Woohooooooo!!!! We are finally arriving at one of the MOST fascinating places on Earth!! Well, I do not know that for a fact, but what I do know is that Indonesia is among my most favorite countries in the world, and I will never get over its beauty. More about the beauty part later, but a small content warning before we start: some parts of this story will be heartbreaking- just like with the dog shelter in Moalboal, it's not always rainbows and butterflies, and sometimes reality hits us pretty hard.

Tasikoki is another very special chapter in our travels. Most of you are already aware, and I did leave some teasers towards the end of the Lanta story, but for everyone else, a colleague of ours at the Lanta shelter had recommended this place to us. What he specifically mentioned was that:

“Tasikoki is my favorite place on Earth. In fact, if I ever do get a chance, I will move there permanently.”

“What makes it so special, Aaron?” we asked, to which he said, “The nature is just unbeatable in Indonesia. I woke up to some of the most beautiful sunrise views directly from my bed at the volunteer dorm, saw and worked for some of the most beautiful animals during the day, and drank with some of the most fun, warm, and welcoming people at night. I swam with jellyfish and climbed volcanoes; in every direction you look, there is raw nature to be discovered, and the most wonderful locals to guide you and keep you company!”

Well fine then, Aaron, damn, maybe their tourism board should hire you, and also thanks, I want to go to there!

🚗 The Arrival

Upon application, someone called Chindi Chantika (Tasikoki’s volunteer coordinator) got in touch with us. All paperwork was set up pretty quickly, and soon we were on our way from Cebu to Manado via Singapore. Look guys: this was our actual travel route, we were obviously very committed by this point.

We arrived in a city in North Sulawesi called Manado at around 10 PM on March 20th, and we were picked up by a driver Chindi arranged for us. After driving through the busy city of Manado, the traffic thinned out to only occasional two-wheelers, the landscape peppered with smaller and smaller houses, until in less than an hour, we found our taxi crossing the gates of the reserve, with mostly foresty darkness on the other side.

The pitch black was broken only when families of wild deer suddenly jumped across our taxi's headlights, completely unexpected but what a welcome! As we stepped out of the cab, there was Chindi (along with her boyfriend, Ryan) waiting to greet us. They immediately took us under their wing and helped us get settled into the volunteer house, our home for the next two weeks!

By the time she left the building with Ryan, we had a huge dump of information from her, some dinner that the Tantes had prepared for us, an invite to the Eid celebrations on the next day, and a slightly scary sleeping arrangement at the surprisingly empty volunteer house. This is when Niki started noticing that his sniffles were starting to develop a slightly viral flu flavor to them, but after eating a bit, we settled into our separate bunks in separate dorm rooms.

That first night, I needed all the lights of the women’s dorm to be on, because I was terrified of everything. The next day, I made an executive decision to move into the men’s dorm since the whole place was anyway empty (minus some 20 geckos and 3,000 crickets- surely they won’t mind much, I assumed).

The next day, bright and early, we made our way around Tasikoki with Chindi as she gave us a tour of the whole property. This was when we got introduced to most of the animals and other humans living here. On this evening, we were invited to and attended two separate Eid dinners.

Through stuffing our faces with some fabulous local homemade meals, trying captikus shots for the first time, and some ice-breaking conversations, the thought that I was struck with before going to bed was: How lucky are we?? How did we manage to meet exactly the type of people that we look for everywhere. The people that embrace you completely and with no hesitation, feed you until you are bursting, and even through broken communication, find a way to make you feel exactly like one of their own. I went to bed with a wide smile on my face, knowing that we were exactly where we needed to be.

👥 Meet the Team

At Tasikoki, we worked primarily either with Chindi or with Dr. Asa and Dr. Audrey, the vets in charge of the entire population of animals at Tasikoki.

• Chindi (Volunteer Coordinator): Should instead be promoted to the in-house entertainer, planner of fun things, and full-time content creator. If roller coasters could be a person, Chindi is that person. There is literally never a dull moment with this woman; if you sit with her to have breakfast, breakfast will have turned into lunch and dinner with no one having done anything much other than talk and giggle at her extempores. But not just that, Chindi has a treasure trove of information about every resident rescue at Tasikoki- their backgrounds, how they were rescued, and how we can improve their quality of life, etc.

• Dr. Asa (Veterinarian): One of the young vets who is in charge of the entire population of some 150 rescues at the centre. You can ask Asa for his opinion on any random topic in any random category, from culture to history, from animal welfare to local delicacies, and he will always come up with some of the most profound answers that you never expected. The man works non-stop. No, seriously, he has not taken a holiday in years! And the reason is obviously his incredible sense of duty towards the animals under his care. He also likes to pretend he is a tough guy, but secretly he is just a softie for kittens, and always seems to “run into” abandoned kittens all over the Tasikoki property.

