15-Mar-2014 -- On Saturday, 15 March 2014, by the end of the afternoon we decided to try to reach Confluence point 1°S 102°E. We did some scouting the day before, there was a dust track reaching about 400 meters to the point.

Majority of the area is cultivated with Acacia mangium or Eucalyptus. But of course it appeared to us that the point was probably right in the riparian preserved forest. We were stopped by a river and by the night fall at about 300 m from the point. That Saturday we crossed the river on a fallen trunk, we thought the harder was behind us... But eventually we had to cross the river 5 or 6 times on the next 200 meters as it was extremely meandrous. It was very hard to progress straight forward because the forest was thick with spiky vines and we didn't brought any cutlass. Each time, we had to find natural bridges to cross the river.

We finally reached a un-maintained young Eucalyptus plantation. That was even worse, with high grass and very thick bush reaching 2 to 3 meters high, plus the place was swampy! We had to crawl and to push the grass in front of us, sometime pushing 3 together to open the path. We reached the point, it was located at the limit of a swamp in the middle of a young Eucalyptus plantation, everywhere around was thick bush with very high and dense grass. We saw some wild boar footprint right there and also some elephant footprint in the swamp.

We tried to return back through a plantation road but after some time we realized it was leading us in the wrong direction. We decided to go back through the same way we came. Easy? Not quite. With the night falling, a storm closing up and the GPS not so accurate it was hard to follow the same track. The storm finally broke out, the night was nearly total inside the last portion of forest. We lost our track and we were not finding the natural bridge we took first for the last river crossing. The heavy rain and exhaustion were not helping...

After some time we found our way and managed to reach our car, wet to the bones, exhausted, covered with insect bites and grass cuts, but so happy of achieving our goal after 4 hours of struggling.