Successful networking trip completed

From 15-30th January we (Amanda Korstjens, Ross Hill and Susanna Curtin) visited new and established LEAP collaborators. This was a very eventful trip!

Here are a few highlights from our first activity: a visit to the Ecolodge at Bukit Lawang.

We did not want to spend the Sunday after our late Saturday arrival in Medan so we left for a 1 night visit to Bukit Lawang early Sunday morning. We visited the typical tourist trails and spend much of our time photographing Thomas langurs, silver leaf monkeys, orangutans, longtailed macaques and pigtailed macaques, lots of butterfiles (especially Susanna), and beautiful forest. To be honest, I was a bit worried that it would end up being unpleasant due to the strong tourist focus on orangutans. It was, however, a very nice trip! We stayed in the beautiful new Ecolodge, supported by our collaborators from PanEco-YEL-SOCP.

It is the perfect place to escape Medan and view primates up close. Of course it is hard to see how some orangutans are still hanging around the main trails waiting for a food gift, and how the tourists and guides are mostly focused just on orangutan tourism. Still, it offers unique opportunities to see the other primates as well as the orangutans up close and mostly the other primates were simply ignoring us and habituated from regular exposure to people rather than because of feeding by guides or tourists. Guide Eddy was great and we enjoyed two 4-hour wanders in the forest (one in the afternoon after arriving from Medan and one in the morning before returning to Medan). Clearly, a better plan is to spend a full day in the forest so you can go further and do not see the same trails too much.

The ecolodge was lovely and it was so lovely to wake up with silve rleaf monkeys sleeping right along the trail between our little bungalow and the restaurant.

The villagers were also great and I did not have the overcrowded touristy place-feel that I was fearing. I hope to come back in June with a gorup of students and am curious to see whether it will then be busier with tourists. As it was, we enjoyed watching local kids do what they love everywhere: play in the river and have a lovely lazy Sunday afternoon.

Susanna and Ross spoke with the manager about the aims and running of the lodge but then we really had to get back to Medan so we could meet SOCP friends and go to Sikundur on Tuesday.