The Rainforest of Bukit Lawang
The Indonesian rainforests are amongst the most biologically diverse landscapes in the world and provide a home for hundreds of indigenous animal and plant species.
What to consider on every jungle trek
The Orangutans in the Sumatran Rainforest
Gunung Leuser National Park is the only place where you can still see the Sumatran Orangutan (Pongo abelii) in the wilderness of the rainforest. (The other remaining orangutan species (Pongo pygmaeus) is found on the island of Borneo.) Around 6500 orangutans still live in the ca. 1,095,000 ha of rainforest that form Gunung Leuser National Park.
The small village of Bukit Lawang lies 90 km west of North Sumatra’s capital Medan at the entrance to Gunung Leuser National Park.
In Bukit Lawang, between 1973 and 1991, around 230 orangutans have been brought back into the forest from captivity in the framework of a rehabilitation programme. Some of them have become wild-living animals in the primary forest. However, most of them remain semi-wild and keep coming back to the secondary forest close to the village. This makes protecting the jungle and respecting the orangutans’ habitat even more important. This entails:
Other primates you will see in the jungle around Bukit Lawang are siamang, Thomas leaf monkey, lar gibbon (white-handed gibbon), pig-tailed macaque, crab-eating macaque (long-tailed macaque), silvery lutung and slow loris. Moreover, you will see a variety of insects, reptiles and other animal species and of course a rich and stunning flora.