi-wild, it was cool to watch the orangutans. Especially the babies were very funny, making different noises and doing some acrobatics on the trees. Interestingly as we got farther from the village on the second day, we did not see any orangutans during the whole day. Actually we did not see any mammal other than a black squirrel. No tiger, no rhino, no elephant... :o( So that was more like real jungle trekking. But on the first day we saw the Thomas leaf monkey, that has a Mohawk hairdo and a few long-tailed macaques. There were giant ants too, much bigger than what we saw in the Amazon region. One even bit our guide and he could hardly pull it off his finger. The other blood thirsty animals were the leeches that sucked themselves to our skin very fast, so it was very difficult to remove them. But at least their bite did not burn, unlike the ones of the mosquitoes...
The night in the jungle was quite uneventful, we had a very nice dinner with 5 different dishes and went to sleep in our bamboo tents. Only monitor lizards came close to the camp to clean up the leftovers. They swallowed the big chicken bones very quickly.
At the end of the second day we took a raft (inflated car tires bound together) back to the village. It took us almost an hour to get back and went through small rapids, luckily no grade 5...

Today we took a minivan to Medan with 17 people distributed over 12 seats. Tomorrow we take the ferry to Georgetown in Malaysia and with that begin our continental Asia tour.