Chlidonias goes to Asia, 2009

Gunung Ranaka (Flores, still)

On Timor I made my way up that island’s highest mountain, Gunung Mutis, and now I’ve also stood on top of Flores’ highest mountain, Gunung Ranaka. Its not really as great a feat as it may sound – there’s a paved road all the way to the top! Still it was a hard slog and took about five hours, including numerous birding stops as well as for second breakfast and elevenses. The entrance road isn't far from Ruteng, maybe eight kilometres or so, about four bends past where the road has obviously fairly recently been completely taken out by a landslide and re-cut. Its rather inconspicuous if you're trying to find it, just a modest arch labelled "Taman Wisata Alam Ruteng" set back from the main road. The situation seemed the same as at Danau Ranamese -- it looked like you should be paying a permit fee but the buildings are deserted. I’d heard that the road was all overgrown and pretty much impassable in the higher reaches but it turned out that someone had been up there recently, probably in the last week or two, and cut back all the canes that would have previously blocked it and also chopped up and moved any fallen trees. You could go from the main road all the way to the top by motorbike although its quite steep in places so you wouldn’t want to be too heavy a passenger and you’d also risk scrambling your kidneys on the last few kilometres where the road is made up solely of broken rocks. A four-wheel drive could make it easily – I know because one passed me when I was about three kilometres from the top. They asked if I wanted a lift but I said I’d rather walk it. The pain lets me know I’m still alive. Also you can’t look for birds in the trees unless you’re on foot. Plus it was good for my calves.

The birding was pretty good up to a certain point but in the higher regions the numbers declined, probably simply because it was getting into the afternoon when the birds are less active anyway. I was pleased to come across two of the three dark-eyes that I’d failed to see at Danau Ranamese the other day, as well as the pigmy woodpeckers that I never get tired of, oriental cuckoo, dark-backed imperial pigeon and others. Once at the top there’s not much to see because you’re surrounded by scrub, so if you’re just after birds there isn’t much point heading all the way up except to say you’ve been there. Gunung Ranaka is actually a volcano. It hasn’t erupted for at least a couple of decades but when you’re near the top you can see smoke rising from behind the rise. Unfortunately when right at the summit where the road ends any view of the crater is completely obscured. The four-wheel drive occupants were workers for Motorola there to fix the radio transmitter which had been broken for the last six months (and hence the reason the road had been cleared). Halfway down the mountain – it was quicker going downhill but harder on the legs! – they passed by again and this time I accepted the lift because it meant that I didn’t have to pay for a bemo back to the hotel when I reached the main road. We surprised a green junglefowl on the track on the way down which was a bonus.

Somewhat in contrast to what I wrote in an earlier post about the Rutenginites (Rutengians? Rutengorians? Rutengers? Rutengerines?) appearing not to be used to foreigners, there has been a steady stream of them through the Rima Hotel while I’ve been here. I have therefore come to the conclusion that the reason I am regarded as such a curiosity is because I’m travelling alone. Most foreigners come in small groups on tours – Labuanbajo to Ruteng to Bajawa to Ende, that sort of thing – so you wouldn’t normally see them wandering alone around the fish market for example. And walking in the forest by oneself is just plain bizarre behaviour. Maybe they’re all so friendly towards me because they think I’m touched in the head.

So tomorrow I am leaving Ruteng and taking the four hour bus trip all the way back to Labuanbajo where the Komodo dragon awaits. I saw the Hobbit cave, I saw lots of birds, but the closest I came to finding a giant rat was seeing a shrew at Danau Ranamese. I know they used to be found in the area because their bones have been found in the cave deposits but absolutely nobody here has any clue what I’m talking about. Maybe I can find some somewhere at lower altitude round Labuanbajo.
 
a dragon of a time on Rinca

The bus from Ruteng took an hour less to Labuanbajo than it had on the trip up. I’m not sure if it was better to get the ride over with faster so it would just be over, or if longer would have been better as it would have been somewhat less nauseating and we wouldn’t have almost been taken out by trucks on two of the blind hairpin bends. The chap in the seat in front of me threw up four times during the trip!

In Labuanbajo I’m staying at the Gardena Hotel which is where most tourists stay – and there are a lot of tourists in this town (it being the gateway to Komodo). At least at this time of year its advisable to arrange your hotel ahead of arrival as everywhere seems to be fully booked (I just got a room on lucky chance). Labuanbajo is stinking hot and it doesn’t strike me as a very friendly place. Its very different to the other places I’ve been in Sumba, Timor or Flores. In fact it reminds me of a smaller dirtier version of Kuta on Bali, where everyone is just out to get as much money from the tourists as they can. In the main the only people who show smiles are those working in the tourist industry piling people onto Komodo and Rinca. There’s only one ATM in Labuanbajo which is inconveniently located at the opposite end of town to my hotel, but contrary to what I had heard pre-arrival it doesn’t only take local cards so that’s a relief. There are mosquitoes everywhere; on my first night I neglected to utilise a mosquito net and got bitten 21 times, and not little bites either, great big welt-like bites. Nasty. Blackouts seem to be regular. And there is a mosque right next door which broadcasts ultra-loud chanting through speakers, starting at 4.30am! On the plus side there was a tokay gecko living in my bathroom. At the supermarket I had to buy a Pocari Sweat to see how it tasted – it turns out its like a very weak L&P (for overseas readers, that would translate as a very weak fizzy lemonade). I’ve also seen the first feral pigeons of the trip: not exactly a thing of earth-shatteringness but its just interesting because usually you see them in every single town you go to anywhere on the planet.

I didn’t do much the first day in town, just went for a short walk in the late afternoon to see if I could see any birds south of town. I came across what appeared to have once been some sort of beachside park but which is now neglected and overgrown and inhabited by some rather unpleasant-looking feral dogs. Not many birds to speak of. At the hotel I sorted out a boat to the island of Rinca for the next day. Most of the town is geared towards getting tourists out to see the Komodo dragons; there are tour operators every few metres down the main road. At the hotel three guests had already organised a boat to take them over to Rinca and then to the resort island of Seraya Island, so another girl and I both joined in the Rinca section of the trip. With the five of us the price per person was only 140,000 (about NZ$25 or so). To that has to be added the National Park permit fee of US$15 for 1-3 days (US$25 for 4-8 days which is what I got because I’m gong to Komodo as well in a few days), 20,000 rupiah for the entry fee to the park and another 20,000 rupiah retribution fee whatever that means (both doubled to 40,000 if getting a 4-8 day ticket). However there wasn’t a camera fee which I had read there was, so that’s something.

The boat ride (on the “Prima Dona”) took just two hours to Rinca. I had originally been planning on staying overnight on the island, but it was easier to just come back the same day. I’m running a bit over-schedule on this leg of my trip and the longer I spend in the Lesser Sundas the shorter the length of time I get in Sulawesi, due to having to be out of Indonesia on a specific date for visa reasons. So therefore I did Rinca as a day trip which worked out quite well. You only get about three hours on the island but the dragons are easy to see in that time and there is little birdlife there. The only reason I wanted to stay overnight was to try and search out a little rat called Komodomys which was only discovered in 1981 and as yet has only been found on Rinca, but the likelihood is that I wouldn’t be able to find it anyway so it was a small sacrifice.

Douglas Adams in his book “Last Chance To See” made the observation that the landscape of Komodo is reminiscent of the Komodo dragons themselves, in the way the brown barren hills are all rounded and pleated like the bodies and limbs of the dragons, and he is absolutely right. All the islands around the area look the same, and it takes very little imagination to see the dragon characteristics of the land-forms. The dragons of course are really giant monitor lizards which subsist on buffaloes, deer and pigs. On Rinca you walk up to the reception area where you get the permits and a room if you’re staying overnight, and there are dragons lying all around the huts like big scaly dogs. Its sort of like seeing them in a zoo in-as-much as they aren’t doing anything at all, just lying there in the shade, relaxing, gloomily watching the barred doves pecking around in the sand by their heads. Oh look another lot of tourists, they think, opening an eye to take a quick look then back to sleep again. You are required to have a National Park guide with you any time you are walking on Rinca or Komodo. There are a couple of trails near the “settlement” at Loh Buaya so the group of us went for a two hour ramble along a well-prescribed track, passing other lots of tourist groups with regularity. The Komodo dragon has a lot of mystique about it but it is really very easy to get to the islands (just a short inexpensive flight from Bali to Labuanbajo then a short boat trip) and probably thousands of tourists do it every year. Yet this sort of cheapens the experience. Seeing the dragons should be an awe-inspiring experience but the island is so thick with tourists that it becomes a rather pedestrian thing walking there with everyone else, pointing at a dragon, pointing at a macaque, pointing at a buffalo. I’m very glad I went and I did enjoy it a lot but it wasn’t the way I would have liked the moment to be. Apart for seeing the dragons sleeping round the huts, we also saw quite a few “in the wild” as it were, out in the bush, including a group languidly surrounding a buffalo with a great rip in its hindquarters where a dragon had nailed it. The buffalo was taking its stand in the middle of a waterhole while the dragons basically just sat around on the banks looking at it, waiting for it to die. Like a tourist in Labuanbajo surrounded by tour operators.

After we left Rinca we stopped off for snorkelling on some tiny island I can’t remember the name of, where I went for a walk in the forlorn hope there might be Nicobar pigeons somewhere on there. Turned out the island was privately owned and regular people were only allowed on the beach which measured all of fifty metres in length. I found a path leading off the beach but someone came along and told me to leave because only guests of Reefseekers Bungalows were allowed up there (even though he also admitted the bungalows were still being built and the place wouldn’t be open till next year). Then we dropped off the others at Seraya lsland and I travelled back to Labuanbajo on the Prima Dona in the dark through the disappointingly non-phosphorescent sea, almost half-expecting to run aground in the maze of islands and reefs and have to spend the night on a sinking boat. Once back at the harbour I had a fun obstacle course jumping from my boat to another one, climbing through that to its front, then jumping to another boat and then another, and then shinning up a too-delicate ladder to get onto the wharf, all in the dark.
 
still on Flores....

I guess I should start this entry by contradicting what I wrote in the last entry, about Labuanbajo being an unfriendly town. I’ve been here a number of days now and the locals have gotten used to me walking back and forth around the streets looking for food and water, and now they’re always smiling and saying hello and asking how I am. So I have decided that its not an unfriendly town but rather a town full of unfriendly tourists. That may sound weird, me being a tourist myself, but I’ve watched the way most of them interact with the locals and they are just downright rude. Not all of them of course but a good percentage. If I was a local I’d be a bit sick of it all too.

Its so flaming hot here that you can’t do anything for most of the day. Even just walking down the road to get food or internet leaves you as drenched as if you’ve fallen in a swimming pool. Basically I go out early in the morning if I can muster the gumption, look for birds for a couple of hours until the heat starts building up (at say 8 or 9am), then I go lie down somewhere in a congealing pool of sweat and dirt until evening. How the British and Dutch managed to survive in Indonesia without electricity for fans is beyond me.

The two days after the Rinca visit were a complete bust as far as finding wildlife was concerned. There were two birdy spots I wanted to visit, Potawangka Road and Puarlolo, both fairly close to Labuanbajo and both technically easy to reach. The problem is that it is impossible to get anywhere very early by using the local buses, and hiring someone to take me places would cost more than I’m willing to pay (I guess I’m just not a very dedicated birder!). I tried going to Puarlolo first, which is where the endemic Flores monarch flycatcher lives. I had been told I could just wait at the crossroads at the end of town and hitch a lift but the only people who stopped wanted exorbitant amounts in the region of 300,000 rupiah (about NZ$50). So I went back to the hotel and discovered that by then there were a whole row of buses waiting about ten metres from the door. Every bus that goes from Labuanbajo to Ruteng passes Puarlolo because there’s only one road. The first bus I tried went to Ruteng and it was all good until I said I was only going as far as Puarlolo, then suddenly the bus was full. The second was also fine to start with but then the driver tried to tell me they actually don’t go past Puarlolo after all, which got some indignant responses from some of the other passengers, so he changed tack and said it would actually cost 100,000 rupiah to Puarlolo not 20,000 They obviously didn’t want someone on the bus taking up room that could be used for someone paying to go all the way to Ruteng, and at this point I got fed up and went back to the hotel for breakfast, and then went to Potawangka Road by motorbike instead. By this point it was already late morning and I wasn’t even sure at what point on the road I should be in order to find the target birds (Wallace’s hanging parrot and Flores crow) so I got off at the first patch of forest and then walked for several hours without really finding anything at all. The second day I dutifully went out of the hotel to try to get a bus to Puarlolo for the second time - and there were no buses! Eventually one drove past, I flagged it down, and then we proceeded to drive in circles round town trying to pick up non-existent passengers. I think there must be some mysterious Friday void where nobody uses the buses in Flores. Anyway, I didn’t get to Puarlolo till 10am and again the birds were all at siesta and I got nowhere with my searches. Rather than consider those two days as miserable failures I instead decided to call them reconnoiters for later visits.

Potawangka is only about 10km out of town so its readily accessible by motorbike. I decided to try my luck there a second time, but at a proper birding hour (6am), and as I stepped out of the hotel a bus to Ruteng passed by – right after I’d finished complaining that you can’t get anywhere early on the local buses! I stuck to the plan however and went to Potawangka Road. I got the driver to stop at what seemed like a good distance into the forest, and as I was paying him a hill mynah landed in a nearby tree, a bird I’ve wanted to see in the wild for years. So it was a good start. It took about two hours to walk back to the main road (it was downhill) and I saw a couple more of the birds that were on my most-wanted list, the red-cheeked parrot (like the hill mynah, a bird I’ve wanted to see for many years) and the Flores crow. Seeing a crow may not sound very exciting but this particular crow is only found in one region of Flores and nowhere else on the planet. Also its not all brash and in-your-face like other crows, its very shy and wary although I did see five of them that morning. They don’t exactly slink away when they realise you’ve seen them but its as good as.

A bird I didn’t find that morning was the Wallace’s hanging parrot, a little wee thing about the size of a sparrow. When I was a boy I read about this bird in Joseph Forshaw's brilliant encyclopaedic book "Parrots Of The World" and decided that one day I would go to Flores and see them. The bird itself isn't overly exciting to look at, mostly green with a bit of red, much like any of the other species of hanging parrots actually, but it wasn't the appearance of the bird that intrigued me it was the text in the book. The copy I have now, published in 1989, has a text column of only about ten centimetres that basically consists of a description based on the one known museum specimen, a note about some eggs that probably belonged to another species entirely, and just three sentences on its life history that starts off with stating that its "a mysterious bird, about which almost nothing seems to be known, and the type is the only specimen that I could locate." Since then of course Flores has become more accessible and birders go there reasonably often so I'm a bit late to the party, but that's all right because I never liked parties anyway. With all that in mind, for a third morning I returned to Potawangka and for a third time I failed to see a hanging parrot. Actually that third time I didn’t see the crows or hill mynahs either although there were lots of other birds in evidence. I’m going to keep searching…stay tuned for more failure!

People may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned the Flores giant rat for a while. The reason for that is that I’ve stuck it into the too-hard basket. There’s almost no information available on the internet or in books about it beyond its size and colour; even its habits and where it lives on the island seem to be unknown or at best educated guesswork. Absolutely nobody I spoke to about it in Ruteng or Labuanbajo had any clue what I was talking about. My searches in the forest were equally unrevealing. In the natural history museum at Bogor (in Java) there is apparently a stuffed specimen and I think that when I get there in September that will be the closest I will come to seeing a Flores giant rat with my own eyes.

The rat isn’t the only thing I’m having trouble with. I can’t seem to get to Komodo Island!! I could hire a boat just for myself but that would set me back somewhere in the region of NZ$200 and I can’t justify that. I’ve been sitting around waiting for some more tourists going to Komodo so I can join in and we all distribute the cost to everybody’s advantage. But nobody’s going to Komodo, they’re all going to Rinca because its closer and cheaper to reach. Its very frustrating! Some people said to me this morning that they’re going to Rinca because everybody goes to Komodo and therefore Rinca is more select and quiet. What rubbish! They read that in some guidebook and the reality is the exact opposite. I haven’t found a single person actually going to Komodo except a group of birders who refused to let me join their boat!!! How ironic is that?

Finally I have to mention last night when I was in the restaurant at the hotel waiting to be given food, and a medium-sized (about 20cm) tokay gecko fell from the ceiling to the floor and sat there looking a bit stunned. After a couple of seconds he recovered its composure and scuttled straight up my leg, round onto my back and then up onto my shoulder where he sat for the rest of the evening, either being under the impression that I was a tree or that he was actually invisible. I named him Mr. Tokay Gecko. He did little to keep the mosquitoes at bay.
 
Hi Chlidonias,

I really enjoy the little notebook excerpts you keep writing on your Lesser Sunda part of your trip. It seems like a true adventure (I get the travel bug jitters when reading and want to go out there myself .... :D, if only my holiday time is already up and gone)!

How long are you still down for in Flores before you go on to Sulawesi and elsewhere in the Indonesian archipelago?

Will try and pm or e-mail you soon!

K.B.


Post scriptum: I agree totally on your comments re tourist behaviour in Labuanbajo (it is SO exemplary of those that will not go with the local flow and actually talk to or take in or with them the locals in their endeavours on an equal basis)!
 
This is a fabulously entertaining thread - looking forward to your next entry. Hope you make it to Komodo!
 
Kifaru Bwana said:
How long are you still down for in Flores before you go on to Sulawesi and elsewhere in the Indonesian archipelago?
Click to expand...
actually by my schedule (which is flexible to a certain degree) I should have been in Sulawesi a week ago! I would prefer to be there already but I'm hooked on continuing to look for Lesser Sunda wildlife that I can't find (namely the hanging parrot and giant rat, damn them to Hell!). I have a fixed departure date from Sulawesi (the 27th of July) so I think I'm only going to end up with three weeks on Sulawesi which isn't nearly enough time; I had been hoping for five weeks but the Lesser Sundas are taking up all my time, and now it appears I can't leave Flores for quite a while even if I had to due to no flights or boats being free. Go with the flow while in Indonesia or you'll go insane!
 
tiny parrots and giant rats, part II

For the fourth morning running I headed up Potawangka Road in search of the Wallace’s hanging parrot. Its interesting going through villages early in the dawn because it gets quite cool overnight, so you pass the villagers all squatting in blankets along the roadside, like snakes basking in the stored heat of the tar-seal. This time I had some information from a person in town that the place to go was all the way up to the village of Tebedo, twice as far as I’d been up before, and there I could see the parrots in the trees about 300 metres past the village. But again no luck. It didn’t help that unbeknownst to me at the time, my motorbike driver took me right through Tebedo and onto the next village so I was in completely the wrong place anyway. As I was walking back along the road, having just passed through the real Tebedo, I passed a man walking from the other direction who stopped to talk. As it turned out, Frans as he was called, knew exactly where to find the hanging parrots because he often took people to see them (“all the time, tourists come from all over, always want to see nuri – nuri, nuri, nuri – why they all want to just see nuri?”). As it happened it was too late in the morning by the time I met Frans and the parrots would be all back deep in the forest, so we arranged for me to come back that afternoon at 5pm when apparently I would be assured of seeing them in the trees outside the village. As we sat in his house drinking coffee and discussing parrots and other birdy things, I threw my usual question out there, about whether he knew tikus (“mouse”), and yes he did; did he know besar tikus (“big mouse”)? Yes, yes, this big, he says, holding his hands apart at exactly the right distance to show the size of a Flores giant rat. They live in the cave, he says, motioning to the forest behind the house, and they also come into the village to eat the coconuts. I asked just to be sure, they were found here in this area? Yes, yes, their name is bitu, or in Manggarai (the local language) beco. This seemed like a wild stroke of good luck, finding both of my absolute most-wanted Floresian animals in one fell swoop. But you know what they say about getting your hopes up before your chickens are cooked… or something.

In the afternoon I returned to Tebedo with ample hopes. The motorbike driver I got this time must have had a few too many spills off his machine because he was the most singularly dim-witted person I have ever met. I explained to him where I wanted to go a couple of times, then we set off in the wrong direction. I explained again, and we set off in another direction. I got him to pull over and explained again, and again, and again, masterfully resisting the urge to just head-butt him in the back of the skull. I don’t think it was my Indonesian that was the problem because this was the fifth time I’d been to Potawangka Road and every other driver had understood my directions first time. We finally set off in the right direction, and every few minutes he would swivel round to repeat the instructions to be sure he understood; that was when he wasn’t trying to up the arranged price mid-trip that is.

