Chlidonias goes to Asia, 2009

three and a half weeks to go, counting down....yes, I am going back to Asia on another trip in search of the world's wierd and wonderful wildlife. Its going to be mainly an Indonesian trip with some Borneo in the middle and some Thailand at the end. Because I will be away for over five months, from 29 May to 13 November, I shall not be posting much for quite a while.

Starting point is Bali because that's cheap to get to, but as Bali doesn't actually appeal to me overly much I'm just going to be there for a few days birding with a side trip to the Baluran National Park in east Java, then I'm off into the Lesser Sundas (aka Nusa Tenggara) where I shall be visiting Sumba, Komodo, Rinca, Flores and West Timor. Most of the wildlife I shall be seeking there will be of the birdy persuasion (eg, Sumba hornbill, Timor finch, Wallace's hanging parrot, etc) but the highpoints will undoubtably be the Komodo dragon and Flores giant rat (if I can find the latter).

Next stop will be Sulawesi for about a month, where the strange creatures are far too numerous to mention but include babirusa, anoa, giant civet, several species of tarsiers and macaques, bear cuscus, maleo, red-knobbed hornbill, etc etc etc. Some of the localities I aim to visit (depending as always on current accessibility, time and luck) include Tangkoko, Dumoga-Bone, Lore Lindu, and Morowali.

After Sulawesi I head to Sarawak (Borneo) to visit Bako and Mulu National Parks, then through Brunei and on to Sabah to hit Mt. Kinabalu, the Kinabatangan river and Danum Valley amongst several other places of interest. I'll be in Borneo for about one and a half months, then I'll probably have to sit around in Singapore for a while waiting on my next two month visa for re-entering Indonesia.

Once the visa is sorted I fly into west Java to do some animal-spotting in Gunung Gede Pangrango, Ujung Kulon, and some other little random places. There is of course absolutely no hope that I'll find a rhino in Ujung Kulon, but my motto in wildlife-spotting is that its always better to give it a shot and fail than to not even bother trying at all.

Krakatau (aka Krakatoa) is right next to west Java so I hope to be able to get across for a day-trip because you can't really be that close to Krakatau and not make a visit can you? I just hope it doesn't choose that day to erupt again.

Onwards to Sumatra, with just three key sites for me, spread over about three or four weeks: Way Kambas, Kerinci-Seblat, and Leuser National Parks.

After Sumatra I'll only have about a week or two before my flight home from Bangkok, so depending on time I may go to Taman Negara to find a Malayan tapir, and maybe go to the Cameron Highlands for a few days; then its up into Thailand where I'd quite like to make another attempt for Gurney's pitta at Khao Nor Chuchi (after a miserable failure to find any in 2006) and on to Bangkok.

And that's the plan. Because its a wildlife trip there won't be a lot of spare time for zoos but I shall be wanting to see the Bali Bird Park; in Borneo the Lok Kawi zoo and Kota Kinabalu aquarium (which was due to open in late 2008 but it keeps getting delayed, so fingers crossed); probably a few of the ones in Java and Sumatra; and I may make return visits to ones in Singapore, KL and Bangkok. I shall endeavour to keep this thread updated along the way with the animals I see and the (mis)adventures I have but it will of course be somewhat irregular. If I don't post for more than a month then I'm probably dead.

 

yes I shall be visiting Gunung Leuser National Park in the north of Sumatra (the other two sites in Sumatra I'll be going to will be Way Kambas in the south and Kerinci-Seblat in the middle). There are certain species restricted to the north of the island, notably the orangutan, Thomas' leaf monkey and Kloss' squirrel, so its quite necessary. Unfortunately it looks like I'll be hitting the rainy season in north Sumatra which may turn out to be tricky (potentially impassable roads, etc). All the rest of the trip works in nicely with the less-rainy seasons. Hopefully I don't get blocked out of Gunung Leuser.

 

I leave in two days (Friday). Here's a rough map I made of the route I shall hopefully be taking (starting in Bali and ending in Thailand):

 

Baluran National Park, eastern Java

I won't go into details but basically everything was going wrong when I arrived in Bali and after one day I'd had enough. To save myself from just throwing it all in and going back to New Zealand to spend the next five months watching tv, on just my second day in Indonesia I fled to Baluran National Park in eastern Java. Getting there entailed a tortuous three hours crammed into an Indonesian-sized space on an overcrowded local bus, and then a short ferry ride to Ketapang. I had then been anticipating another bus ride followed by a 15km walk to Bekol, the accommodation within the National Park, but I came across a tourist office right outside the ferry terminal and instead managed to get a ride in a car all the way there for 150,000 rupiah (about NZ$26, which is all right as it saved me the walk).

Baluran is quite a nice place. Most people I'm told just go there on day trips for a couple of hours duration, but the rooms are really cheap, albeit with no electricty so no relief from the million-degree heat. You need to take in all your own food and water so your stay is limited by how much you can carry. Due to lack of variety in the local shops I was subsisting almost entirely on dried noodles and tins of cat food (actually tins of corned beef, but it was much the same thing). Bekol is surrounded by savannah, although scrub has encroached upon it so much that its very hard to see any of the wildlife and what is there all seems very wary. The banteng (a type of wild cattle) were absent, apparently all up in the hills at this time of year, but there were lots of rusa deer and the ubiquitous crab-eating macaques. Green junglefowl crowed constantly from the scrub and there were green peafowl all over the show as well, although they were too skittish to get any photos of. I was surprised how readily they took flight when flushed from the sides of the roads; I would have expected them to run for cover but they always shot up into the air and flapped unconvincingly away across the bush. Other nice creatures I happened across included Oriental pied hornbills, tokay geckoes, and Javan langurs which are quite bizarre-looking with a big boofy hairstyle surrounding a very human-like face. Outside my room on the first night a common palm civet came visiting. I've only seen civets asleep in zoos before so it was very interesting seeing how it slithered across the ground and up into the trees like a great furry snake; much bigger than I would have thought too.

