Cabin Fever in Kalimantan

We’re currently writing this from the luxury of shiny happy Singapore about 10 days after the last post was written, so our experience in East Kalimantan has had a chance to sink in. First thoughts are: how on earth did we put up with it and have we got fleas in our baggage? Second thoughts are, actually that was quite good fun, and although it had its ups and downs, it was definitely an extraordinary adventure that fell beyond the limits of the normal traveller routes, proven by the facts that there were only 2 pages in our Lonely Planet guide dedicated to Kalimantan and that we were, for about a week, the only whites in the village.


Despite East Kalimantan being a chunk of the earth that tourism seems to have ignored, we arrived late at night in the noisy, dual-carriagewayed city of Balikpapan to discover that all the guesthouses, hotels and B&Bs were fully booked by local Indonesians. Luckily our taxi driver Yuri was helpful and patient and spent about an hour driving us around the city to enquire at all the various lodgings. At last we were shown two available rooms – one had excrement on the walls and the other had a bin outside which had exploded, several days ago. I think even the roaches had forgone those, so we resigned ourselves to either asking our driver to stay with him, or checking in at the most expensive hotel in town. Then without warning we stumbled upon the Fortuna Hotel – it was cheap, it was open, but most importantly it was CLEAN!!! Really clean – with fresh sheets, white walls and shiny tiles in the bathroom!! I know it must sound like we go on about cleanliness a lot, but seriously we will never take it for granted ever again, especially after having to wash in this bathroom in East Kalimantan’s capital Samarinda:

The next day we investigated what there was to do here and found that the main tourist draw in East Kalimantan was to take a river tour up the mighty Mahakam river, on the way visiting the rainforest and seeing some traditional villages belonging to the indigenous Dayak tribe. This sounded perfect, so we found ourselves a guide and two days later arrived at the port in Samarinda and looked around for our houseboat, on which we were to spend the next two days as we travelled upriver. Somehow or other (mainly thanks to a rich ex-pat’s website) we got the idea that this would be like a pretty little canal boat in the UK. Our boat was a bit larger than that, about 20 tonnes larger, and about 200 other people were also getting on.

Above: our houseboat

Funnier still was when we saw our ‘room’:

Our bed space was about 2’ by 6’ each, with a dirty mattress each to sleep on, and complete strangers to sleep beside. We were fairly lucky – we got a chain smoker on one side and a lady with a baby on the other.


As the boat moved away from the port we got our new sleeping bags out and bedded down on our mattresses, in the process probably ingraining the idea in all the local’s heads that the British are extremely fussy and preoccupied with cleanliness, as we took our mattresses outside and sprayed them with flea killer, and thereafter tried our utmost not to make direct contact with the fabric. We also made the best of what space we had, with a games corner, a strung-up washing line and a larder (mostly containing Tim Tams, delicious biscuits like Penguins only better). Then we noticed everyone else was doing the same in their own fashion. Ladies were hanging makeshift costs from the ceiling, and getting out pre-prepared picnic baskets, kids were using the gangway as a running circuit and others were getting in their pyjamas and snuggling down for the day. It actually started to feel really homely, and when a few people gave us some tentative smiles we started to realise that this was actually a real, local experience and one we were lucky to join in! We also quickly realised after we ventured downstairs that we were in ‘First Class’; some poor souls had seats downstairs, where there were no mattresses, only a plastic mat to sit on, no walls, an unbelievably loud motor engine, all squished in between the cargo – boxes containing everything from chillies to chickens, motorbikes, bicycles and coils of steel.








Next to them was the kitchen, a small table to eat on, and next to the kitchen – right next to the kitchen - were the bathrooms. Imagine a wooden cell about 2 foot square, with a hole and a hose. It was a whole new level of basic, and we didn’t realise until we were well underway that in Kalimantan there is no such thing as ‘sewage treatment’ – everything goes straight into the river, from the boat, the villages and the factories. Andy described the water as ‘brown with white bits’ which made me laugh until I realised this was what we were expected to wash in and drink for the next two weeks of our trip.

Bottoms up!

We arrived safely at the end of the river at a village called Long Bagun, on Christmas Day. After being shown around the village we were a little disappointed that many of the Dayak traditions were a shadow of the past. The great longhouse was empty and only used for the odd ceremonial occasion, sadly not including Christmas, and mobile phones shops and plasma screens seemed to have replaced singing, dancing and storytelling. However, the village still had some unique charms. The children were lovely, bursting with energy and led us a merry race around the village on their bikes:

The village also had many floating houses - basically wooden houses strapped to massive logs, which were designed to rise and fall with the level of the river. Apparently these were favoured over normal land-based houses as if you fell out with your neighbour you could simply float downstream. Genius!

We ate a simple Christmas Dinner of boiled rice, boiled veg and boiled fish, and for the first time really appreciated the English roast dinner, a concept which we couldn't make the Indonesians understand. I think at that point both of us would have drunk some unboiled water in return for a Yorkshire pudding.

Later the same day we took a short canoe trip across to a neighbouring village to see another longhouse, sadly also out of use. But on our way we passed a small Catholic church where a Christmas service was taking place. We were immediately invited inside and listened to the wonderful singing, until the end when everyone turned around and wished us 'Merry Christmas' in English. I think we both had tears in our eyes as they were so welcoming, warm and friendly and at that point we missed home terribly. But we weren't allowed to feel sad for long as a lovely girl called Lia invited us back to her home for some tea and cakes, and to meet her family. At the grand age of 22 she was a retired model from Sulawesi with three children. She was spending Christmas with her husband's family, and here we found our first trace of true Dayak tradition, as her great-grandmother-in-law was over 100 and sported the elongated earlobes which Dayak women used to wear - they nearly reached to her shoulders! (It was too rude to take a picture so we haven't got one to show).

With Lia on Christmas Day

On Boxing Day we took a much longer canoe journey upriver, which was really exciting as we wound along the bendy river, scooting over fallen logs and listening to the screeching of the birds in the treetops above. The canoe (pictured below) had a stick for steering and no daggerboard, which meant that the slightest movement nearly pitched us and our belongings into the river. Luckily we had a highly experienced Dayak guide with us called Thomas, who with some sort of magical instinct could tell where the water was safe and later, when we stopped at a rocky riverbank, built us a simple shelter with his machete. It occured to me that we had allowed ourselves to be driven into the middle of nowhere by a man wielding a giant knife, but fortunately Thomas was lovely, if possibly the most talkative man in Indonesia, with not a word of English in his vocabulary. And our Indonesian didn't extend much beyond 'how much is that' and 'no more rice, please'.

After watching Thomas setup our camp for the night, we ventured on a short trek into the rainforest. Here we were again disappointed, as the forest we were walking through wasn't true rainforest, but secondary, recovering rainforest as the land had been previously cleared years ago by the locals for rice planting. In fact on our canoe journey we saw whole swathes of forest which had been cut and burned to make way for paddy fields, and although on a local scale this is sustainable, on top of this scores of logging, coal and gold-mining companies are clearing the forest at such a rate that 20 years ago you could arrive in Sanmarinda on the coast and be within virgin rainforest within half an hour, whereas we had travelled for nearly 3 days into the heart of Kalimantan and even here it was impossible to find. The reality that Greenpeace haven't got it all covered, and that today's children may not have any real rainforest left to see in this part of the world, was really upsetting. Apparently Malaysian Borneo is far more protected than Kalimantan, but here it seemed to be a free-for-all, and even worse the local Dayaks, in return for money to buy modern conveniences, help the large corporations to discover new areas of virgin forest to chop down. Kalimantan seemed to us to represent one of the world's greatest resource supermarkets and also one of the world's biggest rubbish dumps. For such a beautiful, spellbinding place with such a lovely people this is a real tragedy. And on this realisation we felt we'd seen enough. Although there were many more 'traditional' vilages awaiting us down-stream, we couldn't reconcile the picturesque view of Kalimantan with the ugly reality. So, after a night outdoors beside the river, we packed our things and got back aboard the Big Brother houseboat and sped our way back to Samarinda.

After Samarinda we spent an enjoyable New Year's Eve back in the city of Balikpapan at a Chinese restaurant, and went wild with fruit juices as the city is dry, being largely Muslim.

Altogether I think we'll always remember Kalimantan, and especially the crazy houseboat, as a unique experience. But it's safe to say that Greenpeace now have two new members!