At Tebedo there were no parrots in the trees. We looked at the fossilized tree trunk sections that litter the ground. Frans asked me what the name was in English of a particular tree growing there and I said I didn’t know, and he said in Indonesian it is called kapok which I found etymologically amusing. The kapok is a South American tree and the name comes from Tupi-Guarani (a local American Indian language); it got transferred intact to English and obviously from there to Indonesian, and now the Indonesians consider it to be their own native name! Because there were no parrots there at that moment Frans said he’d show me the “big mouse cave” so we hiked off into the forest for about ten minutes. The cave wasn’t really a cave as such anymore, more like a large overhang, but it had obviously once been a cave as there were big stalactite formations in there. Along the back wall were various small openings to burrow-like cave systems which looked like good hidey-holes for giant rats. Frans pointed to a large burrow in an earth bank. “Landak” he announced. “Oh”, I said. Landak is a porcupine and while I haven’t seen a Sunda porcupine before it wasn’t really what I was after. Were there bitu here as well? I asked. Frans shrugged and said “sometimes” in a very non-committal sort of way. On the way back to the road to see if the parrots had arrived he was saying “July, August, September, many many nuri, all the time”. “And now?” I asked, knowing what he was going to say. He shrugged and said “sometimes” in a very non-committal sort of way. “Sometimes,” I repeated to myself, perhaps a bit too sarcastically. Back at the road we wandered around all the trees in the area until dark but no hanging parrots came. Then we returned to the cave to see if any bitu would come out. It took a bit longer to get there than last time because we got lost in the dark, but eventually we found our way. No bitu came out and neither did the landak. I don’t blame him. With the amount of noise we made bashing through the undergrowth he probably thought we were coming to knock him on the head for dinner.

The ride back to Labuanbajo was pretty scary on a motorbike that had a slow leak in the front tyre, a wobbly back wheel, and was obviously running out of petrol, not the best of combinations when on a deserted mountain road in the middle of the night several hours walk from the nearest settlement. Every so often there would be little ‘chinks’ as bits fell off the bike, probably something un-necessary like wheel nuts. Once on the main road it was even worse because nobody dips their lights for approaching traffic and you can’t see a thing. I kept expecting to get swiped by the side of a lorry or to just run right off the edge of the road. When trucks went passed they kicked up clouds of dust that absorbed the beam from the headlight (when it was working that is!) so there was just a wall of lit dust ahead.

So as yet no hanging parrots and no giant rats. They may or may not eventuate. Something that definitely didn’t eventuate was the boat to Sulawesi. The guy who was going to sell me the ticket kept pressing me to give him the 300,000 rupiah for the ticket and I was adamant he needed to make a reservation for it first before I was handing over that amount. As it then transpired, the boat leaving on Thursday didn’t go to Sulawesi at all, it was going to Maumere (another town on Flores), the Sulawesi ferry wasn’t going till the 12th of July which is too long away for me. There may or may not be another ferry that goes weekly to Sulawesi but I can’t get a firm answer on that one from anyone. I thought I had a boat rounded up to Komodo tomorrow as well, but as that turned out the other guy who was “definitely” going had in fact only said he was thinking about going, so I don’t think that’s leading anywhere either. And all the flights out to Bali so I can then fly to Sulawesi are fully-booked for quite a way in advance (because there are so many tourists in this town) so I may be stuck in Labuanbajo for even longer. I’ve already been here a week, and the longer I’m here the less time I will have in Sulawesi. Everything’s getting more and more frustrating as the days go by.
 
Hope your keeping safe Chlidonais... Sounds like a great trip so far, enjoying the wild places while they still exist... What is Christchurch Aquarium doing without you..? Kids must be tapping on the glass like crazy, pronouncing latin names incorrectly... Pure madness...
 
Tiny parrots and giant rats, part III

There was only one thing for it now that I knew where both the hanging parrots and giant rats should be found - I went back to Tebedo the next evening (after yet another unsuccessful morning visit) and stayed the night in Frans’ house so I could be “on-site” as it were. There were still no parrots that afternoon (I wasn’t really surprised at all). I had taken my field guide to show Frans the birds. When he got to the page with the elegant pitta on it he exclaimed “oh, very expensive bird this one, 500,000 in the market. A couple of years ago people came with big nets to catch these birds to sell.” I asked if there were still elegant pittas in the Tebedo forests and he said no.

According to Frans the best time to see the giant rats would be at the caves at 11pm. So well after dark we set off into the forest. We waited and waited and waited. I had been getting up extra early, even for my usual earliness, to be up Potawangka Road at dawn to try to find parrots for the last however many mornings in a row, so I was literally falling asleep on my feet while standing in the dark. No bitu came out. Eventually we left the forest and tried the coconut groves near the village. Still no joy. Still, I had managed to gather some information on the rat that was otherwise mostly unknown to me. Its Manggarai name was bitu (or beco but nobody else seemed to have heard that one before) and its Indonesian name was tupai which actually means “squirrel” so it was obviously a transferral in the same way that the English named birds in New Zealand and Australia robins and wrens because they needed familiar labels for unfamiliar things. Funny thing was that previously I hadn’t found anyone who recognized the giant rat from my description but as soon as I could now say its name was bitu everyone knows it. Nona’s brother-in-law had flat-out told me in Ruteng that there was no such animal in Flores, but the other day I said it was called bitu and he and his wife were both suddenly like “oh we know bitu, it eats the coconuts” etc. Other info I discovered was that it lives in caves (or presumably any sizeable burrow or hole), comes out well after nightfall, mostly lives in the forest but also comes into villages after food, climbs coconut trees to get the fruit, apparently it jumps well. The locals hunt it opportunistically if they discover it in the village, but its quite dangerous to try to catch because of its very large teeth. Dogs sometimes kill them too. Somewhat disturbingly I was also told a few times that "when I was a boy" the bitu were common but now they aren't seen so much. Not exactly enough to write a scientific treatise on, but more than I knew before. However I have pretty much run out of time so that would be the last time I would be searching for the Flores giant rat.

The next morning I made my last attempt at the hanging parrot. They say that the eighth time’s the charm (actually third time’s the charm but I’ve always been a bit slow). But even eight tries couldn’t get me the hanging parrot. They simply weren’t in the area at this time of year. Next month sure, but not this month. At least I can say I didn’t give up easy!

I have arranged my transport out of Flores for tomorrow, with a seven hour ferry to Sumbawa, eleven hours overnight by bus across that island then another ferry to Lombok, then another bus and another ferry and another bus so eventually after two days non-stop travel I arrive in Denpasar in Bali. It costs 350,000 rupiah, as opposed to around 900,000 for an aeroplane, so it saves on money but not so much on comfort I should imagine. I didn’t find the Wallace’s hanging parrot, I didn’t find the Flores giant rat, and I never did manage to find a boat to Komodo to join in on which is annoying because its pretty much the only place now where you can find lesser sulphur-crested cockatoos because they’ve been hunted out for the pet trade over the entire rest of their range. The ferry to Sumbawa does pass by Komodo I think, so maybe I’ll see little white specks in the distance as the boat sails past.

Today I thought I’d use my last day on Flores for a visit to Istana Ular, the “snake palace” as it translates to. A Google search will give a better idea of what it is but basically it’s a big cave system filled with both small and huge pythons as well as loads of bats. What better way to end this leg of the blog than with descriptions and photos of monstrous pythons coiling round stalagmites and swallowing bats? As far as I could gather from information sites and local people, you take a bus on the Ruteng route but getting off after two hours in Lembor, then get a motorbike to take you most of the rest of the way followed by a 40 minute walk to the cave. The bit from Lembor to the cave was supposed to take an hour in all. Also you were supposed to have a local guide because of the sanctity of the cave. Sounded easy. I told the bus driver I was going to Lembor to go to Istana Ular. I was expecting Lembor to be a small town so when the driver told me to get out at a few huts I was a bit surprised, but he said this was Lembor and I use one of the motorbike’s there to go to Istana Ular. This was where the confusion started because after the bus left it turned out that none of the ten or so people at the stop spoke any English whatsoever. I can use some Indonesian for relatively simple things like asking prices, directions, etc but I’m very far from fluent so it works best for more complex things if the other person speaks a little English to go with my little Indonesian. As it transpired, this wasn’t Lembor at all, I was still 7km before there, but one of the motorbike owners knew where Istana Ular was and he would take me there for 100,000. I asked if I needed a guide to go in the caves and then things got very fuzzy as far as understanding went because he thought I wanted to arrange a guide as well, rather than me simply asking if I needed one or not. Eventually after much back-and-forth he said he’d take me there. We set off down a very very bad road of broken rocks for maybe fifteen minutes, then he pulled into a village. Hello what’s going on here then, I think. Turns out the driver didn’t know where the cave was, he was taking me to a person in the village who spoke English. So that’s where I found out that the road to Istana Ular was a very very VERY bad road, much worse than the one we’d just come in on, and furthermore it was an hour and a half ride from where we were and then an hour’s walk before reaching the cave. It was already 11am by this stage and with this new information I had to accept that I wouldn’t be going to Istana Ular. On any other day maybe but I had to be back in Labuanbajo before 5pm to sort some stuff out; and I couldn’t stay overnight in the village as offered because I was leaving the next day for Bali. And because Fate sometimes just likes to kick you in the groin, it also turned out that the guy that spoke English, Yohanes, worked as a guide in Labuanbajo and was taking a group to Komodo the day after I’ve gone. Even without going to the cave I still didn’t get back to Labuanbajo till 2pm. The bus completed its run at the bus terminal instead of going all the way into town. The Labuanbajo bus terminal has to be the most inconveniently-sited bus terminal in the entire world. Its almost 10km outside town and because the buses cruise round Labuanbajo itself picking up passengers before leaving, by the time they reach the terminal they’re invariably almost or totally full already, so nobody seems to really use it except for when going to side villages. A bemo from the terminal into town costs 3000 rupiah. I know because I’ve taken them a few times when coming back from Potawangka Road. So when the bemo driver insisted it would cost 20,000 I at first thought I’d misheard what he said, so he repeated it. I said 3000, he said 20,000, I told him where he could go and took a motorbike instead. It was not the best way to end my last day on Flores.