Now I'm aiming for Sumba. It looks very easy on paper - catch a plane to Waikelo, take a bus to Waikabubak and get a National Park permit, then another bus to Lewa where I look for birds - but I can guarantee its not going to be anywhere near as simple in practice.

 

Sumba -- where there is no internet

I set off for Sumba with excitement and a little concern. The plan seemed easy enough but I didn't know how it would go in practice given that my fluency in Indonesian didn't extend much beyond "punya pacar?" (do you have a boyfriend?) and "umur anda berapa?" (how old are you?). I got lots of small bills changed at the bank because the ATMs give the cash out in 100,000s which are of absolutely no use in the eastern islands (or pretty much anywhere else for that matter). Getting the money from the ATMs was a mission in itself actually, with the first three machines that I tried all rejecting me. The first said "cannot comply" or words to that effect; the second said to contact my bank (eep!); the third just spat the card back out at me, which is at least better than swallowing it completely I guess. Pretty worried by now - and after checking my online banking to make sure all my money was in fact still in there - I finally found a machine that didn't want to test me any further. Anyway, the upshot of all that was that I was now walking around with three million rupiah in small unmarked bills. Anyone want to paint a bulls-eye on my back?

The flight to Sumba was delayed by over an hour, and seeing as I'd just been talking to a Hawaiian family who's Merpati flight had been cancelled three days running I was a little apprehensive as to whether I'd even reach Sumba. Once off the plane at Tambulaka some guy hurriedly rounded up the six or seven foreigners disembarking and herded us off to a side building -- but when he found out I wasn't bound for whatever resort he was pimping, instead being some rare independant traveller, he lost all interest and abandoned me without a second word. And rare I appeared to be! On the way to Waikabubak every single person along the road stared almost open-mouthed, and in the town itself kids followed me around yelling "hello mister!" and giggling when I said hello back. The downside of being a rarity is of course that precious few people speak more than two words of English. I had been going to stay at the Hotel Arta which is apparently quite nice but its also more on the outskirts of town so I went instead to the Hotel Pelita, chosen for its relative closeness to the bus station, but also because its basically right opposite the police station and post office, both places which I figured would be likely points of enquiry as to the whereabouts of the parks office, which I had to find to get a permit for the Langgaliru National Park near Lewa where most of the endemic birds are found. It was easier said than done to find this office. I had "PHKA - Perlindungan Hutan dan Konservasi Alam" written on a piece of paper because everything I'd read called all the parks offices around Indonesia "PHKA offices". Turns out that (apparently) the PHKA office is in Jakarta and all the other regional offices are just called Departemen Kehutenanan ("Forest Department"), so my little note got me absolutely nowhere. But here's where blind chance -- or the hand of God, again -- came into play, because at the Hotel Pelita there was staying a chap from Ruteng in Flores who spoke perfect English, who went out of his way to help me out of pure kindness, driving me all round town on his motorbike and translating everything as we tracked down the elusive office. Of course I had to ask him about the Flores giant rat in case he knew of any localities but he'd never heard of it which was a bit unsettling. My initial plan for tracking down the giant rat when I get to Flores was to begin by asking the locals if they know where they are found. I figured that if there were rats the size of house-cats living in your area you'd probably know about it. I'll just have to hope for a better reaction once there.

The cats round Waikububak are all docked and invariably only have one eye. Docking the cats' tails is supposed to bring good luck. I'm not sure about the eye. The drug of choice round here, coming in second after cigarettes, is betel-nut. Apart from being addictive and carcinogenic, long-term use rots away the teeth and gums and stains the mouth bright red from the juice. Not only do betel-nut chewers look like they've just been smacked in the mouth with a baseball bat, but because it increases saliva production they are also constantly spitting streams of blood-red saliva into the street. The bus station-slash-marketplace, which is the main meeting point, as a consequence looks like a set from a zombie movie.

