Kumi and the Orangatangs and to Belitong Island

   At first light the next morning  we rode a one knot tidal current up the river.  To get from the Kumai river delta to the mouth of the river we followed the waypoints below.  After you enter the main river  the water is deeper and you can move around the river somewhat, no channel.  We arrived at the anchorage of the town of Kumai after 2 hours and anchored in 50 ft at 02 44.371S  111 43.953E
We took the dinghy to go ashore but there is no where to land as is it all commercial, no beach.  But you can tie up at Henrys who runs most of the Kumai river tours.  Need to ask someone where it is. People who booked there jungle tours back in Lovina Bali paid twice as much as those of us who booked them locally in Kumi.  We paid 1,050,000RP or just over a $100 for the 3 day trip, one of the best spent $100 ever.  There are a lot of operators and boats, no need to book in Lovina and even those that booked with Henry got a better price in Kuami..
The town of Kumai has many large apartment style buildings that are actually giant bird houses to house swallows for bird nest soup for the Chinese, and is big business here.  We explored the town some and it had a little different flavor to it and seemed more Muslim than others. It is not a tourist town and was like many of the down and dirty towns we have visited.  There are ATM machines here now and we got some more Indonesian cash. There is a BNI bank just 10 minutes from where we left our dinghy and a market a few minutes beyond that.

We are booked to go on a three day jungle trip up a branch of the Kumai river and see the famous Orangutans and jungle.  There is 8 of us off four Yachts.  Just Magic, Nuka Lofa, Sharita and ourselves. The old fashioned looking wooden boat is about 40ft long and 10 feet wide and 2 levels high.  The 4 man crew lives below and the upper or top deck is ours for the 3 days.
We are picked up at our boats at 9:30am, an hour late and at the same time a boat boy is dropped off to stay on the boat to look after it while we are gone. Sometimes large islands of grass come down the river and can dislodge your boat from its anchor, and they protect against theft as well.  You lock the boat up and the boat boy sleeps in the cockpit and food is brought out to him.
Our boat crew consists of a female cook, boat skipper/helmsmen, a deckhand and our guide who speaks passable english.   They all work together to look after us.  We motored up the river at a sedate 5 or 6 knots and stopping along the way to look at birds and long nose monkeys swinging in the trees, also pass the occasional crocodile.  Over the 3 days we stopped at 3 different feeding stations where you walk for 20 minutes or so into the jungle to where a platform is set up and food is put out for the orangutans.  They are fantastic to watch.  We saw some along the trails and others high up in the trees near the feeding platforms waiting for the food.  They swing from tree to tree not like regular monkeys as they are too big.  They climb up a tree until high enough that their body weight  bends the tree enough that they can grab the next tree and go like this from tree to tree.  They do a lot of funny things and are very intelligent.
We watched one dominant male, bigger than all the rest sitting high up in a tree. A female came on the platform and suddenly the male descended the tree at a unbelievable rate of speed and grabbed the female by the leg as she started to run from platform and pulled her up to him and proceeded to rape her, though she did not struggle after things started. 
The boat crew waited on us hand and foot, cooked our meals, did the dishes, put our beds out each night with a mosquito net around each double mattress and hung from the sun cover. There was a cover on the mattress, but no sheet for ourselves, I just put my rain shell over my shoulders and that was enough.  (We are almost on the equator). We all just slept in a row on all the mattresses.  These were put away each morning.  There was actually very few mosquitoes as we were well into the dry season. There is suppose to be malaria in much of Indonesia. They brought out drinks for us during the day, no alcohol, that we had to bring ourselves. It was all a nice change from boat life on our own boats.  We had a nice sing along in the evening tied up to the edge of the river on a small rickety dock, just forest all around us.  We were sorry when the trip finally ended as it was a great experience with great company.
We found out our boat boys had mutinied and abandoned our yachts while we were gone. Though all was well on the boats, nothing missing.  Nuka lofa had dragged anchor while the crew was with us, but some other yachties rescued it.  Adi our trip organizer we heard is bit of a shady character.  Probably better to use Henry.  but our trip was great do in part to the great 4 man crew on our boat.
We left the following afternoon to anchor again at the mouth of the Kumi river after negotiating a fish net that was strung across most of the river. We had to go near the river bank to get around it and were worried about running aground.  Early the next morning we headed our for Belitung 260 miles away which meant 2 nights at sea.  While up the river we had our first real rain in 3 months, the season is coming to and end.

  We plan to check out of Indonesia in Belitong and then head up to Singapore from there with 2 or 3 stops along the way.  The first two days were great sailing with moderate seas and good winds.  Then we had to motor the last half of the last night at sea.  Also had lots of sheet lighting late that night. I dropped the main sail since we were motoring anyways, in case there was some big wind coming with the lightning. But the big squall was saved for the coming morning.  The second day out we passed a very busy shipping lane with more ships than we had ever seen before just past Kalamitan.  Two hours later all was quite again with just the odd fish boat around.
The next morning with about 15 miles to go to Belitung, a huge squall came on us.  I dropped the sails again and waited as this huge black cloud came down on us, the sea in the distance looked like it was boiling.Then the wind went from zero to about 20 knots and very heavy rain was onto us.  We were glad the wind did not come up to bad, but you never know with these big squalls if it is going to be 15 knots or 50 knots.  It poured rain for about an hour and a half.  This is the first big rain squall we have seen since last year. The wet season is coming for this area and a change in the monsoons.
We got into our anchorage just after the squall passed and another one was coming on our tail with more rain.  We used the approach waypoint of 02 31.519S   107  40.539.  Then straight into the anchorage to drop anchor at  02 33.093    107 40.572  in 35 feet.  Then the rain poured down again with 18 knots blowing off the beach into us.

Navigating into Kumi river::  Cmap and Navionics was farily accurate until you get further up the river then out some.   02 56.92S   111  41.55E ,    02 54.23   111  42.52,   02 53.46   111 42.19,   02 51.17   111 43.55,    02 49.83   111 43.48,   02 47.63   111 42.03,   02 47.15   111 42.10  When in river it is deep and can move around it.