• Dr. Audrey (Veterinarian): The fellow vet also in charge of the animals, is a cupcake of a human. She has what seems like endless empathy, faith, and compassion. Audrey always has a smile on her face, is always easily excited about what is coming next, and always, always laughs with her full lungs. If I could stay, she would easily be the first friend I made... or well, maybe that would be a tie between Chindi and Audrey.

• The Keepers: The people who do the actual back-breaking work of caring for the animals. Without the keepers, it would be impossible to run a place like this smoothly. They do everything from sourcing and preparing foods to ensuring that everyone is fed on time. Need to relocate a giant turtle to a different part of the property? Find a keeper. Located a random wild python where it doesn’t belong? Find a keeper. Need live chickens to feed the crocs? You guessed it.

• Wildlife Sniffer K9s and Handlers: Gisele and Ivy were trained in the Netherlands, and have moved to Tasikoki for the sole purpose of detecting wildlife being smuggled in and out of the Manado port. These dogs and their handlers have rescued most of the animals at Tasikoki. Need I say more about how cool that is?

• Tante(s): A Dutch loanword to the Indonesian language, Tantes are aunties that are in charge of feeding all the humans. It was one of the Tantes that invited us for the Eid party at her home!

🛠️ The Daily Grind: Our Actual Work

To understand the work we did here, you first have to understand the bittersweet reality of why Tasikoki exists. The animals rescued here come from all across Indonesia- places like Papua, Sumatra, Maluku, and Kalimantan. While they are treated for their injuries and illnesses with the ultimate goal of being released, the logistics are incredibly complicated. Because Tasikoki is located in North Sulawesi, you cannot simply release an animal endemic to Sumatra or Papua into the local forest. Doing so risks upsetting the local ecosystem, introducing non-native diseases, or forcing an animal to survive in a habitat it isn’t evolved for.

And so, they wait for their chance to go home. Like everything else in life, it is a money game. Unless there are enough funds to charter transport for a whole batch of animals back to their home islands, they have to stay. Despite everyone's best intentions, these rescues remain in captivity simply because the math has to make sense; no one is funding an entire ferry or plane just to carry a single snake back to where it originally belongs. However, while the animals are in captivity, their daily lives don’t have to feel like a prison sentence, and this is where volunteers like us try to mimic natural environments to make their stay less stressful.

👶 Bunta and Bunti

This was easily one of our most favorite parts of the day. Most of our Instagram friends are already familiar with this gorgeous forest couple. Bunta and Bunti are Sulawesi dwarf cuscuses, a nocturnal marsupial endemic to Indonesia's Sulawesi island. They were rescued from the bushmeat trade market. Generally, these animals hide in the trees, using their prehensile tails to climb tree branches while they feast on the leaves and flowers of the tree.

The story we heard from the vets was that hunters first found Bunti and cut her tail in order to capture her, and then her brave boyfriend, Bunta, threw himself at the hunters to protect his lady. The result was both babies with their tails removed and on their way to be sold to the highest bidder for their meat. This is apparently where they were rescued.

The vets performed some life-saving surgery on them, and while they can never be sent back into the wild, they will be sent to breeding centres to help with population recovery once they have recovered. Our job was to assist their post-surgery bulking journey and make their stay at Tasikoki cozy and comfortable. This required foraging- lots of foraging for the right leaves, berries, flowers, fruits, and wild nuts from plants all over the property. In the evenings, we would head to the clinic with our “jungle salad,” clean up their cage and surroundings, decorate the cage to make it feel like a cozy tree nook, and hide various food items all over the cage.

I cannot begin to explain the immense satisfaction this small task provided for us, especially if they started munching away at the goods. I swear, and no shade to my chosen career path as a product manager, etc. but I have never spent 20 minutes staring at my PRDs or fabulously written Jira tickets with the good kind of moisture in my eyes. The hardest part of this task was that I was not to speak to the animals; these are wild animals and any movement and sound from humans still freaks them out, but there was so much I wanted to say to them! Like, "How and why and who's a good boy, and wow, a big stretch, and was that a yummy mango, Bunts?"

🐒 Primate Deworming

A very cool task that the vets had been saving for when we got there: the deworming of all the primates on the property. This included several long-tailed gibbons, Macaque Nigras, and Macaca Heckis, in total more than 50 animals. We went through bag after bag of baby food powder enriched with the medication and prepared endless rounds of medicated cookies, which had to be custom made based on the weight of each animal. After this, though, came the real task of making sure all of them ate what was prepared for them.