The next morning I went to the zombie bus station. All I had to do was catch a bus to Lewa and once there find what had been described on an internet bird-trip report as a "basic losmen owned by Cornelius and Katy Hary" (sic) who were used to the strange ways of birders. I figured that Lewa would have to be just a small town so it shouldn't be hard to track the place down. The guy in the Forestry Department had also said that lots of foreigners stay at a place called Mamariwu House, which I thought would likely be the same place. So, I go to the bus station and they tell me the bus is full (even though its empty) and I end up paying 50,000 rupiah to some guy with a car that he uses as a bus. I was pretty sure I was getting ripped-off judging by the way they were all laughing about it, but it was the same price as all the other passengers (locals) were paying and apparently it is a fair price, so I guess they were just laughing because I was a wierd tourist -- I was the only one in the whole town after all. We leave at eight, I'm told, but because its Indonesian time I sit around till ten then we drive round town a couple of times picking up and dropping off various other people, then sit at the station for a while longer. Eventually the guy comes up again and yells "go, go, go, now we go!"...in another half an hour apparently. There's all sorts of interesting sights along the roadside in Sumba, from the semi-skeletal colts tethered to trees to the millions of dogs roaming everywhere (except for the ones trussed up in the marketplace next to the goats and chickens of course). At one point two half-naked men charged past the car wielding seven-foot metal spears, obviously hunting something for the dinner pot, possibly a small foreign child. Once in Lewa the driver asked a few people for directions then dropped me right at the door of Mamariwu House which was indeed the guesthose owned by Cornelis and Kati Hary. In days gone past, any birders coming to Sumba had to stay in the main eastern town of Waingapu and hire a taxi and driver for the day to visit the forests around Lewa, but not any longer fortunately. I wrote my name in the guestbook and saw that just two days before I arrived, two birders I'd met in Malaysia in 2006, Conny and Ingo, had been staying there. They appeared to be doing the same route through the Lesser Sundas as I was, just a few days ahead of me. Funny old world.

Once settled into the most excellently pleasant surroundings of Mamariwu House I headed out to the forest via a short motorbike ride. Really all the forest birds of Sumba are doomed. The forest is being destroyed left right and centre, its over-run with introduced macaques, and poaching is rampant. Even protected areas like Langgaliru National Park are in reality composed of little more than isolated degraded patches of trees dotted about like islands in a sea of man-made grasslands. Even the biggest remaining stretches are just thick wedges either side of the main Waikabubak-Waingapu highway. The localities that birders visit are generally referenced by the kilometre posts of that highway. The one I went to on that first afternoon was km 51 (although I kept inadvertantly calling it Area 51!). I stayed inside the forest till after dark hoping to spot the small Sumba hawk-owl which was only discovered in 1991. I heard some owls calling -- along with the calls of great multitudes of the introduced tokay geckoes -- but none of them appeared within my torch beam.

The next morning I went on a longer motorbike ride, 45 minutes or so on what could only graciously be called a roughly-sealed road, to a place called Watumbelar in search of the citron-crested cockatoo, probably the most endangered bird on the island. Everyone I talked to about parrots said that maybe ten or fifteen years ago they were commonplace, in gardens and even coming into kitchens to steal food, but now they are rarely seen by anyone because they have all been hunted out for the international and domestic pet trade, a situation that goes not just for the cockatoo but for all five species of parrots on Sumba. The requisite National Park and local guides led me from isolated forest patch to isolated forest patch trying to find the cockatoos but all I got in return were cattle ticks burrowing themselves into my ankles.

In the afternoon it was off to another highway site, km 69. The National Park guide took me into the forest -- and got us lost! I was not impressed. I mean, I can quite adequately get lost all by myself for free! What was even funnier was that after an hour he finally admitted he had no idea where he was, and I had to lead us back to where we started from. Once back at the road he wanted to go straight back to town, but if I was having to pay to have him there then he was jolly well going to stay there till after dark so I could look for owls! As dusk fell I got some good flight-views of the recently-described Mees' nightjar, found only on Sumba and Flores, but the small Sumba and large Sumba hawk-owls refused to show themselves.

The next day was more of the same, along the road at km 69 to 71 (where the forest ended) looking unsuccessfully for the hoped-for Sumba hornbill, then back to km 51 in the late afternoon where I again saw no owls but did see a ricefield rat (and got my fingers filled with thorns struggling back through the scrub in the dark). In the morning I gave the hornbills one last try, once again without success, then had to give up on them and head off to Waingapu to make my way to West Timor. The hornbills will probably be extinct before I ever make it back to Sumba again, but being at Lewa was really the first time I've properly enjoyed myself on this trip, simply because I was out there looking for birds, doing what I came here to do, instead of just struggling to actually get anywhere. I've said it before but I hate the travelling part of travelling -- I like the bits in between the travelling.

 

thanks. I sort of prefer to make fun of my own ineptitudes when I write about my travels. It makes it more entertaining than if eveything goes according to plan. At the moment I'm in an internet cafe in Kupang where the fan doesn't work, it must be about forty degrees celsius, half the letter are worn off the keyboard, and the connection is so slow that its taken me twenty minutes just to log-in, go to the Asian forum, open this thread, then post this reply!!

 

into West Timor

Between the Merpati and Transnusa airline companies, planes leave Waingapu (Sumba) for Kupang (West Timor) every day of the week. But as I found out, they're all fully-booked days in advance which was a bit of a surprise. I went on the waiting list for the next day but there wasn't much hope of getting to Kupang before the end of the week. I had inadvertently found myself staying at the Hotel Elvin which was 275,000 rupiah per night (the cheaper fan rooms all being already occupied) so I was going to have to move to a much much cheaper place if I was in Waingapu for more than one night. However there was a surprise cancellation about quarter of an hour after going on the Transnusa waiting list and by a fluke I got on it, possibly at the expense of the locals who'd already been on the list before me. I had no time to go in search of the endemic Sumba buttonquail, so I really do need to come back to Sumba one day to see the birds I missed -- before they all become extinct -- but I doubt I'll ever be able to do so.

Because the Hotel Elvin is an expensive upmarket-type place -- marble floors, chandeliers, toilets -- they give you a free breakfast consisting of coffee, two pieces of toast and a boiled egg. And here's where I came across the most bizarre thing yet. When you travel in a foreign country you are constantly seeing things strange and new every day, but truly the wierdest thing so far was the green toast. Not green with mould, just entirely lime green, like white bread with food colouring added. Never before have I seen such a thing.

