I'm struggling to make friends here. Miriam, a 9-month-old orangutan orphan who's learning how to climb a tree, almost scales past her trainer when I approach. For good measure, she starts to cry. Another orangutan signals displeasure by emulating the sound of a Harley barreling toward me. In fact, the only one who tolerates me is 11-year-old Leuser, and not because the 42 air-rifle pellets lodged in his body have mellowed him. He's also blind.

At any zoo, these surly apes would bomb the aw-isn't-he-cute exam, but here at the world's most successful school for rescued orangutans, they're taught to get back in touch with their wild side. Even playtime is serious business. Passing, say, the test of recognizing a friend (another orangutan) versus a foe (a human logger) could spell life or death for these critically endangered icons of the old world jungle.

Everything happens here with one goal in mind: graduation day, when the shaggy students are set loose into the harsh Sumatran rain forest. But for the students to have a shot at survival, handlers must teach them to avoid humans at all costs, a tough task considering they need to be fed by humans.

And teaching them about the dangers of Homo sapiens means no lines of gawky tourists dangling bananas and posing for pictures. That's why this center at the far north of Sumatra – one of the main islands of Indonesia – is closed to the public and barely known to outsiders. Even if you made it to the nearby village – where the specialty dish is fruit-bat soup and the humid air is clouded with mosquitoes - this part of Sumatra is definitely not for the faint of heart.

This is the second post of a 2-part series. Read the first part here.

The swamp here could be the stuff of nightmares. Because this happens to be the rainy season, which lasts from October to March, the trails are meant to be waded, not walked. Yet I am utterly stuck, knee-deep in pungent red mud with stagnant water up to my waist. Ellen Meulman, a PhD student from the University of Zurich, doubles back to pull me out of the quagmire. It takes a few hard yanks. "Be careful," she says. "You can disappear in these waters." Thoughts of leeches and king cobras vanish, replaced by a more immediate fear.

We've been slogging and hacking through the jungle for nearly three hours, on our way to rendezvous with today's observation team. The field staff hustles day in and out to arrive at the nest-site before dawn and do not return until after dark. In between, they track the individual behaviors of the orangutan in excruciating detail: Is the subject playing with a neighbor? Eating, and if so, what? Vocalizing? Using a tool?

The orangutans here already know some remarkable tricks. They've learned how to fashion a seed-extraction stick to crack open the prickly shell of the Neesia fruit. The theory goes that this rather complicated skill developed from simpler abilities to use tools to dig for honey, fish for termites, and scoop for water. Yet primatologists know little more than that these smarter-than-we-thought apes possess culture; the pressing question now is to figure out how it's acquired and transferred.

Forget for a moment the dreadful conditions in this miserable Sumatran swamp, which include being eaten by tigers (seven in the surrounding area last year). Just getting here is an ordeal in itself. Start by taking the 1,400-kilometer flight from the capital, Jakarta, to Sumatra's bustling northern port, Medan. Then it's a grueling twelve-hour ride straight across the island's dramatic mountains-and poorly maintained roads-to the Indian Ocean, where a puttering speedboat will be waiting to make the hour-long trip upriver.

If all goes well, you arrive at camp for the daily rationing of rice and canned mackerel. This is assuming you secured the four permits required for a visit to this hidden corner of Leuser National Park, a World Heritage Site.

Yet despite the remoteness or food or the fact the Suaq Balimbing field station is in the middle of a flooded swamp, the scientists here couldn't be happier at their return. "We were all waiting for this place to reopen," Andrea Gibson, a PhD candidate at University of Zurich who had to delay her orangutan fieldwork by three years because of the station's hiatus, said to me.

Here it is in all its bare, cold and smoking beauty. A volcanic version of Marlene Dietrich, taylor-made for black and white imagery: Mount Bromo in Java, Indonesia.

This stunning photo was shot by everything-everywhere a little after sunrise, while it was "very overcast and the clouds were very low in the caldera."

A little after sunrise? Is that the trick to good pictures? Does one have to get up early to become a good photographer? What a downer.

***To have your photo considered for the Gadling Photo of the Day, go over to the Gadling Flickr Pool and post it. Make sure it is not copyrighted, otherwise we can't post it here.***

Is Indonesia reverting to the era of chastity belts? The country recently implemented a policy requiring its female masseuses to wear padlocks on their trousers.

We all know that for some folks, visiting a massage parlor means they're getting a whole lot more than a back rub. There are specific institutions that cater to these types of customers and I'm certain that those particular "massage therapists" didn't put in 500 hours and get their massage licenses. Working out the kinks in your back isn't their specialty.

So it seems to me that putting a padlock on the masseuses' pants isn't really solving the masseuse-as-prostitute problem, and, as the State Minister for Women's Empowerment Meuthia Hatta pointed out, it makes the masseuse appear to be in the wrong, not the customer.

What do you think?

