Kalimantan, Borneo

Selamat,

A month in Thailand and Malaysia was just what we needed to recover from two months of hard travel through Nepal and India. But towards the end we were itching to get back off the beaten path. So, we decided to scratch Java and Bali and head for Borneo and Sulawesi.

Kalimantan is Indonesia's part of Borneo Island which it shares with Malaysia and Brunei. So we took a cheap flight to Malaysia's Sabah area and crossed over by boat. This area is absolutely stunning and while our guidebook says that about 80% of forest has been cut down over the last 20 years, the island is still filled with thick and lush forests. The country has benefited a lot from logging and palm oil and while people are well off, infrastructure here is still very poor - for instance there is no way to get from the east coast to the west by car and on even the major highways (a narrow dirt road through the forest) it can take more than 4 hrs to go 50 kilometers. While the Dayak people live pretty modern lives these days their lives are still very much dependent on the several long rivers that run from each coast into the center of the island. Our original plan was to travel on one of the rivers into the center then cross over by land to the other river and take it all the way to the other cost. While this is possible we found that it would require more than 3 weeks, 7 days of wilderness trekking (with full camping equipment and food) and a guide - as some of the rural tribes here still follow specific customs that we have no idea about. So we decided to just stick to the east coast and spend our visiting villages on the Sungai Mahakam River. The people here are very sweet and although some of the tribes resorted back to their tradition of cannibalism during unrest in the late '90s, they are back to eating mostly rice, noodles and chicken.

We wanted to get away from the tourists and we definitely got it here in Kalimantan. Over the last 2 weeks we have only seen a handful of westerners and all but 2 were here with a guide. There is a good reason for that - most people here don't speak a word of English.

We got our first taste at Tarakan, a small island in North Kalimantan that serves as the major port between Indonesia and Malaysia. Right off the boat we were back to dust roads without sidewalks. One of the first things we noticed is how aggressive people are with their greetings. They start yelling loudly "hello, mister" (the only English they know, and we're pretty sure they don't even know what they're saying) as soon as they see you - but what's weird is that they are doing it from cars as they drive buy, from across the street over noisy traffic or from so far down the street that we can hardly see them. They also continue to yell and follow you until you acknowledge them. When we finally get to them (after 20 other people we have greeted) they smile back contently. This is followed by an awkward moment of silence when they desperately think of other words they might know, and we try to remember our Bahasa Indonesia. Eventually they just smile and leave. This is pretty entertaining and we have adapted quickly to the instant fame and superstar status. We could seriously stand on the corner all day waving hands and posing for pictures. Todd's head has actually quadrupled as groups of girls (all so shy with colorful head scarfs on) often walk by giggling and batting their eyes at him -somewhere he got the idea that they think he is Brad Pitt (Todd: dude, you know they do -why else would they keep asking us to adopt them???). Every day here is a photo shoot for us. Random people come up to us all the time asking to take pictures with us. Sometimes we have to spend 10 minutes each posing with each other person at the bus stop while their friend takes a photo on their cell phone. Some people just don't bother asking and it has become common for us to turn around and realized that someone at the restaurant or from across the street is taking a photo of us.

Like in Malawi, people here point to my blue eyes and Todd's hairy arms. When we took a local teksi the other day (shared cab) a really old man sitting next to Todd was amazed with Todd's arms. He lifted up his own sleeve and brought his arm close to Todd's to compare and show him that he has no hair. Then he gently started to run his fingers through Todd's curly blond hair, smiling an enormous, toothless grin (Todd: felt kinda funny, like climbing the rope in gym class).

Well, enough with our fantastic flashlight lives. Not everything here is jolly and so I will get back to the awful roads and us always feeling lost because no one here is able to tell us how to get where we need to go. We realized the pickle that we were in when we took the ferry from Tarakan to the mainland the following day. When we got off the boat we were instantly surrounded by young guys asking us where we wanted to go in Bahasa. At first we would tell them in English that we need a bus station but they would just look confused. So Todd pulled out his little phrase book and asked in Bahasa. Well, they just thought that it was the funniest thing ever to see a white guy speaking Bahasa and the whole group rolled with laughter. I realized that we weren't going anywhere for a while so I went to sit on the side and watched Todd try to figure out our next step. It was pretty hilarious - every time he would say something they would start laughing in amusement, ignoring his actual question and asking him what else he knows. (Todd: In most places, you share at least a few common words with people, but in Borneo we didn't even share any common hand gestures -noth'n. Never experienced that kind of frustration before). Finally, a young man who spoke some English came along to help us. Through him we arranged for a driver to take us down the coast to Samarinda - 400km away - where the river spills out into the ocean.

Through the driver's limited English, our limited Bahasa and a piece of paper we arranged a price and figured that it would take us about 10 hours to get down the coast. Well, 10 hours later at midnight we looked at the map and realized that we weren't even half way there. This was probably the longest ride on our trip lasting 22 hours on rough and narrow dirt roads going through the jungle. We were in a mini-mini minivan that we shared with 3 older ladies. Within the first few minutes Todd (or Brad) had these ladies (all in headscarf's) laughing and blushing as he charmed them with his Bahasa - just as he does at the Russian bakery on Geary street. One of the ladies actually took her headscraf off. After 7 years together I just sit back and enjoy the benefits - free black bread from the Bakery and in this case the yummy corn that they started passing to the back seat.

Our long day didn't stop there and after we got to Tenggarong ( a small town 2 hours from Samarinda, where we were going to start our river journey) we realized that ALL of the hotels were booked due to a huge local festival. We spent maybe 5 hours walking around in blazing heat checking every hotel and homestay before we finally got back on the bus and went back to Samarinda. We finally crashed hard there in an AC hotel room after more than 35 hours of straight travel and didn't emerge from our room for the whole next day.

Two days later (after two nice nights in a $27 hotel room - the second most expensive room we got on this trip) we took the bus back to Tenggarong and after booking the first hotel we spent the day walking around. The town is a very nice laid back place with beautiful colorful mosque domes sticking up behind grey stilt houses on the banks of the river. The next day we took a bus to a nearby town and chartered a ces (pronounced "Chess" -a long boat with a motor) to take us to Muara Muntai Village, about 2 hours away. This is a full boardwalk village with all houses on stilts and streets are boardwalks high above the ground, to save them from flooding when the river crowns in the wet season. A few years ago this village completely burned down and has now been rebuilt. With all houses and streets built out of wood the fires are not at all uncommon and the night before we got in a small fire destroyed 7 houses. Here, we settled into a little losman (homestay) and spent the afternoon watching little kids running around screaming, laughing and getting soaked as the local men checked their antique fire hoses. Lets just say the hoses looked like a fountain with water shooting out from all the holes along the sides. We spent the evening walking around the village greeting people sitting out on their porches.

The next day we chartered another ces to a Dayak (the native jungle people) village called Tanjung Issuy about 2 hours away. The boat ride was pretty amazing as we passed through whole floating villages and amazingly simple structures that people have built to work large fishing nets. The last part of the ride was over a VERY large but VERY shallow lake where we saw many fisherman setting up large nets in waste deep water. When we got off the boat in Tanjung we met a nice man named Shony (we think he was the village "headman" -the unofficial mayor) who showed us to the losman in town (we stayed at a restored Dayak long house - they are very communal and use to live in long houses with extended families). We ended up spending the afternoon with him visiting the village school and just hanging out with his wife, his daughter and her school friends on his front porch, eating cool pineapple spears. Later that day he invited us to go with him to get the fish from his nets and we eagerly agreed. We took his boat to check his 3 nets that were set up about 5 minutes away from the town. These are the same wooden structures that we saw all over the river and consist of a long horizontal pole crossed by a long vertical pole that holds the net on one side. All they have to do is pull down the rope tied to the other side of the vertical pole to pull up the large net. Once the net was up he would scoop up the small fish and we would move on to the next structure. The fish were all very small and I felt a little bad because I though this was fish that they would eat. But after we emptied the three nets he took us to a floating platform. On it he unlocked a hatch door and emptied the buckets of fish inside. As the fish fell in, the water went wild and we saw large fish jumping up and eating up all the small fish. he explained that we were standing on top of a large wooden cage that was filled with large fish that he grows for about 7 months before selling them to the Chinese.

The next morning we caught a bus to Balikpapan, a large city rich from oil on the east coast and after spending a night caught a 15 hr night bus the next day to Banjarmasin, the largest town in Kalimantan (south coast) and home to one of the only two 'old" floating markets in the world. That night we arranged a boat and woke up at 5 am to visit the 400 year old market. The market starts at dawn and goes until 9 am. Basically, farmers come out on small boats filled with vegetables and fruits and shoppers pull up their boats. They tie their boats to each other so that the buyer can pick out the stuff they want. Before this was solely a barter market, but now they use money. There was also a large restaurant boat and a small tea/snack boat. The tea boat was interesting - it's small and narrow with a guy sitting inside making tea and selling pastries. On each side you see two large boats tied close to it with people drinking tea and using long sticks with a hooked needle on the end (Todd: pronounced: "harpoon") to spear pastries. There are also a handful of boats waiting patiently for their turn to tie up to the tea canoe. The market was interesting and while we were the only westerners there, there were plenty of Indonesian tourist boats to make it a bit too touristy. Of course the young Indonesians on the other boats waved and took as many pictures of us as they did of the market. (Todd: Someone offered 15 yams and three kilograms of fish for Tatyana. After six months traveling together... well... I could learn to love yams).

We were glad that we got to see the market but we enjoyed the boat ride back to our hotel even more. The river got very narrow and we were going through little alley waterways of the city. This is where we got to see just how much the Dayak people depend on the river. It was 8 am and the little stairs leading from their myriad stilt houses to the water were filled with women scrubbing clothes and washing dishes; with men bathing; and kids playing in the water.

The people here really are super sweet and while many locals warned us to be careful we have never seen anything to make us doubt their good intentions. Today we are catching a ferry to Sulawesi where we plan to spend the next two weeks. This area should be a bit more touristy but still a bit off the beaten track.

Dah Dah (bye, bye in Bahasa) for now, Tatyana

Todd: Unfortunately, we don't have any pictures to share with you from Borneo. After six months of good fortune on the road, someone finally lifted our camera. During an eight hour car ride from the sea port of Mamuju in Sulawesi, one of the passengers in our shared taxi slipped a hand into Tatyana's bag and stole her camera, along with some cheap bracelets. Normally, we back all our photos up before we leave a country, but we couldn't get to a decent computer in Kalimantan, so we had everything on there. Clearly an amateur job: the bracelets were worth about 10 cents, and our camera was so old the flash had begun smoking after every use, and the display was distorted from years of scratches. But, of course, to us, to Tatyana, those pictures were priceless. You'll have to take our word that Borneo was quite picturesque, and that we really WERE attacked by a troupe of monkeys over Tatyana's water bottle. And, we do still have the FlipVideo, with some good Borneo footage, so there's that. We're in Parepare now, where we found a few cameras for sale... Hopefully we can find a replacement.