Kath’s Jungle Diary: ‘Tired and homesick, but then azure butterflies flap gently by like satin gloves’

A JOY TO WATCH: A Binturong or Bearcat eating a melon. One of the animals on Kath’s ‘like to bring home’ list

Kath Roe, a veterinary nurse from Beverley, is on a month-long internship at a wildlife rescue centre in Indonesia. She is writing about her experiences exclusively for The Hull Story

WEEK 3

Week three, or is it still two, maybe four, I’ve lost track.

Time here is very unpredictable. Minutes last for hours; hours pass in a blink. A week can take a day, a year, or a second. Life has become an endless round of mosquito repellent and sunscreen application, which is sweated off rapidly. Never have I been so engulfed in chemicals.

In this small rural community, time is marked by prayers. The mosques, of which there are many, all have speakers on the roof, and at sunrise (which, being near the equator occurs at the same time all year round) – 4am – the call to prayer blasts out. Even if you think you can sleep through that, all the local dogs in the area set up a communal howl in response that lasts several minutes.

The singing (and the dogs) can be beautiful, but surviving on three to four hours sleep a night not so much. I like to get up around 5am and just sit on the balcony with my tea, in the company of squirrels and bats as the sky brightens. Sometimes I’m treated to the flashing turquoise display of kingfishers wheeling from tree to tree above the rice fields. It’s becoming my favourite time of day.

CAREFUL WORK: Kath giving Bryan the otter an injection

Nature here is colourful. Huge black and azure butterflies flap gently like satin gloves; red dragonflies the size of bi-planes flit between foliage too green to be allowed. And the spiders – oh my! Luckily I love insects, but if you don’t my advice would be don’t go to Indonesia.

I think around the end of my second week I finally succumbed to a wall. Exhaustion hit, and hit hard. I felt, for the first time, very far from home. I missed my dog, my cats, my husband (not necessarily in that order!) and felt ready to leave. I was inwardly grumpy, a bit sad and not sure I could carry the weight of wellies on my feet.

It didn’t last. I allowed myself a small, self-pitying cry then had a nice cup of tea and pulled myself together. So many more amazing things to see and do. Also, there is always someone checking if you’re OK, asking how your day’s going and if they can assist with anything. A happy little dance helps too. Every morning PhD Chris (henceforth known as Clever Chris) and I sing the Happy Happy Joy Joy song (made famous by Ren and Stimpy – google it hun!) and get blamed for making it rain.

A word about the rain… think of all the descriptions there are for a huge downpour, string them together in a sentence too challenging for me to attempt, and that still doesn’t cover it. The keepers are excellent at weather-reading and will tell us not that it will rain later, or this afternoon, but in two hours 45 minutes. They are never wrong.

PALM-SIZED: A rhinoceros beetle that was flying into lampshades in the clinic

The humidity ramps up to unbearable, distant thunder rumbles, the swallows fly low (and yes, rain does follow). Preceded by a delightfully cool-ish breeze, suddenly, like 100,000 firefighters turning on their hoses, down it comes, often with horror-movie style, thunder and lightening special effects. It can last for, well, see earlier issues with time, until suddenly, hoses off and up goes the heat and humidity again. I love these moments of drenched respite, and despite wet T-shirt competitions not being a thing here, it’s sometimes called for.

Thankfully, the physical side of things has decreased a little, as I spend more time in the veterinary clinic (less scrubby-scrubby more wipey-wipey), though this comes with a different set of anxieties as the work is so far removed from my normal practice.

In the UK I like to think I’m mostly quite competent as a nurse, but here I seem to be less so. My role is tricky for the vets, never having had a nurse. The keepers do all the handling and gentle restraint of birds being examined in their enclosures, and mammals are sedated and brought to the clinic for an annual health check, including a dental exam, vaccinations, X-rays and blood sampling.

My skills as a cat whisperer and restrainer of angry little dogs are redundant here. The two vets are used to doing everything themselves, and working alongside the keen, young vet student Hanna, who likes to get stuck in, I’m happy in the role of observer. There is always wipey-wipey to be done (my forte).

SERENE: The sunset after a storm

One rainy afternoon we are tasked with making the darts used, on the less co-operative residents such as crocodiles, to deliver medication. These are ingenious improvisations created by the vet, proprietary darts being very expensive and hard to come by.

