Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part two: 2011

In 2009 I set off on a six month trip through Indonesia and Malaysian Borneo. You may have read the thread here Chlidonias goes to Asia, 2009. It was exciting and arduous and fun, and I had to do it again so here I go. This time I've only got a couple of months though, and I'm basically revisiting places to try and find some of the particularly devious wildlife that evaded my sights. So some of the blog entries that will follow may sound a little familiar to those who read the last ones, but hopefully there will be enough hardship and near-death experiences to keep everyone entertained amongst the boring animal bits.

First stop will be everyone's favourite oddly-shaped island, Sulawesi. Does it look like a mimic octopus, a diseased orchid, or a child's drawing of a plesiosaur? Or perhaps all of the above? My time in Sulawesi will not be long, I'm mainly going back there to try and spot a pigmy tarsier, the cutest little weirdo amongst the Earth's many cute little weirdos. The pigmy tarsier is tiny, nocturnal, lives in the tops of forest trees and has hardly been seen by anybody ever, so my chances of seeing it....well, they're not good! To give me a hope of seeing at least something exciting on Sulawesi I'm also hoping to take the opportunity to climb Mt. Lompobattang. I mentioned this briefly during the 2009 blogs: the Lompobattang Massif is the sole home of the cunningly-named Lompobattang flycatcher, once again a rarely-seen animal. In fact after its initial discovery in 1931 it wasn't seen again until 1995 and few birders have seen it since. Mainly because no-one can be bothered because its just so incredibly boring-looking. The reason I gave it a miss in 2009 was largely due to not having any information on how to easily access a good site on Mt. Lompobattang, but now I have that info and the ascent will begin any day now.

After Sulawesi I return to the lovely isles of the Lesser Sundas, namely Sumba where I had missed nearly all the sought-after birds, West Timor where I had only missed a few but it is a conveniently sited stepping-stone, and Flores where I missed the whole point of the trip, the giant rat and the Wallace's hanging parrot. The latter is a parrot that hangs upside-down and was named after a chap called Wallace; the former is a rat that is giant. I do like self-explanatory names. The giant rat is another one of those cute weirdos I mentioned, as much as a giant rat can be cute at least. Which is to say there are giant rats that are cute - the woolly rats of the Philippines for example - but the Flores giant rat really just looks like a huge sewer rat. Not that there's anything wrong with that! Few non-locals have seen a giant rat and there are almost no photographs of them. I found out a bunch of information on them on my last visit however, so at least now I have the upper hand.

Taman Negara in Malaysia was the unmitigated disaster of the 2009 trip. I got so sick I never even got into the forest, so this time I'm determined that I will see a tapir here. Dead or alive. (Me, not the tapir).

The flight home will be via Western Australia because why not. I've never been to WA and I am pretty excited about all the wonderful critters I stand to see, potentially including quokkas, numbats, woylies, noolbengers, boojums, snarks and quangle wangles. Wait, is that right...?

I'm leaving on the 11th of August but I figured I'd start the thread early in case anyone wants to post comments or ask questions, because once I'm underway internet accessibility will be fairly sketchy.

Anyway, here are some press-released photos from the internet because I haven't got any of my own yet. First, a pigmy tarsier (isn't it cute?!). Second, a Hobbit (Homo floresiensis) carrying a Flores giant rat -- not much help if you don't know how big the Hobbits were but never mind. The third photo has nothing really to do with the trip but its a tooth row from the biggest rat of all, known only from subfossil remains from East Timor, in comparison to the entire skull of a common black rat. The Timor giant rat weighed up to 6kg which is pretty hefty (the Flores giant rat probably weighs about 2kg but I don't know if anyone has actually published weight data on them before -- I must do that). The bones that have been found in East Timor were around 2000 years old, and as living rodents of unusual size have never been reported from Timor one must assume that they are now extinct (along with a whole suite of other giant rats from that island).

 

Gunung Lompobattang: the start of failure

So, I'm back in Sulawesi. So far I've seen very little in the way of animals. On leaving NZ my check-in bag was 1.2kg over weight and the airline was going to charge me $40 for the extra ($20 per kg), so I took out the Wallacea field guide and that brought it down enough. Anyone who has had to cart around this doorstop of a guide will know what I'm talking about! I started the trip list off in a small way outside the Tune Hotel at KL airport with Pacific swallow, house crow, house swift, common mynah and tree sparrow, then flew off to Makassar where there were cattle egrets by the runway. Last time I was here I ended up at the Hotel Lestari which wasn't the cheapest place in town although it was very nice, but this time I decided to go with a cheaper place and asked the taxi driver to take me to the Losmen Semeru. Unfortunately the one room they had spare was too dirty even for me to sleep in, so I got the driver to take me to the Hotel Lestari. He took me instead to the Hotel Lestari Permai which wasn't quite the same. The doorman, after he'd shown me to my room, asked if I wanted him to get me a girl. However the next morning he gave me a ride on his motorbike to the Terminal Sungguminasa for free, saving me, oh, about 50 cents on public transport. The place I was heading was Malino which is a town by Gunung Lompobattang which of course is where the Lompobattang flycatcher lives. The road to Malino is pretty bad. I must have killed half my brain cells the number of times I smacked my head off the roof of the pete-pete. But that probably helps over here. A pete-pete, in case you're wondering, is a mini-van, and they are driven quite fast. I don't know the name of the hotel where I stayed -- it was just the one the pete-pete driver took me to -- but it was definitely overpriced. Then the pete-pete driver said he would take me to the forest to look for birds, which helped me out a lot.

The Lompobattang flycatcher, as I mentioned in the last entry, was originally discovered in 1931 and then wasn't seen again till 1995, pretty much solely because no-one had gone to look for it. I had found a trip report on the internet by some people who'd seen it and they gave some fairly exact directions for getting into the forest. But, naturally, on my trips it's par for the course for things to descend into a comedy of errors. Or maybe just a shambles. I suppose it depends on how good a sense of humour one keeps. In the trip report it says that when you reach a big welcome archway ("Selamat Datang") which leads to the waterfall (air terjun), you instead take the road that leads left, in the opposite direction. The pete-pete driver was a bit perturbed that I wanted to go that way but I knew what I was doing. Turns out he was right to be perturbed. After turning away from the archway the road is meant to lead onwards for 2km, the first half paved and the second unpaved, then there's supposed to be a little bridge. The problem was that after what had to have been more than one kilometre, with no side roads along the way, the paved road ended at an unexpected T-junction. Hmmm. Turn left? Turn right? Not a clue. The driver called out to a nearby house. Is there forest this way? No. Is there forest that way? No. Interesting. I decided on right, because I could see forest on the distant hills. Sure enough the paved part of the road soon ended, so I figured it was looking good. Well, not good for the pete-pete! When I say the road was unpaved I mean it was constructed solely of rocks (imagine driving a mini-van over a dry riverbed that goes up and down hills). Suffice to say that pete-petes are not really made for 4-wheel drive courses. However we persevered, mostly because there wasn't anywhere to turn around anyway, the valiant machine bravely surging forwards while probably-necessary bits and pieces rattled loose every few minutes. All along the way the local paddy-tenders stared. Even the dogs seemed a bit nonplussed by this vehicle on a road obviously not at all designed for vehicles larger than motorbikes. Eventually we gave up, stopping at a cluster of huts where we sought out some help. A nattily-dressed farmer took over the operation and led me off through the fields and up into the hills where, wonder of wonders, we found a patch of forest. It was by this time mid-afternoon, and there were almost no birds. Sum total was yellow-vented whistler, Sulawesi leaf-warbler, rusty-bellied fantail and hair-crested drongo, as well as one of the dwarf squirrels (didn't see it well enough to ID it) and a snake which again went unidentified for now. I did not see any flycatchers, or black-ringed white-eyes (the second bird I was looking for), or any moor macaques which I'd also been hoping for.