Gili Air

The Gili islands are three small islands off of the coast of Lombok. As the speedboat pulled in to Gili Trawangan it felt like a scene from Shipwrecked, however upon seeing the Bintang singlets we knew something was up; it seemed Gili T began where Kuta left off. We decided to try one more Gili and if it were the same we’d leave for Lombok.


Although only a 30 minute boat ride away, Gili Air was worlds away; it was like walking onto a paradise island. We stayed in an incredible bungalow (£8 per night including breakfast) which deserved a place in the Sunday Times travel magazine. The sea was tranquil, the island was beautifully quiet as there are no motorised vehicles on the Gili’s, and there was absolutely no hassle from touts. Also the fresh fish and juice were delicious. We spent our days diving, cycling around the island, chatting with the locals and eating long slow meals whilst watching the sea. The only drawback was the weather. If it had been hot we would probably have stayed until our visas ran out but unfortunately it was very stormy, so much so that we could not go to our next destination, Flores. So instead after a great week, during which we became advanced, Nitrox enriched air PADI divers, and developed an addiction to some penguin-like biscuits called Tim-Tams, we gave in to the weather and made our way back to Bali to catch our next flight.


We arrived at Denpasar airport not knowing where we wanted to go next, all we knew was that we wanted to leave that day so we went to the flight operator booths, reduced our options to a short list of two, Sulawesi and Kalimantan, neither of which we knew a lot about so with about an hour before both flights left, we flipped a coin, tails it was and Kalimantan was to be our next destination.

Bali

We had both always wanted to go to Bali for years, lured by Kuoni images of rice paddies, strange Indiana Jones temples, exemplary craftsmanship and friendly locals.

We arrived in Kuta – home to a breed of young aussie, identifiable by the close sunken eyes, generally glazed, clueless yet dangerous-if-poked expression and body of sculpted meat that you would associate with ‘Donk’ of Crocodile Dundee fame. In order to identify these creatures, and so that they could identify each other they were all branded with Bintang singlets of various colours. They could generally be found around watering holes that sold cheap beer and Viagra. We found their diet, although largely liquid-based, also consisted of KFC or McDonalds, though it has to be admitted it was the best MackyD’s we ever had. Here was the Shag-a-luf of Indonesia. Our initial reaction was God help us!

Thankfully, we were not alone, and with our new-found friends, Bailey and Kimberly, we decided to apply the old adage, ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’, and together we set out to earn our singlets.

We walked along a main street until we found a dark bar with full music kit setup, many tattooed and pierced young Indonesians sitting outside and importantly, not a singlet in sight. Our drink of choice was a litre each of ‘jungle juice’ with ‘secret ingredient’. It was a mixture of Arak (a local spirit) and god knows what else, served in a children’s plastic beaker (perhaps this was also done with the aussies in mind). The boys had two litres, the girls had one, in both cases the job was done.

We then proceeded to watch the Indonesians take it in turns to pick up the guitar and play and sing with aplomb. Bailey and I had come to the same conclusion: be it art, dance, craftsmanship or music we were skill-less Westerners. The locals could even address us in our own language and all we could do in return was smile, say thank you and probably, if asked, hit a triangle, although not necessarily in rhythm.

From there we headed to the super-clubs. These were sprawling monstrosities bursting with sweat, adrenaline and herds of alcohol fuelled animals of which we were now a part. Inside there were drinks promotions every 15 minutes which helped Bailey and I pace ourselves whilst Alex and Kimberly danced away. After a few incidents, one involving a distressed Bailey, a disappointed stranger, some public toilets and the prayer position, we left to go home.

The night was over for all of us, except for Alex who decided to go on a night sleepwalk in just her knickers and T-shirt. Her first port of call was the reception area where she got quite aggressive when they wouldn’t let her use their toilet, how dare they try to explain that she had one in her own room. Her next victims were a poor Indonesian family who rather foolishly had not locked their door and after a brief conversation she was told to go back to her room. Whilst this is very un-Alex-like behaviour it did secure her a top two finish in the stories that happened last night competition the next morning.



