Gunung Leuser National Park, Sumatra

What do you do when you are close to the jungle? You damn sure go into it! And so we went on a 2 days one night trek. Overall, it was sweaty, wet, muddy, exhausting, and not free from dangers.
In other words: it was awesome. The thought "yeah, we should not have done that" crossed our minds several times, but we had a good guide and made it through the trip unscathed.

We started from our guesthouse - where we have a room with a hammock and jungle view - at 8.30 in the morning. We were a group of 6 + 2 guides. It took us roughly 10 minutes until we encountered the endemic Thomas Leaf Monkey (Claire's favourites). After maybe an hour we already came across the highlight of every jungle trek in Sumatra: Orang Utans! Several trekking groups found the spot where about 10 of the apes had gathered. Most groups took some pictures and went their way but we lingered for almost 2 hours and so we could see the Orang Utans from really close, like 5 meters away! Absolutely amazing! Later on we also saw big ass ants, tons of insects, a giant spider, white handed Gibbons which are the absolut best (says Karsten), monitor lizards, no snakes. We went up and down through the jungle. It wasn't raining but we were absolutely drenched

- While I am writing this a group of like 20 smaller monkeys came through the scattered bungalows here and we had to defend our territory -

from sweating so much due to the high humidity. Especially the last descend from a view point to our camp was quite a challenge. At the camp we had a delicious meal - among other things we had the best pineapple ever - played some games and solved some riddles. We even got proper air mattresses to sleep, pure luxury. Middle of the night we had to scramble from beneath our plastic roof because a giant rainfall was threatening our clothes that we left out to dry. Same in the morning during breakfast. The strong rain caused the nearby river to swell up which made both our hike to a nearby waterfall and the rafting tour back to the village more challenging than they needed to be ;).
It was great, great fun overall.Read more