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Ketambe, Kutacane, and Gunung Leseur National Park, Aceh Tenggara, Sumatra, Indonesia. September 15-20, 2011.

It’s taken me a while to write about this. I write enough fiction featuring people coming to terms with their own lapses in sanity to recognize that it’s a process of interest to me. I also spent enough time on independent travel forums, and especially with threads around traveling to Sumatra’s Aceh Province, to recognize that women who work toward expressing the complexity of their feelings about their experiences there are most often gaslighted and told to grow up. And the thing is, I really liked Ketambe. It was utterly beautiful and startling and intense, and the people were warm, and the food and coffee were seriously the best. I felt truly foreign there, almost otherworldly. If you can get to Sumatra and to Ketambe, go.

The heat is so much wetter than that of Central Texas; insect bites raise the skin all over. Leeches waver up hungrily from the dirt. I came from drought and could smell the coming rain. Rain pounds for hours, muffling all the senses. Across the road, the brown river pulls branches in its wake. I hung my towel on an empty electrical socket and the circuit coursed through me and I screamed. I had vowed to forsake toilet paper in Sumatra because the locals don’t use it, and slowly I realized that despite my attempts to master local methods I smelled mildly of pee. I wanted to walk in the jungle alone but couldn’t even find the waterfall up the hill on my own, though I acquired several leeches along the way, so I walked up and down the road and was greeted by everyone I passed and also honked at by every passing vehicle, and I felt of interest, and answered jalan jalan each time someone inquired what I was doing or where I was going. At night I’d lie awake in my beautiful room under the pink mosquito net and metal roof and rain and feel that the end of all things was encroaching. I think it would’ve helped if I’d gone to Sumatra later in my trip, though that wouldn’t have made sense logistically. Travel is a loop or a wavery continuum, and you settle into it and you open and open, and so you should not do the hard part first. More than anything I wanted to be open to Ketambe.

I went on a jungle trek with Mus, who has been guiding forever and whose father was a guide, and Joanne and Eugene, an awesome Irish couple. Part of the reason I came to Ketambe was because I wanted to see orangutans in the wild—in all the world, they only live here and in Kalimentan (Indonesian Borneo). An hour or so into the first day of our trek, we walked out onto a thick fallen log and observed a group of them. To use some Texas points of reference, they look somewhat like Willie Nelson, but with fur of a more vivid red, and they move like rock climbers. They’re completely magnificent. They’re just mammals going about their day. Babies cling to their mothers until they’re big enough to go out on their own. A mother had deposited her baby in a tree crotch and we watched and heard it cry out for its mom, who returned to it and picked it up in her long, loping arms. Hornbills took flight, most often in pairs. Their wing feathers cut the air in a rhythmic whoosh.

We camped at a hot spring section of the Alas River. The Irish couple and I walked down among the rocks and crossed the river to its center, where we sat with our bodies braced against rocks as the hot, sulfurous river plummeted past us into a small waterfall. I leaned back and looked up into the long sickled palms through my foggy glasses. It was incredibly relaxing and I could feel my mind just going. The rocks at the campsite were warm from the geothermal excitement, and the river and rocks steamed. Late at night, it rained. The next day, we saw another orangutan, who was resting in the trees. They enjoyed nailing us with fruit pits. We also saw macaques, the butt of a Thomas Leaf monkey, butterflies in many sizes and colors, tiny birds, a little squirrel, and a dead Rafflesia. Back at the guesthouse, the power went out and we watched the geckos stalk insects across the ceiling, the good television of the tropics.

Joanne and Eugene left the next day and I decided to spend another two days at the guesthouse, just reading and writing and sitting on my little porch. On this huge green island, at the edge of a national park that’s one of the last bastions of the orangutan, where electricity is intermittent and the water has little black things in it, it isn’t quiet at all. There’s truck and motorbike traffic on the road all day. The sons drive their motorbikes across the grass with pretty girls riding sidesaddle on the back. They go into the empty bungalows and run the water. The daughters float about in loungey white outfits. The little kids yell and macaques fight or play and the tiny bright birds sing and cicadas hum. Laundry flaps on the line. It gets rained on and dries again. Mus calls me outside and we look at an enormous orangutan eating in the tree up the hill. Everything is thick with life.

Mus’s 15-year-old son fell off his motorbike and I was asked to administer first aid. They sat him in a chair and two of his siblings held his arms as he thrashed through my attempts to clean his bloody knee with alcohol pads. I had Mus rub antibacterial cream into the wound because I didn’t have any gloves and it seemed instructive. Everyone seemed baffled by the creaminess and he tried to retain a slab of goop atop the wound. I began to fear that my instinctive use of my stash of medical supplies had triggered some awful chain of events. With the help of my phrasebook, I wrote Mus a brief letter in Indonesian detailing how the dressings need to be changed twice a day to prevent infeksi, etc., and I noticed that they did change the dressings and appeared to be dousing the cut in iodine, which is better than the cream I used since cream won’t dry in the tropics. The next day, the son sat with me on my porch and we talked for a few hours in our equally bad English and Indonesian, and looked through my Lonely Planet Indonesia book (which I called my buku turis, which made him laugh [I’m a cutup in bahasa]) at places neither of us would ever see. He said I was brave for traveling on my own. I was surprised and delighted to hear this. I had surmised that the family thought I was a depressive weirdo, which they handled deftly: Mus or Tuma (his wife) plus one or two of the kids would come out and eat with me every night so that I wouldn’t be alone. Most guests perhaps eat with the family in the little room I only caught the edges of.

My little bungalow!

