Tips For Adventure Photography

Choosing Your Camera
It is now time to choose your camera to accompany you during your adventure trips. You can either bring a still camera and/or a video camera (handycam) to record exiting moments of your trips. Depending on your destination, certain types of camera will do a great job for you.

• Mountain areas; characterized by high altitude, low temperature, and often high humidity (wet and misty). Make sure you have dry case, or, dry bag (or at least plastic bags) to protect your camera. Due to misty or cloudy conditions, please make sure that your camera can work under low light conditions. Manual cameras where you can adjust speed and diaphragm are ideal. However, some pocket cameras also have options for low light conditions (ie: night photos, candles, etc.).
• Beach, oceans, and seas; open areas with plenty of light. Be cautious also with the humidity and splash. Seawater can harm electronic equipments. Choosing waterproof camera will be very useful and comfortable under this conditions. Dry case and dry bags are also useful, but they can be quite troublesome when you catch unexpected moments, and have to struggle to get your cameras out from the dry case/dry bag.
• Forests; similar conditions with mountain areas. Some forest areas may be populated with vegetations that can damage your equipments (and your skin) such as thorns, hanging vines, dripping sap, etc. Please, watch out for these conditions by having proper protection for your equipments.

In most cases, pocket cameras are very good. They are light, small, and easy to operate. This is ideal in the places where you have to hike or walk a long distance, as they don't burdened you so much. Most digital pocket cameras can take great, high resolution pictures.

Halimun - The Misty Mountain

Citorek Village
The bitter cold greeted me in the morning. It was 6:30 am in Citorek village, West Java. This village lies near Halimun National Park, the last pristine mountain rainforest of West Java. I could not see farther than 3 meters as the mountain fog covered this beautiful landscape. It was too cold to take a bath without warm water this morning. Besides, due to the dry season, most of the wells in this village were already dried out. The name Citorek came from the word ‘Cai’ (Water/river) and ‘Torek’ (Deaf). Apparently back in the old days, the nearby river was so wide and the water was so deafeningly noisy that the people named the village after this phenomenon. Today, no such river existed.

The mountain trek that we were going to start from Citorek village was not like the regular trek I used to do. This one was going to go through mountainous areas, as well as sprawls of paddy fields along the way. Last night, we managed to ask local villagers to be our guides. Other than a few villagers, no one else had gone through this trek across the National Park. Ajo, Uwa (which literally means uncle) Nadim, and Nuhadi were the accompanying villagers. By 8:00 am, the fog gradually subsided, and we were all set to go westward to another village named Cibedug.

Megalithic Remnants
The trek was, as expected, quite strenuous with steep hill climbs and descents. Parts of it were covered with stones, but most were just bare red-orange soil known geologically as littosol soils. Some of us had to stop and breathe heavily adjusting to the pace of others and also to the heat from the sun that radiated the mountain and hill slopes. This morning it was really cold, but it became rather hot as soon as the sun came up.

Three-hour hike led us to a small village named Cibedug. Unlike Citorek, this village was isolated from the outside world, for no roads and cars could reach this village. We approached the house of a Kasepuhan elder. Kasepuhan is the highly respected elder councils in villages around Mount Halimun NP. There were influences of many Kasepuhan all over the villages in and around the National Park, including Cibedug village. After a short conversation with the elder, I decided to explore the megalithic remnants in this village known as Candi Cibedug (Cibedug temple).


As a matter of fact, it was not a temple at all. The structure was a pyramid with platforms and other stone structures surrounding it. They were arranged in a certain way, as if accommodating some kind of ancient gathering of some sort. Interestingly there were also stone inscription nothing like Sanskrit or any other ancient scripts of Indonesia that I knew of. I was no anthropologist, but I would predict that these scripts predated the first kingdoms of Java.

The Baduy Tribe
We decided not to stay overnight in the village, but instead walked further west close to the point where we would start the southbound lag of the trip. Abah (Father) Nurja the village elder was kind enough to provide us with a villager to guide us in this trip. Again, we walked across paddy fields, rivers, and hills to a relatively flat area with a small hut by the paddy field. This place was also close to the river.


