We were up late
again this morning and eventually sloped down to Sam's for breakfast.
When we got back to the bungalow, there were monkeys on our balcony
and I'm pretty sure a few of them got in next door.
Kate had heard that
there was a market on in the nearest town – a place called Borohok
– today, and of course, we love a market (well, Kate and I do,
anyway), so it was to the market we headed. This involved walking to
the end of the tourist section of Bukit Lawang and into the more
local section. We asked a few times for directions to the bus station
and were pointed the same way each time but although we walked
steadily, we saw no sign of it. We were starting to get pretty hot
when a tuk-tuk driver pulled over and asked us where we were going.
When we mentioned the bus station, he said that it was at least
another kilometre, so as the cost of getting his tuk-tuk all the way
to Bohorok wasn't that much more than getting the bus, we all piled
in. The tuk-tuks here are elaborate contraptions a bit like a covered
side-car - Kate and I got a nice comfy seat, but the girls had to sit
on some less padded spots. On the way, we passed a spot where a lot
of men had gathered around some absolutely foul-smelling bulbous
blocks of greyish-white material. When we asked the driver what was
going on, he explained that it was a raw rubber market.
We soon arrived in
Bohorok and headed into the market – a proper local affair with a
mixture of food and clothing. Zoe was very grumpy as she is much less
enamoured of local markets than we are - she's often pinched and
prodded and isn't too keen on some of the smells that emanate from
them. Sarah was excited because there were people selling a type of
big, green seed pods that we've been seeing since Laos but never got
around to trying. She enquired about the price at one stall and was
given a pod to try. I opened it up with some difficulty and got a
seed out, but when I bit into it, I found it unbearably bitter. Kate
and Sarah were more appreciative, but even they found it difficult to
eat more than a few seeds and we ended up giving half of the pod to a
small child.
When we had
exhausted the market, we walked into the town itself – what little
there was of it. There isn't an ATM in Bukit Lawang and we're running
a bit low on cash, so we stopped off at Bohorok's only ATM and
withdrew another enormous wad of bills. We then went to a small
supermarket to get some toiletries and snacks, and to a small
clothing store to get some new t-shirts and a new pair of
thongs/flip-flops for Sarah. It was around lunchtime by then, but we
couldn't see anywhere to eat that didn't look a bit scarily local, so
we jumped in the back of a van with a bunch of local women and
children for the ride back to Bukit Lawang.
On the way back to
our end of the village, Zoe got some banana fritters and Sarah got a
dress. We then had some lunch at the Jungle Inn. It started to rain a
little as we walked back to the bungalow (which the macaques had been
into again), where we went out on the balcony to read. At one point,
as I stood talking to Kate, I glanced down at the river and could
scarcely believe my eyes. Gone was the lovely clear waterway of only
moments before, replaced by a raging, roiling, caramel-coloured
torrent. The small amount of rain that had fallen on us was obviously
the outer margin of a much heavier downpour farther upstream and as
we watched, the river crept higher and higher until it reached from
bank to bank and the exposed river pebbles we were used to seeing
were all submerged. We went down to take a closer look and the girls
discovered that some of the young local guys were using nets to scoop
fish from the maelstrom. That was the last we saw of them for a while
as they joined in the grabbing of the little fish that the net guys
emptied onto the river bank.
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