Sumatra: Harapan - Fly Camping: Life on the River

Half the Kew staff and our local team members took the two small wood motorboats out for 3 days on the river to get to some of the more hard to reach sections of the Harapan Rainforest. If the rain had been on our side, the river would be twice as full as it currently is, and we could have taken a speedboat.

Team 1 heading downstream

Rather than a speedboat this was the relaxing way to travel, if you don’t mind crashing into a few submerged and hidden trees and pushing the boat over a few rapids.

Boat in need of a bit of local help

There is plenty of wildlife along the river, we saw a lot more than we were able to photograph.

Frequent sightings were:  

A few stowaways

Enormous monitor lizards (much larger than the little one in the photo, the biggest we saw was close to 6ft)

Troops of macaques

And many birds, especially Kingfishers (this one was still for a second, but obviously far away!)

We found a fly-camp base by the side of the river where we could set up our tents. Some machete action needed to take place to clear some of the roots, and plants. We also set up our water purification system. I was warned profusely that it would need cleanwater as a source, but we only had river water so thought we would give it a try. 

I don’t think that clay sediment, that doesn’t fall out of the water when still, was the ideal test candidate and after a few litres of water, the system stopped working. I think some sort of pre-filter is required, was a great idea though not practical in our particular case.

Water filter when working

It is a hot day everyday and apparently the bees at our campsite were particularly happy to crawl along my arm drinking in the sweat, lovely.

Sweat bees

We couldn’t find a cook to accompany us on our journey, but all the local staff and Pak Deden the botanist from Bogor were ready and willing to cook up delicious food every meal time.

Pak Deden and Pak Mouhamad

In thunderstorm, there is no better place to be than out in the jungle under a relatively dry tarpaulin with some lovely Indonesian food, as long as the leeches stay away (only got one bite that evening).

Dinner time