We leave Kendari on February 13th around noon. We have a long road ahead of us today!

In preparation for a series of upcoming expeditions, Naturevolution has conducted various explorations in recent years, most recently in early […]

The first day of trekking is being prepared this morning from the first base camp. We spread out the boats and bags, then we dive gently into the forest just after taking a group photo. We are moving at a good pace, especially in the early hours.

We took advantage of a few days in Kendari to finalize the preparation of our material. While a team was taking care of the last purchases, antoine and memed (President of Naturevolution Indonesia) and I left for a mission…

Today, we left a little late this morning, at around 9.30am, after removing the dirt and plastic from the camp to make it more or less presentable. We then did a section of the crossing, which wasn’t necessarily easy, as we had to find the route, which our guide sometimes had a bit of trouble finding.

We were beginning to smell quite a lot of carrion, and we came across a dead python about 6 metres long. We could see its skeleton, with thousands of worms inside and lots of flies on it, it was quite impressive to see. The day before, we were walking through the river at night, so we thought wow, we’re alive…

We attacked the descent on the hillside and reached the river 1h30 later. The path wasn’t the easiest. As usual, we had to hack our way through the mud, with leeches, things that stung, dead trees that cracked when you stepped on them, clay, in short, everything was complicated with 30 or 35kg bags!

We started the day thinking that we were going to reach a confluence and that we could potentially have climbed onto the boats at that point, but we’re still a long way from that…

Today we did a total of 2.5km, which is quite normal. The first reason is that the terrain is really complex. It’s a big torrent that goes downhill, we lost 200m of ascent today, there are waterfalls, rapids, it’s very uneven, it rumbles, you always have to cross the river and it’s very slippery.

It took us a little longer to get ready this morning because we had to repair two pairs of shoes, Antoine’s and mine. Mine had a gaping hole of 10cm and I had to find a system to repair them. So we did a bit of sewing.

As planned, today was the first day of packraft. The first day means a lot of preparation time, to explain how we inflate, how we set up the boats, how we put the equipment inside the boats, and so on. And then a quick safety briefing.