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.