Regarding the buttonquail though, as I was preparing to leave the hotel James from BirdToursAsia walks into the lobby with his group heading to Lewa (Conny and Ingo are a few days ahead of me, but I'm a few days ahead of James). From what he tells me its very difficult to see the quail if you're on your own. If in a group, when you flush a quail you all surround it to get a look, but if you're alone you never get more than a quick glimpse of it as it disappears into the grass, so as I had already half-suspected I would have probably been wasting my time going looking for it anyway.

Check-in for the Kupang flight was at 11.30, but at that time the airport was literally deserted. There wasn't a single other person there except for me. At 11.45 some security turned up to turn on the lights and X-ray machines and so on. That's Indonesia for you. The check-in formalities seemed to be just that -- formalities -- because nobody paid any attention to the beeping as I went through the metal detector. They did strictly enforce the 5kg carry-on rule though, which left me desperately trying to get my bag down in weight, something I only just managed to do and still keep my essential breakable items (binoculars, cameras, etc).

Waingapu, as the major city of Sumba, was full of dogs and goats. Kupang is full of bemos, which are mini-vans painted all the colours of the rainbow and emblazoned with baffling slogans such as "Weekend", "Rambo", "Only One Hit", "Fist Me Good" and "Black Woman Ride Cowboy". They are everywhere acting as taxis because the town is so spread-out. The streets are completely insane.

On my first full day in West Timor I caught the bus eastwards to a little town called Camplong which has a bit of the last remaining lowland forest beside it. The bus on the way there cost me 20,000 rupiah, the one on the way back 5000. Figure that one out. On arrival I had a bit of trouble with three guys who took it upon themselves to act as guides for me -- and by acting as guides I mean one walked in front of me pointing at the all-too-obvious trail and the other two walked behind me, all of them talking loudly to each other and basially doing everything they could that could be guaranteed to scare any nearby birds away. Then after a few minutes they demanded 50,000 rupiah each for their unwanted 'services". There was a big argument and I ended up telling them less-than-politely to go away and leave me alone. Once free of them I started seeing some nice birds in the forest, most of them species I hadn't seen before (several of them being endemic to Timor). So it was a good first day. Tomorrow I'm planning on going to Gunung Mutis, a forest-covered mountain about four hours or more from Kupang, where I shall stay for a couple of days if I can.

 

Gunung Mutis, West Timor

Gunung Mutis is FANTASTIC!!! Getting there was a bit of a laugh though. First was a three hour bus trip from Kupang to Soe which wasn't bad because the bus was only half-full (the buses aren't really buses either, they're like bigger versions of mini-vans). Then a quick motorbike ride to where the bemos to Kapan leave from. I had been given to understand that I had to take a bemo half-an-hour to Kapan and then another bemo another half-an-hour to Fatumenasi where I would be trying to track down what was described on the internet as a "basic losmen" owned by Mateos Anin (yes the same internet source that called the delightful Mamariwu House a basic losmen too, so I wasn't worried). A bemo is a small mini-van in which instead of having rows of seats there are two benches along either side, while the aisle in the middle is used for cargo, in the case of the Kapan bemo the cargo being sacks of rice and flour, boxes and baskets of indeterminate goods, a puppy, several chickens and a stereo system. The major drawback of bemos is that they are small. Really really small. The floor to ceiling height can't be more than four feet. The Indonesians slip in and out of them with graceful ease whereas I have to almost bend double just to get through the door, and then when I'm sitting on the bench I have to scrunch right down forwards to fit under the roof. I must look absolutely ridiculous in them amongst the Indonesians, like a gorilla sitting in a row of gibbons. The bemos aren't the only area where I am too large. Many of the doorways in hotels and houses are little more than five-and-a-half feet high so I always have to watch my head, and going on the backs of motorbikes is always a trial because I weigh probably twice as much as their usual passengers. I'm always worried they're going to lose control going round corners, and any time the bike is going up-hill you can tell its struggling with me on the back. In fact during my time at Gunung Mutis one of the bikes actually did stall on a particularly steep stretch and I had to jump off and run up the hill on foot.

Anyway, the bemo pulled into Kapan and I hopped out and asked where I could get a bemo to Fatumenasi. This bemo does continue on to Fatumenasi I'm told. Excellent. I hop back in again and wait for it to load up with more passengers. The entire town, it seems, appears and crowds round the vehicle, peering in all the windows to see the oddity of a white man here in the middle of their town. After ten minutes or so of saying hello and telling people where I'm from and where I'm going, etc etc etc, a man comes wandering past dressed in full hill-tribe gear -- robes, sashes, head-gear, gold bracelets and necklaces, ornamentations galore, big old knife stuck through the belt, all-in-all looking extremely resplendant, and at the same time curiously out of place amongst his own countrymen in their T-shirts and trousers. He comes over to the bemo and puts his hand through the window to shake my hand. The conversation then went something like this (except partly in Indonesian and partly in English):
"Hello, where are you from?"
"New Zealand"
"Ah, New Zealand. And where are you going to?"
"To Fatumenasi"
"Ah, where will you be staying in Fatumenasi?"
"With Mateos Anin" (I say hoping I can find him when I get there)
"My name is Mateos!"
"Your name is Mateos too?"
"Yes"
"Oh that's nice"
"You come on ojek to Fatumenasi" (an ojek being a motorbike)
"No, no, I go in this bemo"
"No, no, come on ojek. My son he take you"
"No, I don't like ojek, I go in bemo"
"Ah..." he disappears for a minute then comes back and says "This bemo doesn't go to Fatumenasi. It goes to another village"
"This bemo not go to Fatumenasi?" I say to the guy who had told me that it did. He asks the driver who says that no the bemo does not go to Fatumenasi.
"You come on ojek. We go to my house," says the man.

