Climbing Gunung Sulawah

For any of you who were tuning in to find an adventure on an Acehnese fishing boat on the strait of Malacca, you will be disappointed. After hanging around the docks for a few hours, the word got out that the waves were too big and we would have to wait until the weekend (nobody thinks about water on Friday, the Islamic sabbath). This might be the last nail in the coffin of helping out the fishing industry in Banda Aceh, which was my excuse for coming here in the first place. Ah well...

I did, however, climb a volcano this weekend. Gunung Sulawah is extinct as the dodo compared to most Indonesian volcanos, but that is not saying much. It rises a vertical mile above the strait of Malacca and is covered by what can only be described as trackless jungle. We took along some hippie guides who are studying Arabic at the Islamic University in Banda Aceh. It takes all Muslims...

The jungle that we began in was loud and active. The insects and bird calls made us have to shout. I was initiall put off by spiders that were spinning webs large enough to catch birds, but we soon pushed those out of our mind in order to deal with the constant onslaught of leeches.
These tropical leeches are much different than their Great Lakes brethren. They are much smaller, and they can move about like an inchworm in the dirt. They actually seemed to come from the dirt which was thick and slippery everywhere. Fortunately, you could pull them off with your fingers once they attached, but that mean that you bled from the spot which attracted more of the buggers. One of our guides said that of all the creatures in the jungle (which does contain tigers), the leeches were her kryptonite.

We began the trip a little late to accommodate Jesse, so we ended up climbing the last (and steepest) part completely in the twilight. The ground was slippery and sloping at 30 degrees or more so the only thing that kept me upright was gripping trunks and vines. It occurred to me that my hands are the way they are in order to grip trees just like these. I had turned into a bona fide oranghutan (in Indonesian, orang = person, hutan = forest). We spent the next morning on the chilly (60 degree) peak even though there wasn't much of a view (jungle, again). The guides were content to just sit back and cook noodles, and relax in the woods. When we asked about the possibility of running into the likes of the man eating tigers I'd seen at the Aceh nature conservancy, we were told not to worry, because even though they were on the mountain, they would never use the same trail that we did. It was a great experience.

Just 5 more days in Aceh before I'm on the road again.

Also check out these girls; they run the show.