After much fiddling and tutting and stabbing myself in the finger with a needle, I am demoted to cutting up rubber stoppers into small squares with a blunt Stanley knife, as Hanna cracks on like a pro.

Another day I’m trusted to give an inpatient – a large pig-nosed turtle who has been receiving treatment for abrasions on her shell – a subcutaneous injection of vitamins and some oral pain relief. I fail miserably on both counts.

In my defence, she’s feeling a lot better, flapping her flippers and biting the end off the oral syringe. The end was retrieved without incident but after this I am solemnly handed the blunt Stanley knife and an old flip flop – back to square cutting for me. I do good squares, the best squares ever, and they’re an integral part of the darting process – without them the drugs would fall out, so I’m OK with that. But it seems Java has turned me into a nincompoop.

GRUELLING: The ‘Death Stairs’

A fun time is had by all when Bryan the otter is due his health check (made my day, an otter called Bryan!). The otters here (many) are sleek, fun loving and very used to humans. They have indoor and outdoor enclosures with a pond in each, whistle and shriek whenever they hear people, stick their little paws through any gaps they can find, and eat chicken and catfish with gusto.

They are, quite frankly, too adorable and very hard to ignore. Some volunteers complain about the smell, but I would describe it as ‘tangy’. Bryan doesn’t want to get in his crush cage (really not as brutal as it sounds, just a cage with a sliding side enabling animals to be injected with minimal handling) and he and his roommate Sophie lead us a merry dance.

The sound of four Indonesians calling “Bryan” and occasionally “Sophie” for half an hour is something that will stay with me for life. Naughty Bryan is eventually caught, succumbs to his ketamine and we head back to the clinic minus Sophie.

I haven’t mentioned the Binturongs have I? OMG girlfriend! Also known as Bearcats, these beauties look like somewhere in their genetic past a badger fell in love with a racoon. Another on my ‘like to bring one home’ list. As a nurse I want to pick them up and hug them, but am quite fond of my face so don’t do it. It’s enough of a pleasure watching them devour a melon.

LYING IN WAIT: Big Mama, the largest of the freshwater turtles, at the foot of the Death Stairs

Also very huggable and hard to ignore are the sun bears. We’ve had the privilege of being on a rota for constant observation as two juvenile Paddington bears have been gradually introduced and hopefully will live together.

This is done quietly, from a few metres distance and with instruction to walk away if the younger one, who still looks to humans for food and company, tries to engage. Hard, but things go really well. Watching them play, climb and eat together is a joy; friends for life, which can be around 25 years. I feel they need a hat though.

I’ve been talking with the giant turtles about the humorously named ‘Death Stairs’ that rise up the steep sides of the swampy valley where they live, across the path from the crocodiles. The near vertical concrete steps are Kill Bill-esque and aptly named. It’s lucky no one has taken a tumble down them and over the fence at the bottom. If the fall doesn’t kill you, the crocodiles will.

There are over 30 crocodiles lurking in several enclosures in the valley. Rarely seen but ever present, many have pitifully deformed jaws. Kept in tiny cages they quickly outgrow, often with legs tied behind their backs, their mandibles have nowhere to go but upwards. No surprise then that they slide quickly underwater at the sound of approaching humans.

SIMPLE PLEASURES: An inpatient sunbathing

The biggest of the freshwater turtles, Big Mama, has no such reservations, but has assured me that should I fall to the other side and land in their lake; she’ll only snap off a digit or two to begin with.

The Death Stairs are also a good indication of lung capacity. Now I don’t smoke, and I certainly wouldn’t advocate it, but let me tell you, Indonesian cigarettes are delicious, so I’ve been told. They come in fruity flavours such as berry, applemint, grape, even the plain ones are flavoured with cloves and all the filters are coated in sugar. Some have little flavour poppers in the sugary filter to add an extra woosh.

If I smoked, which of course I don’t, my favourite would be Double Pop, a delightful combination of apple and mango, and some long, slender minty ones that make me feel like Audrey Hepburn. I’ve had to stop any smoking I might have done had I smoked, or at least cut down, as halfway up the Death Stairs one day, wheezing like a set of leaky bagpipes, I realised my tidal volume had been reduced to that of an asthmatic hamster.

But, you know, I mean, apple and mango! Several other volunteers also don’t smoke, and we’ve decided what happens in Java stays in Java. 

MOUTHS TO FEED: Preparing food for the cassowaries