For the problematic animals who were kept in isolation, it was somewhat easy. But for the larger groups that lived together, there existed strict social rules, wherein a few alphas were always entitled to more food (or in this case, cookies) than the others. This meant some monkeys were over-medicated and some were left with no medication. My role here was that of the Chief Distraction Officer: I would distract the alphas, and Niki and the vets would try their best to go around and give the younger ones their cookies.

In one instance, Asa locked up the most aggressive alpha lady in an isolation cage, and then what I saw was so baffling to me. With the alpha gone, within 10 seconds, there was a restructuring, and now there was a new alpha. This would repeat if the next alpha was captured in a different cage. My task was to keep track of who the new alpha was and attract them to one corner of the cage with treats. This was an insane task, and I learned a lot about primate behavior and body language in those few days! For instance, if you ever see a monkey smiling at you with their full face, know that it's not a smile, but mostly the animal being nervous and submissive.

🦅 Eagle Assessment

Never in my life did I imagine such cool tasks would be on my resume! Here, an eagle that had been rescued was recovering from some injuries, and our task was to assist the vets in giving the eagle a health checkup. Eagles are HUGE in person! Their primary feathers and tail feathers (rectrices) are highly specialized to generate thrust, reduce drag, and allow for precise steering. They possess exactly 10 primary flight feathers on each wing and 12 tail feathers. While Niki identified the physical condition of each of those feathers, I recorded the data outside the aviary so that the doctors could make a decision about releasing the bird into the wild in the next few days.

🐍 Snake Enclosure Cleaning

What a casual statement: “Tomorrow you guys will clean the snake enclosure. It would be great if you can also catch some geckos at the volunteer house tonight; the snake prefers the hunt of a live gecko.” Excuse me, sir?? We didn’t attempt to catch geckos, but we did learn how to transfer a snake safely from one spot to another. Another skill that maybe we will never need in life, but it's a good practice of the whole “breathe, you have more time than you think, no need to react in fear, don’t randomly kill a snake” mindset.

🥥 Enrichment for Macaques, Loris, Cockatoos, and Sun Bears

Animals that are in captivity while they recover get fed well to help them with their recovery. This means there is always a keeper keeping an eye on everyone's diet so that no one is going hungry. However, there would be a time when these animals would no longer be in captivity, and once that happens, they may very much lose their skills for hunting/foraging. For this reason, one of the major and most time-consuming tasks for volunteers is to keep an eye out for different ways in which you can provide enrichment to the animals. Enrichment refers to creative daily activities and puzzle items designed to stimulate rescued animals physically and mentally. It encourages natural wild behaviors like foraging, climbing, and problem-solving, which are crucial for their rehabilitation and release.

We would prepare tiny packages of peanuts and honey wrapped in leaves so the macaques could practice finding food in hidden, hard-to-reach places. We would leave big logs of wood or old coconuts with honey drizzled over them so that they attract a ton of ants overnight and could be given to the sun bears the next day. We would go harvesting abundant amounts of long grass to give to the cockatoos (those were some really stressed birds that were rescued from smuggling rings): apparently, picking at the seeds on these long grasses helps them not pick their own feathers, which is a very common stress response for these birds. To all humans who want wild birds as pets, please stop. This entire industry should just not exist.

🐕 K9 Training

On their days off, Gisele and Ivy need to keep up with their training. To do this, the handlers sometimes invited Niki to help out. The task here would be to hide a piece of a loris' or a cassowary's feather at random locations in the outdoors while the handlers walked the dogs. It is very cool to see the noses on these animals in action, and it's obvious that the rescue operations would simply never run as successfully without the dogs.

🌅 Evenings & Off-Hours

🎲 Yahtzee at the Beach

I had never really played Yahtzee before, but it seemed like a pretty popular game among the gang. So one evening, we were invited to play Yahtzee by the beach, accompanied by some ginger tea, Indomie, and fried bananas! Not to brag, but two mugs of tea down, and in a very unlikely turn of events, I actually won that very long round of Yahtzee 😀

🎱 Pool with Ryan

Again, not something I would normally get excited for, but when Chindi makes a plan, it's generally a good idea to join in. I did not win this one (you see, I am hardly coordinated enough to play pool), but we did get to see the competitive side of some folks and the opposite of the competitive side of some other folks. At some point, Asa was rolling on the floor laughing at how much we all (except Ryan) suck at this. It was fun.

🍜 Bakso

Bakso ayam is easily among my top five Indonesian dishes. A traditional meatball soup, served with noodles, and in this case, some curried chicken. I only casually mentioned this to Chindi once, and she made sure to take me to the exact right place in the neighborhood where I was happy to eat to my heart's content!