I erected my tent while other prepared the hut for an overnight stay. In the distance there were people dressed in white shirt with white Ikat (cloth band) in their heads. They were the members of the inner Baduy tribe. This was an ancient tribe still exist in the western part of Java. They refused to use modern tools such as vehicles, television, radio, even nails and paint for building houses. They rely on the materials available from their surroundings to build houses, farm agriculture commodities, as well as foraging fruits and vegetables. This time three of them, one Ayah (adult male), and three boys were carrying coconuts back to their village. This area of Mount Halimun Park was close to the villages of inner Baduy tribe. The Baduys have what was called the “restricted forest” where no hunting and foraging was allowed. In fact, this forest was off limits to most villagers.


The Southbound Trek
It was raining for half the night indicating the end of the dry season. Despite the rainfall, many of the paddy fields did not get water, as the water volume was not adequate to fill all the fields. However, it was enough to make our tracks slippery. Early morning, I forced myself to bathe in the river despite the cold water and air. It was surprisingly a refreshing way to start the day. After breakfast we packed all our belongings and logistics, we then started walking southward.

This route was long, as we walked along hilltops, slopes, and mountain range. No villages or civilizations existed in this area. Just forest and more forests, until we reached a river called the Cimerak (Peacock River). I did not know where the name came from, and neither did the villagers, as they never saw any peacock around. We made a camp on the river side for an overnight stay. In the night we exchanged information with the villagers about the Baduy tribe stories, the trips we had done previously, the animals we have seen, and also how the villages had been during the time of rebels in the 1960’s. One of the villages was Ciantalwangi that was abandoned in around 1956.

No rainfall in the night, just heavy fog in the morning. It was sunny, actually, but we needed to wait until the sun was up to be able to bask in its warmth. We did the morning bath ritual, to start the day. We continued south up the hill that was just behind our campsite. Heavy breathing came out of my chest and my colleagues’ as well. The villagers breathed normally, as they were used to exploring these mountains. We needed to take a break every once in a while, while the villagers were just chatted and laughed over the over-exhausted trekkers (my colleagues and I). We hoped to reach Cisiih, a village at the end of this long trek, today or tomorrow at the latest. It was hard with all the climbs, to which our guides referred as “easy” climb.

The rain started to fall again this afternoon, and we still needed to make our ways through the forest. We finally made it to the edge of a slash-and burn farm. There were still burnt out woods and roots where we stood. Not a good sign if you wanted to protect the forest, but a good sign of nearby civilization. Now the tricky part was to walk down the steep, deforested hill slope to reach the path below. Then it started to rain again, just enough to make this hill slope as slippery as an eel. Everyone made it in one piece, though. We stopped at a hut, as it was getting rainier. Fortunately for us, the hut owner offered brown palm sugar, a very nice snack for time like this. When the rain stopped we moved on to a dry paddy field to set up a camp. I just hoped that it wasn’t going to rain tonight, as the rain would surely flush down our campsite.

Civilizations
We were delighted to reach Cisiih after a long and hard trek. One of my colleagues was originally from this village, and he was still able to meet his great grandmother here. She was probably over 100 years old. She and her husband were some of the founders of this village, the civilization that we saw today. The discussion led us to the lost civilization in Ciantalwangi village. We heard the story that the communist rebels (PKI) and the Islamic rebel soldiers (DI) ransacked this village, and the people decided to abandon this area to find better and safer settlements. It would be interesting to see what that village looked like after 50 years. The team was then prepared to go to Ciantalwangi village for the next day.

After walking for almost half a day, the team reached a flat area in the forest of Halimun. We were not sure if this was the abandoned village, or just a different patch of forest. Later, the answer came in form of land depression from previous farming activities. Undoubtedly, this was the sign of past civilization, the abandoned village of Ciantalwangi.

The village was now a well covered secondary forest with remains of the village such as house foundation, farming marks, irrigation, and also village square scattered all over 20 hectares of forest. It was amazing to find past civilizations away from existing civilizations. Here in the misty mountain of Halimun is another treasure from Indonesian forest, a treasure of history.