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Latitude : 8 39 45 S Logitude : 120 41 25
E
Altitude : 0 to 1200 metres
Area : 500 ha Wetlands: 500 ha
Tenure : Government of Indonesia
Site Description
Located at 25km of Ruteng towards Borong city, Ranamese lake has size
about 5 ha at 1,200 meters upper sea level. Formerly, this lake was a
crater which eventually created deep-slope beach. To date, this lake
is visited by locals for picnicking, fishing and water salad
harvesting. It is also a good spot for bird watching. |
Ranamese means “big lake” in the local language (in the official
language of Indonesia, bahasa Indonesia, that would be “danau besar”).
It is about 22km out of Ruteng, about 40 minutes by bus. Just before
you get to the big archway entrance there is a stretch of high
concrete wall, apparently built there to block the view down to the
lake from the road! I had been imagining it to be a circular
crater-lake with a trail running through forest around the
circumference, which as it happens is exactly what it
Danau Ranamese
Danau Ranamese
is. I randomly selected left and headed off round the west side of
the lake. After an easy start over concrete steps the trail suddenly
changed into the work of the devil. Its no exaggeration to say that
parts of it were easily the most treacherous trail I have ever been
on. In many places it was only the width of my foot, with on one
side a ten metre drop straight down to the water below and on the
other a near-vertical forested slope. On the downward bits you
couldn’t just plonk your foot down as you went because you didn’t
know if the ground would hold or even if there was ground underneath
the overhanging grasses and ferns. Some lower sections were so close
to the water’s surface that they must surely be submerged in the
rainy season. At times the trail just petered out altogether and I
had to bush-bash to try and find it again, and there were little
side-shoots that looked like they might be trails but quickly ended
in masses of vines. Where-ever the track came out of the trees into
the open there grew head-height tangles of a fern that was similar
to bracken but covered in little spines, another thing like
blackberry but with even more thorns, and various other prickly
triffidy herbiage. I cut my arms and hands up something fierce
forcing my way through these patches.
The area is supposed to be brilliant for birdlife but I saw
almost nothing in the four hours it took me to make my way halfway
round the only-average-sized lake. It may have been just one of the
dead periods you get when birding, or it may have been because I was
having to watch my feet for the entire time! Ironically the last
quarter of the lake’s trail was easy, wide and obvious, exactly how
I’d imagined the whole trail would be before getting there. And it
was in this section that I saw most of the birds, although the three
dark-eyes all eluded me (I couldn’t find the spot-breasted dark-eye
in Timor either, so I think dark-eyes must be my new nemesis bird).
Apparently bird waves are common at Lake Ranamese but on the western
side I’d seen only one and it had been made of just a whole lot of
mountain white-eyes, one brown-capped fantail and a male
bare-throated whistler, so I was feeling a little put-out. But on
the easy eastern side I found three waves, the best of which
contained brown-capped fantails, little minivets, leaf warblers, a
female bare-throated whistler, scaly-crowned honeyeaters,
yellow-breasted warblers, a pigmy woodpecker and various other
flitty things that I couldn’t pin down. |
