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Published: October 31st 2009
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Why would anyone, just for the sake of seeing a flower, come off a nine hour bus trip and get straight onto another bus for a further 21 hours? That’s what I did. I don’t know if it can be considered intrepid, inspired, or just insane. The flower in question, of course, is the
Amorphophallus titanus by Bukittinggi. When I last saw it on the 21st of October it was still a bud and it wouldn’t be in proper flower for about ten days, by which time I’d have left the country. But the more I thought about it the more I realised that to leave Indonesia without having seen such a profound rarity would be madness. MADNESS!!! You can plan a trip around orangutans or tapirs or Komodo dragons, but not around a flower that displays such obtuse unpredictability in its life-cycle. Really the only course of action available to me was to cancel my outbound flight in order to head southwards again to see the flower, even though I couldn’t actually afford to do this on what were now almost non-existent monetary funds. I couldn’t simply change the flight date because it was one of those cheap budget deals
scenic view along the railway tracks
what do you mean, you can't see them!? that didn’t allow that. However Fortune must have had a good run on the horses which put her in a good mood because when I went into the Malaysian Airlines office in Medan to cancel the flight the very nice lady at the desk did change my flight date giving me the extra few days needed at no extra cost, on the basis that my original morning flight had already been cancelled by the airline themselves and I’d been rebooked on the afternoon one, and therefore I’d been “inconvenienced” by that.
So after visiting Gunung Leuser National Park I took a truck for an hour to Kutacane and then a mini-van to Medan for eight hours, arriving just in time to catch the 21-hour overnight bus back to Bukittinggi (and I mean literally just in time -- I arrived at the bus station with only five minutes to spare!). The
Amorphophallus was still in bud so I had a few days to wait, enabling me to finally go see someone who may or may not have been a doctor who poked me in the ribs and said “you’ll be fine”. That’s a relief….
While waiting for the flower
tracks to nowhere
landslide from the recent earthquakes I took in some of the natural sights around town, starting with the walk to Lembah Anai (as it turned out, the Lembah Anai waterfall and not the Lembah Anai Nature Reserve as I thought). This is a 6km walk along a railway track that I’d been told was only used on two days of the week. It was fairly obvious though that the track hadn’t been used in a very long time. At some points it was so overgrown you couldn’t even see the rails. It was a pleasant enough stroll with a few mitred leaf-monkeys and pig-tailed macaques along the way and a few birds, but where the tracks went over a highway was a bit nerve-wracking to someone not great with heights when there’s nothing to stop you falling except your own sense of balance (or lack thereof, as the case may be).
The next morning I went to the town canyon to see if I could find the colony of flying foxes that pass over town each night. (Whenever I see streams of flying foxes in the night sky I can’t help but be reminded of the scene in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of
Doom” where Willy says “oh look at the big birds!” and Indy goes “those aren’t birds, sweetheart, those are giant vampire bats!!”). This wasn’t as relaxing a walk as the one yesterday, the first section being a seemingly never-ending set of steps leading straight up the canyon wall. Then there was a wander along a road between the villages of Kampung Sihanok and Koto Gadang, then back down into the canyon again where a rickety old suspension bridge sat waiting. The flying fox colony was way down in the far reaches of the canyon and although I walked for a long way, fording the river many times I couldn’t get there in the end and had to abandon the quest.
Now all there is to do is sit and wait for the
Amorphophallus to open, hopefully in the next two days because I have to be on the bus back to Medan on Monday afternoon.
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Andy
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ha they were selling that blue fanta frozen at mcdonalds a month or two back