One day at dusk it poured and poured and Tuma loped across the grass to fetch me and we huddled underneath her huge rainbow-striped umbrella and walked to the common area as she held my arm. She is squat and strong and the mother to these 13 children and if I spoke better bahasa I’d beg her to take me to the market with her to buy food and then show me how she cooks. Mus sits at a table with his littlest daughter each night as she does her homework or writes or draws in her notebook. He built everything here by hand and with love: the star and triangle shapes cut out of the wood, the patterns along the roof edges. His mother and siblings live up and down the street. They all stayed. He owns the land by the river, grows corn and palms and fruit trees, and has some tiny farm animals: goats and their kids, sheep with long and matted wool, a chicken leading baby ducks. When it rains very hard, the guesthouse chicken paces startledly along the rail, hesitant to ascend into her semicircle of vines. I discover why the narrow grey cat is always slinking purposefully across the common area floor: four kittens beneath the porch, grey with black stripes. She lies under there with her pretty eyes calm; one kitten plays with her tail, one hides, two pop from the box where they were probably born and play.

It’s like a dream now, all image and no feeling. There was so much beauty and sweetness. But at night I lay or snapped awake and grew terrified. It was like a tropical sickness without the fever. I can’t fully recall the source of my paranoia and dread. There was a sort of malaise, too—the unstoppable inner chatter that I should have been better, eaten with the family, sat at the table smoking and staring silently into the trees with whichever family member was currently relieving my female solitude for longer instead of going to my room to read (I could not convincingly explain why reading in bed was lovely). I felt sticky and intransigent and like I’d failed to connect with the family in any of the ways I normally connect with people when I travel. Physically I felt vulnerable in ways I can’t fully recall. I felt like a bad traveler.

I have gratitude for their hospitality and respect for the land they are keeping close. I was ready to move on and I did feel brave. On my last day in Sumatra, I woke at 5am after barely sleeping. The rain coursed outside and I was petrified. Tuma gave me a plastic bag full of glorious coffee. Mus took the bemo with me. It filled with and emptied of schoolgirls in white jilbab, which they decorated at the throat or back of the head with cartoon character buttons or little chains of beads or filigree. The airport was populated with guys in their 20s in work uniforms. I was irritable and bedraggled and full of horror; all my accumulated bahasa (which was never much to begin with) fled and I knew they were talking about me in a macho manner but couldn’t understand a word or sass back. They took pictures with me and I made an angry sad face in each photo. I was visibly not into having a conversation, and their disrespectful persistence appalled me and made me hate them. I felt bad about hating them because again I wanted to be better, a good traveler and grown-ass woman, and really they’re just backwoods hicks and probably virgins who work in an airport smaller than the ones in Wyoming that they will never in their lives afford to fly from. My plane landed, spun its propellers. I crossed the tarmac.

The only other person on the flight was an educated gentleman from Banda Aceh, who is affiliated with the university and is running for office. He lived in New York for two years and taught at Colombia and NYU and was the best possible person to be on that plane. We talked about classy, worldly things. The pilots were white. I felt utterly disoriented. I felt incredibly wealthy. We flew low over mountains and fields.

I thought I could buy a ticket straight to Padang from Medan, but at the domestic ticket counters I learned that the flights were full or had already left for the day. I was sweaty. I had PMS and felt deeply vulnerable and unhinged, but tough too. Medan seemed horrible and I couldn’t stand to spend the night there. Part of me wanted to not fail, to be strong and good and spend that week in West Sumatra; I still desperately want to visit Padangpajang and the Harau Valley. Most of me recognized that I just needed to relax. Travel isn’t like everyday life when you hang onto all your old baggage when you move to a new place hoping to reimagine your life. Travel is transformative in the day-to-day. You can slough off your crazy old shit over the span of a flight. I asked if I could get a flight to Bali instead.

I had to make two ATM withdrawals to pay for the ticket. Suddenly, I felt light. I was elated. In the snarl of Lion Air’s bag check, I waited forever, watched everyone, let them go in front of me. Soon it was mid-afternoon and all I’d eaten all day was four jam-filled biscuits on my Air Susi flight. On the jungle trek and on the green side of the volcano, I had fantasized about walking through level fields for hours and hours. Among Sumatra’s raucous and reeking motorbikes and shitty trucks, I was embarrassed to find myself fantasizing about being sealed inside a decent car, being moved hermetically from one place to another, closed off from the sounds of the roads, just for half an hour or so. I thought about the goodness of what I was leaving and it was eclipsed by the goodness of what might come and I was thrilled.

 

Travel Tips

My bungalow at Pak Mus Guesthouse cost IDR 50,000 a night. Dinners cost something like 20k and they’re great at accommodating vegetarians (as is everyone else I met in Indonesia, incidentally)—highly recommended. The 2-day trek was 700k per person with everything included. I went a little crazy, but you don’t have to! I really recommend this guesthouse and Mus as a guide.

The bemo ride from the Ketambe guesthouses to the Kutacane airport cost 60 or 100k—I don’t remember—you’ll have to negotiate with the driver once all the kids are dropped off. The airport is seriously podunk and the ticketing seems informal, so don’t worry about getting there too early. Mus called Air Susi to reserve my ticket a day or two ahead. NBA is half the price, but its planes are decades old and I read about a crash on the Kutacane-Medan route a few weeks later where everyone onboard was killed. Air Susi seemed competent, straightforward, and safe, but grow a thicker skin if you’re a young-looking, light-skinned woman waiting at the airport alone.

Book at least a day ahead if you want to fly from Medan to Padang. It’s more expensive to buy plane tickets for the same day—even flying the day after ticket purchase is about half the price. Ticket prices are fixed. Tickets at the counter are cash only. Like everywhere else I went in Sumatra, kind people materialize in front of the domestic ticket counters and will help you figure out which airlines fly to your destination. My impromptu Medan-Denpasar ticket cost 2.2 million rupiah, but it’ll cost less if you do some minimal planning or are flexible.