Because I was in Malino overnight I had been planning on this first day being simply a practice run, to see if I could find the forest, and then a return the next morning when the temperature was more conducive to the birds being active. But I gave up on that idea after the events of the day before and just went back to Makassar instead. Flycatchers are stupid anyway. Outside the hotel in Malino that morning though I saw a party of black-ringed white-eyes. One out of three will have to do.

Tomorrow I fly to Palu and the next day travel to Lore Lindu, home of the pigmy tarsier (predicted Failure Number Two).

 

I've just got into Palu, so I thought I'd just post a little preamble on the pigmy tarsier before I set off for Lore Lindu tomorrow. On my last visit to Sulawesi I briefly looked for and failed to find this critter in the mountains of Lore Lindu. It was a doomed attempt anyway given the short length of time I had, but it wasn't helped any by the hindrances of the National Park guide Idris. The story of that visit is here: post #39 on this page http://www.zoochat.com/19/chlidonias-goes-asia-2009-a-78709/index3.html

What made the failure even more galling however was the discovery, months later back in New Zealand, that despite what I had been told at the National Park office in Palu it was actually not a requirement to be accompanied by a pricey and ineffectual guide on the Anaso Track at Lore Lindu because the Anaso Track isn't even inside the park boundaries (apparently)! It really is the case in Indonesia that you cannot believe anything you are told by anyone, and if you do find out the truth of something its usually too late to do anything about it. Still, this was good news for my return trip because it meant I could save a great deal of money and anguish by just trekking up the mountain and camping out there by myself. which is what I intend to do (with intentions not necessarily being the same as whatever happens in reality).

To recap the historical side, the pigmy tarsier was first discovered in 1916 on Mount Ranorano, with the second specimen not being collected until 1930 on Mount Rantemario. Then it basically disappeared for seventy years and although pretty much every primatologist who went to Sulawesi had a search for it at the known collection localities they all failed. So the general consensus became that either it had never existed at all or that it had become rather conveniently extinct in the meantime. Then in May 2000 just the third pigmy tarsier ever seen was found dead in a rat trap set by a rodentologist (or whatever rat-people are called) on Mount Rore Katimbo in Lore Lindu. Tarsier specialists descended on the mountain like a plague -- well, a very small and intermittent plague because there aren't really very many tarsier specialists around and most weren't all that eager about going to look for it, and as it happened all of the ones that tried failed to find any pigmy tarsiers anyway. It wasn't until 2008 that more pigmy tarsiers were finally rediscovered (er, for the fourth time....), and that's when I heard about it.

To give an idea of the near-insurmountable odds against me seeing a pigmy tarsier, the animal is not only tiny (10cm body length), arboreal and nocturnal, but also apparently occurs at very low population densities. It also probably calls at frequencies outside normal human hearing range, so you can't even hear them when they're around. The team that did the discovering in 2008 set up 276 mist nets in the cloud forest on Rore Katimbo. They caught a tarsier on the second night, then none for the next three weeks. In two and a half months on the mountain they caught -- wait for it -- a grand total of THREE pigmy tarsiers. They put radio collars on them to track their movements, and in 2010 published the first (and as yet, only) behavioural and ecological data on living pigmy tarsiers, in the International Journal Of Primatology (Grow & Gursky-Doyen if you want to look it up).

Really, I don't know why I'm bothering.

Still, the good thing with Lore Lindu is that even if I don't see the tarsier there are loads of other fantastic animals up there, and with five or six days I should see plenty.

 

indeed. Lore Lindu contains almost all of the mammal species found in Sulawesi and most of the birds as well. I can't help but find plenty to entertain me whilst there; the pigmy tarsier is just the excuse to go

When I get back to Makassar at the end of the week I'm thinking I'm going to take an extra day and go to Bantimurung to see if there's any moor macaques around. Then I'll be two-for-three for the southern animals.

 

Lore Lindu and the pigmy tarsier

There's a public car (a share taxi, if you will) that leaves from Palu's Terminal Petobo for Wuasa at 9am every morning and costs 40,000 rupiah. I thought I'd better get there early just in case so arrived at 7.30. but was told that in fact the car didn't leave till 10. So I got some breakfast then sat around for a while. At 8.45 a chap comes up and says they are leaving now -- but it would cost 150,000! Now, on my first trip to Indonesia in 2009 I was pretty staggered how expensive the country was in relation to most other southeast Asian countries. Almost everything was two, three or four times more expensive than what was stated in the then most recent Lonely Planet (although it has to be said that in terms of accuracy the Indonesian Lonely Planet isn't exactly top-notch), and this time round almost everything is even more expensive again, which doesn't bode well for my wallet! Still, I could scarcely credit that the price of getting to Wuasa had almost quadrupled in just two years.

"We are going now, and the cost is 150,000", I'm told.
"But I was told 40,000", I say (as I had been when I first got to the terminal)
"No no, 150,000: we go now. If you go at 2pm it is 40,000"
"Wait, what? Its 150,000 in the morning and only 40,000 in the afternoon?" -- something wasn't kosher there.
"Yes 150,000. Only price. We go right now"
"That is very expensive"
"No not expensive"
"No, I'll just wait for the 2pm one then" -- I didn't really want to sit around waiting till 2pm but I wasn't going to get ripped off by that amount!
The guy sort of shrugs and wanders off, and then another guy who had been sitting on the sidelines the whole time stands up and says "OK Mister, I go to Wuasa now: 40,000"
So there you go, there's some sort of lesson there! (None of that was actually in English of course, I just made it more understandable or my readers).