We spent the next 8 days on a road trip around Bali with Bailey and Kimberly. Having the car and the world’s worst map meant that we travelled most of Bali. We stayed in the most beautiful accommodation in Ubud and also saw some really naughty monkeys at the monkey temple. We dived on the North coast as well as in Amed where we did a wreck dive inside a sunken WWII US cargo ship and stayed where the atmosphere was so much quieter and more traditional.



Miraculously, we returned the only just road worthy rental car on time even after being stopped by the horribly corrupt Bali police force who after a lot of play acting and lying managed to drop all ‘charges’ for a bribe of £6. As beautiful as Bali was, we felt it was now pretty much a tourist island and in the end we were pleased to move on. So the next day we parted with our road trip partners and left by boat for the Gilis.

Pulau Weh

From Bukit Lawang we took a Bemo (clapped out little van) to Bin Jai and then another night bus to Banda Aceh on the Northern tip of Sumatra. Incredibly this bus driver also had a love of heavy bass based trance, although he managed to fuse this with a love of Alvin and the Chipmunks to create a very unique blend of irritancy; it was like music created by the love child of Dizzy Rascal and Joe Pasquale.

Finally we arrived in Banda Aceh and took a Becuk (motorbike with a sidecar and ability to hold far more weight than is sensible or legal) to the ferry port and a ferry across to the island. We then took a taxi to Ipoh Beach where we were told the main guesthouses were. After a very long walk we thought we had arrived at the wrong place so we took a motorbike to another part of the island. This was similar but worse, so we went back. Banda Aceh and Pulau Weh were devastated by the Tsunami in 2004 and it appeared that the place had not quite recovered, or that people thought it was not worth investing the care in rebuilding in case of a repeat attack. They were also not very open to visitors which may have been due to the vast number of NGO’s that swarmed the island after the Tsunami; either way prices were inflated, interaction with locals was limited and we felt very cut off from everywhere, especially with no transport.

Our accommodation was a very basic bamboo hut on stilts, overlooking the sea. It had a shared bathroom and holes in the roof as we found out during a thunder storm one night, but at £3 a night it was o.k. The mosquitoes here were also really vicious and I was averaging about 15 new bites a day. However, the positives. Pulau Weh has a beautiful sea, the views are immense and the diving even better. Unfortunately Alex could not dive as much as she’d have liked as she felt a little sick as did a few people we met there. But in one day I saw a turtle, tuna fish, four black tipped sharks, lion fish, trigger fish, clown fish, a frog fish, honeycomb eels and a school of barracuda to name but a few.

Another strange occurrence that happened during this leg of our trip was when we met an English couple from Watford, Bailey and Kimberly, who we’d previously met in Bukit Lawang. We were getting some food in a tiny, empty Warung when another couple came in. The guy was an Aussie but his wife was from a little place in Hertfordshire called Potters Bar. How peculiar. Anyway, Bailey and Kimberly and us decided to leave and again nature plagued our plans as we’d intended to go and climb the volcano, Gunung Bromo, in Java, but it had the cheek to erupt that week. We decided to go as a four instead to Bali via Medan and Jakarta. It was a tiring journey but made better by the company, and by the fact that at Banda Aceh, the executive lounge was £2 to enter and included free wi-fi, biscuits, coffee, nuts, cakes, crisps and unlimited soft drinks. On top of that the 100ml liquid rule does not seem to apply in Indonesia, needless to say we stocked up!

Stunning (and scary) Sumatra

We didn't know much at all about Sumatra before we arrived, but the name conjured up all sorts of wild, tropical images – rainforests, monkeys and waterfalls, and possibly tribal locals in war paint wielding huge spears. And although we didn’t get eaten by cannibals, it was just as fantastic and romantic as we imagined. From Medan, the capital, we sped north-west by bus to a little town called Bukit Lawang. The town grew up around an orang-utan rehabilitation centre which closed 15 years ago but the feeding platform was still there and highly active with around 20 semi-wild orang-utans visiting it twice a day for their fix of milk and bananas.

But before we even got a glimpse of the forest-men, we were stunned by our first impressions of Bukit Lawang, a tiny, bamboo-constructed collection of huts nestled on the banks of a roaring river, with great, lush rainforested hills looming over it. The locals were mostly smiling, friendly women and their kids, offering cheap but tasty grub from simple warungs with the most magnificent fruit salads we’ve ever had. Our room was positioned right over the river bank, and the room itself was like something from Heals – we slept in a great, carved mahogany bed beneath a draping mozzy net, with a balcony overlooking the rainforest. All for less than ten pounds a night.

Above: the river crossing to the orangutan centre. The whole of BL was surrounded by rainforest like this, with the river running through it. One morning we awoke to watch the orangutans ambling along the opposite riverbank, and on another day an entire troop of monkeys (we counted over 100 animals) clambered over the rocks upriver!

The morning after we arrived we got up at dawn for a rainforest trek, via the orang-utan feeding platform. It was one of the best days of our trip so far and also of our lives. At 9am we stood about 2 metres away from a female orang-utan, watching her baby play with the milk cup and munch on bananas.

We didn't even download this picture from google images, we were that close!

After that we spent the morning trekking through the rainforest, swinging on vines, spying the fauna and flora (including some ginormous prehistoric looking ants) and for lunch we stopped and swam in a waterfall, with a rice-in-banana-leaf lunch, and lots of mouth-watering fruit.

With our jungle guides Obiwan and Cucumber - big names make up for small stature

I forgot to bring a hat so Cucumber made one for me

The afternoon was a slow amble through the rainforest to our pick-up point on the riverbank where we had a refreshing swim before launching onto the river in a home-made raft made from old truck tyres, which delivered us straight to the door of our room. The only not-amazing moment was when Andy was offered the chance to steer the boat and bonked me on the head with a massive stick.

Having had such an incredible experience, we were both feeling so optimistic and positive that when later on that evening, sitting over dinner, a man called Jansen with a bag arrived and offered to sell us some wood carvings he’d made, we decided to go one better and signed up for a 3 day, 9-hrs a day course to learn traditional Indonesian woodcarving. What we didn’t anticipate was that this would involve sitting in a posture somewhere between the lotus and birthing positions for 3 entire days, using our feet as a vice and primitive metal and wooden tools to fashion what apparently would end up as works of art from two bits of wood that could have come straight out of my dad’s log shed. Andy decided to make a spirit mask traditional to the Batuk tribe, and I decided to make an orangutan.

Andy assumes the position...

The tools of our new-found trade

After day one we regretted it, after day two Andy had seriously damaged his coccyx and I was certain the orang-utan I was making looked more like a wonky gorilla. But by the end of day three, we somehow, with a little help from Jansen, had two finished, rather beautiful woodcarvings that actually looked a bit like they were meant to!

Day 1...


Day 2...


Day 3!

We were pretty exhausted after the course (as you can see from Andy's face), so took the next day off and did a little river tubing. This basically involves throwing yourself down the river at top speed on a rubber tyre. We’d done tubing already in Austria on Honeymoon, with helmets, wetsuit, life jacket and a safety guide. Here we just had the tyre and – if you were really a novice – a big stick to stop you hurtling into the rocks. Our only safety briefing was ‘Don’t go as far as the big dam. You might die.’

To quote Barbara, ‘Life is experience’, so we thought we’d give it a go, anyway, but then a massive overhead storm erupted without any warning just as we entered the water. It was too late to go back – all the locals were watching – so we leapt in. I was utterly terrified and screaming my head off, until I was suddenly made to look like a great big wimp when two tiny pre-school children, seeing the funny white people clearly not doing it right, ran parallel to us along the river bank, threw off their clothes and dived onto their own tyres!


As fun, magic and mesmerising as Bukit Lawang was, it also provided our first taste of the dark side to living in nature’s paradise, which is something we’ve since felt all over Indonesia. 6 years ago the river here experienced a flash flood which killed a vast number of the inhabitants. Every time it rained and the river rose it sparked a panic attack from me and a quick visit outside with the head torch to check whether our room was afloat, while further upstream a team of men battled an enormous heap of mud from a week-old landslide which had hit one of the guesthouses, with a further, larger devastating landslide predicted within the following week. It made us realise that we’re not used to dealing with real, life-threatening danger that often. Life there is never guaranteed, but perhaps for that reason it’s also not controlled by petty laws, or safety measures, and in many ways is much more free. Either way we loved it, and for anyone who dreams of seeing orangutans up close and personal, this is definitely the place to go.