With visions of cutting a path through dense undergrowth with a machete whilst sweating like a pig, boots full of blood from the leeches, dangerous beasties on every tree branch, I've never been sure if jungle trekking is really for me. But whilst there is some accuracy in these stereotypical images (the guide did have a machete), three days in the rain forest of Lore Lindu was not as harsh, and far more rewarding than I expected. There weren't too many leeches at least!

There is so much more to see than I imagined, although the mammals are a bit elusive, as you might expect. The wide-eyed tarsier lives in the trees and comes down to feed by night, so we didn't see one. But we heard them calling at dusk as we sat under a tarpaulin on beds made from logs and leaves, whilst our guide and porter cooked the evening meal on the campfire.

What we did witness, apart from an abundance of insect life, was how many useful products of nature are all around. One species of tree drips a white resin that hardens and burns easily, so can be used as fuel in lamps - our guide collected some to help start our fire. We ate guava fruits when we found them, and our guide planned to find banana leaves to use as umbrellas if we needed them. This is just a small sample though - really, it's like walking through a huge natural supermarket. And the views from above the trees can be stunning - we reached a height of 2000m after starting from 800m, so I'm really happy that my knee trouble seems to be over.

On the nights that we weren't sleeping under a tarpaulin listening to crickets and tarsiers, we stayed in the villages of Bonda and Doda, which support themselves with farming and extensive rice fields. They are remote - the roads that we used have not existed for longer than ten years. And the villages of these valleys have their own languages - in one village of 600 people, they have a language all to themselves. The stone-carved megaliths that are dotted around some of the villages were only discovered about 100 years ago, and no one has been able to establish anything about them - not even a wild guess at their age.

Our stay in Doda was unplanned. We were stranded there after the last car had left for Palu at lunchtime, and we had to wait until the next morning for one to come back. With a ship sailing for Borneo once every five days, this put me on a tight schedule once I eventually arrived in Palu. I had to get a ticket for early the following morning if I didn't want to be stranded here, so I haven't been destined to see very much of Sulawesi's cities with their busy streets and Dutch architecture.

My intake of fluids has switched from the chai of India to the coffee of Indonesia. Java is the island name that is most synonymous with coffee, but each of the big islands has its own. Sulawesi exports more cocoa, vanilla and cloves than it does coffee though; and did you know that cloves and nutmeg grew no-where else outside the Spice Islands until the Dutch got their hands on them in the 1600s? Incredibly though, Indonesia is a net importer rather than an exporter, presumably due to the size of its population.

Posted from Balikpapan, 16th March 2011.