In Wuasa I stayed the first night at the Sendy Inn where I had stayed last time I was here. I had forgotten how good the food was there. (I had also forgotten how steep the Anaso track could be, but I wouldn't find that out again until the next morning). It seems that despite my unclear thoughts on whether the track is in the Lore Lindu National Park or not, it turns out that it is because you need to get some cheap permits to be there, but one doesn't need a guide which was good. Apart for the pigmy tarsier, one of the animals I would be looking for in central Sulawesi was the Tonkean macaque. There are six (or seven, or eight, depending on how one splits them) species of macaques in Sulawesi, each with separate distributions. Last trip I'd seen the black crested macaque and the Heck's macaque but failed to find any Tonkean or moor macaques. So that first afternoon, one of the local guys who knew the paths around the village took me out to look but of macaques there were no signs. One patch of forest we entered had name labels on all the trees ("Nunu - Ficus benjamina", that sort of thing); it was very weird, like some sort of abandoned Botanical Gardens in the middle of nowhere.

Early next morning I got a motorbike ride to the start of the Anaso track which climbs up to 2300 metres above sea level or something like that. On the road on the way there we spotted a white-bellied imperial pigeon which I was pretty pleased about because I managed to miss this common species last trip, and its one of the best-looking pigeons around. In the lower part of the Anaso track is a deep rift (I prefer to call it a chasm) where slips and rain have over the years dug out a massive barrier crossed only by a narrow strip of track. Last time I was here I thought it wouldn't be long before the way became impassable, but as this track is actually a local connection between villages and not solely for the use of overseas birders (!) the way has been shored up into a sort of bridge -- although the remains of earlier bridges can be seen at the bottom of the chasm. Just above 1800 metres I spotted a tarsier sign on a tree which had to be a good sign. These signs became more frequent as I climbed; there must have been at least ten of them. They all said exactly the same thing: "Habitat Tarsius (Tarsius sp) Home Range 100m". I'm not sure of their actual significance because as far as I know the researchers had only found that one family group of pigmy tarsiers, and its hardly likely that even if they had found multiple groups they would all have their home ranges within 100m of the track! One of the tarsier signs was right next to the anoa poachers' lean-to shelter we used to get out of the rain in 2009. If they were in fact the shelters of anoa poachers as Idris had told me, then I figure the anoas have all gone now because the shelters have almost fallen apart from disuse.

I set up my tent at the campsite at the top of the Anaso track. There were yellow-flanked whistlers playing in the trees nearby; so much nicer looking than their depiction in the bird guide! The site is called Puncak Dingin ("the cold summit"), and after dark I set off up the track that leads from there to the summit of Mount Rorekatimbo. After several hours with nothing being seen, not even a rat, I got a bit disillusioned and decided to try down the Anaso track instead. Within about twenty metres I spotted a dwarf cuscus in the top of a tree, which perked me right up. Sulawesi is as far west as Australasian marsupials get, and there are just two species here. The bear cuscus is the largest possum in the world (I saw one on the lower part of the track in 2009) and the dwarf cuscus is the smallest cuscus in the world. While I wasn't too confident in the purpose of the tarsier signs, when I reached the first one I headed into the forest along a little trail. Once in there it is seriously dangerous going by torchlight with the mud and rotting logs underfoot, and sheer drops hidden by moss and ferns! No tarsiers were found. I wasn't helped by the ever-present fog which could be so thick that it would absorb the torch-beam so effectively that I couldn't see the trees more than ten or twenty feet away.

Camping at the top of Anaso is great stuff. You can be up there at dawn without the hassle of actually climbing the mountain! Not that I actually got up at dawn, despite the birds urging me to do so, because I'd been up most of the night searching fruitlessly for impossible primates. If you're just after birds then camping down the bottom of the track makes more sense because there are more down there, but of course if I'd done that then I'd have long walks up and down every night to get into the tarsiers' altitude range and I couldn't be bothered with that. When I did get up, around 7.30, I decided to try my hand at birding on the far side of the Anaso track rather than the "normal" side which worked out quite well because I saw a Sulawesi thrush, a rather elusive if drab bird that I hadn't seen before, as well as one of my all-time favourite Sulawesi birds, the malia, which is all chestnuty above and yellow below, and charges through the tree-tops in groups yodelling like Swiss idiots. I also found a little waterfall to top up my water supply when needed.

This second night I forsook the Rorekatimbo trail and went back down the Anaso track as the previous night. I found a second dwarf cuscus which sat staring at me until I got my camera ready, then it vanished like a wraith. The only other animal I saw that night was a tree mouse exactly the same size and colour as a pigmy tarsier. In fact I would have said it was one if it hadn't scampered away through the branches like a mouse would rather than jumped like a tarsier would. That is, unless someone can tell me that there is no tree mouse of such a size and colour on the mountain, and that pigmy tarsiers do in fact run rather than jump. That would be good. These two nights I had been thinking what a stupid thing this was that I was doing, trying to find a mouse-sized tarsier at night in the depths of a forest, but a mouse is mouse-sized and I found that! I am going to pretend that means something.

The weather's pretty wild up on top of the mountain. It is usually good all day until about 4 or 5pm and then the rain lets rip and absolutely hammers down for about an hour, then it all clears up again. On this day, my third on the mountain, I thought I'd go all the way back down the track to the road where most of the birds are and spend the day finding them along the road and at nearby Lake Tambing. The plan was to wait out the late afternoon rain in the abandoned building at the lake, and then look for owls along the road and continue spotlighting for owls, cuscus and tarsiers all the way back up the track to my tent. What a stupid idea that turned out to be!!! I did find lots of nice birds down there, not as many as I'd have hoped for but they included two new ones for me, the piping crow and the citrine flycatcher (the latter one of those really common birds that you just cannot find, but when you do finally find one suddenly you see them everywhere!). The rain came down as predicted at about 5.30 and petered out after an hour. I waited a bit till it got dark then began owling. It would no doubt have been spectacularly successful, but on this night the rain came back again and didn't stop. What a jip! All that I got was a miserable three-hour trudge back up what was now basically a waterfall to get to my tent. Anyone who's been to Anaso will know what I mean; anyone else, just use your imagination. Hiking up a mountain in the dark in torrential rain is a lot more exhausting that doing it in the daytime with lots of nice birds to look at. Needless to say, I saw no animals that night.

There aren't too many endemic birds on the Anaso track that I haven't seen on either this trip or last, but one of those I was most missing was the Geomalia. The name means "ground Malia" but it bears neither relation nor similarity to the Malia. Its quite a sneaky terrestrial bird and mostly its seen as it dashes across the path from one patch of impenetrable undergrowth to another. In other words, you're either lucky or you're not. I spent the first half of the fourth day on the part of the track leading down the other side of the mountain where the lack of birds was more than made up for with the multitude of leeches. This was rather surprising as I had never before seen even one leech in Sulawesi and the "normal side" of the track seems devoid of them. In fact, just the day before I had been musing to myself on the apparent lack of leeches in Sulawesi given that there are a lot of fairly large mammals native to the island such as babirusa, anoa and macaques. Anyway, I found no Geomalia (or much of anything else), so for the second part of the day I intended staking out a stretch of track on the "normal" side and hoping one popped out. Unfortunately the rain started early that day, at 2pm, so that put paid to that idea.

At night the plan had been to head back down the other side to where I'd found a fruiting fig tree and see what turned up to feed -- who knows, perhaps pigmy tarsiers are partial to figs or the grubs of fig wasps? -- but that way had got flooded from the rain. The only animals I saw on my last night were a group of mountain rats foraging round the campsite. Very cute they were but very skittish and although I tried for a couple of hours to get some photos for identification later I had no luck. I sort of wish I had some collapsible live-traps for when I'm travelling, but I really have too much stuff to carry as it is. If anyone can come up with a list of rodents found on Rorekatimbo that would be a great help!

The next day I hiked back down to the road and hitched a lift in a truck to the Sendy Inn where everybody expressed great surprise that I hadn't found any tarsiers because apparently they are very common up there!! Every local person I ask says they have seen them. I'm not quite sure what to think. Perhaps they are seen regularly around the campsite up there as Idris had told me in 2009, and I should have just waited by my tent with my camera instead of trudging round inside the forest. The other tarsier species found on this side of Lore Lindu is the Dian's tarsier which I had been hoping to look for as well on my last night, but Wuasa must be a touch too high for them because I was told there are no tarsiers in the forest round the village. So I didn't find a pigmy tarsier but I did find a couple of dwarf cuscus which I'm happy with. Actually I should admit that all the times I've mentioned "pigmy tarsier" I was just getting my words muddled and I actually meant "dwarf cuscus" -- making the quest a complete success!! (And that's the story I'm going to stick with for now!)

I had one free morning in Wuasa before the car back to Palu, so of course I used it to go for another look for Tonkean macaques. It was the same story as in 2009 -- look in the afternoon, no macaques; look in the morning, no macaques. I mean, come on! Macaques aren't supposed to be hard to find!! We did find some horrifying-looking monkey traps though, with several sharpened bamboo stakes fixed to a trip-loaded branch that whips up between two upright poles to impale any macaque that had the misfortune to take the corn bait. I guess the Tonkean macaques will just have to wait for another trip to Sulawesi.

 

Sulawesi to Flores

The day I got back into Makassar from Palu I booked a ferry to Maumere on Flores for the next night. Being a bit of a penny-pincher (through not having much money!) I figured c.$20 for the ferry versus c.$150 for the plane was worth any discomfort. Because I had a whole day to spare I had decided to go to a little national park outside Makassar called Bantimurung which is famous for its butterflies. It is also home to moor macaques, which was one of the endemic monkeys I was still hoping to find. I ended up going in the company of a young lady I had made the acquaintance of which sort of put the kibosh on active birding so literally the only species I saw there were glossy swiftlets. However, going completely against type for me, I actually did find a moor macaque! It was only one macaque but it sat for quite a while in a palm tree on the opposite side of the river then sauntered off into the trees. I even got some photos. A guide had attached himself to us when we arrived, and he turned out to be a surprisingly dab hand at catching flying dragons (cicak turbang in Indonesian, which translates as "flying lizard").

Normally I'm not keen on guides but this one proved his worth by taking us to a little nearby village called Parantinggia which was absolutely dripping with hundreds of fruit bats. They were everywhere in the trees and giant bamboo stands between the houses. I got a bunch of photos and there's at least two species (I think one is the Sulawesi fruit bat Acerodon celebensis) but I still need to do some research to find out what they are when I have time. Try googling Parantinggia and you come up with nothing!

After Parantinggia we went to the Leang-Leang Prehistoric Park where there are loads of huge weather-sculpted rocks all over the landscape and various ancient cave-paintings of things like babirusa (which of course are now found nowhere near Makassar!).

The ferry to Flores left at the ungodly hour of 2am (it was supposed to be 11pm but, well, its Indonesian time). It really it wasn't as adventurous or death-defying as you might think taking economy class on an overnight Indonesian ferry. True there were people everywhere on the floor but apart for the disgusting toilets it was fine. Once I woke up (after about four hours sleep) I just went out on deck and watched for birds. Sea-watching. Honestly? It has to be one of the most boring bird-related activities ever! Apart for probably hundreds of flying fish the only signs of life I saw were four distant white specks that may have been identifiable if they had been about a hundred miles closer! No whales, no dolphins, turtles, archaeocetes, mermaids, nothing. Most of my sightings of moving objects were the pieces of rubbish going overboard every few minutes. Paper, plastic bags, bottles, polystyrene food containers, everything went in the ocean. It was pretty depressing actually. And when we reached the Maumere harbour at 8pm the next day, a veritable torrent of rubbish went over the edge.

Both getting on and getting off the ferry was pretty crazy. The people here are nuts. They seem to be able to wait patiently in queues for hours but as soon as the bus arrives or the boat boarding begins there's just a free-for-all. Getting on the ferry even the security guards were just shoved aside. I can sort of understand the disorderly getting-on because they want to make sure they secure a place to sit or sleep, but even disembarking is just a wild scrum. Women, children, cripples -- they all just get pushed out of the way in the rush to the gang-plank. Its a wonder people don't end up in the ocean. I got smacked in the head with a wheeled suitcase some guy was carrying on his shoulder, so I "accidentally" gave him a good crack back. Luckily I haven't been travelling long enough to have lost any muscle yet so at just under 100kg I'm big enough that's its not easy for them to push me round too much. Even on a plane, barely has it touched down than the passengers are jumping up from their seats and hauling luggage from the overhead compartments, before its even slowed to taxi-ing speed. Its like everyone is always in a huge rush to get on or off any kind of transport, which is curiously at odds with with the usual Indonesian take-your-time attitude.

Once off the ferry in Maumere it was still pretty full-on. It was night time so I couldn't see much of anything, and there were probably hundreds of people massing outside the harbour gates to snag passengers for their motorbikes or taxis. Masked "polisi" were patrolling inside the gates and attacking any of the touts who jumped the fence, hurling batons at them to drive them out again. Once outside, there was just a surge of people yelling "hello mister, where you go?" and all grabbing and shoving at you en masse. I'm lucky I didn't have anything in my pockets and that my bags were padlocked because there were so many of them you couldn't tell what was going on. With so many hands I'm also glad I'm not female! I ended up in a run-down hotel called Wini Rai because I knew nothing about Maumere, it not having been on my original schedule. I don't think I'll go back there either; on the face of it, its not a pleasant place at all.

Now I'm in Labuanbajo, once again at the Gardena Hotel where the price of a room has gone up by 50,000 rupiah since 2009, from 125,000 to 175,000. Quite remarkably the owner recognised me as soon as I walked up to reception and asked if I was back for more birdwatching! He also said a bitu (giant rat) had been killed on the road right in Labuanbajo just recently! I'm always just a little too late or early for everything.

