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!