Realisation suddenly dawned on me like a hand slapping me across the back of my head. This man WAS Mateos Anin. How random is that? The very person I would be looking for just happens to come up to the bemo I was in in entirely another town to the one in which he lived!! That evening Mateos recounted the entire episode to his whole extended family, taking particular delight in miming the way I was hunched up to fit inside the bemo and the way I said in utter surprise "Oh, YOU'RE Mateos Anin!!??". In Kapan Mateos got his friend Yanto to take me to Fatumenasi on his motorbike while he himself was driven by his son. Yanto had a hole in the back of his head from the Bali bombing which probably explained his irregularities. He didn't really want to take me on his bike because I was too heavy, but he also housed grave suspicions as to my military affiliations. I had come across this a little in Thailand and Cambodia, where people somehow thought I was in the army, but in Fatumenasi it was extreme. I had originally put it down to me wearing jungle boots, cargo pants and a khaki shirt instead of regular tourist gear, but apparently here it was because of my build. With me being much more muscular than most tourists Yanto was convinced I was there for covert military reasons (because of course I blended in so well!) and by the end of my stay half the men in the village were looking sideways at me, everyone seemed to think I was in the army, and there were even whispers of "CIA" and "FBI". It may have been my overactive imagination but the atmosphere was getting a bit tense and I was half expecting to wake up with a gun to my head. It might just be a Timor thing because of the conflict in the east, but at the same time I'm thinking my apparent army look may make things very interesting in Sulawesi!

Mateos' homestay is in a traditional hill village, and rustic would be a real-estate's way of describing it. I slept in the same room as the extended family, which given they were all couples was, well, a bit uncomfortable for me. The floors in the houses were simple packed earth. Didn't want some item of food? Throw it on the floor for the dogs and chickens that roamed in and out constantly. Needed somewhere to throw your cigarette butts? On the floor. Needed to spit out your betel-nut juice? That's right, on the floor!

The evening meal on that first night was rice and fried dog meat.

When we first arrived at Mateos' homestay we went to the round smoke-filled building that would be called a lounge in a Western house. We sat in there for quite a while, not really doing anything and me feeling a bit wierd because I didn't know if there was some sort of traditional thing I should be doing. Then he says "now we go to my office", which I assumed meant to fill out a check-in form or something. Instead we went to the village office where a lot of people sat at desks, wrote on hand-made charts on the wall, stuck signs onto polystyrene backings, and other things like that. It looked remarkably similar to one of the military HQ scenes in a 1970s Dr Who programme. I had absolutely no clue what was going on, but I ended up spending most of the rest of the afternoon in there, and then an hour or so watching the village kids playing volleyball. It was all very confusing and I really just wanted to head off to the forest to look for birds, but at the same time this did appear to be some sort of admitting-the-guest-to-the-village-type thing.

It got very cold in the Timorese mountains at night. I was sleeping in a T-shirt, sweatshirt and gloves and was wrapped in two blankets and was still shivering. In the winter it is apparently REALLY cold!

The next day I spent from dawn to dusk on Gunung Mutis, the highest mountain in Timor at 2427 metres. Mateos' son dropped me off at the start of the track, after a horrendous 9km motorbike ride over a roller-coaster road composed almost solely of rocks. The forest here is made up of an endemic species of Eucalyptus, and the scene is very reminiscent of an Australian forest, complete with screeching flocks of lorikeets. Here they are the endemic olive-headed lorikeets. They are everywhere, can't possibly miss them if you go there. After only a few minutes I also found the iris lorikeet which was one of the birds I most wanted to see in Timor. After an hour's walk I came out of the forest to a stretch of hills covered in grass grazed ultra-short by roving groups of domestic banteng and horses. Mateos had drawn me a rough map of the route to the top of Gunung Mutis. There was supposed to be an obvious track over the grassy hills and then a track through more forest, then more grassland and then more forest all the way to the top. Only problem was, there was no track across the grasslands. I scouted around, following what could possibly have been a faint trail over the hills and eventually found another obvious trail through another patch of forest. I was a bit unclear if this was in fact the right trail, given that it was heading downhill and in the wrong direction but I perservered for a while in case it doubled back on itself, but it didn't, so I returned to the start of the grass. Gunung Mutis rose into the sky off to the left, so I decided to just walk towards it. Sure enough, once I hit the forest again I found the right track and started pulling birds out of the trees, figuratively speaking. Timor imperial pigeons, Timor leaf-warblers, Timor crimson-wing parrots, Timor friarbirds -- all endemics in case their common names didn't give the game away -- as well as the awesomely-cute yellow-breasted warbler which is like a tiny bright yellow golf ball with an orange head. Rather to my surprise I pretty much found all the birds I was expecting to find there, including all the higher-altitude endemics, on that single day. So the next day I returned to Kupang to see about finding some more of the lower-altitude ones. Absolutely loved Gunung Mutis, military suspicions not-withstanding. It was my favourite day of the trip so far.