But to end on a more amusing note is the way to go. I’ve been perusing some Indonesian/English dictionaries, as you do, and they really are quite funny. There are often very obscure English words like “burgomaster”. From the Indonesian translation I worked out that “mahlstik” was a paintbrush and “manatma” was a young noble, but “mickle” just left me confused (the Indonesian translation was banyak which means “many”) as did the English translation for pacar (boyfriend or girlfriend) which was given as “a plant”. And what was I to make of the English word “ditf”??

There’s also an awesome soap opera on tv here which seems to be playing every time a set is turned on, called “Kasih & Amara” (which I think translates as “love & affection”). For a long time I thought there were only four characters on the show and even though I can’t understand what they’re saying their acting is so appalling that I can’t stop watching. Most of the time I can follow it even with the language barrier, but the other day the evil sister (Kasih) appeared to turn Amara’s husband into a paraplegic by putting some white mice on him, then they put him in a bath of blood for some reason, and then Amara and the mother buried him in the garden up to his neck in an effort to cure his affliction (and then they forgot they’d buried him so he stayed there overnight). All very strange but very entertaining!
 
final words from the Lesser Sundas...then Sulawesi !!

So I finally left Flores, via a ferry to Sumbawa. After five hours we came up to Sumbawa and I thought "oh that was quicker than expected" but two hours later we were still chugging slowly along, gradually getting closer. I can only swim in one direction (straight down) but even I could have got to the island faster if I'd just jumped overboard. Once at Sape, the harbour town of eastern Sumbawa, there was a mini-bus waiting to take us to Bima from where the regular-sized buses left from. Seeing that the mini-bus was packed to the gunwales with locals I innocently asked if there was a second bus. "No. One bus. You ride on top. Is OK" was the reply. So three other tourists and myself all clambered up onto the roof with all the luggage. Its a normal sight to see the buses with locals perched nonchalantly all over the roof and hanging off the sides but it isn't really normal to see tourists doing the same. All the way through the mountains to Bima an hour away, the roadside locals stopped and stared in absolute astonishment. Not the usual "oh look tourists," type astonishment but the gob-smacked "what the hell -- the tourists are on the roof!!" type astonishment. In actual fact, so long as the road is good then the roof is a much nicer way to travel because you're not squashed in like sardines, and the view is great. Sumbawa is really beautiful with its mountains and forests and rice-terraces, sort of the way people picture Bali except its real and not just trickery to get tourists to visit. The following bus ride wasn't as nice, overnight the length of the island on an alternately good/not so good road that was so snaky that you couldn't really get much sleep without risking being thrown out of your seat. Part way through we stopped at a roadside restaurant for food. I was sort of surprised that we were getting a free restaurant meal; I was more surprised that it was at 1.15 in the morning. Then there followed a two hour ferry crossing to Lombok before dawn, on what seemed to be rougher seas than the previous strait, and another bus ride to the next harbour. This ferry to Bali took "four to five hours", which meant four hours to cross then an hour sitting outside the harbour waiting clearance to enter. But there were halfbeaks around the boat which was good (for non-aquarium readers, halfbeaks are a type of fish), and on the crossing I saw my first flying fish which are amazing things, looking like small birds or bats skimming across the surface. In Bali the bus dropped everybody off somewhere in the middle of Kuta not at the actual hotels as promised, so I had to walk for over half an hour through the night to get to the Bali Manik Hotel, where I'd stayed last time I was on Bali. That morning I'd done something I don't usually do, and that was pre-book the hotel room, because I knew it was high-season in Bali and there were millions of tourists everywhere. So imagine my disbelief when I turn up at the hotel and am told that there are no rooms, they are all full. I tore a number of good-sized strips off the guy at the desk, even though it wasn't his fault (but I had been two days without much sleep or food, and I had just been dragging my sorry carcasse half-way across town, so I was in a bad mood). I wandered the streets for a long time, passing many other be-packed tourists in the same situation as me, and finally after about twenty hotels I found one with a single solitary room left unoccupied, which cost 350,000 rupiah (about NZ$62)!! Unless I wanted to sleep in the gutter like a drunken Frenchman I had to take it. So once again Bali had stabbed me in the throat with a sharpened pencil. I loved Sumba and Timor and Flores, even with the ups and downs, but I really do not like Bali one little bit. Early the next morning I set off to find another hotel but no-one knew whether there would be any check-outs till noon, and as Fate would have it I actually ended up back at the Bali Manik Hotel. On a happy note, I was pleased to see that the nutmeg finches that live in the palm tree outside the rooms have raised a family while I've been in the Lesser Sundas.

[I should note here that I do realise there are much nicer places to stay in Bali than Kuta but I am only there for a couple of days so it is convenient in that there are cheap backpacker accommodations and its close to the airport.]

Today I purchased a ticket for tomorrow to Manado (Sulawesi) with Lion Air which is almost a million rupiah cheaper than the flights with Garuda. I guess I'll find out the reason why tomorrow. I haven't seen a new bird for well over a week now (for non-birders, a "new bird" is simply one that I haven't previously seen in the wild), but that will change as soon as I get to Sulawesi! Now that my time in the Lesser Sundas (Nusa Tenggara) is over, I thought I’d take the time to write a little summary of my time in these islands.

Kuta is a little hell-hole of avarice and gluttony where everyone does their best to claw as much money from everybody else as they possibly can. But get away from there and head eastwards away from the other tourists into the Lesser Sundas and it’s a whole other world, the way Indonesia should be, the way it was in my head. A lot of people still see you as a walking ATM but not to the same degree, and everybody without exception was as friendly as could be. There was the guy in Waikabubak who drove me all round town on his motorbike looking for an elusive National Parks office. There was the staff at the Hotel Alvin in Waingapu who paid for my taxi to the airport for no reason at all. And there was likewise a guy on the plane from Sumba to Timor who randomly paid for my taxi from the Kupang airport into town. Not the sorts of things you’d get in Bali!

The natural heritage of the Lesser Sundas is in a parlous state. The relevant forestry departments aim to protect the forests but have little effect it seems on its continuing destruction. Things seemed slightly better to me on Timor and Flores than on Sumba, probably as a consequence of them being larger islands, but everywhere the lowland forest is almost gone, only the mountains retaining any large stretches. All the islands I visited had wild introduced populations of crab-eating macaques, presumably originally brought in as pets, as well as pigs, deer, giant land snails, tokay geckoes, black-spined toads, etc. Poaching is still a regular occurrence. In the reserve at Bipolo on Timor the forest was frequented by wood-cutters, one of whom I passed mimed pointing a rifle into the canopy to ask whether I was there to shoot birds. Even without hunting, once the forest is eaten away to scraps then the birds will all die out anyway, a connection that most people didn’t seem to understand. I was asked at one point why if the owls weren’t being hunted they were still becoming rarer. Basically what it comes down to is, if you want to see the birdlife of the Lesser Sundas, get there as soon as you can because it won’t be long before its all gone.

Some interesting things I discovered in my month in the islands:
1) Credit cards are useless except at ATMs and sometimes even then. Even when purchasing flights from the airline companies you need to get out the money from an ATM first and then pay the seven or eight hundred thousand rupiah in cash.
2) Everybody is very friendly and you’ll always have somebody wanting to sit next to you on the bus or help you out for no other reason than that they want to practice their English.
3) Being a birdwatcher elicits no surprise at all. In fact it seems to be accepted as a completely normal activity for a foreigner to indulge in.
4) Travelling alone, however, IS considered to be very odd, especially if you are spending time in the forest. I was constantly being asked wasn’t I afraid to be in the forest alone, and that it was very dangerous to be by oneself.
5) Every single person has a cell-phone and no matter how remote the location there always seems to be perfect reception.
6) Britney Spears is the most popular person of all time.
7) I've seen so many chickens crossing roads that even I've grown tired of making witticisms about it, and I can't translate any of them into Indonesian so nobody but me gets to appreciate them anyway.

Indonesia is not as cheap a destination as I had been led to believe. The prices quoted in the latest Lonely Planet, which was my pre-trip research guide for working out how much everything would cost me, are way off, quite often by 200 or 300 percent. When I had first arrived I was shocked at the discrepancy between what my pre-trip research said and what the reality was. I had thought it was because I was in tourist-infested Bali, but even in the Lesser Sundas away from most tourists everything is just as expensive. I am hoping my funds will stretch (just) to the end off the five months but its going to be a squeeze.

And finally to finish, I have discovered that Anak Krakatau, the volcano between Java and Sumatra that I was to be visiting later in the trip, has been erupting constantly -- hundreds of times in fact -- since June and it is currently on a level three alert meaning no fishermen or boats of any kind are allowed near.
 
I've put a few photos here Indonesia - Wildlife Gallery » ZooChat but only a few (Komodo dragons and a pet olive-headed lorikeet) because the upload times here are devastatingly slow. I've actually got very few animal photos so far anyway because most of the wildlife in the Lesser Sundas is birds and they aren't well-adjusted to the presence of people who don't want to shoot them.
 
Hi Chlidonias,

I thoroughly enjoyed the trip report so far and it must have been incredibly mucho mas enjoyable to you! And I am really looking forward to your Sulawesi and Kalimantan parts of the trip.

I will probably go out myself to Sulawesi in 2010 (not yet decided whether spring or autumn timing) and go out on some anoa-babirusa research ... with the local and international science folks. So, that part will have much scrutiny on my part. Will pm later I guess.

Cheers,

K.B.
 
Tangkoko National Park, north Sulawesi

My plane into Manado in the north of Sulawesi went via Makassar in the south. I was told I would just stay on board because there was no change-over but in Makassar everyone had to get off, go to the transfer desk, get a new ticket and then reboard exactly the same plane with the same air-hostesses. It was very strange, I’ve never come across that particular way of doing it before. In Manado I stayed for the night at the Manado Bersehati Hotel because I arrived in town at about 11pm. It’s a nice hotel, quite cheap, has a tv in the room so I can watch Indonesian soap-operas, an internet café, travel agent, etc. The chap at the desk offered to take me to the village of Batuputih which is where you stay for Tangkoko National Park, my first wildlife stop for the island, for 100,000 rupiah on his motorbike the next morning. I had been going to go by local bus which would only cost around 40,000 (before the usual “tourist taxes” as I like to call them) but involves several transfers and would take twice as long, probably around four hours, so I took him up on it.