One of the big fails of the 2009 Indonesia trip was the distinct lack of giant rats found by me. Flores is a remarkable island that at one time had a whole range of bizarre animals including pigmy elephants, pigmy people ("Hobbits", which I wrote about in 2009), giant tortoises, and even giant storks. The only big creatures still surviving there nowadays are the Komodo dragon and the Flores giant rat, the latter of which is one of the largest rats in the world, roughly the size of a house cat. I was understandably quite eager to find one in 2009 but, at first, all my enquiries came up empty. Literally no-one I talked to on Flores had any idea what I was on about, and most people flatly refused to believe there was such a creature living on their island. Eventually I did find one villager who not only knew the giant rat but said they lived right by his village. He gave me all sorts of useful information on them, including their local name (bitu -- after which suddenly everyone knew what I was talking about of course!), but in the end I didn't see any with my own eyes. This time I am all set to remedy that situation.

There is almost literally no information in the scientific literature about the giant rat beyond the basic size and colour. At that time I knew of just one photograph, and that was an old black and white one in Walker's Mammals Of The World of two individuals in a wire cage. In 2010 I was shown a colour photo taken recently at Danau Ranamese by the town of Ruteng. I don't know of any other photos of live animals (internet searches do show a few more but none of them are actually Flores giant rats, they are mislabelled species from New Guinea and the Philippines).

There actually used to be another giant rat on Flores. The living species is Papagomys armandvillei and the extinct species is Papagomys theodorverhoeveni. At least its supposed to be extinct because its only known from subfossil cave deposits. Its bones look pretty much the same as those of the living species unless you're a rat specialist, but how the two differed from one another in outward appearance is anybody's guess. Perhaps Verhoeven's giant rat does still survive, although how one would tell them apart in the forest is a bit of a puzzle. The Flores giant rat is known from the same subfossil deposits as Verhoeven's giant rat, and so are the endemic Hainald's rat (Rattus hainaldi) and Flores long-nosed rat (Paulamys naso), both of which still live in the montane forests of the island. In fact, the long-nosed rat was first described in 1981 from subfossil bones, declared long-extinct, but then found alive in 1991 -- and apparently its common on Gunung Ranaka by Ruteng. I suppose while I'm out at night in the forest looking for the Flores giant rat I also have a reasonable chance of seeing the Hainald's and long-nosed rats; the only problem, as always, is that I have no idea what they look like because I can't find any pictures of them.

Anyway, today I am just about to head off to the village of Tebedo to see if I can find some Wallace's hanging parrots and where (apparently) giant rats are also found. Tomorrow I go to Ruteng to continue the search at a higher altitude.

 

thanks guys. Plenty more tales of woe to continue I'm sure. It can't really be helped when the animals I'm looking for don't want to be found!!

 

....and the search for the giant rat continues

Labuanbajo is very hot. I just thought I'd throw that out there. I mean I remembered it was hot, but not really how hot. Although I think its actually hotter than it was last time I was here because all the locals are complaining that its too hot. It hasn't rained since January apparently, and of course the longer it goes without rain the hotter it gets. The first bird I saw in Flores this trip were black-fronted flowerpeckers in the gardens of the Gardena Hotel. I even got some photos. There were other birds around as well but I didn't bother looking. I think that's my problem, most of the birds I'm seeing I've already seen and because I'm really just looking for a few (impossible) target mammals I'm not putting all that much effort into actually birding. Never mind.

The day I arrived in Labuanbajo I headed off in the afternoon up the road a-ways to the village of Tebedo. Last trip I had come here to try and see Wallace's hanging parrots and had met a chap called Frans who told me that the giant rats were also found there, although in the end I saw neither. That was in June 2009, just over two years ago. I thought it was remarkable that the owner of the Gardena Hotel had recognised me when I turned up, but that was nothing to when I arrived in Tebedo and Frans greeted me immediately with my full name! I'm hoping the reason people still remember here is a favourable one; they don't seem displeased to see me, so I assume so. Once again though, no freakin' hanging parrots!!! Last time Frans told me "July, August, September - always nuri here". I asked him when I arrived this time if there were any nuri around and he said "yes, lots". I waited at the fruiting tree he said they come to until dusk and no parrots showed. I really shouldn't go looking for specific animals, its bound to result in disappointment.

The next morning I caught a bus to Ruteng. Local buses are fun. You jump on in the street outside the hotel and then they drive round and round town trying to find enough passengers to make the trip worthwhile. My bus couldn't find any, so after an hour or so we went to a village outside town and sat there for another hour until more people turned up. Then we drove for a bit before stopping for a cigarette break, drove a bit more, stopped for lunch, drove a bit more, eventually reached Ruteng and then drove around that town for an hour dropping off boxes and sacks. It took eight hours for me to get from the Gardena hotel in Labuanbajo to the Rima Hotel in Ruteng (where, incidentally, the price hasn't gone up at all!). The owner of the Rima Hotel didn't recognise me at all. Bummer.

The reason I was in Ruteng of course was to try and find a giant rat. Around Labuanbajo way they call them bitu (bee-too), around Ruteng betu (be-too). Strictly speaking it shouldn't be too hard to find one. They've been recorded from sea level to the mountains in a variety of habitats and if you ask about them by their local name then absolutely everybody knows them. Its like saying the word "possum" to a New Zealander. Although I'm not entirely convinced that everybody really distinguishes between actual bitu and just really big rats. Anyway, the plan was to search the forests at night at Lake Ranamese and Golo Lusang. I asked the boy at the Rima Hotel desk what time their doors are locked. Ten o'clock. Oh, because I will be coming back late, I say. Like eleven? No, more like midnight, one, two o'clock. No, not possible. I managed to bring the time up as late as eleven o'clock but that was the absolute limit. The next problem was arranging a motorbike to pick me up from the lake at night. It wasn't possible said the boy again, nobody will go out there at night. Eventually we found a driver who would but ten o'clock was the latest he would agree to. It really shouldn't be this hard! Ten o'clock only gives me about three hours of darkness. But, on the other hand, its not like I'm even going to find the damn thing anyway so it doesn't really matter!

That afternoon we went off to Lake Ranamese. I wrote about this before from the last trip, but it is a rather curious place. It used to be a sort of nature reserve with an HQ and nice paths everywhere, but its all fallen into complete decay. The path that used to encircle the lake has almost disintegrated so there's only a portion left on the right side. The gazebo type structures have more-or-less collapsed. The only people you ever see there are fishermen and the occasional birder. But at least its now free to visit! It was almost dusk when we got there so no birds were seen apart for a flock of 200-odd Pacific black ducks on the lake's surface with a few scattered little grebes for good measure. The driver left and I went into the forest on the path. I honestly had good hopes. The forest looked great and I could totally imagine a giant rat sitting on a branch going "eep eep" at me. But no. I heard a Wallace's scops owl while there but that was it. I really really do suck at finding nocturnal animals!

Early next morning (today) I went to the pass at Golo Lusang just outside Ruteng. I hadn't been here before because I didn't know about it on my last visit. The dawn chorus of the bare-throated whistlers was in full swing and what an astounding aural spectacle it is. Its like a parking lot in the future where all the spaceships' alarms have gone off simultaneously. Absolutely amazing. Trying to see any birds was quite another matter. I am having some trouble finding anything in Flores right now. Eventually I spied some yellow-browed dark-eyes, mountain white-eyes, brown-capped fantails, scaly-crowned honeyeaters and finally a male bare-throated whistler in full song.