 

last days in West Timor

I arranged my flight onwards to Ruteng in Flores (home of the giant rat....hopefully) for Thursday, at the unusual hour for Indonesia of 6am. With three days to utilise I chose to go to Bipolo on the first and third days and back to Camplong on the second, to attempt to try and find the remaining endemic birds of the island. Bipolo was remarkably easy to get to, simply bus to the whistle-stop town of Oelmasi and then take a motorbike to the forest at Bipolo about 15km further on up a sideroad. I was going to just bird along the road, which runs right through the middle, but I found a dirt trail heading into the trees so I took that instead and in a couple of minutes came across a fruiting fig tree. These are great for attracting wildlife. In the Greater Sundas (eg, Borneo, Java, Sumatra) you might see monkeys and gibbons and hornbills, but in the Lesser Sundas there are just birds (I mean, "just" birds). All the forests in Timor had fruiting trees when I was there and it made finding a lot of the species much easier than it might have otherwise been. Best-looking bird in the tree was the black-banded fruit dove but there were also some endemic species such as the Timor figbird and fawn-breasted whistler. This latter bird really looks nothing like its picture in the field-guide. There's only one bird book for the region, "The Birds Of Wallacea", which covers the Lesser Sundas, the Moluccas and Sulawesi. Its not really great as a field-guide because it weighs about 2.5kg! I did the sneaky thing and made up my own lists of the birds found on each island, so I just have to take the relevant list with me into the field and consult the book for the identification of the trickier species when back at the hotel at night. The pictures of the birds look good but as I have found out they don't always accurately depict the species, the fawn-breasted whistler being just such a one. The northern fantail is another bird that had me going for a while. I couldn't work out what it was at first because it was bigger than other fantail species I've seen and acted completely differently (speaking of which, the Arafura fantails here have a wierd habit of scuttling about on the ground!).

After a while the trail came out onto a dirt road and I followed that until it hit the rice fields. Here was where I was hoping to find the Timor sparrow, which is related to the Java sparrow commonly seen in pet shops. I wandered round and round and up and down for hours under the blazing sun but narry a Timor sparrow did I spy. I did however find my first Timor zebra finches, which of course then turned out to be exceedingly common.

The next day it was a return trip to the forest at Camplong, where I discovered that you actually need a permit to enter the forest (15,000 rupiah). Camplong and Bipolo are both excellent forests, but somewhat different from one another. Bipolo is moist lowland forest (although as its the dry season, not as moist as the name might suggest) while Camplong is dry lowland forest. The ground is completely carpeted in bone-dry leaves making walking silently impossible. Camplong is the best spot to find some interesting endemic species including one I was particularly keen on seeing, the Timor stubtail. It looks almost exactly like a tesia which for those not familiar looks something like a tail-less feathered mouse (or, for New Zealanders, like a smaller not-so-round rifleman). The stubtails live on the ground in dense undergrowth and are very secretive, so while I was hoping to get lucky I wasn't overly confident, but no sooner had I entered the forest at Camplong than a stubtail goes hopping across the forest floor about ten metres away. Really nice little bird. I ended up seeing three in total during the day. Two other endemic skulkers refused to show themselves however, the buff-banded thicket-warbler and the black-banded flycatcher. I did manage to successfully track down the white-bellied chat (finally -- I had been thinking it would have been larger) and the very attractive orange-sided thrush

My second visit to Bipolo was completely different to the first. Birds that had been dripping out of the trees in their dozens were now missing entirely. The forest seemed deserted. But that's the way it is in birding, one day there's birds and another day there's not, even in exactly the same place. Giving up on the forest I made my way to the rice fields to have another crack at the Timor sparrow. Once again I wandered hopelessly across the fields seeing every sort of finch in the entire world except for the Timor sparrow. It may seem a strange way to spend a holiday in Indonesia, traipsing round a rice field for hours in forty degree heat looking for a sparrow, but that's the way we roll in the bird nerd world. On the way back I tried the forest again for a last shot at the remaining endemics, like the Timor black pigeon or the spot-breasted dark-eye, but of them there wasn't a sign.

So that's my West Timor dash done. I'm quite pleased with the birding outcome. I saw heaps of nice birds and the only endemics I missed out on were the apparently-almost-gone Timor green pigeon, the two awful skulkers (buff-banded thicket-warbler and black-banded flycatcher), the devilish Timor sparrow, and the spot-breasted dark-eye, Timor oriole and Timor black pigeon. I was hoping (nay, expecting) to get the last four but the first three I wasn't really expecting to see.

Kupang is hot and congested and noisy, but apart from that I liked West Timor quite a lot. It was very easy to get to the birding sites so long as you didn't want an early start. Birding is of course best first thing in the morning before it gets too hot but in Indonesia you can't rush anywhere. On my first day on the island, going to Camplong, the first bus didn't leave till 7, on the next to Oelmasi (which is right before Camplong) the first bus didn't leave till 8, the next day not till 8.30, and the next not till 9. Basically the buses just sit there until they have enough passengers and then they leave (or just sit there some more) -- and then they stop at what appears to be a secondary terminal about four minutes away and sit there for half an hour for no discernible reason. Its all a bit frustrating but there's nothing you can do about it. Before coming to West Timor I had really assumed that there would be more people than in Sumba that spoke English because of the troops going through and the flights that come in from Darwin (which apparently are still going despite what I had been informed of last year), but the ratio is about the same. Its funny where English-speaking locals turn up though. Most people know a couple of words (usually "hello Mister") but you just randomly come across others, maybe in the depths of a rice paddy or in some remote roadside rumah makan, that speak better English than some people who have English as their native tongue. Apart for five or six at the airport when I first arrived I didn't see a single non-Indonesian the whole time I was in Timor, which was also a bit of a surprise. I thought there would have been at least a few around Kupang.