First stop in Manado though was the fish market to see if there were any coelacanths there. The coelacanth’s a fairly famous fish, thought extinct for 60 million years or so then sensationally rediscovered at the Comoro Islands off Madagascar in 1938. A good while later (in the 1990s) further populations were found off Madagascar, South Africa, Mozambique and other nearby countries. That seemed to be that as far as the coelacanth was concerned but then quite unexpectedly an entirely new species of coelacanth was discovered off north Sulawesi of all places. In fact its probably quite likely that there are coelacanths all round the world in suitable deep-water localities but the local fishing techniques need to be very specific to catch them so they’ll generally remain unknown to anyone. That there would be a coelacanth at the fish market on the very day I visited was of course hovering somewhere close to zero, especially given that only two specimens of Indonesian coelacanths have ever made their way into museums (in 1998 and 2007, to Java and Japan respectively) but imagine how aggravating it would be to not bother checking it out and then finding out later that there had been a coelacanth at the market on that morning!! I had a wander round, seeing everything from parrotfish to barracuda, but no coelacanth. Much as I suspected.

Before getting there I had for some reason been expecting Batuputih to be in the hills but its actually a coastal village. The National Park is rather dry lowland forest but there are also a couple of sizeable volcanoes there (the main one of which is called Tangkoko). There are at least five homestays in the village and a surprising number of tourists coming and going (most usually on day-trips up from Manado) but it’s a relatively expensive place to be a birder. I can see Sulawesi as a whole costing me an arm and a leg because the format is pretty much the same in all the National Parks. You stay in a homestay (which at Mama Roos in Batuputih is 200,000 per night, which is a typical price), but then you are also required to have a guide whenever you are within the boundaries which for a whole day birding is 250,000 (around NZ$47-odd). At Tangkoko you also need to make a boat trip into the mangroves to see the endemic great-billed kingfisher, which is very expensive when by oneself, at a fixed-price 300,000 for the boat and 100,000 for the guide. Fortunately I did see the kingfisher (two of them in fact) otherwise I would have been pretty grim-faced on the return, but the pair of Sulawesi masked owls (like really big barn owls) that live in the nearby cliffs and are almost always reliable to see, were roosting elsewhere that day.

Now that I’m out of the Lesser Sundas my mammal list is starting to pick up a little. I missed the small cuscus and bear cuscus at Tangkoko so I’m hoping for them in some of the other places I go to, but I spotted two species of dwarf squirrels (Prosciurillus murinus and P. leucomus), the crested black macaque and the spectral tarsier. There are four intermingling troops of the macaques in the general area where the public are, two or three of which mainly hang out around the Tangkoko Research station funded by the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle in 2002 but now to all appearances used as a fishing camp. There is a lot of rubbish strewn all over this area, even though the Park staff clean it regularly. Apparently the bulk of it is left by Indonesian tourists coming in to see the monkeys.

The other main attraction at Tangkoko for regular tourists, both local and international, are the spectral tarsiers. There is a strangler fig in the forest where three tarsiers live. I went along there on the second and third evenings to see them. It really is a circus. The first evening there were about 25 other people there. Their guides were walking back and forth in front of the cleft where the tarsiers hide, periodically shining their torches up inside to see if they were coming out, which seemed rather a counter-productive sort of behaviour when waiting for a nocturnal animal to emerge from its den. When one tarsier did come to the opening, immediately a barrage of camera-flashes went off in its face. It sat stoically in place, no doubt blinded, then edged round to another opening, followed naturally by all the cameras. It was really sad to watch. On the one hand you couldn’t help feeling sorry for the little creature but on the other hand this happened every evening and if it was too disturbing to them then they would go find somewhere else to live (like all the other more sensible tarsiers had done, apparently). And of course it did keep all the people at this one tree and away from all the other tarsier roost sites. It’s six of one and half-a-dozen of the other really. I tried taking about ten photos without a flash with no result, so even though it makes me a massive hypocrite I took one photo with a flash. I’m not proud of it but it was a drop in the ocean amongst all the other flashes, and the way I see it when I die I’ll be judged by the Tarsier God and he will decide on whether I suffer eternal Damnation for my actions. The second night was better because there were only about five other tourists, they took their snapshots and left, and I stayed behind with two girls doing their university theses at the Park (on the macaques and the local bush-meat trade respectively) who were also doing a tarsier survey recording the numbers of people at the tree each night, the people’s behaviour, the effect on the tarsiers – such as how long it took them to come out, when they started vocalizing, etc. Just before dark the three tarsiers all came right out of their holes and bounded off through the trees like tiny arboreal kangaroos. It was really amazing to see. Before leaping they urinate on their hind feet and then rub them together to make the soles sticky for the landing, an action that results in a very amusing little bottom-wiggle. Tarsiers are my new favourite mammal that I’ve seen in the wild (the previous was the Kitti’s hog-nosed bat from Thailand).

The birds in Tangkoko are all amazing. I was surprised how few small ones there were though. In most forests there are flocks of white-eyes and babblers and all sorts flitting through the canopy and flycatchers sallying back and forth, but in Tangkoko with few exceptions most of the birds were larger species. My first full day birding was fantastic, with rare and endemic birds literally falling out of the trees and into my pockets (well not “literally” obviously but as good as). I saw three red-backed thrushes, described in the field-guide as uncommon and difficult to see, the fabulous yellow-billed malkoha (one of my favourite bird groups, malkohas), lilac-cheeked and green-backed kingfishers, the extraordinary finch-billed or grosbeak starling, silver-tipped and green imperial pigeons (the latter with a strange rufous nape unlike in the rest of its range), excellent views of a pair of perched red-knobbed hornbills, and most surprisingly a pair of lesser sulphur-crested cockatoos. I had been disappointed not to be able to get to Komodo to see these and I really hadn’t been expecting to see them anywhere else, especially not in Sulawesi where they are so close to extinction. On the morning after I went about ten kilometers back up the road from the village to where there is a viewpoint over a forested valley. At first nothing much was happening here and I was thinking that it was going to be hopeless without a scope anyway, when a Sulawesi hanging-parrot landed in the tree right above my head, and then a pair of the gorgeous yellow-breasted racquet-tailed parrots sat in full view on an exposed branch. Then we heard the curious call of the Sulawesi dwarf hornbill and eventually tracked down five of them in the trees right beside the road, the females all black and the males with stunning yellow faces. On the way back to Batuputih a Sulawesi black pigeon landed in nearby tree, the sun showing off all its iridescent glory. The rest of the day was somewhat slow bird-wise with notable sightings only of several bay coucals, a zonking purple-winged roller (yes I know, “zonking”: I’m running out of toothy descriptives to head up the bird names), and ashy woodpecker.

I wasn’t long at Tangkoko, just one afternoon and two full days due to my restricted time in Sulawesi, but it’s a great place, fully deserving of a longer stay. The local villagers are all well aware of conservation issues and take care to protect their forest because it brings in the tourists and the guide fees go straight into the village, but disturbingly most of them still eat bush-meat regularly, including monkeys and cuscus (bush-meat is the meat of wild-caught animals). They don’t hunt in the National Park because that would be wrong, instead they buy the meat in the market at the nearby-ish town of Tomohon. There seems to be no connection in their minds between the two. You may wonder where the bulk of that meat comes from – that’s right, the National Parks. At Tangkoko the rangers are always finding snares in the less-visited regions, set for warty pigs, monkeys, birds, you name it and its on the menu.

Photos of tarsier, lilac-cheeked kingfisher and black-crested macaque in the Indonesian wildlife gallery
 
Kifaru Bwana said:
I thoroughly enjoyed the trip report so far and it must have been incredibly mucho mas enjoyable to you! And I am really looking forward to your Sulawesi and Kalimantan parts of the trip.

I will probably go out myself to Sulawesi in 2010 (not yet decided whether spring or autumn timing) and go out on some anoa-babirusa research ... with the local and international science folks. So, that part will have much scrutiny on my part. Will pm later I guess.
Click to expand...
I have been enjoying it immensely, even though I like to complain about things :D
So far Sulawesi has exceeded my expectations, awesome place!
I'm aiming to get to Nantu Reserve to see the babirusa and hopefully anoa but it is an extremely expensive destination as it turns out so I may not be able to stretch it. I may be able to get there with a guy I met who's taking a client there, which would bring the cost down somewhat, so here's hoping.
 
Bogani Nani Wartabone National Park (north Sulawesi)

My second destination after Tangkoko was Bogani Nani Wartabone, formerly known by the more-easily remembered name of Dumoga-Bone. Nani Wartabone was a local hero who was an anti-Dutch guerilla. I'd read on the almighty internet that instead of staying at Kotamabagu as birders usually did, one could now stay at a guesthouse in Toraut about an hour further on from Kotamabagu (itself about three hours south from Manado) and right on the boundaries of the park so much more convenient. When I was at Tangkoko the first of my required guides was Samuel, regarded as the best there for birding but he got sick after the first morning so was replaced by Antri, who told me that the guesthouse in Toraut was called Tantemin and he would ring them for me and arrange the stay. I also met another guide called Bobby at one of Tangkoko’s other guesthouses, Tangkoko Lodge, who was taking a Belgian client to Nantu Reserve for babirusa-spotting and he said he would see about whether I could join in (thereby making it affordable for me to reach the expensive destination). He also knew of Tantemin and said he’d ring me there once he got the yay
or nay from his client.

So I set off for Bogani with high hopes of as good a wildlife experience as at Tangkoko. Travelling in Sulawesi really is a breeze, especially compared to some of the other places in Indonesia. I took a motorbike from the hotel to the bus terminal, which turned out to be not so much buses as 4-wheel drive Toyotas that fit about 8 or 9 people. The real buses are probably even cheaper but a seat in the taxis is only 45,000 rupiah (about NZ$8) and much more comfortable. Once in Kotamabagu several hours later the driver pulled over a bemo. As far as I could make out from the exchange, the bemo would take me to another place from where I could get a motorbike to Toraut. I really couldn’t follow the conversation properly but I got in the bemo and set off without a clue where I was, where I was going, or where my bag of expensive optics and lenses had gone (it had disappeared up the front somewhere while I ended up wedged in the back rear corner, but there wasn’t a lot I could do about it). My pack was put on the floor as an extra seat for other passengers. It’s a strange sort of feeling being on a bus not knowing where you’ll end up but really the worst that can happen is that you’ll have to spend the night in some random town and get to your true destination the next day.

