Fight Flee Or Flow

What I Learned About Life From Spending a Night in the Sumatra Jungle With My Children

The hillside felt like it would give-way at any moment as we clung to roots and branches, suspended on the side of mountain in the Sumatran Jungle.  We had been trekking for five hours, slipping and sliding down muddy hills, laboring up steep embankments.  This place felt like a different world, like you had landed on a foreign planet, a treacherous one, a place you only see in movies like Avatar or Indiana Jones. Yet there we were with our eight-year-old and five-year-old children, hanging off the side of a cliff, praying no one slid off and fell.

We had traveled 12 hours from Bali to get here, on three different airplanes, eventually crossing 270 miles by car.  Bukit Lawang is a tiny village perched on the edge of the Bahorok River, and is also the entrance to one of the wildest jungles on earth.  Tigers, venomous snakes, spiders, monkeys, all inhabit this rainforest, one that is quickly disappearing due to acres of trees that have been cut down to make way for palm oil plantations.  

We were spending the night there, and while we knew it was a slightly crazy thing to do with children so young, we vowed a long time ago to show them this planet, much of which we know won’t be around for them to see when they come of age to do this for themselves.  

Our guide was on a mission to find orangutans, and had traversed down the side of this mountain as if it were nothing, beckoning us from the brink of a death-fall because he thought he had spotted a streak of orange fur. These beautiful fire-red mammals are a cross between a monkey and an ape, with the same intelligence level as my son. This is not a stab at my son,  my son is amazing, but rather a nod to these incredible creatures.  Orangutan literally translates to “person of the forrest” in Malay.  They are an endangered animal and are now only found in Sumatra and Borneo, a tragedy considering they used to populate much of South East Asia.

Female orangutans are constantly on the move and travel within a 2 kilometer radius to feed their children, only stopping to sleep or let their babies nap.  The males simply roam at will looking for new mates to procreate with;  Must be nice.  They are shy, elusive creatures, and one usually needs to hike into the jungle to see them.  Hence our lapsed judgment as we risked our kids’ safety for a glimpse of an orangutan.  

While we indeed were able to see a flash of red fur far away it was obscured by a bunch of leafy treetops, and it suddenly struck me in that very moment how dumb this was.  We have done a lot of crazy things with our kids, I will admit that, but for some reason this felt especially silly.  The children were exhausted and scared, Anila was crying and flopping her sad little body all around, while Theao tried to be a good sport but was clearly concerned. “This doesn’t feel safe, mom,” he said.  

Allow me to take a slight detour from our story to highlight a learning moment with my son that happened two days prior.  I promise it will be relevant later.  

Upon our arrival in Bukit Lawang we were met with several challenges.  After three flights and a four hour bumpy and windy car ride from the airport, we pulled into this tiny, make-shift town by a river at 11PM.  The children were exhausted but being good sports as usual.  A worker from the hotel met us at our car, and informed us we would need to walk twenty minutes and then climb 300 steps (I’m not exaggerating) to get there. Luckily they had porters for our luggage otherwise I’m not sure how we would have managed. 

Theao and Anila skipped out of the car and I swear on my life didn’t complain once as David and I dragged behind wondering what we had gotten ourselves into this time.  After walking through a village that consisted of a few lean-to warungs, and crossing a rope-bridge suspended 50 feet off the ground, held together by sporadicly placed wooden planks, the 300 stone stairs brought us to the very top of a mountain with a few cabins perched upon it.  

It was dark, we couldn’t see anything, but could hear the jungle, all of it. Just as we thought it couldn’t get any more worrisome, the owner of the hotel informed us that the original room we booked was under construction due to monkeys tearing it apart, and that the hotel restaurant had burned down in an electrical fire a couple weeks prior.

A familiar sense of dread I have experienced on a few other adventure excursions like this one crept over me.  David was equally negative, fixating on the lack of common space to gather and work from, while I was hyper-focused on the construction noise that would surely pollute our stay there.  

We were going back and forth complaining and contemplating whether we could find a new place  to move to by morning, until we were knocked out of our spiral by Theao.  “Are you guys really doing this right now?  This isn’t good enough for you?! We just climbed three hundred stairs for nothing?  Talk about being ungrateful!”  Almost verbatim.

At first David and I pushed back, telling him he didn’t understand the situation fully, but Theao would not relent.  Soon enough we began to feel foolish.  The view from the replacement room they were offering us promised to be incredibly beautiful, we had more space, plus the staff was so welcoming.  What kind of example were we setting?  In that moment of fight, where our instinct was to flee, our son was encouraging us to flow.  

Thus, back to the cliff we were hanging off of, we were met with a similar challenge.  Fight, flee, or flow.  When Theao said something didn’t feel right, we decided to listen without a fight and we all climbed back to safety to regroup and check in. 

At this point Theao’s stomach was bothering him, and Anila was in full breakdown mode saying she wanted to go home and couldn’t go on any longer.  Truth be told it was very hot and we were all exhausted, but the guides were busy preparing a lovely impromptu picnic off the side of the trail so I asked the kids to just give it a few minutes until we had eaten.  What I did do, however, was let our guides know that we absolutely did not need to see orangutans.  We were in this for the experience period, without expectations of what we would see, and that is the honest truth.  How we had forgotten that for a moment confuses me. It felt like we were almost going along with it to make the guides happy because most people who do this overnight are in it for the orangutans, it’s a major attraction and source of tourism for Bukit Lawang.

As soon as I said this to the guides they seemed to relax, our kids mellowed out, and it felt like we had collectively re-set. We continued on our journey to the camp, and wouldn’t you know it, five minutes later we rounded the corner coming face to face with a mama orangutan and her baby.  She was so close we could have hugged her.  

I don’t know if it’s a coincidence, if it’s voodoo or what, but I do know that every single time in my life that I have let go of expectations, my experience is exponentially better.  My therapist used to tell me that expectation is the antidote to happiness but I don’t think I truly understood that until recently.  

Being on this year long journey we have had to let go of control in a big way, and with that release of control comes a freedom from expectation.  If you have expectations in either a positive or negative direction you are going to be disappointed because ultimately you are living in the future instead of in the moment.  

Things only got better from there.  We spent a good half hour with our orangutan friend and her baby before she moved on.  After that the trail only got steeper and harder but we were all on such a high from the orangutan encounter that it didn’t matter.  

Once we arrived at the camp we were floored by how incredible the set-up was.  There was nothing fancy or glampy about it, we were to sleep under a bamboo covered lean-to, next to a small river, on a single mattress pad, covered by a thin blanket and tiny pillow.  It smelled mildly of mildew and sweat but it didn’t matter, we thought it was glorious.  I think so much of that had to do with our no expectations outlook.  

There were three guides just for the four of us which felt extremely luxurious.  They had created a “kitchen” with an open wood burning stove, and storage for plates and utensils.  They served us an incredible dinner of curries and chicken smothered in some sort of jungle sauce, laid out on a worn yoga mat, under a second lean-to.  The rain poured down outside as we played cards and told stories by candlelight.  Anila even got bitten by a leech and it didn’t ruin our optimism. 

That night we got the best sleep which was a huge surprise to me considering I can’t sleep a wink when we go camping even with our state of the art gear. Theao was at first terrified a tiger would eat him in the middle of the night, and I kept jolting out of sleep at every little and big sound that surrounded us in the pitch black jungle.  Eventually though, we stopped fighting it, realized we couldn’t flee from it, and simply flowed into a delicious night of vivid and beautiful dreams.