🍛 Indian Food Night

During one of our very early conversations with the gang, to no one’s surprise, the topic of food came up, and I learned that most of our new friends had never had a proper Indian meal. Only Asa had some experience during his days as a vet in Malaysia, and he expressed deeply missing it. “Say no more, friends,” I thought- “I have myself been dying for a chance to feed someone.” And this is how I ended up elbow-deep kneading 3 kg of naan dough in preparation to feed 30 people. Don't freak out, literally everyone helped me with the cooking.

The menu consisted of butter chicken, naan, and veg biryani (don’t come at me, it was so hard to find any of the ingredients here!!), and I totally did not stress anyone out because all the keepers decided to show up exactly on time and nothing was ready. However, all's well that ends well, and I think we ended up finishing almost all the food that we made, making Indian food night a HUGE success! Aren’t you glad that your girl’s annoying habit of force-feeding people has ensured the spread of our pride and joy-Indian food- to new corners of the world? You are very welcome, I will accept my prize now.

✨ The "In Betweens"

⛪ The Bible Study Evening

In her free time, Audrey likes to host Bible evenings for kids from the local village areas, to help them through their faith. She does this, in part, to help out the small church right next to Tasikoki, and also for the kids to have a sense of community as they grow up. As a way to improve their confidence, she occasionally invites the Tasikoki volunteers, and in many cases, for these kids, it's their first interaction with a non-local, non-Indonesian person.

Now, I am far from the number one biggest supporter of organized religion, but I do believe that a person like Audrey embodies all the good parts of any religion. When you see her doing what she does, it kind of makes sense.

🤒 Very Ill at Times

Remember the sniffles I mentioned at the beginning of this story? Yeah, this was one of the worst virals Niki has experienced so far in our travels. Headaches like never before, high fevers through the night, and a cough that would not leave him alone for days after he was fully recovered!

On a few occasions, Asa and Audrey brought us our food, because we were simply not able to leave the volunteer house! It got a bit worrying for a bit there, because we were in a remote village after all, but as usual (and I do not mean to tempt luck), we got extremely lucky, and it never got too serious.

🌋 Earthquakes & Tsunami Warnings

So... kind of weird that I am only now mentioning this crazy event. Yeah, one early morning, while I was about to start with my meditation, we experienced the whole volunteer house start to shake somewhat violently! This is a not-so-new structure, and has wooden staircases, and I was barefoot as we slowly made our way down to the ground floor. Within a few minutes, the violent shaking stopped, and as we waited downstairs, Asa and Audrey showed up on their bikes, with instructions to gather at the guest house building and wait for tsunami warnings to pass or further instructions from the local government. Of course there could be a tsunami, as we were right next to the sea.

So, we made a very quick trip to our dorm, I put on shoes and picked up our passports, and made our way to the guest house. We stayed there for nearly two hours before we got the clear to get back to regular life. This could honestly have been a pretty crazy incident, but luck prevailed, and being around very sane and level-headed folks kept the whole situation sane and level-headed. Over the next few days, we experienced several small aftershocks, and it was almost like a reminder of how differently this story could have gone.

🌅 Sunrises

Speaking of nature on steroids, every morning, I woke up to the sunrises that we heard Aaron absolutely rave about in Lanta. I get it now, sunrise in a forest just hits differently. Sometimes fleeting, sometimes dramatic, but always spectacular, and it brings the waking up of all the jungle animals. This is when the gibbons started their singing/shouting and the birds in the big aviary made their presence felt despite the shouty gibbons.

On this note, and with immense gratitude, I will close this chapter. I will always remember the sounds of the gibbons, Bunta's monchies, the screeching crickets, the hopping wild deer that would often almost jump right in front of us, Chindi’s non-stop chatter, Asa driving the pickup truck through the sketchy village (non)streets, stargazing by the beach, the million mosquito bites, Tante’s Indomie and pandan pancakes, Audrey’s sweet singing with her church girlies, and most of all, how deeply satisfied and happy I felt during our time in Tasikoki. It was not perfect, there was an earthquake, etc., but it was so extremely perfect that I cannot explain it despite trying so hard with all these words.

One of the many ways in which Tasikoki has changed me is that now, nature walks are always accompanied by mental notes about how the Bunts may have enjoyed these flowers or how the palm cockatoos may have happily munched on this bunch of long grass.

Fun fact: The gang, i.e., Chindi, Asa, and Audrey, are all around 25 years old. They are a decade younger than us. Let that sink in.

As always, we love you for still sticking around <3