VISIT INDONESIA 2008

This year is the Visit Indonesia year...
End of Dec last year, Ministry of Culture and Tourism launched it...
It was aiming to get up to 7 million foreign tourists with estimated income in foreign exchange of US$6.4 billion...

And as a good citizen , I'll help promoting it...
One of the thing that the government trying to sell is the Indonesia Eco Experience...
Other than the beauty of it's landscapes, Indonesia is rich with wildlifes..
One of them is orangutan...
The word of orangutan were taken from Indonesian, orang hutan which means "person of the forest"...
Their natural habitat is the rainforest, that's why you can find them in Borneo island or Kalimantan...
Unfortunately orangutan has become endangered species due to logging, mining and forest fire that destruct the forests...

End of Nov last year, me and colleagues (boses actually) went to Tanjung Puting National Park in Central Kalimantan...
We were there basically to see the OCSP project funded by USAID as part of our high level joint mission with the government of Indonesia to the announcement of the Indonesian Forest Partnership to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emission...
To get to Tanjung Puting National Park you can go from Semarang or Pontianak by Trigana or by IAT to Pangkalan Bun airport...
We flew on a small plane of Trigana from Semarang...
From the airport, we went to Kumai port which took us about 20 minutes ride...
We crossed the Kumai river by speed boat from Harry's travel to Rimba Lodge, situated inside the National Park...
It was the first 45 minutes exciting ride due to the fact that I can't swim and it turned out that we have to travel by speed boat during our 2 days trip there to save times, yeay!!
I know for sure now what it's like to be in the Fear Factor...

During our trip, we were honoured to be accompanied by Prof. Birute Galdikas, a wellknown primatologist and the president of Orangutan Foundation International (OFI)...
She has dedicated over 30 years of her time to study and help orangutan, wow!!
We visited Camp Leakey one of the orangutan feeding point...
There's an information center on orangutan, you can get info on principle things you have to know about orangutan...
We met Akmad and Atlas there...
She's one of the eldest orangutan female that regularly come during the feeding time...
Atlas is her youngest child of 5...
You'll know this coz there are family trees of orangutan that come to Camp Leakey including Akmad family...
It was facinating to see the effort of Prof. Galdikas and OFI staff has put to save orangutan from extinction...
We also went to the other feeding point, Pondok Tangguy...
Overall it was a very memorable journey for me...
You can see some of the pictures here...

So I want you to have the same experience I had...
You can either contact Rimba Lodge or contact Harry's travel...
As I don't think I have the permission to put Harry's number in this blog, you can email me...