Orangutan Trekking in Sumatra

With Sumatra in basically in the same time zone as Shanghai, it seemed a shame not to visit this last wild refuge for orangutans while we're on this side of the world. As close cousins to the mountain gorillas of Rwanda, these animals live inside a somewhat large and highly protected forest that's hemmed in by rubber and palm plantations in the island's interior. The local people we met value the orangutans as the backbone of eco-tourism so they're keen to protect the environment while sharing their great apes with visitors. Bukit Lawang literally means "doorway to the hills" and, as we stepped through this figurative doorway, we found lar gibbons, Thomas's langurs, pig-tailed macaques, long-tailed macaques, white-handed gibbons, river turtles and of course, the Sumatran orangutans. Most of those made it to our highlight video: