Day 19

We had attempted the sleep early the night before, but in good Batak spirit, the locals had got drunk, sung and played guitar until the early hours, just below our room. Weaved walls aren’t particularly soundproof.

We awoke to find the house covered in monkeys. They ran across the washing lines, hobbled across the banisters and raided the rubbish. We went downstairs and played with the monkeys a while. They ate the discarded fruit skins and anything else they could find.

We followed the river for a while, and then trekked through the jungle in search of a bat cave we had seen marked on maps. Finally finding two men under a tarpalling, they offered us torches and a guide, in which we refused respectfully, we was then pointed down a steep path towards a rock face. Sarah had been very reluctant to visit the bat cave; it took much persuasion and blackmail to get her to come. I was not disappointed.

After scurrying through an uneven pathway between the rock faces, we came to the mouth of the cave. Sarah was loitering behind, but slowly we shuffled into the darkness.  As the smell of body odour intruded my nose, a local man came shuffling out of the darkness. Without our consent, he then proceeded to begin our tour of the cave.

After a short while we became quite thankful for his guidance. He showed us tiny pathways in which we had to crawl through to continue deeper into the cave. He took us through 3 separate caves, the last being the biggest and the most densely populated by bats and other cave inhabitants.

The peculiar bat sounds echoed around the caves, we flinched as they dropped from the ceiling, flying blindly towards us. The guide pointed out spiders quite literally the size of my hand, as I tried to put a finger near it to compare, he advised me otherwise, informing me they are very aggressive. The guide pointed out centipede things, the size of my face, legs spread in all directions, blind pale fish swimming in the shallow water.

The guide dropped to his knees and started fumbling around in the river, he pulled out small weighty balls, unable to translate them to English, and I assumed they are some kind of ore, I quickly pocketed them. After leaving the cave, I gave the guide 20,000rp (£1.40) for his troubles. He looked very happy.

Welcome to bat cave

Tomb raider's

Prepared

Bats