After an hour we pulled into a town and all the passengers left on the bemo got off. I said that I now needed to go to Toraut, to which the response was did I want to go somewhere that sounded like “wallis”, which I didn’t understand. I said I was going to Tantemin, which they didn’t understand. After a few tries I wrote it down and they’re all immediately like “Oh! Tantemin!”, pronouncing it to my ears in exactly the same way I was pronouncing it. I get on a motorbike and head off again, not for a long trip as I thought, but just up the road and round the corner. So there was the Tantemin guesthouse, where they were actually expecting me although it wasn’t Antri that had booked me in but Bobby. Nice guy. So far so good but I was still puzzled by certain things. By the end of the day I had discovered that the town I was in wasn’t Toraut at all but Dolodua. When Antri and Bobby had said Tantemin was in Toraut I think they must have been meaning just that that’s where they stayed when visiting the forest at Toraut. Which also explained how the internet report had said there were several species of forest owls around the guesthouse at night whereas Tantemin was in the middle of a village. Another thing that had initially been puzzling me was that in Manado I had been warned off staying in Toraut because it was too dangerous (its an illegal-gold-mining town and apparently the miners regularly get drunk and kill one another!) - yet I’d been thinking how friendly everyone was in this drunken miner town! And of course it also explained all the confused reactions I got when saying I was going to Toraut but then said I was going to Tantemin. (To wrap it all up, the guesthouse at Toraut is actually run by the national park people and is called Wallacea, hence the “wallis” questions).

The next day came another instance of mild confusion over destination. Every birder that goes to Bogani goes to a place called Tambun to see the nesting grounds of the maleo, a big megapode that buries its eggs in volcanically-heated soil for incubation. They are now very rare over most of Sulawesi due to the usual scenario of over-hunting and in this case, over-collection of the eggs. After their visits the birders write reports on the internet for the benefit of other birders (because we’re an agreeable bunch) but they all just write something along the lines of “went to Tambun in the morning to see the maleo”, which is all well and good but doesn’t actually help in letting you know where it is or how to get there. I thought I had it sorted in Manado when someone told me that Tambun was the name of a nearby village and easily reached by motorbike, and I envisioned a small coastal village with a black-sand beach beside it where the maleo came to congregate. The owner of Tantemin had, I thought, arranged a motorbike for the next morning at 5am to take me to Tambun and she also said that I didn’t need a guide to visit, both of which were wrong. In the morning she said I had to walk to the terminal and get a motorbike from there, so I set off down the road thinking that this was pretty stupid because it was still dark, but there was one bike there. He said I needed a guide at Tambun, I said I didn’t, he no doubt said the Indonesian equivalent of the sarcastic “um, OK then buddy”, but he took me anyway. Riding on the back of a motorbike in the dark in the tropics isn’t very pleasant because instead of little weeny insects like in the daytime you are constantly getting hit with huge katydids and beetles and owls. There are few things more painful than having a rhinoceros beetle hit you in the eye at 50kph. Tambun turned out to be not a village at all but the name of a site within the national park where the only building is the guard post and I did in fact need both a guide and a permit. After a lengthy wait a guide was rustled up and we entered the nesting grounds, which are completely enclosed with a padlocked mesh fence to keep out pigs and dogs and poachers (the maleo can fly over the fence of course). Rather than the black-sand beaches where maleo are normally photographed and filmed, Tambun is inside a geothermal area of forest, complete with boiling-water streams. There were nest holes everywhere but, as misfortune would have it, I was outside the main breeding season. In fact my visit coincided exactly with the very absolute lowest point of maleo activity in the area! In high season you can easily see five or six pairs at once as soon as you arrive, but now all I saw were two distant birds scuttling rapidly off into the lantana thickets. The view wasn’t good enough for me to be able to say I’d “seen” them - I wanted to get a good look at them for that - so it was disappointing but that’s the way it goes sometimes.

At Tambun all the eggs are collected every afternoon and buried inside hatchery cages to protect them from predation by monitor lizards. In the high season they collect 50 or 60 a month on average; in the low season only a handful. There were two chicks ready for release that very morning. They were a day old and about the size of guinea-pigs! I got to hold one to release (you know, doing my bit for conservation) and it flew like a pigeon off into the scrub. The eggs of megapodes are so big and take so long to hatch that the chicks are fully-developed upon hatching. I did know they could fly as soon as they had dug their way out of their nest-holes, but it was still pretty amazing seeing it in action with my own eyes. I was tempted to count that chick as me having seen a maleo (after all, it was wild as soon as it left my hands) but I decided that would be cheating.

There are three sites you have to visit at Bogani as a birder. As well as Tambun there is also Toraut which is primary forest, and Tapakulintang (trying saying that fast!) where you just walk along the main road through the forest looking for birds in the trees either side. I went to both of the latter and in both the birding was very very poor. I’m sure that’s not always the case but it certainly was when I was there. At Toraut I stayed out till after dark to look for owls with no luck at all. Owl-hunting really is a fool’s game. The guide was all like “normally there’s owls all over the place here!”. I did find a green tree viper coiled up in a palm frond about eight metres off the ground. I’ve seen six snakes on the trip so far and all of them have been dead on the roads, starting with a metre-long baby reticulated python in Bali, so this was the first live one. One of the guides (there are always two for some reaosn) cut a big long stick and headed for the tree. Either he thought I would want a closer look at it - and having an extremely-venomous agitated snake landing at my feet in the dark isn’t my idea of fun - or more likely he was going to knock it down and kill it, which I would have liked even less. I told him to put the stick down.

I only had a short stay at Bogani (two days) due to time limitations (ie visa expiry date approaching), so I used the last afternoon to have a final go at the maleo. We hung around the nest sites for a while but when we heard a male maleo calling up in the forest we went in after him. For the next several hours we scrambled about in the jungled hills, once even coming close enough to hear a maleo dashing off into the undergrowth. Tracking down another calling bird we found only its scratchings in the dirt and a solitary white feather. So I’d seen the nest holes, seen two distant un-tickable birds, seen an egg, released two chicks, heard maleo calling, heard maleo running, found their scratchings, found a feather - surely that must all add up to the same as one good bird? There wasn’t much daylght left so we had to give up. As we trudged wearily back to the road we suddenly, almost literally at the last minute, spotted a maleo perched in the top of a tree about ten metres above us preparing to roost for the night. Through the binoculars it was as clear as day, the sun’s final rays illuminating its unusual rosy-pink belly as if it had perched there specifically for that very reason. Then its mate flew in to join it and together they strutted about on the branches, snaking their ridiculously small heads about as they called back and forth. Seeing a maleo on the nesting ground on the first try would have been good, but these two birds were so much better because of all the effort we’d had to put in to see them. Is the maleo the best bird of the trip? Yes it is.
 
Nantu Reserve, north Sulawesi

One of the more unusual animals in Sulawesi is the babirusa, which is a type of big hairless pig with four big tusks in the males. The lower pair of tusks grow out from the sides of the mouth like a regular pig but the upper pair grow straight upwards through the snout, curving back towards the eyes like horns, hence the name babirusa which is Indonesian for "pig deer". Because babirusa are quite large creatures and tasty to eat they are now very rare over the entire island. In fact the only place where they can still be seen with any regularity is at a place called Nantu Reserve near Gorontalo, which is where I headed after Bogani Nani Wartabone national park. The only reason the babirusa are still found in any numbers there is because of a constant police presence to protect them. There are always three guards in the reserve, patrolling to stop poachers. The ones there during my visit all looked about eighteen years old, and seemed to spend the entire time playing with their AK47s, having ping-pong matches, and listening to an interesting selection of Bryan Adams and Whitesnake songs. Nantu is a very expensive place to get to. Just as an example of the costs, the three-hour motorised canoe trip up the river to the reserve's camp is currently 500,000 rupiah each way. I was told that because there are no fixed prices the costs go randomly up or down according to the whims of the local people involved. Apart for the cost of the boat, there are also the hefty permit fees from the forestry department and the police, the required park guide, the local guide, etc etc etc. The rooms at the camp there cost 200,000, the price of a homestay elsewhere, but at Nantu getting you a mattress on the floor. You have to take your own food and pay the cook to prepare it (although as everyone was eating the same food at the same time I'm sure there's an unneccesary step in there somewhere!). There is no toilet -- and I don't mean there was no toilet in the room, I mean there was physically no toilet. The river is the toilet, and also the bathing area. I'm not too sure that using the river as a toilet is really very environmentally-sound so during my stay I did my best to avoid polluting the local water sources!

As previously mentioned, at Tangkoko I had met a chap named Bobby who was taking a Belgian guy to Nantu to see the babirusa and I managed to wrangle my way into the visit. It cost me the equivalent of three weeks of my budget for four days and they were some of the more uncomfortable days I've spent in a long time but it was totally worth it (although I may change my mind about that at the end of my trip when I run out of money and have to sell my kidneys). I could probably have done it a bit cheaper on my own but realistically I don't think I would have even made it because the whole journey there turned into a complete shambles. First stop from Gorontalo was the forestry department to get the permits there and then the police in Limboto about twenty minutes drive away to get more permits. Although the visit had already been arranged weeks in advance it still took two full hours to get these sorted out. If you don't speak Indonesian (or aren't travelling with an Indonesian) it would take considerably longer! Then it turned out that the river was too low for the boat to make it; or rather it could have made it if we spent half the trip pushing it over the rocks. Bobby was not exactly happy with this as he had been in touch with the national park guide every day for the last few weeks and it had never been mentioned. There is a road to Nantu but it was so bad that the car Bobby had brought from Manado couldn't make it (he having assumed that we would only be driving as far as Mohiolo on good roads to get the boat). We did our best but eventually had to ditch the car at a little cluster of huts and try to find some motorbikes. Normally its not hard to find a motorbike in Indonesia but, as it turns out, it is when there are five of you! This was about where we were thinking we were going to be ending up back at Gorontalo with no Nantu. Eventually we did manage to round up five bikes for I have no idea how much money, and we took off for an hour's ride over what could have been an extreme motorcross track. The river was low because it hadn't rained in months but you wouldn't know it from the road we were on. Some stretches were just broken rocks but mostly it was kilometre after kilometre of quagmire. No joke, at one point we passed a truck abandoned in the road up to the top of its tyres in the mud. Then inexplicably for the last ten minutes the road turned to perfect seal, but by that stage of course we all looked like Swamp Creatures. Then there was a raft across the river, half an hour over another very bad road in what had in a former life been a Landrover, another half hour of walking through rice paddies and corn fields, a wade through another river, and finally we reached the Nantu Reserve just after dark, after ten hours of travelling.

