More things I love about Sumatra

I should probably start with things I dont like as there are much fewer,

Love:
1. How everything works on the honesty system, with toilets in the bus station you have to pay more for a pooh and they ask you before you go in, "pee pee'? On the bus there is a guard by the toilet who stops you from poohing, he says 'no shit' and then smells the air when you come out

Hate:
1. EVERYONE SMOKES EVERYWHERE - on the bus, with the window shut and no ventilation, and a lot of people smoke filterless and big fat cone shaped ones that look like spliffs, I do like smell of the posh clove cigarettes that spark like firecrackers when people inhale them

Love:

the lack of tourists, we pretty much met everyone on the circuit. There were 2 guys whod had the same room as us in bukit lawang where we saw the orangs, we all had the same pet rat who gnawed through a canvas bag to get at cream crackers and ate a bar of perfumed soap and sugar coated paracetemol. We heard about a lot of people before we met them, like the aussie man who'd taken his 11 year old daughter on a 7 month trip around indonesia and india and made her walk 7 miles in the rain and fast at ramadan, apparently its a rite of passage he makes all of his children go on at that age, she kept saying 'its a good education' but not with any conviction...

love the way you can see genetics at work, a lot of the cats have stumps instead of tails and we thought theyd been docked, but actually they were just inbred

I love that a lot of people wear hard hats on bikes instead of helmets, what good they do I dont know because there are no straps so if they fall off the hat does too, little children have 'bob the builder' helmets you buy at toy stores

Facial hair in sumatra is also pretty fantastic, the muslim beards are quite funky, just whispy goatees, it seems to be a prerequisite to have a tash and a mullet to work for a bus company, I love that the developing world is still embracing the mullet look, I hope it continues

I love that the childrens school uniform is like an airforce cadet outfit, lots od caps with laurels leaves

wire donation boxes in the middle of the road, I thought maybe it was a toll again using the honesty policy, but its actually to build mosques, it should be to repair the roads which have enormous craters, but that does tend to slow the drivers down somewhat

I love the wild girls of pulah weh, they are so beautiful and feminine but also so earthy, they climb trees and build fires on the beach and jump over them and say 'ooh I burn my jungle' after theyve lept, they all have foreign husbands who are not really around and young children, but the babies are sort of communal so everyone looks after them and you never know whose is whose. They use plants from the jungle for medicine or to make their lady bits tighten up after birth - they told me to come back if I ever have a baby

I love that in pulah weh I just went out to my balcony and looked below and saw clear water and tropical fish, you didnt even need to snorkel or dive to see all the parrot fish and sweet lips and turtles and puffer fish and sting wray and barracuda. Fruit bats flew by like eagles and ate from the trees by the balcony. We sat at breakfast and saw whales, heard mata wray belly flop as they jump out of the water. We went fishing for our dinner with eva - the most amazing woman Ive ever met who shouted 'sexy too much' at stan the 72 year old englishman who comes every year for two months as he walked past in his trunks and flippers.


I love that indonesians watch indian soap operas

I love that sumatrans are such kind people who will try and shove 3 people on a seat so you dont have to stand and when you walk through their gardens they offer you fruit and vegetables or whatever is growing, which sometimes is turnip and you have to eat it raw so as not to offend.

I love Arrafin the 57 year old guide who took us into the jungle with his 17 year olf boy band member son, he believed if it was easy it was no fun and that following the path was cheating, so instead we macheted and crawled and climbed (the aching in my armpits by the end of it was phenomenal) and scratched and slipped and fell and hung from vines and jumped and got attacked by leeches and bugs. We also got chased by a wild orang utan. I love orang utans, but now I love them from afar, they are so strong and so agressive its frightening, we were deep in the jungle and spotted one in the distance, arrafin ran but left us behind and until it started growling like king kong we hadnt twigged that it was coming for us or rather for whatever food it assumed we had - guides occasionally bait them for the tourists so its really our fault and believe me if I could get away with biting people until they give me chocolate I would, I also got pinched by mena the notorious, she has bitten and scratched 63 guides, she is a semi wild orang - they come to the rescue centre everyday for milk and bananas - a diet the people who run the underfunded centre - locals with no outside backing or trained vets or zoologists, hope they get bored of so the orangs will eventually return completely to independent jungle living, apparently she only attacks men, so she just wanted to get a look at me.

In the jungle we saw a leopard track, thomas leaf monkeys, a black squirrel which arrafin was very excited about and disappointed that we didnt share his enthusiasm for rodents that we get in our backyards, we also saw a tree fall directly next to our campsite - that night we slept on a plastic sheet while the plastic sheet above us leaked rain as the river 10 feet away from us rose rapidly and we felt the tremors of an earthquake, its a wonder I slept at all that night

I loved watching the locals walk across thewild river, theyd wade in and disappear under water halfway and then resurface 100 meters further down stream on the other side. I am absolutely fascinated by the people who live in bukit lawang and their relationship with water, 4 years ago the entire village was wiped out by a flash flood (since then very few hotels have rebuilt, bukit lawang has not really recovered) and people drown all the time, yetthey are so calm around it. To a certain extent that is a bad thing, especially when they rent out tubes but forget to warn people about the washing machine effect that sucks you in half a mile further down.

I hate - giant gecko shit - they are big meaty poohs - they eat baby rats as well as insects, at first we didnt know what all the black stuff on our beds were - we assumed they were big dust particles from the palm roof of the hut, so I sort of rubbed it into the sheet with my hands, we were plagued by it, the geckos would climb onto the ceiling as you were eating and pooh on the table, I think its them taking their revenge on us for pulling off the tails of their little brothers to see if they grow back. As side note, I saw a civet, a cat/fox/weasel type thing whose pooh is sold for 300 bucks - apparently when they eat coffee beans the kernel passes through whole and makes for a very flavourful cup

I hate that all of the jungle is being cut down for palm oil and rubber plantations, in my western mind I do find something attractive in the orderliness of the trees and the diagonal strips on the rubber trees dripping white thick liquid into the little cups on the trees

I hate the fact that in Lake Toba on the idyllic samosir island (like a south pacific tropical island on an alpine lake with warm water) you go 2 km inland and the villages are some of the poorest Ive ever seen and deformities are rife - like clef lip and mental disabilities

I hate that so many people who work in the tourist industry are so bored, apparently in the 80s and 90s sumatran was a tourist hot spot, but since all that earthquakes and floods and tsunamis and conflicts - the government and achenese separtists, hardly anyone comes. While we were in sumatra there were 3 earthquakes and 1 tsunami.

I hate that mosquitoes bite you in the day as well as the night.

I hate all the face whitening products, ladies lather up and rock a kind of marcel marceau mime look

I hate the NGOs and how rude they are to locals and travellers when they come to pulah weh and that they talk shop with other NGO people and care on a power trip and have egos the size of a small country. I hate that the locals think when they leave the troubles will start again and the only option for young men will be to run away because either the militia will force them to fight or the government will assume theyre freedom fighters even if theyre not and imprison them

I also hate ramadan, which I know is intolerant, but pretty much the whole of sumatra went on lock downduring daylight hours and no water in such a hot climate is stupid. People will still feed you though, they 'pssk' at you and tell you to sneak round the back and then you find even the sumatrans hiding in the kitchen eating. I also hate call to prayer at 5.30 am over loud speaker

ok, sorry that was so long and rambling - Im actually nearly 3 weeks into sri lanka, so that blog will follow shortly