No view and no summit – Gunung Butak

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The season got off to an in auspicious start with a rather wet and misty trip to Butak, where we failed to reach the summit and did not get a view.

The hike was a little more challenging than expected, partly because of the wet weather, but also because the trail was very overgrown in places. We were lucky to secure the services of 4 excellent porters in the local village, who hiked at a good pace with our bags while also wielding their machetes to clear the overgrown trail. Their money was well earned!

Gunung Gede and Gunung Pangrango

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A week after getting back from Flores, we grabbed our chance to bag Gede and Pangrango, two volcanoes that are located close to Bogor. We had intended to climb during the fasting month of Ramadan when the paths and campgrounds would be quiet, but the whole park was closed for “restoration” work. We hoped the park would be quieter after Ramadan as it was getting late in the season.

Flores – Komodo Dragons, Volcanoes and Sharks

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We’re a little bit late making this post, but life after a holiday can get pretty hectic, especially if the weekend after you get back you head off and climb another 3,000 m + volcano. The end of Ramadan is ideal time for a holiday escape from busy Java, and we’ve been planning a trip to Flores since we arrived in Indonesia. Finally we made it there and it was well worth the trip.

Gunung Palung National Park

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Having spent the last year on the organizing committee of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation 2010 meeting (and doing very little else in the last 3 months!), we took advantage of the pre-conference trip to Gunung Palung National Park in West Kalimantan. The Research Station in the park is usually off limits to everyone apart from researchers so this was a very special opportunity to visit the Station and view wild orangutans, populations of monkeys, gibbons, birds, fabulous primary lowland rainforest and pristine rivers. The park is famous for its variety of habitats, including lowland peat and fresh swamp forest with huge trees, riparian forest, lower montane forest, and montane forest near the summits of Gunung Palung and Gunung Ponti. The folklore character Pontianak (which gives her name to the town of Pontianak) is a female vampire who comes at night and drinks the blood of her victims; the Malay believe that women who die in childbirth will rise again as Pontianak.