6 days in the Wehea Rainforest

On to the Wehea protected forest- we drove 4x4 from the wehea dayak community out into the rainforest to the research station where we will spend a full week. As we drove here we talked about how much we needed to re-charge, unwind, and reflect… the last month has been quite a ride, and we are all very thankful to have some time to appreciate the things we have seen and have a home-base for more than a couple of days.

The forest on the drive in was immediately different from the forest we saw in Kutai, the trees are taller, the sense of majesty about this place is just MORE somehow than what we already experienced in Kutai. This place really is straight out of ‘The Land Before Time’, as Jesse mentioned on the way in… there were probably two spots the entire drive in where we could actually see out from the top of a hill through the trees and over the forest, the rest of the time the vegetation is so thick that it was impossible to see anything but what lined the dirt road.

We have 6 nights here in the rainforest, running the generator for power only a few hours a day, and cooking our own meals for the first time on this trip. We have been given a bit of a break from blog and video assignments for the duration of our stay in Wehea, and we are planning to take advantage of that. When we bounced and rattled our way up to the buildings in the middle of the forest where we would spend our time, we had one of those collective sighs- there is a river on one side with clear water (the first of it’s kind we’ve seen) and a stream feeding into it with a beautiful swimming-pond fed by a small waterfall, and dense forest on all sides.

(6 days later)
The time we have had here has been so needed, as we all expected. The meals have been quite healthy (we’ve eaten mainly rice, with some changing flavors here and there) and we’ve been active, still with time to relax. The rangers here have had our ‘help’ with their forest surveys- we’ve been able to participate in the ‘biodiversity survey’ where the rangers walk along the road after a rain, and note all of the different animal tracks. Also the ‘orangutan survey’, in which we count the nests (orangutans make a new nest to spend the night in every evening, and it’s the most effective way that’s been found to get a sense of their numbers) and evaluate how old the nests are. There has been night walks, night’s spent out at some look-out towers, river-tracings, class times and educational/informational talks from various rangers, and just lazy days around the camp.

My birthday was pretty awesome- I was woken by demands for me to put on a vine-crown, hold a wooden staff and wear a jungle-leaf skirt… it was pretty funny. The kitchen crew for the day went over the top, and cooked some delicious meals, and even smuggled in a delectable Guinness to go with dinner, which they cooled in the river- probably the best beer I’ve had.

I have not actually taken many pictures of this magical place- I guess that is partly because the surveys etc did not really present the opportunities… while the lazy days around camp were not really that photographically exciting. I still feel like I slacked off a bit, because now that I’m wanting to share where we were and what we saw, I don’t really have the means.

I went on an orangutan survey with Jesse, one thing I did take a couple of pictures of. The survey took us most of the day to complete, and only involved a kilometer of forest transect. We were looking for orangutan nests, as I’ve mentioned, and it’s amazing how hard they can be to spot in the canopy above. The rangers-in-training we trekked with spotted most of the nests, and the supervisor Pornomo only had to point out a few. This one is the most obvious one we saw, and is really the only one that came out in pictures, since the others were all so obscured by branches and trees.

We played lots of guitar, and each group took their turn cooking the meals for a day. We went out to sunrises and sunsets at the lookout towers as I mentioned, the view out over the rainforest was spectacular, and the mists and clouds that hang above the trees were beautiful. There were many cool bugs, everything seems to be just Bigger… I played with one praying mantis that was attracted to my headlight one night, it was big enough to make me seriously question why I was letting it crawl all over me (something I’ve never been worried about with praying mantis before). And this rino-beetle, I don’t have anything in the images to help you understand how big it is, but it was not that much smaller than a clenched fist.
It was crossing the path as I walked to the water-hole for a midnight dip with the fireflies.

Jesse Spencer and myself went on a really awesome river-tracing excursion, wading through water of varying depths with slippery rocks and hanging branches and vines… We spent an hour and a half goofing around and taking some video footage of the area on our way,
and being able to appreciate that we were deep in the rainforest up to our necks in clear beautiful water for the first time this whole trip was indescribable. We stopped for lunch for an hour or so, and laughed while threw perfect skipping stones out over a slow-moving section of the river, while we enjoyed our lunch of a very fishy rice. Veronica, Elise, Nadine and Gillian came around the corner as we were packing up and we headed around a few more bends in the river to the big water-hole, where we were able to dive off of the rocks and float around while the rays of the sun passed over the trees.

The smaller swimming hole was a beautiful place to take a dip before bed-time, the clear water from the small waterfall felt like it had imbued healing properties. A couple of nights in the camp I took my underwater strobe-light and placed it on the bottom of this pool so that the light glowed up from the bottom making it like a grotto where the ripples played with the light in the trees, and the fireflies would come over and blink around with the incredible bright starry skies above… this was really only possible later at night because the generator would be turned off after 10 or 11 pm, but it was glorious.