At Gadling we are pretty crazy about odd and bizarre foods. We've already written about Indonesian turd coffee, a byproduct of wild civets, but today the good news is that you don't have to travel all the way to Southeast Asia to get it. To get your morning cup of turd coffee, make your way to London instead.

Peter Jones, a department store in Sloane Square, is selling a gourmet coffee blend made from animal dung and selling it at £50 a cup; that's almost $100! Caffe Raro, which is thought to be the most expensive coffee in the world, is a made from a blend of Jamaican Blue Mountain and Kopi Luwak beans. The Kopi Luwak beans are eaten by the Asian palm civet, and once passed through their system, collected and sold for a little under $650 per kilogram. Don't worry -- they're washed before they are roasted.

$100 may seem like a lot to spend on a good cup of java -- especially when it's made from animal dung -- but then again, if you live in Europe, it's cheaper than a ticket to track down the specialty in Indonesia.

Smokers in New York already face some of the highest prices for cigarettes in the country. But last Wednesday, the New York legislature approved a $1.25 tax hike on cigarettes, meaning that taxes alone on a pack in New York are a whopping $4.25, not including a roughly 8% sales tax. Add it all up and a pack of smokes in New York is likely to cost around $9.00. Ouch!

This all got me thinking: Where in the world are cigarettes the cheapest? And more importantly, how can I smuggle a couple hundred thousand packs into New York and sell them for a handsome profit? I think I've more or less discovered the answer to the first question, but I'm still working on the second.

A table produced by the World Health Organization (maybe a couple years old) shows that one pack of Marlboros or an "equivalent international brand" costs about $1.70 in Argentina. As much as I'd love to spend some time in Buenos Aires, I have a feeling I can track down a cheaper pack.

In China, an international brand costs about $1.57, which is sneaking down into my price range. The same thing in Ghana will run about a buck-forty. Cigs in Egypt look to be about $1.17, and those in Georgia are a dollar even. But we can do better than that.

The cheapest "international brand" smokes are to be found in Indonesia, where even fetuses are known to light up every now and then. A pack in the steamy Southeast Asian nation will run you a cool $.62. I probably have enough in my couch cushions for at least a couple.

But enough of this hoity-toity "name brand" crap. Let's look at some prices for the hard stuff-- the kind of violent cigarettes that leave open sores in the mouths and throats of all those who dare to inhale.

No other island in the world has such a bizarre history as Anak Krakatau's. It appeared out of the sea 80 years ago, became home to dozens of bird and plant species, and then disappeared just as quickly. More volcanic eruptions followed as it resurfaced and grew to its current height of 1,300 feet. Then the explosions stopped.

For the next half century, Anak Krakatau has served as the ideal laboratory for observing how life begins, endures, and sometimes perishes in an island ecosystem. In fact, much of what we know about island colonization, biogeography, and ecology comes from the decades of research on Anak Krakatau, starting with Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson's classic treatise The Theory of Island Biogeography (1967) to Oxford ecologist Robert Whittaker's Island Biogeography (2007).

I've always had a strange desire to be in a Jurassic Park film. The last time I was at Universal Studios, I remember seeing the dinosaurs in an utter state of awe as I imagined how life would have been if these creatures still existed.

Dragons on the other hand, I've only read about in story books and would never have imagined that there are 2,500 of them walking freely on Indonesia's Komodo Island. Yes my friends, there are humongous carnivorous lizards -- some that are 10-feet long -- walking at their own liberty, on our planet!

17,000 people visited Komodo National Park last year, a number not too high perhaps only because of the lack of tourist facilities on the island. (I imagine if you are visiting an island with dragons, the more tourist facilities around, the higher your likelihood of visiting, no?). As for me, my explorer spirit doesn't include being dragon-fearless: I'd jump out of my skin and run for my life if I ever encountered one.

Also, according to National Wildlife Magazine, the thick saliva of the dragon is known to kill the animals it bites and some researchers are risking their lives to find out what is in the saliva that kills other animals, and not the beast itself. They think that perhaps it's saliva has strong immunity properties or some natural antibodies in it's blood that could be harnessed for human health.

The wonders of nature often leave me speechless.

Pilots in Jakarta have been protesting over the arrest of Marwoto Komar, the Garuda national airline pilot accused of causing the 2007 plane crash, which killed 21 people. There are, of course, two sides of the story.

The pilot has been under police supervision since the crash, BBC reports. The chairman of the Indonesian Pilots Federation, Manotar Napitupulu, said that the "criminalization of pilots will put pilots under pressure in carrying out their job". The federation has been receiving support from pilots' groups around the globe.

On the other hand, the Indonesia's National Transport Safety Committee said that the pilot ignored 15 warnings against landing and approached the runway too fast. He has been charged with five offenses, including negligence causing deaths and the destruction of an aircraft and could face more than five years in jail.

This is a tough one. I don't envy the responsibility pilots have over human lives. Yet, not even pilots are immune from making bad judgments...