I’m looking for endangered orangutans in northern Sumatra. An imagined rainforest floats into my head — a carpet of exotic plants in shades of green under huge trees that go to the sky, a rare flower, alien insects, reptiles, amphibians in technicolor — Michael Jackson’s Earth Song feeds me a few more images before I’m distracted by the prospect of lunch at a tiny roadside warung food stall.
Medan City to the rainforest of Gunung Leuser National Park, takes 2 hours to reach on empty roads. When not absolutely rutted, the unmarked two-lane “highway” is respectably smooth. Motorcycle taxis with take-away-packaging sidecars are the main mode of public transport, but everyone from ten year olds to women in jilbabs, seems to have a motorbike. There are garish tin-roofed green arabesque mosques every kilometer; abundant glass-countered Nasi Padang food stalls; and flowering gardens fronting cinderblock houses in various stages of development — from raw grey to confection pink.
We pass a woman on a sewing machine in one yard, narrowly missing three waddling geese exiting another. Ahead, a small truck unloads tacky plywood furniture in front of an orange building with tinted windows. People seem happy and prosperous if not possessed by good taste.
About halfway there, I notice the oil-palm plantations — the bane of rainforests, the ghostly itch on every environmentalist’s back, and the source of the newfound riches of the freshly minted consumers I’ve just passed. Elaeis palms are beautiful in an ominous way, ordered like centurions of some vast, soulless phantom army, long-leaved and bigger-built than most palms. Clumps of heart-red fruit are being harvested and loaded onto trucks for pressing into oil. We drive past the endless rows — the gaps between their geometric placing is flip-frame hypnotic; facts swirl in a haze — 98% of Indonesian rainforests are expected to vanish by 2022 alongside exotic flora and fauna, 10% of worldwide greenhouse gases come from their destruction and burning. All these miles of palm must have been living primary rainforest once.
The entrance to the national park, Bukit Lawang’s one-lane tourist strip, is part tacky grunge, part pretty manicured garden. It sits alongside a slender rain-fed river full of boulders and rounded pebbles, across from the rainforest that rises up a hill, all tall evergreens, tangled vines and falls of creepers. The entrance past the crumbling, abandoned, primate rescue center has well worn tourist paths.
In the forest we see endemic Thomas Leaf Monkeys, Long Tailed Macaques, Black Gibbons and a cheeky baboon. Jackie, a 30-something rehabilitated Orangutan rescued from the pet trade loves tourists, will hold your hand and not let go until bribed with fruit. Her 18-month son is learning to bless congregations with pee while hovering overhead from low branches. The other solitary orangutans are more wild and not recommended hugging material.
Seven hours of slow, sweaty, strenuous hiking up and down deathly slippery peatland hills over paths of mulchy brown leaves and orange mud, holding on to saplings, creepers, lianas and faith for support, I’m trying not to worry about broken limbs, malaria, leeches, bees, thorns, venomous snakes and hallucinogenic toads. I spot a strange winged insect that I name Dragon Mosquito, and a chameleon that I christen Boy George. There are huge sandalwood trees everywhere and termites enough to bring them all down. Our guide gives us bitter quinine bark to chew on and a tart leaf that tastes like sour apples — we just need gin and ice. I’d love to see the climbing orchids and the massive, odiferous raffelesia that flower in late September, but it will be the rainy season then with biblical downpours of forty days and nights. Heaven and hell mix in rainforests, it’s hard to tell which one you’re in.
By 4 PM, I’m at a campsite of tarpaulins-on-bamboo by the river. So is every other tourist who’s overnighting here. The river is cold. There’s a 4 foot monitor lizard and macaques looking for lucky tiffin breaks. Adam, Eve and the Serpent? This is how trouble starts.
Dinner, a steamy tent, a rainstorm, daybreak, breakfast, a hike, a waterfall later, and I’m tubing downstream towards the comfort of a hot shower and a bed that doesn’t smell like socks. Looking up at the towering rainforest on both sides I wonder if it will it all be gone in a few years. Or will there be even more ghoulish guides and adventure tourists than now?
In remoter, deeper parts of the forest, the chances of seeing a rare Sumatran tiger or rhino are higher than bleak and the orangutans don’t have names. On other fringes though, the surrender of ancient tree-spirits to marching zombie armies of palm trees is perpetrated by logging and deforestation legally, illegally, by big players and small freeholders. The end of the world comes hard at once.
In a state of post-consumerist enlightenment, it’s easy to say ‘stop the deforestation’. Then, consider that 50% of all consumer goods from shampoo to icecream and potato chips contain palm oil. Everyone consumes it. How many would actually change their lifestyle for the sake of old trees and monkeys they can see in a zoo?
Adam, Eve and the Serpent are not two macaques and a monitor lizard. Every “developed” country once had forests which they ate up. Indonesia is simply following suit. “Progress” is access to a modern consumerist lifestyle and a “better” standard of living — so many temptations, so many apples to be had.
Maybe in a few generations, when everywhere looks like everywhere else and variety is the flavor of a potato chip; when ecological disasters are commonplace, and “the environment” means an air-conditioned room, people might finally be on the same page and make some real changes. And just like in the Earth Song video, the world will spin backwards, trees will re-grow and strange creatures will walk the planet again.