Two days in the Sumatran jungle.

Bukit Lawang is a small town at the edge of Gunung Leuser National Park, one of two places in the entire world that is home to Pongo abelii, the Orangutan, Borneo being the other. Bukit Lawang is a small town that is still transforming itself from the heart wrenching flood over five years ago that claimed 300 lives, or one-third of the town's population. Being at the edge of a vast track of protected rain forest on one side with palm & rubber plantations on the other side, everyone you meet in town is either a farmer or a guide. The ramifications are deep, more jobs for people in the trekking industry or the persistent tide of plantations chews at the edge of forest boundaries.
Thomas is a fast talking salesman with a sense of humor & anywhere else in the world he would be selling you your car or home insurance policy, but here in the jungle he is selling himself to take you way out there & get you back the next day in time for dinner.
In the morning we climb up towards the rays of a brilliant yellow sun leaving the rubber trees behind (the trees that are saving the world, not just by their carbon sequestering, but because, well rubbers come from them). At the edge of Gunung Leuser N.P. we come across a Thomas Leaf monkey low enough on its perch to shake hands with. The day wears on, you wouldn't need the steeply intense hills going down & ricocheting back up to sweat due to the humidity, but we have both. The ground is tricky from being wet from last nights rain, the rest is just like you would expect it to be from the movies: the enduring machine-stamina buzzing of cicadas, the wet litter of tree leaves that could cover half your body, vines from high up descending to the ground that Tarzan would trust to swing on, far-off animal calls & the heat.
Orangutan is the Indonesian word for "man of the forest" & by early afternoon we have our first sighting. These orange haired primates have the uncanny appearance of an unshaven person; there is, for me, a certain mirroring-back feeling in their presence. Their climbing agility is beguiling for their size, having the largest arms of all apes, they climb upside down, hanging off a tree trunk sideways, they climb to the ends of branches until the branch bends under their weight sending the orangutan down like riding an elevator. It then grabs onto the branch of a neighboring tree & continues onward like this. When they are not eating fruit or the leaves of the Maas tree, they are breaking apart termite nests in the trees feeding on the winged insects.
At the evening time we sit content in our shelters as rain slams down in large drops. Three ft. long monitor lizards are active at the stream feeding just 15 feet away from where we camp. As we ready ourselves for a well earned sleep, a guide spots a snake slithering through our make shift jungle kitchen, but the thin long dark snake is no ordinary herpetoid, it is more deadly than the king cobra.
By the second day we have had four encounters with orangutans, close enough to reach out & touch, including two mothers with baby in tow. A beautiful ridge network so thin you could go tumbling down either side takes us to a river, lunch & inner tubes that float us back.