So I'm finally off to Flores tomorrow. Apparently there's no internet in Ruteng. But hopefully there are giant rats.

 

Something funny happened on the way to Flores...

Something funny happened on the way to Flores – I discovered that the flight to Ruteng actually goes to Labuanbajo then they take you by bus to Ruteng. I wasn’t particularly impressed by this. The whole point of flying straight to Ruteng was to avoid the four hour bus trip there in the first place. You have to go with the flow when in Indonesia but sometimes they really do make it difficult. The first grueling forty minutes of the bus trip were through what appeared to be one continuous roadwork. And because it was largely being accomplished through the use of wheelbarrow and shovel, I think it’s a fair bet to say there won’t be a whole lot of progress made over the next hundred-odd years. Once past that the road was actually very good but awfully narrow with LOTS of blind corners, and it twisted and swirled through the mountains so much that I started feeling seasick. We stopped halfway for a goat curry lunch-break then it was back to the buttock-numbing test of endurance.

Ruteng sits at 1177 metres so the climate is relatively cool and the nights are a bit nippy (blankets needed). The locals here seem as surprised by the presence of a foreigner as everywhere else in the Lesser Sundas that I’ve been, even though I’m hardly the first to pass through this way. There have even been white folk living in town for extended periods during archaeological digs. There were three places I wanted to visit when in Ruteng, and all of them are easy to get to. Two are birding spots – Danau Ranamese and Gunung Ranaka (danau means “lake” and gunung means “mountain”) -- and the third is the aforementioned archaeological site Liang Bua (bua means “cave” in the local dialect).

Danau Ranamese was the first on the agenda. Ranamese means “big forest” in the local language (in the official language of Indonesia, bahasa Indonesia, that would be “besar hutan”). [EDIT: I have since found out, at odds with what I was told the other day, that Ranamese actually means "big lake" not "big forest", which makes a bit more sense I suppose]. It is about 22km out of Ruteng, about 40 minutes by bus. Just before you get to the big archway entrance there is a stretch of high concrete wall, apparently built there to block the view down to the lake from the road! I had been imagining it to be a circular crater-lake with a trail running through forest around the circumference, which as it happens is exactly what it is. I randomly selected left and headed off round the west side of the lake. After an easy start over concrete steps the trail suddenly changed into the work of the devil. Its no exaggeration to say that parts of it were easily the most treacherous trail I have ever been on. In many places it was only the width of my foot, with on one side a ten metre drop straight down to the water below and on the other a near-vertical forested slope. On the downward bits you couldn’t just plonk your foot down as you went because you didn’t know if the ground would hold or even if there was ground underneath the overhanging grasses and ferns. Some lower sections were so close to the water’s surface that they must surely be submerged in the rainy season. At times the trail just petered out altogether and I had to bush-bash to try and find it again, and there were little side-shoots that looked like they might be trails but quickly ended in masses of vines. Where-ever the track came out of the trees into the open there grew head-height tangles of a fern that was similar to bracken but covered in little spines, another thing like blackberry but with even more thorns, and various other prickly triffidy herbiage. I cut my arms and hands up something fierce forcing my way through these patches.

The area is supposed to be brilliant for birdlife but I saw almost nothing in the four hours it took me to make my way halfway round the only-average-sized lake. It may have been just one of the dead periods you get when birding, or it may have been because I was having to watch my feet for the entire time! Ironically the last quarter of the lake’s trail was easy, wide and obvious, exactly how I’d imagined the whole trail would be before getting there. And it was in this section that I saw most of the birds, although the three dark-eyes all eluded me (I couldn’t find the spot-breasted dark-eye in Timor either, so I think dark-eyes must be my new nemesis bird). Apparently bird waves are common at Lake Ranamese but on the western side I’d seen only one and it had been made of just a whole lot of mountain white-eyes, one brown-capped fantail and a male bare-throated whistler, so I was feeling a little put-out. But on the easy eastern side I found three waves, the best of which contained brown-capped fantails, little minivets, leaf warblers, a female bare-throated whistler, scaly-crowned honeyeaters, yellow-breasted warblers, a pigmy woodpecker and various other flitty things that I couldn’t pin down.

So in summary, bad bad start at Lake Ranamese and a good short ending, but overall a rather uncomfortable day. I’m not sure if there’s supposed to be an entrance fee to go see the lake. There’s a big entranceway on the road and a bunch of official-looking if slightly derelict-ish buildings, but apart for a couple of fishermen on the lake there wasn’t a single other person there when I arrived nor when I left. The trail is completely unmaintained. I’m told that it all used to be upkept but money was squandered here and there and now no-one bothers with the place anymore.

Back in Ruteng I met a girl called Nona in a warung and went to a wedding, possibly my own, I wasn’t entirely clear on that. But it was interesting and I got free food. The next day I learned that two of the guests from the wedding had been killed in a motorbike accident on their way home.

