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Published: October 14th 2009
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After the Ujung Kulon trip in Java, my first destination in Sumatra was to be the Way Kambas National Park down in the very south of the island. In Carita on Java I had run into a local chap who told me that I should hire him to take me to Way Kambas in his car because it would be easier and cheaper than using local transport. Only 1.7 million he says. When I said that was very expensive he said no it was cheap because it was in rupiah not dollars. (Everybody in Indonesia thinks that any amount of rupiah is a negligible amount to a foreigner, even if its in the millions). Why the ferry alone is 500,000 rupiah, he says, which I had a hard job not scoffing at. If the ferry was 500,000 then none of the locals would be able to afford it and it would never run! Anyway I went from Carita to the Way Kambas National Park by a combination of public transports (mini-vans, ferry, big bus and motorcycle) and it cost a total of only 180,000 rupiah in travel (about NZ$32). The ferry, incidentally, was 10,000 rupiah.
Once there I discovered that
the frog that lived in the shower
if there was such a thing as an identification guide to Sumatran frogs then I would be able to tell you what he is, but there isn't so henceforth from now on he shall be called "shower frog" the Way Kanan part of the park where the birders go is a very expensive place to be, especially as a single traveller with no-one to share the costs. Way Kambas is another one of those parks that requires every visitor to be accompanied everywhere by a guide, although in this case it may be justified given that the park still retains a full complement of large mammals including tiger, clouded leopard, sun bear and elephant. The guide fee is 150,000 but its not for the whole day, just for two hours, and because they will only do two hours in the morning and two in the evening for night birds and because you’re completely forbidden to go anywhere outside the ranger post alone - even along the access road you came in on -- that means that you’re basically stuck almost bird-less from about 8am to 6pm every day. It was very very frustrating! The accommodation and two lots of guided walks per day added up quickly, and then there was the 350,000 fee for a boat trip to a nearby swamp called Rawa Gajah where you need to go to try and see the endangered white-winged wood duck.
I had brought along what I thought was a sufficient supply of rupiah but doing the sums once finding out the costs it was obvious that I didn’t have enough, even with only one trip to Rawa Gajah with one chance at the duck, so I had to cut a whole day out of my intended stay and even then it cost me over two million rupiah.
There’s a breeding centre for Sumatran rhinos just near to Way Kanan, although they haven’t managed to produce even a single calf since it began in 1995. I would have liked to have gone along for a nosey to see how it was being operated but the visitor permit was a whopping 500,000 so it was completely out of the question.
For such a well-known birder spot Way Kanan seems to be very little visited. From the visitor registry book it was apparent that they only get two or three visitors or groups per month on average, although ironically on the Sunday I was there three separate groups turned up (none of which were composed of birders!).
Once I’d got over the annoyance of not being able to go out
into the forest except for those couple of hours morning and evening, I quite enjoyed my time at Way Kanan. I spent the days trying to find birds in the trees directly around camp, accidentally straying along some paths until I got caught and ordered back, but unfortunately almost all the birds there were fairly common Asian species I could have seen elsewhere for cheaper (maybe its the excessive heat and dryness, but it was sort of a repeat of the time at Ujung Kulon). One of the few exceptions to the “ordinary bird” theme was when one of my most-wanted birds, a great hornbill, flapped overhead and landed in a nearby tree. The guided morning walks were mostly pretty quiet as well, with only a few birds worth noting such as crested fireback pheasant and black-thighed falconet (a falcon the size of a sparrow!!). The one trip I could afford to the Rawa Gajah swamp was much better, with grey-headed fish eagle and several species of kingfisher seen along the river from the boat. The swamp itself wasn’t so much a swamp anymore as a small pool, it being very much the dry season here, but on that pool
were three white-winged wood ducks, which was good as it would have sucked to have paid all the money going there and not to find any! These ducks used to be found all over southeast Asia but swamp drainage and hunting have decimated their numbers and now the populations are very fragmented, being practically extinct in several of the countries they once inhabited. The ducks were much bigger than I had been expecting, and also much shyer - I only got to watch them for a minute or two before they got spooked and took off. The other special bird sought after in Rawa Gajah is the Storm’s stork, an even rarer bird. There were no storks on my visit here, but fortunately I’d already seen that particular species on the Kinabatangan River in Borneo.
The night forays after nocturnal birds went as per usual, sometimes well and sometimes not so well. Pick of the crop was a large frogmouth perched on a branch directly over the track. Also seen that night were a colugo (“flying lemur”) way up in top of a tree and a lesser mouse deer right next to the track about two feet away. On the next night I spotted a small-toothed palm civet, but in general the mammal-watching at Way Kanan was very poor despite there being loads of species present in the forests. The usual camp-goers were there (crab-eating macaques and wild pig) but apart for those and a couple of squirrels the only other mammals I saw were the short-nosed fruit bats the size of small rats that had a colony under the roof of the entrance archway. There were plentiful signs of elephants (dung, and also the smashed bird hide at Rawa Gajah that apparently the local elephants had taken exception to!), signs of sambar deer (dung and the roaring of stags) and even signs of Sumatran rhino near Rawa Gajah (footprints and wallows), but see them I did not. Siamang were so common that every morning the forest reverberated to their calls, sometimes so close that your eardrums would just about be shaken from your skull, but always they were in trees just beyond sight and I never saw any.
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indra
non-member comment
hello i'm indonesian, but I have never been to Way Kambas, it feels like to go there but I have less information, if for a little adventure with my funds are advised to go there? I like photography, whether for the object image a lot? helped with this information