Sadly we packed our bags on the last day to leave this incredible forest sanctuary.




After another 8 hour 4x4 out of Wehea and North to Tanjung Redeb, here we are again with internet at the Hotel Sederhana, where we will be for the next few days meeting with some university students and governmental people in meetings etc… and we should have fairly good internet for these few days, so I will/should be able to update pictures and other fun things like that.

Wehea Community

Driving to the Wehea Dayak community was a seven or 8 hour ordeal- bouncing around in a mitsubishi 4x4 truck, all of our gear tarped up in the back. Out the windows we watched all kinds of deforestation pass by; palm oil plantations, mining, forestry, etc etc. We stopped for lunch and stepped out of our air-conditioned cab and ate, sweating heavily as usual, in a nice hut overlooking treeless hillsides covered in rice-fields (not paddies, rice grown like wheat out of the ground) with palm oil seedlings ready to take the place of the rice.

When we arrived several hours later in the Wehea Dayak community, I was surprised because there was no rainforest that we had passed on the way in- while this community is so incredible partly because of it’s commitment to protect the rainforest. We were greeted warmly with a welcome ceremony, a chicken (chick actually) was sacrificed, and we had to have it’s blood applied to our foreheads, before we could participate in the dancing and singing that followed.

We were split into groups after this for our homestays, and moved our bags into their houses. My homestay family was so great, Hedrus the father, his wife, 5 children including infant Maya who was adorable.
I shared this homestay with Shandel, Micheala, Gillian, and Elise- we all felt blessed to have been selected to stay with such a wonderful family. Hedrus spoke some English, and we were able to communicate with him fairly well- he was very good to us, making sweet tea for us every chance he had.

We woke early to attend a ceremony that was being held for a baby in the village, she was days old, and they were celebrating her birth. We helped (mostly got in the way I’m sure) to put some of the bamboo segments filled with sticky-rice, coconut shavings and milk wrapped in a banana leaf over the coals of a cooking fire, and went across the river on small dugout canoes with buckets of slop to feed and entice the pigs there so that we could capture one for the sacrifice required in the ceremony. There was quite a lot of squealing and struggling- but a pig was bound up and carried back to the hut on the other side of the river by the Moss Brothers Tim and Matt.

By the time the ceremony was over and we had watched the pig being sacrificed, the singing, chanting, blood smearing and cooking in earnest, it was 9AM an time for us to pile in the back of a pickup truck with 10 other people to go to the community gardens. Hedrus was concerned for our white skin and brought us beautiful hats to protect us from the sun, and we went to his part of the farm with our whole group to see what the community is doing in the areas that have been already deforested. There is a community initiative to make the leftover grasslands from the deforestation useful by converting them first to ‘gardens’ with banana trees, peanuts, corn etc with rubber-trees which will grow up much more slowly, and eventually take the place of these other crops. The rubber trees provide the community with a valuable source of income, and are much ‘better for the environment’ than dry grass fields, even though they too end up being a monoculture.


While we were here my group of 4 (Jesse, Nadine and Spencer) decided that as an early birthday present they would buy me 23 rubber-tree seedlings that we all planted in some of Hedrus’ property (still grassland) next to his existing garden. It was a very, very cool birthday present, and one that I was certainly not expecting at all- I was very touched by this beautiful gesture both for me but also for the community- very thoughtful.



It was late morning by the time all of this was done, and we jumped back in the truck which drove to the rice-fields, where we had lunch. This was a very incredible experience because we were able to participate in the whole process of preparing an amazing feast- the same rice-coconut-cooked-wrapped-in-banana-leaves-inside-bamboo, along with vegetables cooked in wider segments of bamboo.

It was delicious of course, and everyone ate way too much because it was so tasty.

I spent the rest of the day mostly sitting on the large front porch with Micheala and Hedrus’ children trading friendship bracelets that we made and –playing some guitar. The children thought it was very funny when I read a couple of parts from a story-book in Indonesian to them- they corrected me on the pronunciation of almost every word. Later that night we were sooo lucky to have some of the village elders sing us a couple of their traditional songs,
it was wonderful to be a part of this cultural exchange- even though we felt we were far more on the receiving end. Later on Hedrus showed us his traditional dance-garb, and asked us to try it on for some pictures.



The following morning we took a few pictures of our host family and then some group shots to hopefully have printed in Balikpapan and send back to the village for them to put on their wall. Hedrus was quite excited to have these pictures made, because the few pictures he has of his family together are from quite a while ago when there are less children, and he so wanted to have something more recent to hang on his wall. I am looking forward to sending the pictures as a thank you for their wonderful hospitality.