Sumatra is the westernmost and, next to Borneo, the largest of the great Sunda Islands in the Malay Archipelago. If we do not consider Greenland an island, Sumatra is, according to its area, the fourth-largest island in the world. Neatly sliced in two by the Equator, it is Indonesia's treasure chest; it provides 80 percent of the OPEC nation's crude oil, and nearly as much of Indonesia's second-greatest source of income - timber.
The River Alas springs from the denuded northern face of Gunung Leseur, Sumatra's second-highest mountain at 11,092 feet and the namesake for the national park that surrounds most of the river's course.
The project was organized under three flags: those of the United States, Italy, and Indonesia. From the first came a team from SOBEK expeditions, the adventure - travel company that has pioneered the first descents of the great rivers of the world over the past dozen years; from Florence, Italy, came a team led by Jacopo Mazzei, the man who is 1973 made the first raft decent of the Blue Nile, and the Indonesian contingent was led by Dr. Halim Indrakusuma. Halim had been responsible for putting together two Camel Trophy rallies - where landrovers attempted 1,000-mile treks through untracked jungle.
The official title for our undertaking was the "Florence-SOBEK Expedition," and on October 4, 1984, the twenty-six members convened for the first time in Medan, the busy capital of northern Sumatra. The first stop on our jaunt was Bohorok. Once at the village of Bohorok, it was a half-mile walk through the rain forest, through a limestone cave, to the edge of the Bohorok River, the boundary of the National Park. The river serves to keep tourists at bay and to prevent the orangutans from straying into wrong hands. A single dugout canoe ferries visitors to the center, where they can twice a day watch the released orangutans gather on a wooden platform to be fed powdered milk and bananas by the park rangers. The platform is a sort of halfway house between forest and civilization, and part of a weaning program. The meal quantities are gradually reduced, and the platform is moved every six months, so that the orangutans will, in theory, eventually learn to survive on their own in the forest.
During their 300-year occupation of Indonesia, the Dutch started the practice of capturing baby orangutans (after killing heir mothers) and raising them as household pets. Illegal since 1931, the practice continues as some wealthy Indonesians emulate the colonialists. Orangutans confiscated by conservation officials, or donated by owners, are brought to the rehabilitation center where they are taught how to live in the forest, the forest, then released.
The orangutan, or "Man of the Forest," as the Malay word translates, has for centuries been a source of fascination for humans. The creatures were once thought to be strange-looking wild people rather than animals, and native legends had it that the apes could speak but refused to do so for fear they would be put to work.
From Bohorok, we trundled into the mountains toward the Alas in our Global Van Lines truck. The jade-green of Sumatra is like a hallucination. As we drove, the road wound higher, and the blazing air became more tepid. On our left we passed Gunung Sibayak, a 7,000-foot peak where two Americans disappeared on an overnight hike last year. But the land
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