The babirusa site is just fifteen minutes walk from the camp. Its a big clearing in the forest overlooked by two hides, one at ground level and one about tree-top height. A little stream runs through the clearing and the babirusa come here through-out the day to drink and wallow in the mud. At some points there were fifteen or twenty babirusa in the clearing at a time. We only had two full days at Nantu, so for the first day I took the top hide and for the second the lower, alternating with the Belgian. The upper hide was, shall we say, none too comfortable. The roof was about four feet high and the viewing hole was at a perfect height if you were a squatting Indonesian. They can squat all day long because they've been doing it all their lives but for westerners it gets very painful after a short period. Worst were the ants though. As soon as I climbed inside the hide they swarmed all over me with stings like burning needles. For an hour they kept up the assault until either I'd killed them all or they had suffered such heavy casualties they'd decided a strategic withdrawal was the best strategy. When I returned to the hide after lunch they launched another offensive, obviously not realising I was the same formidable opponent as in the morning. I was wondering how the Belgian was getting on in the other hide, because he wasn't really a jungle type of person, but the next day when I had the lower hide I realised he'd been in comparative luxury. The roof was over six foot high, there were no ants, and there was even a seat at a perfect height to see out the window.

There were LOTS of babirusa at the site, and they were in a remarkable array of colours: dark grey, pale grey, pale grey with pinky legs and bellies, wholly pinky-brown, blotchy in pink and grey, and even some that were almost chestnut. They're hardly the most attractive of animals. From a distance they somewhat resemble hippos with their skinny legs and fat bodies. Otherwise they're rather like a cross between a tapir and a mangy dog. Very odd creatures. There were also Heck's macaques at the site. These have grey bellies and lower legs, and look very different to the black crested macaques of Tangkoko. The black cresteds reminded me of small gorillas (and the males even develop silverbacks), but the initial impression of the Heck's macaques is that they resemble chimpanzees. Very occasionally people see anoa from the hides at Nantu. Anoa are a type of dwarf buffalo endemic to Sulawesi. Like the babirusa they are very rare due to hunting and I wasn't expecting to be lucky enough to see one, so you could have knocked me down with a maleo feather when an anoa stepped out of the jungle, looked around, had a bit of a wander and then disappeared again. I got some photos to prove I saw it but frustratingly they were all shockingly out of focus. Around the camp there were also Sulawesi warty pigs which were much smaller than I had been expecting. For some reason the young ones kept reminding me of super-sized elephant shrews but I'm not sure why.

So, excellent couple of days. Well worth the expense, especially (at the risk of sounding like a wildlife-spotting snob) as it isn't an everyday experience like the Komodo dragons on Rinca where every man and his dog can go. Hopefully the area remains protected but as they are currently building a bridge and fixing up the roads I fear it won't be too many years before poachers have gained easy access and come in and wiped the babirusa and anoa out here as well.


Photos of babirusa, anoa, etc in the Indonesian wildlife gallery
 
Lore Lindu National Park, central Sulawesi

The late Douglas Adams, when journeying to Komodo, wrote something along the lines of "Everything we were told in Indonesia turned out to be not true, sometimes almost immediately." He didn't mean it literally of course, but its pretty damn close.

After returning to Gorontalo from Nantu I had time to grab a shower because I smelled like a babirusa, then it was off to catch the night bus to Palu in central Sulawesi. It takes about 14 hours to get from Gorontalo to Palu and while there is a day bus its basically a waste of a day. The night bus would save me that time, and also the money for the hotel that I'd be paying otherwise, and I'd be able to get to Lore Lindu National Park a day earlier. Lore Lindu is one of the most important protected areas in Sulawesi, home to almost all the species of mammals and birds on the island, but because of my restricted time in Sulawesi I was only getting two full days there instead of the seven in my original plan, so any extra days I could get I needed to take. The bus left at 5pm. It was actually going to Makassar right down the bottom of Sulawesi, so I'd be getting off at Toboli and then taking another bus from there for two hours to Palu. I was told we would be arriving in Toboli at 7am the next morning, which seemed about right. As I soon found out the night buses on Sulawesi are not like the night buses elsewhere in Indonesia where they take on their load of passengers and then travel non-stop through the night to their ultimate destination. Instead they are just like the regular day buses except in the dark. There is no sleep to be had because all the way along the route they are stopping to pick people up and fill up with cargo. The position you are in is the position you stay in for the next ten or twenty hours because you are packed in amongst sacks and boxes and other passengers. Its like a mobile Tetrus game with people. And just in case anyone does try to sneak in a few winks, there is deafening Indonesian dance music played constantly. Some stupid woman had brought on her to kids who were infected with chicken-pox or small-pox or something, and they spent the whole trip rubbing against everything and everybody they could. I can't remember if I've had chicken-pox or not, but so far no symptoms....

At 7am the bus was passing through a town called Tomini and I had one of those moments where you wonder "did I somehow mis-hear Tomini as Toboli, and I'm supposed to get off here?". At 8am we pulled into a petrol station and I asked the driver how far to Toboli. Two hours he says. At 11am I had pretty much given up any hope of getting to Lore Lindu that day. At 1pm the bus finally came into Toboli, after a full twenty hours on the road!! I was in Palu by 3pm but it was too late to do anything about Lore Lindu except go to the central office and get the permits sorted out. The night bus had saved me almost no time at all.

The main site at Lore Lindu for birders is the Anaso track which goes straight up a mountain. As I said in relation to Tangkoko National Park there is a stunning lack of small passerines in Sulawesi's lowland forests, but up in the mountain forests there are loads of them. Its a very striking contrast, and its the reason the Anaso track is so important for people looking for as many of the island's birds as possible. With only two days in the park I decided to spend the entire time on this track. In every National Park in Sulawesi (and indeed in most of Indonesia) you are required to hire a park ranger as a guide any time you're within the park's borders, which works out to be very expensive when ninety percent of your trip is spent in National Parks. The guide I got was called Idris. He appeared at first to be a good guide for a birder but after a few bad ID calls, a lazy attitude which really isn't on when you're paying someone good money for their presence, and some other stuff which I'll talk about a bit later (and some stuff I won't talk about!), by the end of my stay I was well and truly fed up with him. But, the birds were great. The Anaso track is really a rough road that used to be a four-wheel drive track. Now its completely impassable to even motorbikes due to slips. One part in particular is now just a narrow ridge between two great chasms where the track has literally disappeared down the mountain-side. Some of the trees in the chasm still had green leaves on them they had been toppled so recently. I really wouldn't be surprised if that part of the track is gone entirely within the next year and nobody can get up to the top. Some of the best birds there were the fantastically-beautiful purple-bearded bee-eater, the Sulawesi pigmy woodpecker, the red-eared fruit dove, the beautiful fiery-browed mynah, and a wierd thing called the malia which is always described as being "babbler-like" so I was surprised how large it was. Best bird of all though is the one I was most hoping to see, the fearsomely-named satanic nightjar. Its also called the diabolical nightjar and, somewhat less-dramatically, Heinrich's nightjar. It was only discovered in 1931 when one specimen was collected in north Sulawesi and then it wasn't seen again until one was spotted by a birder in Lore Lindu in 1993 and then a few more times in 1996. Now that people know where to find it every birder that comes to Lore Lindu sees them. They sleep by day on the ground and fly at night after moths. I've seen a few species of nightjars now but always in flight at night (identified by their distinctive calls) so I wasn't prepared for how awesome they are when you see them in daylight. Really nice birds, now my favourite bird of the trip (move over maleo!).

