After rising late again and having
some toast and eggs again, we headed out into the forest again. This time we
set off up the hill on the reservoir track, which proved to consist of a lot of
stone steps going up the side of the mountain. A lot of stone steps. Going up.
And up. And up. When we reached a side track heading off to some lookouts, the
girls refused to continue climbing. I decided that having climbed so many
sodding steps, I couldn’t stop without seeing the actual reservoir, and
continued up on my own. I soon met a guy coming down who assured me that it
wasn’t much further so I called out to the others, but the girls still refused
to go any higher. Kate was also keen to see the reservoir, however, so she
continued up with me. The guy was right and we didn’t have much further to
climb, but when we got there, we discovered that the climb definitely wasn’t
worth the effort: the reservoir was just that – a small man-made pond with a
fence around it. Kate quickly turned around and rejoined the girls, but I
stayed and did a circuit in the hope that I would come across a snake or lizard
or two out sunning themselves in the man-made clearing around the reservoir. I
didn’t.
When I got back down to the others,
we set off for the lookouts, which, as per our other lookout experiences in
Southeast Asia, were pretty uninspiring, the haze from the Indonesian fires
obscuring anything that might have been worth looking out at.
When we had set off this morning,
Kate had said, ‘I want to see a snake today,’ and as we approached the last of
the lookouts, she fulfilled her own request, spotting a juvenile viper on a
pile of bark beneath a large tree.
It was around lunch time by now, so
stopped on a big log for some tuna and cucumber sandwiches – but we didn’t
linger as there were clouds of mosquitoes around intent on lunching on us.
As per usual, it was a hot and
steamy day, so on the way back down we stopped for a quick immersion in a
shallow pool in a small creek, struggling a little to find a pool big enough to
get wet enough in. The track we were following was uncharacteristically well
marked, with big slashed of red and white paint on the adjacent trees; however,
Zoe and still managed to wander off it at one point when Sarah and Kate had
gone off ahead of us. Thankfully, we realised our mistake relatively quickly
and rejoined the others not long after.
When we got back to the chalet, we did
a bit of clothes washing and hung it out just as the sun disappeared. There was
another storm in the area, but this time there was a lot of thunder but no
rain.
After dinner – pasta again - I went
out on another night walk, but despite covering a lot of ground, I didn’t see
much: just a couple of sleeping Gonocephalus and a few big phasmids.
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