Tonight I'm returning to Ranamese but rather than coming back early before the hotel lock-up I'm just going to take my tent and stay there overnight. I'm probably not going to have much fun because while I generally don't mind being out in the forest at night alone, all those abandoned building at the lake's HQ really creep me out. I think I must have watched too much Scooby Doo as a youngling. Over the next few nights I'll also try night-spotting at Golo Lusang and Gunung Ranaka.

 

So last night I returned to camp out at Lake Ranamese. Outside the gates was a large troupe of the introduced crab-eating macaques. Maybe I should stop looking for tarsiers and rats and look for crab-eating macaques instead -- I can always find them! The ducks and grebes were all still on the lake, and I spotted some more birds for the trip list in the trees around the buildings (pale-shouldered cicadabird, great tit, pigmy woodpecker, black-naped monarch and helmeted friarbird). There seemed more activity in the forest this night than the last night, although I still didn't see what I was looking for. I did see a smallish arboreal mouse which I have no idea of the identity of. I have a list of the rodents found on Flores and I doubt the house mouse or Ryukyu mouse would be found up in the branches of a forest tree, so unless Paulamys is arboreal (and I have no idea if it is or not) then I haven't got a clue because nothing else seems to fit. There was a bit of noise from small rats as well in the undergrowth which I will assume were probably Hainald's rats, and I heard Wallace's scops owls again but no luck seeing them. Most excitingly-slash-frustratingly, twice there was the noise of something fairly sizeable rushing off into the night before I spied what it was, and if it wasn't caused by giant rats then I can't think what else it could be.

In the morning I tried my hand at actual birding for once. I really am making a complete hash of Flores (in case that translates differently to non-NZers, I'm ballsing it up big time). Its one thing to be able to blame a lack of bird-finding ability on concentrating on finding specific mammals, but when one actually goes out looking for birds and can't find any its just sad! I tried first in the forest around the lake but almost literally nothing could I find. I returned to pack up my tent, chasing away the macaques that were intent on destroying it, then headed off along the road towards Ruteng to see what could be found in the forest alongside. To cut a long (several birdless hours) story short, apart for the ducks and grebes on the lake, the morning's haul was, er, pale-shouldered cicadabird, Wallacean drongo, glossy swiftlet, brown-capped fantail, mountain white-eye and short-tailed starling. How embarrassing.

Tonight I try the Golo Lusang road for giant rats, and then tomorrow I'm heading off to a village called Kisol several hours away from Ruteng for an overnighter. I think the hanging parrots are to be found there, and today I was told the giant rats can be found as well in the coconut plantations there (on my first trip in 2009 several people told me the rats come into villages to raid the coconuts, so it sounds hopeful).

 

I have identified that one of the species here was indeed Acerodon celebensis (a couple of photos in the Indonesia Wildlife gallery). The other was a big black Pteropus species which I am suspecting was the black flying fox P. alecto.

 

"Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast"

After posting the last entry I tried the Golo Lusang road outside Ruteng for giant rats. I got dropped off at the top of the pass in the afternoon and walked down the road on the other side through the forest for an hour and a half looking for birds (which didn't actually go too badly for a change; I even found a new bird for myself, the Flores jungle-flycatcher) and then after dark walked all the way back up again. It was a beautiful night, warmish with not a cloud in sight, and the sky was awash with a veritable mass of twinkly whatsits, like the eye-shine from a million giant rats looking down upon the earth. Of actual giant rats there was not a sign. Back at the Rima Hotel I met a birder from France called Marc whom, as we discovered while we were talking, I had met at Lore Lindu in 2009 ("You were in Lore Lindu in 2009 - so was I. Maybe it was you we met at Lake Tambing? There was a guy there travelling alone; he had just come from seeing babirusa....." Definitely me). He has been to the island of Obi and seen the Obi cuscus; I am jealous.

Marc was travelling with his girlfriend and her twin sister, and they had just come from a village called Kisol a couple of hours away from Ruteng. I had never been there (in 2009 I had heard of it but didn't know how to get there) but I had since heard that the hanging parrot was there and the owner of the Rima told me the giant rats are also common there in the coconut plantations, although both pieces of information turned out to be wrong. Anyway,on the strength of those two things I headed off there for two nights. Kisol is very easy to get to from Ruteng. They have vehicles here called "travel cars" which are the same as the "public cars" of Sulawesi. I'm not sure I understand the financial aspects of running a travel car because they are about the same price for a seat as in a bus but they fit fewer people and their upkeep must be much more than the local buses which are just held together with pieces of string and sticky tape. Anyway, I just took a travel car to Borong about 1.5 hours away, for 20,000 rupiah, and then a bemo (mini-van) to Kisol for 5000 rupiah. At Kisol I stayed at the Seminary where Father Fabi reminded me of Laurence Fishburne (he wasn't Laurence Fishburne though, just to be clear). The Seminary was great, not least because it was filled with tokay geckoes. There really is something a bit surreal about eating your dinner while watching a gecko the length of your forearm scuttle up the wall or wander nonchalantly upside-down across the ceiling.

There is very little lowland forest left in Flores and the small area at Kisol is one of the more accessible bits. Its about a 3km walk from the Seminary. I set off there in the late afternoon and arrived drenched in sweat. The forest is very nice there, but my run of staggering ineptitude at finding Floresian birds continued unabated. I have a short list of the speciality birds of the island which I hadn't seen in 2009. I'd done all right back then finding most of the endemics -- I honestly don't remember it being this hard to find the birds!! On the list were, among others, the thick-billed dark-eye, the white-rumped kingfisher and the elegant pitta. The later two in particular are supposed to be very common here and easy to find. Yeah right! I could hear them calling left right and centre, but see them I could not. Main track, nothing; side trails, nothing; I would have burrowed through the leaf-litter if I thought it would have done any good! Being charitable on myself I decided the reason was because even in the late of the day it was still very hot and the birds were tired. Tomorrow morning would be different.

Dawn in the forest brought more bird invisibility. This was getting ridiculous. Finally after two hours I spied an adult thick-billed dark-eye with two younger ones moving rapidly from tree to tree. It took half an hour but eventually I got good enough views of them to satisfy myself. An hour later some rustling in the dry leaves carpeting the ground attracted my attention. There are great numbers of skinks here and their movements always cause similar noises but this sounded like something larger. I crouched down and peered down the slope and after ten minutes or so spotted an elegant pitta hopping quietly along looking for food. I do like pittas, and they're even better when I actually get to see one! This one turned out to be one half of a pair which was better again. But not as good as when I returned to the forest in the afternoon after lunch and a pitta flew up onto a branch not ten feet away and perched there in full view for half a minute. Later in the day I saw a fourth one, which for me and my pitta repelling device was quite unprecedented. Even better was to come a little bit later towards the end of the day when I chanced upon a white-rumped kingfisher. What a mind-blowing bird that one is! In the field-guide it looks all right, just a kingfisher really, but in life it is just fantastic. I was super-pleased to have seen it finally. And it's really big too -- it sort of made me wonder why I hadn't seen any up till then! When dark fell the forest rang to the popping calls of Moluccan scops owls and tokay geckoes. Unusually I even managed to see an owl when one flew through the torch beam and landed on a nearby branch. There are Wallace's scops owls here too but I didn't even hear one call let alone see one.

