This is a blog post that a few people have asked me to share. What was my best travel story? Hands down that would have to be when…

I was chased in the middle of an Indonesian forest by an orangutang and her baby.

While trying to avoid the typical tourist destinations in Indonesia such as Bali, I decided to take the less traveled path and head over to Medan, Indonesia. Once we arrived in Medan, we quickly realized our ‘oh so brilliant plan’ wasn’t so brilliant after all. Medan isn’t safe for tourists and there is really nothing to do other than explore a few temples here and there.

We decided to embark on a journey 3 hours into the forests to a small village called Bukit Lawang.

How Was Bukit Lawang?

The village itself was incredible, everyone bathed in the river, there were many musically inclined men playing guitars and singing in open huts along the water and there were children tubing down the river with all of their friends. It seemed like a dream waiting to be explored. While we loved the village, we didn’t know the first thing to do here in Bukit Lawang so we had a tour guide send us on the best Bukit Lawang exploration. We were told that the forests surrounding the village were beautiful and most people take a two day hiking tour through the forest to explore the wild. Explore the wild we did. It turned out that our hiking guide for the two day venture decided not to show up so in order to keep the money we had paid for the tour, the planner called up assistance from a retired tour guide who hadn’t been through the forest in 10+ years. We were told that this two day adventure would be flat land and not a terribly hard hike at all – boy were they wrong.

This new ‘tour guide’ of ours took us on the old route he used to take tourists through which of course was fully grown over by nature. The ‘flat land’ was mountainous and our muscles were aching only two hours into our hike. We knew getting into this experience that there were wild and rehabilitated Orangutang’s in the jungle, we were also advised to keep our distance and not look them in the eyes. Hiking in this jungle is a very normal excursion for tourists, but perhaps this route was not. There was one orangutang that the locals had named ‘Meana,’ possibly because she was a mean monkey – or at least I thought so. With our luck we had ran into this foul creature on our foot path ahead. The guide knew that this was not normal behavior for the orangutang. The guide screamed out “RUN!!!!!!” … not what I would consider the best maneuver when getting out of a head on confrontation with a wild animal… but we decided to run anyways. There was the guide, myself, one girl from British Columbia, Canada and another from the USA. While myself and one of the other girls tried to head for the top of the hill as far away as possible, the other girl was stuck behind me. One of the girls made it passed the orangutang just in time to realize that she was carrying a baby and that this situation has potential to get much, much worse. Usually our senses are kicked into a fight or flight response – without a doubt I chose flight. Unfortunately I quickly figured out that running wasn’t going to get me very far as the orangutang was much faster than me. Don’t judge me during this part of the blog —- but my next instinct was to climb a tree… much bigger than me… and near impossible to climb. The orangutang grabbed my arm and in the nick of time I jumped around this massive tree out of sight from Meana and now she was face-to-face with the girl behind me. I immediately ran [instruction from the guide] and from what I remember next I took a quick glance behind me and saw the third girl pinned down on the ground with the orangutang on top of her. I guess this is when the guide realized that things were starting to get serious really fast and he threw his pack toward the orangutang knowing that what she wanted was food.

It took quite some time to wind down from that experience. It was certainly the most exhilarating and terrifying experience I have ever lived through and definitely a story worth telling.

I would love to hear your most exhilarating or terrifying experiences. Comment and post below.