At the top of the Anaso track is another small trail that leads to the top of Mount Rore Katimbo. Visiting Rore Katimbo has been a dream of mine for as far back as I can remember -- well, 20th November 2008 anyway, because that was when gentle lemur posted a thread and I found out about the existance of the pigmy tarsier which is only the size of a mouse. The first specimen found was collected on Mount Rano Rano in 1916, the second on Mount Rantemario in the south in 1930, and then it vanished into the depths of scientific obscurity until 2000 when a third was caught on Rore Katimbo. More were trapped accidentally by rat-researchers on Rore Katimbo in 2008 and the news made it to my ears, coincidentally just when I was preparing my trip itinerary. So onto the schedule went Rore Katimbo. I didn't know if I'd have any chance of success but it was worth a shot. There are actually three different species of tarsiers in Lore Lindu. The Lariang tarsier is found in the west of the park so was out of my reach, but the Dian's tarsier is found commonly throughout the lowlands and the pigmy tarsier up on the tops of the mountains. I had wanted to try for both the Dian's and the pigmy but with such limited time as I had I decided to just concentrate on the pigmy. I had been talking non-stop about the pigmy tarsier since meeting Idris for the first time, and he said he'd actually seen them himself on Rore Katimbo, so we set a plan to go up Anaso on the first morning for birds then do the detour to Rore Katimbo in the afternoon to stay until night for tarsiers. I had found out shortly before leaving New Zealand that the pigmy tarsiers were also found on the upper reaches of the Anaso track itself (some birder was complaining on the internet that tarsier researchers had disturbed the habitat of the geomalia so he couldn't find it, boo-hoo), and Idris confirmed this. So anyway, on that first afternoon I asked Idris how far it was from the top of Anaso to the top of Rore Katimbo, and he says "1.3km. Do you want to go there tomorrow?"
"No, today," I say
"Oh, OK," he says back with a note of surprise as if this is the first he's heard of it.
So we set off up the Rore Katimbo track into thick dripping cloud forest. Great wads of moss covered every surface; it was surprisingly close in appearance to the mountain beech forests in New Zealand.
"Did you bring a torch?" I ask him
"No."
"Ah. Well I've got mine." I would have thought he would have brought one too if we were up there at night. It was a bit strange so I ask, "You do remember I said we were staying up here till after dark to look for the pigmy tarsiers?"
"On Rore Katimbo?"
"Yes, here."
"No, there are none here."
"Yes there are. You even said yourself you've seen them."
"Me? No."
"You said you've seen them before!"
Blank stare.
"Have you seen pigmy tarsier?" I pressed
"Yes."
"Here?"
"No, on Anaso." (This despite him having specifically said "some person" had seen them on the Anaso track but he himself had only seen them on Rore Katimbo).
In any event the track up Rore Katimbo was not the sort of track you'd want to be coming down at night by torchlight and Idris was adamant that he wasn't going to be leaving his motorbike down on the main road at night, so the tarsier search that night was a bust. But at least I had stood at the rubbish-strewn top of Rore Katimbo and seen the tarsier's habitat. The next day we returned to Anaso in the morning for birds and this time I had made sure we were staying put for nightfall, although I had decided in the interests of safety that we would look around the top of the Anaso track rather than the top of Rore Katimbo. According to Idris this was where he'd seen them, and also apparently people regularly saw them around the camping site there which sounded a bit suspicious but it could well be the case. You can't have cloud forest without fog, and the fog there is amazing. One minute you'll be standing looking at the view, then you turn your head for a few minutes and when you turn back all there is in front of you is a white wall of mist. You also can't have cloud forest without rain, and boy did it rain! I think I've only once in my life seen rain heavier than on the top of the Anaso track and that was at Khao Yai National park in Thailand. With rain that heavy there's no point looking for birds so we just stood on the top of the mountain waiting for dark. Idris kept complaining that he was cold and wanted to go but I ignored that. Some people when they want to see some wildlife go to Africa and look at lions and elephants from the comfort of a safari jeep. Not me, I have to be a dumbass and go looking for obscure things like giant rats and pigmy tarsiers that really don't want to be found, in obscure places where the only comfort is that you're not dead.
"So where-abouts did you see the pigmy tarsiers?" I asked
Blank stare.
"The pigmy tarsiers -- where did you see them?"
"I don't know what you mean."
"When you've seen pigmy tarsiers, where exactly have you seen them?"
Blank stare.
"Have you seen pigmy tarsiers?" I asked in exasperation.
"Here?"
"Yes here!"
"Yes."
"Where exactly?"
"Oh, over there," he says with a vague wave of his hand towards the forest. Then, perhaps sensing my annoyance, adds "It was in 2001. We were mist-netting for the pigmy tarsiers. We did not catch any but I saw one. We put nets there, there and there. But now, I don't know if there are any here."
This didn't mesh with the dates I had found out before my trip but what do I know? On the other hand it sounded remarkably like he was making up stories. Because of the rain I decided we would head twenty minutes back down the track (now transformed into a series of mini waterfalls) to an anoa poachers' lean-to shelter and see if the rain abated. With the heaviness of it, looking for tarsiers in it would have been futile, and the shelter was near to the tracks the tarsier researchers had been cutting last year (although whether they had actually caught or seen any tarsiers on those tracks I did not know). In the shelter I asked if the anoa poachers got fines or jail time when caught by the rangers. Idris just laughed and said the rangers eat the anoa too. I decided it would be better for my state of mind if I refrained from asking if he ate anoa. In the shelter Idris was physically shaking with cold despite wearing four layers of clothing (but only jandals on his feet!). I felt a bit sorry for him but he knew what the deal was and this is what I was paying him for. And he still hadn't brought a torch with him!! I was only wearing a shirt and rain poncho and felt perfectly comfortable because in spite of the rain it was still about twenty degrees. After dark and much moaning from Idris that he was cold and wanted to go, I went off the track and into the forest. Idris refused and stayed on the track. There were no pigmy tarsiers to be found. I am fail.

The night wasn't a complete loss though. All the way back to the main road the track was littered with fallen branches and trees brought down by the rain (it was that heavy!). At one point a particularly large leafy mass was blocking the way and as I approached it a big black shape suddenly lurched up from almost at my feet into my torchbeam and lumbered off into the forest while I said words to the effect of "Holy Mackerel that's big!". It was a bear cuscus which is a type of possum, but not just any possum. The bear cuscus is far bigger than a possum has any right to be. Its like a wombat with a tail! Normally they are right up in the very tops of trees and I had been looking unsuccessfully for one for the last three weeks. I can only assume this one was on the ground because it had fallen with the branch. So I may not have seen the world's smallest tarsier but I finally saw the world's largest possum. I think it may well eclipse the spectral tarsier as my favourite mammal ever!

The next day I had to return to Palu for a flight to Makassar at the bottom of Sulawesi, but I had the morning free and I wanted to spend it looking for Tonkean macaques. Idris said they were common in the plantations and he knew right where to find them. They weren't there. A local farmer came past and said the macaques were only in the plantations very very early in the morning and in the late afternoon (basically when there weren't any people around to shoot them); during the day they were off in the forest. So we set off for the forest. What Idris didn't tell me was that there were no trails through the forest around Wuasa village where I was staying. We headed straight up a hill, the sort of hill where when someone is standing in front of you their feet are at your eye-level, hacking through vines and bamboo and spiny palms. Once at the top we headed straight down the equally steep other side. It did cross my mind that Idris was getting back at me for keeping him on the mountain after dark the night before. There was no way we were going to see any macaques with the amount of noise it took cutting a path through the jungle, so the macaque hunt was a waste of time. On the downhill side we came across six snares, four set to catch macaques and two for ground birds. I destroyed them all, which Idris found immensely amusing which I suppose it was because doing away wth six traps isn't going to make much of a difference but it had to be done. By the end I had a pocket-full of nylon rope and fishing line. On the way back to the Sendy Inn where I was staying we stopped off at a house where they had a pet Tonkean macaque chained to a tree so I could at least see one and get some photos. It was a poor sad creature, eating despondently from a bowl of rice, leading a miserable existance. I asked where the people had got it from, knowing full well the answer but wondering what they would say with Idris the park ranger standing there. They said they had got it as a baby from the forest after shooting the mother for food.
 
final days in Sulawesi

Weird happening on the flight from Palu to Makassar: the airport Customs confiscated my two DEET insect repellant canisters because they were aerosols and therefore “dangerous”. They didn’t confiscate them from my hand-luggage, note, but from my check-in bag! This was the seventh plane I’ve been on this trip alone and I’ve been on countless others on other trips and this is the first time I’ve had insect repellant taken off me. I argued till I was blue in the face that all aerosols are flammable, including the deodorant which they did allow, but of course its Customs so you can’t do anything at all. It really ticked me off because in the jungle you need spray repellants for your boots and socks (for leeches, ticks and mites) and its hard to find good stuff over here. In complete contrast they don’t care less about people taking bottles of water and other liquids on board the plane. On the next plane I took, from Makassar to Kuala Lumpur en route to Borneo, I had inadvertently left my deodorant in my hand-luggage and even that went through without a comment.

Anyway, I basically had just one day in Makassar before leaving for Kuala Lumpur. I potentially could have gone up Gunung Lompobatang which is a mountain near Makassar and the only home of the little-known Lompobatang flycatcher which went completely unseen between 1931 and 1995, but I didn’t really know how to access the site and I knew it would have been a fool’s errand looking for the flycatcher anyway. The other site of interest to birders near Makassar is the Karaenta forest where I could see the black-ringed white-eye, a bird restricted to the south of the island. Karaenta is about ten kilometers past a little place called Bantimurung so that’s where I headed first to see if I could get a motorbike from there. But once there I learned that visiting Karaenta is now “forbidden” without police permission because of some trouble or other that had taken place there, so that was out the window. But Bantimurung is very nice, I was told: 2km of trails through good forest, a river and waterfall, lots of birds. Were there any monkeys? I asked, because the local species is one I hadn’t yet seen, the moor macaque. Lots of monkeys, I was told. I was right there at the entrance and it wasn’t like I was going to be doing anything else, so I paid the 10,000 rupiah entrance fee (less than NZ$2) and in I went. I don’t really know how to describe Bantimurung, its not really like any place I’ve seen in Indonesia before but it is very like many places I had seen in Thailand and Malaysia where anywhere there is even the tiniest waterfall it is made into a major tourist attraction, paths are laid, cave floors paved over, sculptures set up. At Bantimurung the river is actually very nice, flowing between great high limestone cliffs pockmarked with holes and caves and laden with lush vegetation, but there are all the man-made additions to make it as little like nature as possible. There was even a stereo system blaring out Limp Bizkit and System Of A Down of all things! On the wildlife side of it I came across a foot-long giant centipede which I got quite excited about. There were butterflies everywhere, both alive in the forest and by the dozen for sale in framed boxes all the way along the entrance road. Birds were notable by their almost complete absence, as were the monkeys which was a disappointment.

There are seven species of endemic macaque in Sulawesi (or eight if you split the Togian Island macaque) and potentially I could have seen six of them in the areas I would have been visiting. I saw the black crested macaque easily at Tangkoko, as I did with the Heck’s macaques at Nantu, but I completely missed the Gorontalo macaque at Bogani, the Tonkean macaque at Lore Lindu and now also the moor macaque at Bantimurung. The fault lay entirely with my poor time-keeping skills. I had originally been planning on spending three weeks in the Lesser Sundas and five in Sulawesi, during which time I would have spent a few days at Tangkoko, a full week at Bogani, a week at Lore Lindu, a week at Morowali, and a few days each at Nantu, Faruhumpenai, and around Makassar. However the schedule got reversed along the way and I ended up with just three weeks in Sulawesi so had to toss out Faruhumpenai (where I could have seen the booted macaque) and Morowali altogether, and cut the other places right down to just a couple of days each, meaning that there was no lee-way for finding animals that proved difficult. I did find some great animals along the way – stand-outs being the bear cuscus, spectral tarsier, babirusa, anoa, and a whole slew of endemic birds – but I also missed a lot that I could have almost certainly seen if I’d had more time up my sleeve. I think a return trip to Sulawesi is definitely in order at some stage in the future.

So that’s the first two months of my trip up already! Now its Borneo time!
 
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