As for giant rats, on the first evening here I spent some time wandering under coconut palms looking up into them. The next day I learned from the local farmers that while they did know the rat, there were none in this area so that was a bit annoying. Still, I found three of the birds I was looking for and all were superb species so I think that definitely deserved a kipper for breakfast.

And that's about it for Kisol. There's nothing too exciting to write about because nothing unfortunate or interesting happened. It rained on me once, some dogs barked at me, and I sort of fell out of a tree while checking out an interesting-looking cavity. And that's really all. I did find out about a place further east again called Riung where there are big lizards described to me as like Komodo dragons but smaller that can change colour, which must be sail-finned lizards (Hydrosaurus) I guess. Very tempting. Right now I'm back in Ruteng and I may or may not have time later to head over Riung way and see what I can see.

 

there was a bit of a hiatus in the rat hunt while I went to Komodo but then it resumed. I'm due to leave Flores in a few days so the hunt is now at an end - I won't reveal whether it was a Fail or a Win yet, you'll have to wait till I have time and a good internet connection.

 

Eragon (but with a D. And Komodo in front)

I have (as you may have all noticed) been a little tardy with updating the blog due to being too busy doing things and, more particularly, being in places that lack internet connections of any use. There will probably be a rush of updates over the next few days (or not; who knows)

To recap just a little bit from the last post: in Ruteng I met a French birder called Marc travelling with his girlfriend and her sister, Peggy and Nathalie. They were coincidentally going to Labuanbajo on the same day I was so we decided to team up, especially for the trip to Komodo thereby making it more affordable for us all. First however we went to Golo Lusang for a morning birding session (this was back on the 2nd of September), they after shortwings and myself after parrots. Neither of us found what we were looking for, but we did discover that while the passenger vehicles were constant in the morning they dried up around ten. To cut a long story short, we had a little trouble getting back to Ruteng and didn't make it back to the hotel to check-out until 2pm (check-out was at 12 but fortunately they were nice enough not to charge us for another night), and not to Labuanbajo till 6.30pm.

After Flores I had been intending to go to Sumba to try and find all the birds I missed in 2009 but Marc and the girls had just come from there and informed me of the price increases at the guesthouse in Lewa, particularly a 700,000 rupiah transport fee to find the citron-crested cockatoos there, and I realised my budget wouldn't allow it. Therefore on the bus ride to Labuanbajo I formulated a new plan. Instead of going to Sumba and then West Timor, I would spend an extra week in Flores - allowing me to continue rat-hunting and also to visit Riung to see these big lizards that occur there - and then go by ferry from Ende to West Timor. The Pelni office in Labuanbajo told me when I asked there that no ferries went from Ende to Kupang but on their own website it says there is one at 9pm on the 12th, so that's what I'll count on. At worst I'll just fly from Ende to Kupang [I'm writing this in Kupang, and there was a ferry]. I had also been wanting to change my flight to Kuala Lumpur from Bali to Makassar (because I don't like Bali, and then I could say I've been to Sulawesi three times!) but Air Asia won't allow route changes so Bali it stays. Once in Kuala Lumpur on the 20th I'm off to Taman Negara (tapirs ahoy!). So basically what all that means is that apart for the 13 days in Sulawesi at the start, almost the entire Indonesian part of this trip will be spent in Flores. I think I must like it here.

The morning after we arrived in Labuanbajo, Marc and I went to Puarlolo, taking a couple of motorbikes at 5.30 in the dawning. Puarlolo is where everyone goes to see the endemic Flores monarch flycatcher ("everyone" in this context being birders, because other sorts of people don't matter). I had gone there in 2009 but only once and not until the afternoon due to the annoying bus system, so I didn't see any monarchs then. This time was completely different. We easily found a number of pairs and watched them for some time. They really are very nice birds. We also found an obliging elegant pitta who sat in a tree and called for ages, and a male paradise flycatcher, all white apart for the dark head, with long streamer-like tail feathers. Like a little forest angel he was. Then we walked off down the road a bit to see if we could spot any Flores hawk-eagles but it was too hot so I piked out and caught a passenger truck back to Labuanbajo. Marc acted like a proper birder and eventually found a distant pair flying over the hills.

The next morning was D-Day (the D stands for Dragons!). The Komodo trip was for two days and cost 2.2 million rupiah (split between the four of us it cost me just under NZ$80 which was a bargain). In 2009 I went to Rinca and saw the dragons there, but I couldn't find anyone to share the cost of a boat to Komodo so never got there. All the travel guidebooks say that Komodo is very crowded with tourists while Rinca is empty and peaceful, so naturally all the tourists now go to Rinca which has the added attraction of being closer to Labuanbajo and therefore cheaper. The standard two-day trip goes first to Rinca then Komodo, and the next day home via some snorkelling sites. Marc was more interested in the lesser sulphur-crested cockatoos on Komodo than the dragons themselves so they opted to miss Rinca out of the trip and go onto Komodo twice (afternoon and evening). The boat was somewhat smaller than we had anticipated, the same size in fact as the one I had been to Rinca on in 2009; actually it looked like the exact same boat. An hour into the three hour ride the boat started weaving a bit erratically, then the captain came up from below deck, his hands covered in oil, and announced that one of the engines had broken and we would have to return to Labuanbajo. Gotta love Indonesia. However after a bit of discussion on his cellphone he changed his mind and said we would continue after all, but we would be a bit slower than usual. I guess if the second engine broke down, we'd be going even slower. There wasn't much of interest on the sea that day, although we did see a couple of leaping eagle rays which was exciting. Some dolphins showed up but they were so far away that we could barely make them out let alone identify them.

First stop on Komodo was Pantai Merah ("Red Beach") where the sand is pink because it is made from red coral skeletons excreted by parrotfish. Few tourists go to Komodo from Labuanbajo but there are several boats that make a 5-8 day trip from Bali to Labuanbajo and they all stop at Komodo. Pantai Merah is one of the standard snorkelling spots so it was a bit weird the first stop on Komodo being a beach with a whole lot of girls in bikinis. Marc and the girls went snorkelling; I stayed on the boat and went to sleep. That done, and lunch eaten, we sailed round to the Komodo HQ and went ashore. Pantai Merah aside, there really was nobody on the island. We got our obligatory guide and went for a wander, and we were literally the only visitors there. Quite a contrast with my zoo-like Rinca visit where you were passing other groups of tourists every 15 minutes.

