This is the final part of a short series about our journey into the heart of Danum Valley’s old-growth forest. Read part 1 and part two here.
Osou has the endearing quality of always saying “I’m old and tired” right before powering off at breakneck speed up a forty-five percent incline, machete in hand, slicing open a fresh trail as he goes. I grin, shake my head, and take off after him.
Today, we climbed Gunung Danum. Hamza, tired after the two previous days trekking, stayed at camp replacing rotten floorboards and cutting the bamboos and gingers that have started swallowing our small hut. Osou, Yoel and I, calves still aching, take a bottle of water, a GPS and packet of peanut-butter-filled cream crackers each and head off for the summit.
Osou last climbed Gunung Danum over eight years ago and all told only a handful of people have been since. We look out for his faint nearly decade-old dabs of yellow paint marking trunks along the way. We also tie fluorescent tape to low-hanging branches as we go, so that the trail will be easier to find next year when we come back.
Next June, we will be returning to Gunung Danum with a team of scientists to carry out the largest wildlife survey of this little-explored mountain to date. So, as we half climb, half scramble our way up the mountainside, pulling ourselves up using thickets of vegetation, it’s not only my heart that’s pounding. My mind is racing too.
Just here is a place flat and big enough to camp for a night or two. Higher up is an area open enough to run some mist nets down, to sample the understorey bird community. We come across two large and muddy wallows. Almost certainly a bearded pig’s. But worth putting camera traps near on the infinitesimal chance that a Sumatran rhino comes to visit. And it would be so cool to get a drone up through the canopy so that we can get a shot of this forested peak in all its glory.
At the bottom of Gunung Danum the forest is still luscious and open, punctuated by gigantic dipterocarps stabbing skywards. The higher we get, the ecosystem gradually starts to change shape. Large trunks are replaced with many smaller, thinner trees coated in thick moss—no doubt adapted to catch to the moisture at this elevation. Epiphytes are lower down, with many orchids at eye level. The canopy itself is much less dense and connected. You can see right up into the crowns of almost all the trees, and there’s plenty of something you don’t usually see much of in a tropical rainforest: visible sky.
A sudden burst of magnetic blue explodes around me. I’ve disturbed a group of lantern beetles that fly up around my feet, their wings iridescent and their weird heads otherworldly.
The summit of Gunung Danum itself is a thicket of dense ferns. To gain the last few metres we have to trample like elephants over the vegetation. There’s no canopy and no view either. But I don’t mind at all. I’ve just found the launchpad for next year’s drone moneyshot—the summit itself.
When we arrive footsore and exhausted back at camp, Hamza has gone foraging along the riverbank for pakiss, a delicious jungle treat not all that dissimilar to long-stem broccoli.
We share our last dinner together on the rocks, the sun setting pink over the river to the roar of empress cicadas. Tomorrow, so that I can make it in time for my flight back to England, we leave at 5 am to walk the twenty or so kilometres back to the field centre. But tonight, we watch the bats skimming along the surface of the water, the fish leaping up to swallow flowers dropping from a tree on the opposite bank and the sky as it slowly succumbs to darkness.
See you again soon, Gunung Danum.
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