Dear Haru
Today we went to plant a couple of trees. It is for the sake of the jungle and all the animals living here. We picked a couple of trees that we believed would help the animals the most. Ren and Ran got to decide the names. For some reason we found ourselves in the ocean life as they started arguing about what the trees should be called. Ren said Shark and Dolphin while Ran stuck with Dolphin and Killer Whale. The argument got intense. I do not think I have ever seen the two of them fight this hard before, they even fought over whether the names would be in English or Japanese. Their argument almost reached the point where they started fighting, until I stepped in and offered to buy one more. So now we have three trees in the jungle. One named Same, one named Iruka, and one named Shachi.
Now that I think about it, it is a bit funny that it ended up being these names. One could argue that they are named after you, Rin and me.
After this we went to watch the last feeding of orangutans. It was not as eventful as the second one yesterday, but it was fun anyway. It was a bit troublesome for us to make our way through the jungle. There were times when Ren and Ran could barely take a step because of the roots, and there were also once when I had to dodge a branch.
It was then becoming late and as the sun started setting we reached the place where we would stay for the night. Tonight we are going to watch the fireflies. They said it is the best spot to watch them from and we were lucky enough to get there first. Many more boats came by but all of them had to turn around and find another spot to be at. I have stopped counting how many passed by already.
After dinner we sat up on the boat and watched as the fireflies started coming to life. You will not believe how many there were. They lit up the tree above us as it glittered, almost like a Christmas tree. It was stunningly beautiful.
Afterwards we sat and spoke to the guide and the captain of the boat. It was a lot of fun to talk to them. We used English as communication and then we taught them Japanese while they taught us Indonesian. The word for water in Indonesian is 'air'.
I really had the feeling that we were all enjoying that moment and that we were actually making friends, even if I somehow, deep down, know that we will probably never ever see these guys again. That thought is saddening.
We are now in bed again. We are getting up early again tomorrow because we have to catch the flight to Surabaya and then the other flight back to Denpasar on Bali. This has been so much fun and I am sure I will never ever forget this experience we had. I will tell you more when I come home.
See you.
Makoto
Same = Shark, Iruka = Dolphin, Shachi = Killer Whale
I think this is the first time when I really changed something important, I couldn't decide on which one of them it would be either you see (in the tree case) so I made the whole thing up of buying an extra tree. In reality we only bought two.
Jackie