Something I found out recently: if you have a big Dolphin torch for spot-lighting at night, take the battery out of it when packing it in your check-in luggage for flights. Should it get accidentally switched on by pressure on the bag not only does it drain the battery but because its packed tightly in amongst clothes etc, the torch gets very VERY hot!! I can imagine the news releases now: the fire that caused the plane to crash was started by a torch in the luggage of a birdwatcher….

Oh yeah, also there is internet in Ruteng, at least at the Hotel Rima where I am staying.

 

Land of the Hobbit

A long time ago when the world was young, there was an island. On the island there were many wonderful animals: a monstrously large lizard, a giant rat, a giant tortoise, and a pigmy elephant. And there was also a little man who walked among the animals and every so often stabbed them with his little spear and ate their flesh. Still, he was only a little man and his stomach wasn't very big so it all worked out all right. But then there arrived on the island a bigger man and he had a big appetite, and he ate all the little elephants and all the big tortoises and he drove the little man into the hills where he hid.

That sounds like a Just So story, but the island was Flores and the little man was a diminutive hominid called Homo floresiensis, nicknamed "the Hobbit". The skeletal remains of floresiensis were first discovered in October 2004 in a cave called Liang Bua just out of Ruteng. The original specimen was actually a female who lived only about 18,000 years ago. She was probably about thirty years old when she died and stood just one metre tall. More remains were found in further digs at the cave, some younger in geological age and some older, but all of a similar height and with the same anatomical characteristics distinguishing them from being just small Homo sapiens. The discovery caused a sensation, not just in the scientific world but also amongst the general populace who generally don't give a toss about scientific discoveries. This was another species of human who lived alongside us not in the dim distant past but just 12,000 years ago (to put it into context, the pyramids were constructed just under 5000 years ago, and the famous cave paintings at Lascaux in France are about 16,000 years old). There's a very good book all about the amazing finds and the ensuing disputes and debates, including the rather questionable behaviour of Professors Teuku Jacob and Raden Pandji Soejono which I won't go into (read the book: its called "The Discovery Of The Hobbit" by Mike Morwood and Penny van Oosterzee). Suffice to say that the recovered skeletons span a period of 80,000 years and exhibit extremely distinctive and sometimes primitive characteristics that set them well apart from any modern human, and they are certainly not just microcephalic Homo sapiens as some detractors would suggest. I think Mike Morwood put it best when he wrote that the people claiming the floresiensis skeletons are just microcephalic sapiens are basically saying that modern humans arrived on Flores 95,000 years ago but they were all retarded -- and then kept going as an entirely retarded population for the next 80,000 years!

One further very interesting piece of information that came out when floresiensis was discovered was that the local people on Flores had always had stories in their folklore about tiny wild people called Ebo Gogo, which translates as "the grandmother who eats anything raw". The Ebo Gogo were said to be about a metre tall, to have pot bellies, long hair and proportionately long limbs, and to walk with an awkward gait: which is pretty much a perfect description of what Homo floresiensis probably looked like in life. The last Ebo Gogo were supposedly seen at the time of the Dutch occupation of Flores in the 19th century. Were the Ebo Gogo stories just folk-memories of floresiensis or did floresiensis actually survive right up to the modern day? Are they still out there, hiding in the hills?

On the morning I went to see Liang Bua there wasn’t a bemo heading that way for another two hours apparently so I took a motorbike instead. I’ve been on more motorbikes than I care to recall since getting to Indonesia but often they’re the only way to get anywhere. There was a live hen hanging by its feet from the handlebars, possibly as some sort of good-luck charm, although obviously not from the hen’s point of view.

The latest edition of Lonely Planet says that Liang Bua is reached via 14km of very rough dirt track that is often impassable after rain, and also that the cave is considered sacred by the locals so you need a guide to visit. Both are rubbish and I suspect the writer never even went there. The road is a perfectly adequate sealed road and there are transport vehicles (bemos and trucks) going past on a regular basis on their way to various villages. There’s a big archway over the road just before the cave saying “Welcome to Liang Bua” and another smaller one right at the cave entrance in front of a barbed wire fence, but neither of the latter two are as obtrusive as I thought they’d be and the gate in the fence isn’t locked as I’d heard it might be. In the middle of the cave is a table where some kids hang out to take your 5000 rupiah entry fee (less than NZ$1) and they’ll also take you inside the narrow tunnels that burrow into the deep recesses of the earth, supposedly for many kilometres. There’s not much to see at the cave nowadays of course. There are some squares marked out on the ground where the digs took place and some nice stalactite action going on, but otherwise that’s about it. But I knew that before going there, I really just wanted to see the cave where (pre)history was made.

A few minutes back down the road and up a hill is another large cave where there is an interesting formation like raised pools known in local lore as the mandi (bath) of the king and queen and their babies.

Liang Bua is quite a bit lower down the mountains than Ruteng is, and so it’s a lot hotter there. Although I wasn’t actively bird-watching whilst there I did still see a few lower-altitude species in the vicinity such as the very pretty black-fronted flowerpecker and the flame-breasted sunbird. The latter is also found on Timor but there I’d only managed to see the females which are basically brown and yellow and sort of dull; the males blaze like the sun.

When I got back into Ruteng I found the owner of the Rima Hotel was having a celebration for his brother who was getting married, so I got another free wedding feast. I do like Ruteng!!