Orang Pendek

What people describe

Orang pendek means short person. The descriptions are unusually consistent for a cryptid: three to five feet tall, walking upright on the ground rather than moving through the canopy, heavily built through the shoulders, covered in short dark or honey-colored hair, with a mane running down the neck and back. Dutch colonial records from Sumatra carry accounts from the early twentieth century, and people in the Kerinci valley describe it as an animal rather than a spirit.

Debbie Martyr

Martyr, a British journalist, went to Sumatra in 1989 meaning to write about the reports and stayed for decades. She and the photographer Jeremy Holden ran a long search funded by Fauna and Flora International, the oldest conservation organization in the world, and Martyr went on to run that organization's tiger protection work in Kerinci Seblat.

She says she has seen the animal three times. She has never photographed it, and she is careful about what she claims: her position has been that it is an unknown ape, ground-dwelling, and neither a hominid nor a relic human.

Footprint casts have been taken repeatedly. Hair samples have been collected and analyzed, and the ones that could be identified came back as known animals.

What the search found instead

The camera traps set out across Kerinci Seblat produced results of a different kind. They photographed a Schneider's pitta, a bird not recorded for nearly a century and widely assumed extinct, and they produced the first photographs ever taken of the Sumatran striped rabbit.

Neither is an unknown ape. Both are animals nobody could prove were there until cameras were left in the forest looking for something else.

Kerinci Seblat is the largest national park in Sumatra, and the practical base is Kersik Tuo, a tea-plantation village in the Kerinci valley below Gunung Kerinci. Guesthouses there arrange guides, and a guide is required for the mountain.

Gunung Kerinci is the highest volcano in Indonesia and an active one, so the summit route opens and closes with the volcanic alert level. Check the current status before committing to it. Danau Gunung Tujuh, the highest lake in Southeast Asia, is the gentler alternative and a day walk from the same village.

This is a tiger landscape, and the ranger teams in it are doing anti-poaching work rather than tourism. Going off trail without a guide is both risky and unhelpful to them. Getting here means a flight to Padang or Jambi and then a road transfer that takes most of a day either way.