It is hot in Labuanbajo - it is very very hot on Komodo! The area the tourists are taken is through a very dry forest comprised mostly of tamarinds, baobabs and palms. The lesser sulphur-crested cockatoos are common here. They have been trapped out through most of their formerly-wide range, with the ones on Komodo probably being the last viable population. Green junglefowl are also very common, as are green imperial pigeons (Marc also saw a pied imperial but I didn't). The spot-necked doves here are huge incidentally: it sounds stupid but the first one I saw as it flew into a nearby tree I thought at first was one of the imperial pigeons! The only mammals seen were rusa deer and Sulawesi warty pigs (both introduced hundreds or possibly thousands of years ago). There are feral water buffalo on the island too, but not around the visitor area. We just saw one dragon in the forest, and when we ended up back at the HQ there were four or five there near the huts. Despite the number of tourists it does seem like the dragons are easier to find on Rinca than Komodo.

The night was spent on the boat about half an hour from the HQ, near an area of mangroves that flying foxes roost in. Unfortunately by the time they decided to fly it was too dark to see anything but silhouettes, but from size alone they can't have been anything else but Pteropus vampyrus.

The next morning we returned to Komodo for more cockatoo-watching. Strangely enough we didn't see any scrubfowl on the island although they should have been easy to find. We did see a female koel (basically a big cuckoo), and near the HQ a fantastic little Russell's pit viper (actually smaller than I would have expected). Best of all though was when Marc spotted four beach thick-knees quite a distance away on the beach (naturally). We checked them out through his scope but decided a closer view was called for on account of their awesomeness. We managed to get pretty close without spooking them and got excellent views. I've never seen the species before and Marc only once. They sort of remind me of a cross between a bustard and a sunbittern (you might need to Google them to see what I mean). When a pair of sea eagles flew past all four thick-knees tipped their heads up to the sky and swivelled in unison to watch the eagles. Funny birds.

On the way back to Labuanbajo we stopped at a dive site called Manta Point. A bevy of boats slowly circled the area watching out for mantas. When we spotted one Marc leapt overboard and swam after it. He was a little slower than the manta but got a good look at it I think. The girls and I stayed on board. I was quite tempted to risk drowning to say I'd swum with mantas but decided I still needed to see a giant rat so drowning wasn't an option. I can still say I've seen them at least. In contrast to the trip out to Komodo, the return one was brimming over with life. At Manta Point we saw a number of Bulwer's petrels and more later, totalling at least 15 or so. Petrels aren't too exciting off a NZ boat, but off an Indonesian boat they're pretty rare. Great crested terns were in abundance and apparently there were also black-naped and bearded terns but to me they looked like little dots on the horizon. Great-billed herons seemed very common in the area, and we also saw a few green turtles, a pair of unidentified dolphins that surfaced briefly, and another that could only have been an Irrawaddy dolphin (but it was so brief and I'm not 100% sure, so I'm not counting it -- also I don't know where the split is with the Australian snubfin dolphin). Dolphins really are very hard to see here, not at all accommodating to sightseers!

So that was the Komodo trip done with an excellent time had by all. I totally think I could live a life on the ocean waves. Apart for seasickness, drowning and the occasional attack by giant octopus (Octopus giganteus Verrill 1897) there doesn't seem to be any downside. If you have a sailboat you don't even need any money for fuel. For food you can catch fish and squid, and maybe an albatross at Thanksgiving. To combat scurvy you can eat sea cucumbers and sea gooseberries. Ah yes, my plans shall come to pass!

In 2009 I wrote about the ease of getting to see the dragons on Rinca/Komodo, and it bears repeating. There's a bit of a mystique about Komodo dragons and most people would probably think it would be a huge undertaking to see them, but basically you just take a short plane ride from Bali to Labuanbajo, then a boat to the islands. Easy-peasy. Do it now.

 

The Flores Giant Rat

The morning after the Komodo trip I took a motorbike to Tebedo, the nearby village which I was constantly assured was home to Wallace's hanging parrots and giant rats. I met up with Frans who lives there (and who was the one doing all the assuring) and we went into the forest where he grows coffee to find parrots. There were none. "Lots of nuri here yesterday morning," he says. I don't think I'll be returning to Tebedo. Even I know when to call it quits!

I went back to Labuanbajo, got my bags, and took a bus to Ruteng where the staff at the Rima Hotel were pleasantly surprised to see me again so soon. I basically had two more chances at finding a giant rat, tonight and tomorrow night, and then I'd be out of range. In the evening I took a motorbike to Golo Lusang, the pass just out of Ruteng. It was already dark when I arrived just after 7pm so I immediately headed on foot down the road shining my torch through the trees. Golo Lusang really is a better place to look for the rats than Danau Ranamese because the road is on the side of a mountain so you can look directly into the canopy of the trees downslope rather than pointing the torch upwards and trying hopelessly to see through the understory.

Just half an hour into my search I found a tree that looked like a species of Schefflera which I felt would be perfect for a giant rat to live in. The trunk was covered from the ground almost to the crown in a tangled creeping plant with sturdy thick stems that a rat could sleep in during the day, and then at night it just had to step into the canopy to feed on the small fruits the tree bore. While I was thinking this I heard a loud rustling noise coming from the climber on the trunk. The noise stopped and started a few times, and it was definitely being caused by something alive moving around. I scanned the tree futilely with my torch, seeing nothing. This couldn't be one of those times when you know there's something there but just can't find it and have to leave thinking "what if?". The tree wasn't actually far from the road, maybe thirty feet, but it was down a steep slope so I couldn't approach it, and it was partly obscured by other trees in the foreground. I could see the whole of one side of the tree from where I was, but not what was making the noise, so I moved along the road a bit till I could see through the other trees into the canopy from another angle -- and there was a Giant Rat!!! There seemed no more appropriate time than this to perform the Ren & Stimpy "Happy Happy Joy Joy" dance!

The rat was sitting on its haunches on a branch, reaching up to pull leaves and fruit towards itself, looking just like a possum feeding. In fact it reminded me very much of a cuscus in its behaviour and it seems likely it is the ecological equivalent here. Its even about the size of a cuscus (or for NZers, its about the size of a brush-tailed possum). Its quite a cute chubby rat actually, rather slow in its movements when I watched it. The position it was in was no good for photography unfortunately but it didn't seem bothered at all by the torchlight, just carried on with what it was doing, so I got to watch it through my binoculars for about half an hour (but not continuously because it was moving around in the tree crown and was out of sight for much of that time).

I had been thinking before this that repeating this Indonesian trip was a bit of a waste of time and money that I could be using for Sri Lanka or somewhere. The chances of finding a pigmy tarsier were always going to be remote, but I thought the Flores giant rat would be about 50-50. The more time that went past though the more I was losing motivation in the search. But now I've been justified and I couldn't be happier. I really can't stop talking about it (although truth be told, I'm mostly just talking to myself because nobody else really cares that I finally found a big rat after two years).

Now I just need to find that hanging parrot!