you flush with the bucket

Now I have some computer access, I’m going to take you back in time to Uncle Tan’s jungle camp. After we’d seen the proboscis monkeys and orangutans in their sanctuaries, this was our chance to see them in the wild (as tiny pinpricks in the distance, most likely, but in the wild nonetheless). We were taken in vans for an hour or so and then grouped into boats for our trip down river to the jungle camp, which took another hour…. I kept seeing monkeys running along the banks of the river, but by the time I pointed them out to Josh, we’d passed them. He was accusing me of having some kind of heat-induced monkey visions…

The camp itself was set up with a big dining area (and thank god, the food was much better than the operations camp), huts that slept six people, and a toilet/shower block – all connected via boardwalks about a metre off the ground. It was great – very back to basics, no running water and just mattresses on the floor, and you could hear the constant chatter of birds and insects.

(Josh here… when penny says “back to basics” she means that the shower was a bucket you filled with Milo coloured river water, before emptying it on your head. If you wanted to flush the toilet you filled the same bucket, and used it to flush manually).

We went out on three boat safaris and two jungle hikes across the 2.5 days….the nighttime boat safari was pretty exciting because we saw a leopard cat (quite rare) and some civet cats (not so rare but interesting looking) and a whole family of sleeping proboscis monkeys (and who doesn’t love them?). We even had a personal visit from a wildlife friend overnight when a rat broke into my bag and munched his way into some cereal….and took some bites out of the backpack itself for good measure. I was feeling pretty forgiving because I thought it was some kind of exotic jungle rat….I hadn’t actually seen it because I’d woken up with the rustling and sent Josh to investigate, and he’d made his getaway. Then I busted it lurking around the cabin the next night and realised it was a plain old brown rat….
The dusk boat safari was the highlight for me….we saw huge groups of monkeys playing along the river banks (and a whole lot of birds, that I had to pretend to be enthralled with when the girl next to me kept excitedly offering me her binoculars. Nothing against birds, but when there are orangutans out there somewhere….). We didn’t end up seeing any orangutans but right at the end of the trip, we watched the flying fox exodus, where they leave their daytime sleeping spot and wing their way to another part of the jungle. There were literally thousands of them flying overhead – it was really magical.

(me again… I got the flying foxes on video, and it’s awesome… I’ll upload it when we get home).

Josh had his moment of triumph in the night walk – he spotted an enormous tarantula which must have been a bit of a find, because our guide was very exited and called over all the other groups in the area. I had just said to one of the other spider-phobic girls “don’t worry, the guide said that they rarely see tarantulas because they live so high up”…. It turned out that the tarantula was the least of our worries, as it became clear that the guide had no idea where he was going because this was a new trail. Josh was behind him and was helping him spot markers on the trees but we seemed to be going in circles…this was at 11pm, and the mud was reaching the top of our gum boots in some parts. I was having PTSD flashbacks of trekking in Zhangjiajie when we thought we were never going to make it out (except this time, our bodies would have been found half devoured by giant spiders, rather than frozen). Luckily, he yelled out to another group and we followed them back to camp….

(and once more with feeling…. the only reason the guide got lost was because he had never walked the trail we were on before, and he made the mistake of switching half way through the hike to a different trail he had also never walked. I’m no Bear Grylls but I’m fairly certain the easiest way to go around in circles is to switch to an alternate trail, which doubles back in the direction you already hiked on the first trail…)